Spoil Big O for Me! (spoilers, obviously)

Cafe Society
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I occasionally catch this series on Adult Swim. It looks like a cool enough show, but it’s never hooked me enough to start watching it regularly. Clearly there’s a big mystery around Paradigm City and some cataclysm 40 years earlier that caused everyone to lose their memories. Every episode has all sort of cryptic clues to what this cataclysm might be, but just watching random episodes here and there I’ve never been able to figure out whats going on.

So … spoil away! What happened 40 years ago? What’s the significance of Roger Smith having control of Big O? Who’s the old guy with the tomatos? Who’re the bald-headed kids in gray suits?

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[Spoiler] The old man with the tomatos IS Gordon Rosewater, founder of Paradigm Corp. However, he apparently IS really going dotty – maybe as a result of the mental trauma of having had to set all this up.

Rosewater apparently was behind the big cataclysm involving the Megadeuses being used to bring about the downfall of civilization, and took on its reconstruction. The disaster apparently involved a war in which the Megadeuses were the primary weapon. Included in the process of the reconstruction, ostensibly, were the “tomatoes”, a set of persons apparently cloned from those alive at the time of the disaster, who were preprogrammed with latent memories for later call-up – such as Roger, who apparently can remember significant flashes from 40 years ago.

One key part about the Megadeuses is that a “true” Megadeus (such as Big-O or Big-Du-O) DOES have an intelligence and can to a point make a choice about what person it will synch-up with. The synchronization is not purely mechanical but apparently partly psychic/neural (more on this in Season 2). Thus Big-O’s login message: “Cast in the Name of God, Ye Not Guilty” actually DOES mean that Big-O “reads” that Roger is a “good guy” and worthy to pilot.

As you are aware, there are TWO “seasons” of Big-O, the second one of which was created in response to US-market demand after the first run of the cancelled-midseason original. At the end of the First season this is as far as we get, so here’s a spoiler box for the rest[/spoiler]

[spoiler] Most of the 2d Season is a Grand Misdirection, but a sometimes really wonderful one. But you wanted spoilers so here it is: In the last 3 eps we learn Rosewater’s reconstruction of the ruined world is a “Matrix” or “Truman Show” type grand simulation, put in motion not with the helpo of the original Waynerights and the clone-sources for Roger Smith and other characters. We also get the hint that many of the population may not even be clones, but mere sims – after all, in VR what’s the difference?

This world is complete with a shadowy “external enemy”, the Union, presumably representing another civilization surviving outside Paradigm, of whom Angel is supposed to be an Agent. However, it seems she’s one of the tomato-children, a clone/sim avatar of an original Angel, inserted into the world of her own creation w/o knowledge of her true identity. The Union though are just as set-up as everyone else – when a Union agent attempts to take over a Megadeus, the screen flashes: “Ye Guilty” and the agent is absorbed.

First to discover this is Schwarzwald!

However, the system has become unstable. There are suggestions that this is due due to the effects of latent memories being activated at the wrong times, attempts at free-will action of some of the players, and that it just stores 40 years’ worth of data – that is, that the disaster may or may not have happened 40 years ago, but it may be that that is as far back as everyone’s simulated memory extends, i.e. the disaster ALWAYS happened “40 years ago” no matter if this is really year D + 18, 19, 39, 41, 50 or 600! This results in ever more frequent paradoxes (such as Dastun meeting a woman that was in a movie he saw as a child and replaying the death scene himself) the system can’t resolve seamlessly.

Alex Rosewater, current CEO of paradigm, who may be the real son of Gordon or may himself be one of the clone/sim tomato-children, has an imperfect notion of wwhat is happening and is setting things up to take back control of the system and reshape it “right”, as it were. The Union has an ambiguous “Cold War” relationship with him on that – each is trying to use the other and doublecross them in the end. The backup for the operating system, that would allow an Alex-controlled Megadeus to take over, supposedly was placed within R. Dorothy’s OS by old Wayneright.

This struggle is having the effect of destroying the environment in which the common inhabitants of Paradigm live, both physically and notionally. In the end, as it all crashes the real final arbiter is revealed as an uber-Megadeus intelligence known as Big Venus. Whose real creator, author of the system that Gordon Rosewater used to recreate the world, is his daughter… Angel. Whose completely suppressed memories were held in reserve in case it is was ever necessary to bring Big V about to do a hard reset.

When it all is coming down, and Big-V seems ready to do a total reformat, Roger performs his final feat of negotiation – as the hard reset would mean erasing all the “reconstructed lives” and those instances of unpredictability that brought about the crash, he pleads the case that the life-consciousness, the life-experiences of those inside the sim, ARE worthy, that they should not just be wiped away, that a sim life is better than nonexistence.

The “lives” of Paradigm are spared, their world is reconstructed, and we get the briefest hint, that in the middle of it all, Dorothy, Angel and Roger, now awake and aware, have come to terms.

HOWEVER, VERY LITTLE OF THIS IS EVER EXPLICITLY STATED SO, YOU HAVE TO INTERPRET, so anyone else’s read is as good as mine.[/spoiler]

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Wow. I totally didn’t get any of that when I watched this series before. It actually makes sense now! Thanks for the explanation!

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Wow, what an excellent discription. The only conculsions I came to (albeit with a little help from reading other message boards like the one on Adult Swim)

There was some sort of catastrophe probably caused by Gordon Rosewater.
He set up Paradigm City and all its inhabitants. The city and everyone in it are computer simulations.
The city has been reset several times, and the “memories” (represented by the glowing lights) people want to retrieve are leftover data that wasn’t completely erased during the resets.

Those were the only things I could come up with. Things like

How did Angel, Roger, and Dorothy go from becoming computer simulations to real people inside of the control room (I think that’s what it is, the main computer room that holds the Paradigm program?)
At the end, the city resets, but now Angel and Dorothy have looks on their faces like they know the truth.
Are they just simulations and their real bodies are still inside the control room, or did they somehow reenter the city, but with all their memories in tact?

I’d still like to see a movie that would give us definite answers, but I seriously doubt that will happen, but that’s OK, I seriously think that JRDelirious’s pretty much explain most of it, and gave me some answers that I didn’t have before.

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Wow, thanks very much! I never would have puzzled that out catching an episode here and there. I kept thinking there might be a final show that revealed all, but it sounds like you have to piece it together from scraps of information here and there.

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Well, there’s a lot of anime out there that tries to be deep and complex, but in the end come out being incomprehensible. Big-O isn’t too bad in this respect, at least compared to Neon Genesis Evangelion, or, the totally incomprehensible Serial Experiments Lain.

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BTW, where it says in my post “noto help of the Waynerights” it should say “not only by himself but with the help of the Waynerights”

Master Control:

[spoiler] My take on it is: not everyone is a complete VR sim – there are a select group of “real” entities interacting within it. Real in the sense of existing independently of the sim: some may be indeed “live” clones or androids, some may be virtual personalities, “alive” in the sense of the Puppetmaster, that either from the start were or through evolution have become NOT subroutines of the sim but features of the root directory. In any case, due to the complexity of the system, their borders between real-real(physical), virtual-real(root), and virtual-virtual(subroutines) have become totally confused, a-la Lain.

It may well be that in the final confrontation, the people controlling the simulation are real, but face a situation where their avatars inside Paradigm have evolved into separate life, a-la GiTS’s Puppetmaster, and risen to the level they can confront them as having fears, desires, thoughts and feelings that are as valid as anyone else’s, and they have to make the choice as to whether to allow that or just reboot again and wipe everythign out.

Or the people in the Control Room may themselves be avatars of the personalities of three people who were “copied” 40 years ago, who are now in the OS root directory instead of the sim, where have finally evolved to the point they can exercise free will over the system and stop the crash/hard reset.

The “terms” include that their in-sim avatars will now know what’s up, and live in this new world with eyes open…
[/spoiler]

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Wow JRDelirious, you’ve really given this a lot of though. A lot more than I’ve been able to.
Since you’re so knowledgeable, just two more questions, if you don’t mind.

Who was the other Dorothy trying to kill Roger? Maybe a simulation that didn’t get erased in the last reset?
And why did she kill everybody who had memories of being born outside of the city?

Thanks.

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Hmm. The basic backstory seems reminiscent of Star Ocean: 'Til the End of Time.

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Well, why Red Destiny was doing her thing is an interesting one…

… as you recall, her appearance is also associated with Roger getting the heavy flashbacks of the Origin, AND having his conversation with Gordon about the “tomatoes” in which Gordon makes some comments about how sometimes you have to “weed out” the crop. That and other clues dropped in the episode hint to me that RD’s victims were “tomatoes” that did not live up to their potential (thus in dead-end jobs) but having those preprogrammed latent memories (of an origin outside of Paradigm) made them a stability risk in the system.
As RD takes them out first, then goes after Roger… who though functioning well IS ALSO starting to have the “wrong” memories, it seems she’s been programmed to eliminate anyone who may be even a risk of breakthrough. She may be a corrupted safety feature, or even a deliberately overaggressive one deliberately planted in the system by the original Old Wayneright either to make sure they purged anything not going according to plan… or perhaps to sabotage it? Hmmm…
As to why it’s a Dorothy clone, since (by implication, as everything) Dorothy is somehow synched to the greater system, so it may be that when the original Wayneright created backups/failsafes for the system, that was his trademark style for them. But with those personalities, the dude had serious issues with wimmyn, methinks.
That said, Red’s facial expression as she’s about to lay it on to Roger just cracks me up every single time.

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JRDelirious’s explanations are pretty darned good. There’s plenty others though. This was one of the pages that I found… http://www.sixfortyfive.com/bigo/wtf/ … the guy tries to do an episode-by-episode analysis, gets behind, and then skips to the last episode, and then never finishes. Regardless, he had something unique (at the time): The Official Big-O companion book, written by the writers and producers of the show. Unfortunately, it’s in Japanese. But he is able to translate a few things:

His opinion is that there is no one truth, though:

Some other interesting explanatory links are at The Big O Season 3 FAQ - Well, more specifically What is the show really about?, which has links to the appropriate Adult Swim and PARADIGM-CITY threads.

It’s interesting to note that in the Season 3 FAQ that the writer still hasn’t finished the story he wanted to tell:

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Today’s the day that savebigo.com wants everyone to send in their letters demanding a Season 3, as part of a mass mailing blitz.

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Ah, I see, you think that

She’s a control mechanism of the system. Everyone in the system is suposed to believe that they were born in Paradigm and that all other nations no longer exist, so those who do have memories of being foreign born represent an instability to the system, and she’s kind of like an anti-virus program to weed them out. Or something like that.
Interesting. I assumed that she was a leftover from the last reset and was trying to kill Roger because he wasn’t “her” Roger, the one from the previous simulation, or, in other words, she saw him as a fake, but your interpretation would explain why she killed all those others.
Funny, but I don’t remember seeing her get finished off. Big-O comes up from the groun, but she seem to just disapear. Unless we’re supposed to infer that she got smashed.

Anyway, that pretty much answers all my questions. Thank you.

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I would not be too worried about that one:

“Lucifer”, “The Bringer of Light”, WAS the Latin name of the Morning Star, i.e. the Planet Venus when it rises at dawn, ahead of the Sun. A passage of the Old Testament wherein there is a vision of the Light-Bringer crashing to Earth was interpreted as representing the Fall of the First Angel, thus it became synonymous with Satan

Indeed this is one interpretation-heavy piece.

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Master Control:

After Big-O shows up on the scene, we see a brief shot on the ground of what’s clearly a removable-media drive, like the one behind Dorothy’s forehead, ripped out from whatever device it was installed in. That R. D. may be part of the safety system, gone berserk, is also hinted by how she grafitties the “Cast in the Name of…” at the scene of her killings, that being the tagline for the Megadeuses who handle larger threats.

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Ah, I missed the removable drive I guess.
Also, I figured that she was spraying “Cast in the Name of…” because she, being an adroid, was judging her victoms the same way that her Megadeuse bretheren would judge their pilots. Hope that makes sence, I’m having a hard time articulating what I’m thinking.

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Funny, but just when I think I’m finished posting, more ideas, questions, and thoughts about the show come to me.
JRDelirious, part of what you said at the beginning of this thread…

[spoiler]The old man with the tomatos IS Gordon Rosewater, founder of Paradigm Corp. However, he apparently IS really going dotty – maybe as a result of the mental trauma of having had to set all this up.

Rosewater apparently was behind the big cataclysm involving the Megadeuses being used to bring about the downfall of civilization, and took on its reconstruction. The disaster apparently involved a war in which the Megadeuses were the primary weapon. Included in the process of the reconstruction[/spoiler]
Remember that

Schwarzwald, in his quest for the truth, says that a Megadeus war never happen.
Now, it’s generally agreed upon that Gordon Rosewater had part in a catastrophy that destroyed most of the earth. It’s also generally agreed upon that he set up the Paradigm simulation.
So either the origional catastrophy wasn’t caused by Megadueses, and Schwarzwald discovered this, or, the catastrophy was indeed caused by Megadueses, and a Megaduese war is what the computer, after a reset, uses as the catastrophy that happened 40 years ago. In other words, everything could be going fine, but the computer needs to reset. So, after the reset, if anybody goes investigating what the catastrophy was, they’ll find clues, left behind by the computer program, indicating a Megadues war, instead of a computer reset.
Also, where you said

Alex Rosewater, current CEO of paradigm, who may be the real son of Gordon or may himself be one of the clone/sim tomato-children, has an imperfect notion of wwhat is happening and is setting things up to take back control of the system and reshape it “right”, as it were.

I’d have to say

Towards the end of the of the series, Alex does find out that he’s not really the son of Gordon. That turns out to be Angel. I think I remember that he found out that he’s one of the “Tomato’s”.
In the episode where Gordon is telling Roger that they had a previous negotiation, and shows him a picture, of a much younger Gordon shaking hands with a Roger Smith, who’s the same age as the current Roger, Gordon looks exactly like Alex. I’m thinking that maybe Alex is a “Tomato” of Gordon.

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Excellent, MC. Very good.

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Thank you :cool:

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[QUOTE=JRDelirious]
I would not be too worried about that one:

“Lucifer”, “The Bringer of Light”, WAS the Latin name of the Morning Star, i.e. the Planet Venus when it rises at dawn, ahead of the Sun. A passage of the Old Testament wherein there is a vision of the Light-Bringer crashing to Earth was interpreted as representing the Fall of the First Angel, thus it became synonymous with Satan

spoiler for all that jesus nonesense:

I am a atheist, but I have probabley read more of the bible then most christians, and I recall that Revelations calls Jesus

lightbring

but I can’t seem to get worked up enought to actually read the damned thing again.