Editor’s Note: This is an essay about endings and narrative structure. That being the case, spoilers are an implicit part of the proceedings - for Sixth Sense, BioShock Infinite, Vanquish and, yes, Mega Man 7. Still, you can’t be too prepared for anything. Spoilers ahoy.
BioShock Infinite is the prettiest, most beguilingly plotted M. Night Shyamalan movie ever made. That’s not an insult to Ken Levine and his army of craftsmen over at Irrational Games. In fact, it’s a high compliment. Like Shyamalan’s visually arresting and unsettling thriller The Sixth Sense, BioShock Infinite is a swift action mystery with characters haunted by painful pasts. Those mysteries are also about seemingly supernatural phenomenon made very real and tangible. The Sixth Sense Is a world where the dead keep talking; Columbia is a city floating in the sky that can only stay there if a reality-warping heiress becomes its leader. Structure and theme aren’t the biggest genetic links between Infinite and Shyamalanian storytelling, though. Levine and M. Night pull the same trick for their biggest emotional payoff: the violent twist ending.
The film has been parodied so regularly over the last decade and a half that its ending feels almost flimsy and threadbare now, but the sudden revelation that Dr. Malcolm Crowe isn’t little Cole Sear’s shrink hits like a cudgel for the uninitiated. He’s actually a ghost, a man who was murdered and still bears the grisly knife wound that did him in years before. Infinite’s big to do is far more theatrical, with would-be hero Booker DeWitt dragged through multiple realities by his ward Elizabeth Comstock after brutally killing her father. But the payoff isn’t dissimilar. It turns out that Booker has in fact been Elizabeth’s father all along, and the pair are caught in an alternate reality where Booker turned into a religious and political zealot commanding a floating city fortress. The only way to undo the harm he’s done, and to keep Elizabeth from becoming a murdering tyrant herself, is for Booker to do. The final image before the credits roll is the water-blurred visage of Elizabeth drowning her own father. In fairness, Levine did Shyamalan one better. The Sixth Sense hit like a cudgel. BioShock Infinite lands like a cannonball shot out of an RS-25 Engine.
As the divisive response to BioShock Infinite and Shyamalan’s early good work prove, though, the violent shock ending is by no means a reliable storytelling tool. People don’t like having rugs pulled out from under them because, you know, it hurts when you fall down. Twist endings can feel cheap, as though they delegitimize everything that came before them. The most familiar example is the It Was All A Dream maneuver. Video games have trotted this one out as regularly as movies and TV. Just look at 1988’s Super Mario Bros. 2. Mario, Luigi, the Princess and Toad risk life and limb fighting freaks that would make Bowser’s army soil their shells. Bomb throwing mice, fire-spewing hyrda, and their morbidly obese monarch Wart stand between the Mushroom Kingdom gang and freeing the downtrodden fairy people that used to live in those parts. Topple Wart, though, and you’re treated to a scene of Mario snoozing away, the victory party all in his head. What the hell is this? None of it really happened?
Pepper in some unreasonable violence that’s clearly there for shock value, and that inescapable feeling that you’ve been hoodwinked by the game can be even more intense. Shinji Mikami’s Vanquish isn’t what you’d call a literary classic. This is, after all, a sci-fi shooter where you play as a football hero soldier in a battle suit that lets him rockstar slide around secret bases while he shoots robot crabs in the face. It’s inherently silly, an action game that goes so over the top so quickly that nothing’s shocking. At least until you get to the end. Fight your way to the end of the game and you find out that the sinister robot military assault was backed by a conspiracy that goes all the way to the top. The President of the United States was in on it! The last thing you see in the game is the president shooting herself in the head. It’s so jarringly morose and grisly that it doesn’t even qualify as black humor. Nothing about this moment works at all.
BioShock Infinite isn’t alone as a prime example of video games milking emotional heft out of a suddenly upturned story pocked by violence. One of the best examples is also one of the most unlikely. 1995’s Mega Man 7 is as far from BioShock Infinite in tone and technology as a game can possibly be on the surface, but Capcom lays out a remarkable twist of its own at the game’s close. It’s all pretty familiar up to that point. Like the previous six Mega Man games, the titular blue ‘bot fights his way through eight evil robot masters before taking on a massive fortress to fight Wily himself. When you finally polish Dr. Wily off, the familiar scenario is warped. Wily admits defeat and agrees to go off to prison quietly, just like always. Mega Man, though, says he won’t do it this time. He’s had it. Now he’s “gonna do what I should have done years ago.” As he holds his gun arm up to Wily’s head, the mad scientist yells about how Mega Man can’t do it since he’s just a robot. “I am more than a robot,” says Mega Man before the fortress starts to collapse and one of Wily’s minions swoops into save him. The credits start and a grim, angry Mega Man walks away from the flaming wreckage.
It’s an insane moment. This is Mega Man for crying out loud! A cartoon icon and hero who was about to actually murder a human being in anger. It changes everything that came before it. Maybe the bright and bubbly adventures of the previous six games, with the little robot warrior and his dog palling around, weren’t so bright and bubbly at all. Maybe Mega Man, forced to endure years of violence defending humanity, has been inexorably warped. The game, and the whole series, that precedes that ending is worthy of re-examination in new light.
There’s the secret sauce for why the endings of The Sixth Sense and BioShock Infinite work so well. The violent shock waiting at the end isn’t just there to give you a cheap thrill. It’s not someone shooting themselves just to make the audience gasp. It’s a moment that transforms and illuminates the story as a whole. Stories that seemed like simple adventures are recast as tales of redemption and sacrifice. These endings only work when they are a crucial gear turning in a larger engine. If they aren’t, they’re just so much sound and fury.
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