There is an Apocalypse at the End of this Story

“Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost if you keep it a secret! Why didn’t you tell the world!?” -Dr. Strangelove, or How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)

Many stories in literature, film, and video games deal with events to prevent the End of the World (in whatever form it might take) or to deal with the aftermath of a devastated planet. Examples of the first include the Pern series, The Fifth Element, and entries in the Legend of Zelda or Final Fantasy franchises. Examples of the other includes The Road, 28 Days Later, and The Last of Us. Preventing the End from coming allows (not exclusively) for stories of the unambiguous struggle between good and evil, life over death, and freedom of will over the cold hand of fate. Coping with a post-apocalyptic world gives storytellers the chance to question what humanity’s true nature is in the face of calamity, whether morality can or should transcend social circumstances, and what there is in pre-apocalyptic society which is best left in the charred ruins of ground zero. Both of these approaches to apocalyptic storytelling deserves discussion, and they might receive treatment in later posts, but for the moment I would like to examine the tale which ends with an apocalyptic event.

While apocalypse-based stories come in many diverse forms and thus have a variety of tones and morals, those which end with an apocalyptic event tend, in my opinion, to have far more of a political or satirical aspect to them than most of their kindred tales in the genre. Why end a story with the bombs exploding, the comet crashing, or the gates to hell opening? Why do the heroes fail to save humanity? The solution lies in interrogating two things: who the heroes or protagonists are and whether humanity is worth saving. If the protagonists are not heroic (at least in a traditional sense) and if humanity is seen as too flawed or their preservation comes at too high a price, then the human race will likely suffer an apocalyptic fate.

Let us take a look at two examples briefly. First, the Cold War dark comedy Dr. Strangelove. This 1964 movie tells the story of a psychotic Air Force general who orders his nuclear bombers to drop their payload on the Soviet Union and the desperate attempts of inept of deranged politicians, scientists, and generals to prevent a radioactive doomsday. They do not succeed in this. As the movie ends, so, too, does our world. But why is this? In one sense, those directly responsible for the end of the world, the bomber crew who unwittingly follow unauthorized orders and trigger a chain reaction that will irradiate the earth for 100 years, are quite heroic. They do their duty as if their country was counting on them and accomplish their mission to the best of their abilities. As the movie’s US president sadly boasts to his Soviet counterpart, “It’s initiative!” They have a strong dose of the everyman in them, particularly the pilot. Those in the leadership, however, are the ones who make a mess of things. Aside from a secretary, we never see a regular civilian. We are only presented with soldiers, politicians, and scientists involved with classified information. Humanity certainly is worth saving, but they are absent. The bomber crew is heroic, but they are inadvertently the instruments of doom. Who are our protagonists? The world’s leaders, but they are not heroes. And so the end comes.

Next, let us turn to another Cold War movie about atomic destruction, though perhaps not an expected one: Beneath the Planet of the Apes. This is direct sequel to the original Planet of the Apes, both starring Charlton Heston. Most people are aware of the ending to the first movie which reveals the story of an ape-ruled planet actually takes place on a post-apocalyptic Earth. The ending to the sequel, however, is also noteworthy in its own regard. In the ruins of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City, a single atomic bomb still exists, one with the power to destroy the whole planet, bearing the extremely eschatological name “Alpha and Omega,” or “the beginning and the end.” It is worshipped by the mutated descendants of humanity. Taylor (Heston’s character). Tries to prevent the weapon from being triggered when an army of apes arrives to kill the remaining humans. But when Taylor is injured and asks for help from Dr. Zaius (the ape antagonist from the first film), he is spurned. With his dying breath, Taylor activates the bomb, destroying the apes, the humans, and all life on earth. In this act, Taylor repudiates both the humans and the apes. Both are incurably wicked in his eyes. Humans nearly destroyed the earth once; apes seem little better, and they all too prone to the same errors of pride and aggression. He is not heroic in a traditional sense, but that is because both humans and simians are not worth saving. He damns them all in deed, just as he had damned in words the humans responsible for the previous nuclear holocaust at the end of the first movie.

In both of these examples, overt yet non-specific criticisms are being leveled at their audiences and contemporary society. In the first case, doom might come about through incompetence and paranoia among the leadership, despite whatever ideological positions are supposedly at stake. Perhaps the ideologies themselves are driving the leaders to such lunacy.  In the other case, the movie seems to say that any people with the will to use such horrible weapons deserves to be destroyed by them. Perhaps these messages could have been portrayed without complete destruction, and many stories do end with a sense of relief at having narrowly escaped a fate that humanity might well have earned. But by letting the button be pressed, the storyteller gives the unmistakable impression that these things might actually happen, that someone might go too far – a sense harder to achieve when there is a happy ending. Even in stories that have ridiculous means of destroying the world (like Cabin in the Woods), when the world is allowed to die, the audience must ask themselves, “Should it have been saved, could it have been, or is destruction inevitable and, perhaps, appropriate?” By asking these questions, one hopes nihilism does not conquer but rather a desire to become a people both worthy and capable of overcoming absolute destruction.

“In one of the countless billions of galaxies in the universe lies a medium-sized star, and one of its satellites, a green and insignificant planet, is now dead.” -Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970)

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Human Hubris, and Doubts about Our Self-Sufficiency

“The spirits I have summoned I cannot now banish.” –Goethe

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice is known to most due to the musical short in Disney’s Fantasia starring Mickey Mouse. The story has an older pedigree, however, dating back 2000 years, though it was a poem by Goethe 200 years ago that established the primary form we know today. For those unfamiliar with the tale, it can be told briefly as follows.

Once there was a sorcerer of great power who had a young apprentice. Despite wanting to learn how to perform all the magic of his master, the sorcerer gave his pupil few lessons in casting spells. Instead of casting great spells, the apprentice spent his days and night sweeping floors and fetching water, tasks he thought beneath him not to mention pointless since he knew his master capable of performing all of these things through magic with hardly any effort.

One day the sorcerer retired from his enchantments to rest while leaving his apprentice to finish bringing in the buckets of water to put in the enormous caldron. The apprentice, however, had a different plan. As soon as his master had left, the young man, who had been peaking at the sorcerer’s book when he wasn’t looking and listening closely to his incantations, decided it was time to show how powerful a wizard he could be. He cast an enchantment on a broom, bringing it to life, and commanded it to do his chores for him of fetching water. The spell worked and soon the caldron was full. The apprentice was very pleased with himself.

Unfortunately, the enchanted broom continued pouring water into the now overflowing caldron, causing the sorcerer’s chamber to be damaged. The apprentice tried to stop the animated broom but realized he had not learned the counter-spell which would have stopped it. Desperate to stop the broom before the room was flooded (and thinking he could still hide the fact he had been performing magic against his master’s will), the young man took up a nearby ax and struck the broom, splitting it down the middle. The apprentice sighed in relief, but his ease was short-lived. Suddenly, both halves of the broom stood back up and began carrying water even faster than before. The apprentice was at a loss, knowing there was nothing he could do and fearing how this disaster would end, if it ever could. But just as the room was becoming floored, the sorcerer returned. The apprentice cried out in fear and hope for his master’s rescue. The old wizard quickly perceived what had happened. With a single word, the enchanted broom halves froze and fell over, lifeless once again. The sorcerer surveyed the destruction caused by the water and his apprentice’s rash folly. The apprentice, ashamed for his presumption, returned to his chores.

This tale is not specifically apocalyptic in any sense of the word. Nevertheless, the general plot does a good job of outlining a type of apocalyptic narrative. Seen in eschatological terms, the Sorcerer’s Apprentice is an example of human hubris resulting in our (near) total destruction which can only be prevented by the intervention of the Divine or some other wise and powerful force which takes pity on mankind. If the apprentice represents humanity as a whole, then the lesson is we will cause our own destruction. This will not be through willful violence but because our misplaced pride in our own abilities. Examples of apocalyptic stories with this theme include Forbidden Planet, Avengers: Age of Ultron, and many others. Most of these modern stories use scientific advances rather than magical spells, yet the misuse of poorly understood power to make life easier is the same in either case.

The presence of the sorcerer at the beginning and end of this story is, I believe, very important for the stories endurance in the Western world. Though the original version came from pagan Rome (where the sorcerer was simply an educated Egyptian mystic and the apprentice a young friend of his), the form that Goethe and Disney adopted buzzes Christian overtones. The relationship between the two characters is very exact with multiple dichotomies: master and pupil, old and young, wise and foolish, restrained and impulsive, powerful and weak with the illusion of power, and so forth. It takes little effort to see these characters as potentially representing divinity and humanity. The fact that the sorcerer leaves but ultimately returns to save his apprentice when all hope is lost can be taken as the Christian conception of God’s return, either to rescue an individual from sin or Christ’s return during the End Times.

Curiously, there is no villain in this story. The enchanted, unstoppable broom is a threat to the apprentice, but it does wish harm on anyone though its actions, which are merely the results of the apprentice’s deem, will cause devastation. If there is no real villain, then how can this be seen as a Christian apocalyptic scenario? Where is the devil, the foe of mankind? The answer, however, is that, while much of Christian eschatology is often framed as a pitched battle between the forces of good and the forces of evil, that is not always the way it has been conceived. In many ways, the end of the world in the New Testament is not even a fight at all. Though John of Patmos speaks of wars in heaven and on earth in Revelation, Jesus in the Gospels speak of harvest time. In these cases, evil is not a foe but a weed. It poses no real threat as an armed enemy might, and someday the master or harvester will simply come to remove the evil and pitch it into the fire to be consumed.

This is the type of eschatology on display in the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Sin (or ignorance) are and have been part of humanity’s character, which has caused them to make terrible mistakes. Like Adam whose downfall came from a tree (what else is a broom made of if not wood?), the apprentice thought that he could be like his master, like a god. His rash actions soon caused a flood, much like what befell Adam’s descendants. The apprentice was doomed because he did not know the right word to end the spell; for Christians, mankind is doomed without the Word to save them. But whether one tells the story in religious or secular terms, the message is that of a cautionary tale. We all want to run, but it is necessary to walk first. If we trip and fall in our excitement, hopefully there will be someone to pick us back up. If there is not then caution is all the more necessary because we may not be able to stand back up on our own.

For the text of Goethe’s poem, in German and English: http://germanstories.vcu.edu/goethe/zauber_dual.html

I encourage you to rewatch Disney’s Fantasia with the above in mind.

One final note. This post comes shortly after the theatrical release of the Avengers: Age of Ultron. I briefly cited that movie above as embodying themes of human hubris and impatience. The movie itself references Disney’s Pinocchio multiple times, but for those who have seen or will see it, I challenge you to decide whether the movie actually owes more of its inspiration to the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Pinocchio is about a wooden boy brought to life, though not because of his creator’s powers. The broom is also a piece of wood brought to life, but the apprentice stole this ability from another. Watch the film. Is Ultron Pinocchio turned evil or the broom simply doing what it was told?

Circles of Fate (Part 2): Pern, the Matrix, and Final Fantasy

“…the Red Star, obeying natural forces, began to spin closer to Pern, winking with a baleful red eye on its ancient victim”  -Anne McCaffrey, Prologue to The White Dragon, 1978

In this season of beginnings and endings, it seems appropriate to discuss cyclical time around the new years.  As discussed in part one of this series, superficially cyclical time appears to lack the possibility of apocalyptic scenarios more commonly envisioned in linear time.  Notions about “the end” require a fixed point in time to which everything leads up and after which history is irrevocably altered.  Linear time possesses these qualities but cyclical time does not, or so it is thought.  Nietzsche’s understanding of eternal recurrence embraces just this worldview in which nothing has, can, or will change, but this does not mean that eternal recurrence should be seen as a labor or a horror..  Everything that happens within the cycle, even the painful, should be looked upon as good, as a way to strengthen oneself.  It should be loved for its own sake, come what may: amor fati, the love of fate.  For Buddha, however, though time is cyclical, the circle of death and rebirth can still be transcended and escaped.  In this way, a moral if not a physical apocalypse can occur; the enlightened one saves his soul as the world and all that it in it (people, things, desires, passions, sufferings) vanish, replaced by a new, incomprehensible existence.  In this way, an apocalypse in cyclical time is indeed possible.

Yet perhaps these philosophical ideas are too abstract to clearly demonstrate how cyclical time and apocalyptic scenarios might work together.  For this reason I have chosen to examine (very briefly) three different serial works of sci-fi/fantasy storytelling in three different media in order to show how these ideas have been and continue to be incorporated in popular entertainment.  These works are Anne MacCaffrey’s Pern novels, the Wachowski siblings’ Matrix movie trilogy, and Square Enix’s Final Fantasy video game series.  Each is very different from the others and are present in their own unique medium, yet cyclical time and the theme of an apocalypse runs through and unites them.  Let us examine each in turn.

First, McCaffrey’s imaginative world of Pern is based upon a recurrent global crisis known as Thread, a thin, silvery, highly destructive organism that rains down from the sky for a period of 50 years every 250 years.  When Thread contacts any organic material, it immediately beings to consume it, causing the organism to expand rapidly.  To be sure, not all life dies out from Thread; the planet of Pern is resilient and can recover.  The human populations who began to colonize Pern, however, could not survive without some defense against Thread.  The danger may not utterly destroy the planet, but the cataclysmic danger Thread poses to humanity is indisputably absolute.  “Thread”:  it is a fitting name, not just because of the organism’s spindly appearance but also because it is simply one letter away from the word “threat.”  To cope with this global horror, the colonists, before they had to abandon their advanced technology, used sci-fi genetics to adapt indigenous flying lizards into a force of fire-breathing dragons capable of destroying Thread before it made landfall.  Because of the importance of these defenders, society on Pern evolved to ensure the dragons would be available whenever Thread returned.  There would be 200 years of peace and safety (called an Interval) followed by 50 years of near-continuous Thread-fall (known as a Pass).  During Passes, dragons and their human riders would protect the lands below.  During Intervals, they would rest while recuperating their loses.  It was a system that was built upon the fact that every 250 years the world would be threatened, and all of Pern society, whether directly or indirectly, was in turn based upon supporting that system.  There are a few occasions in Pernese history when Thread does not fall during its expected Pass (the result of celestial alignments blocking Pern from its recurrent foe), thus creating a “Long Interval.”  Though a time of joy, these periods are not without their dangers since they can cause humans on Pern to think Thread has ceased altogether, thus leading them to neglect up-keep of their dragon population.  When Thread returns after its long absence, their earlier inattention becomes a deadly problem for humanity.

Using the paradigms established in Part One of this post, Pern quite clearly represents a Nietzschean view of cyclical time.  Thread represents the threat of an apocalypse, but one that is familiar and manageable.  Thread simply is.  Like the dawn or the seasons, there is no stopping it.  Once every dozen generations, the whole of humanity will be at risk of utter annihilation, and once every dozen generations humanity must try to fight off this apocalypse using their long-time companions, the dragons.  Permanent destruction of Thread is impossible.  Though some books in the series play with that possibility, ultimately the history of Pern is based on this eternal cycle.  Ridding themselves of Thread is as inconceivable as eliminating blizzards.  The proper thing for a Pernese man or woman to think about is saving the world now, this time, just like future generations should look to saving their world in their times.  When the people of Pern embraced this fate, in an example of amor fati, they prospered.  When during Long Intervals they neglected the fact that Thread would always be with them and thought they would enjoy linear rather than cyclical time, they lowered their defenses and risked the calamity of complete destruction.  Thread is an example of an apocalyptic threat, but one that must always be seen as cyclical.  False optimism only brings the possibility of ruin.  But this doom is not purely negative.  Pern’s society, politics, culture, and economies are portrayed as rich and vibrant.  But they are at their peak only when they practice amor fati, when they shoulder the burden of Thread and yet take pride and joy in their labor and the labor of countless generations.

Turning to the second example, the Matrix series, we find a very different take on cyclical time and apocalypses.  The people of Pern might suffer horrors during every Pass, but each time they are ultimately victorious.  The humans in the Matrix, however, are not so fortunate.  The situation goes as follows.  In the future, Artificial Intelligence has enslaved mankind and imprisoned us in a simulated world from which we cannot escape unless we first understand (at least in part) its unreality.  The first movie in the trilogy establishes that the humans in the real world live in the besieged city of Zion, the last bastion of humanity free from AI control.  It was founded by the One, a human the people of Zion believe to be the first human to have escaped from the Matrix.  The character Neo is a kind of Second Coming of the One, someone who is prophesied to bring an end to the war between humanity and the machines.  At first, this seems like a very straight-forward linear time apocalypse: even casual observers will be able to note the Judeo-Christian symbolism strewn throughout the first movie.  Yet the two sequels radically alter this framework.  In the second movie, it is revealed that the founder of Zion was not the first human to become free of the Matrix.  The One is not a rebel to the AI but is in fact part of their system:  once every hundred years or so, a One emerges and the machines are able to extract useful data from his or her mind.  At the same time, whatever human settlement exists in the real world is completely eradicated.  The One is then sent out to found a new Zion, tell the humans the lie that he is the first and that a savior One will return to them one day, and the cycle continues itself.  In the third film, the series returns to its linear mode of having Neo being the true savior of humanity that ends the war once and for all time, but this is only accomplished because the system of the Matrix begins to break down due to forces outside his control.  Thus when Neo saves the day, he does not simply save humanity; he saves the machines as well.

In contrast to McCaffrey’s novels, the Matrix series, taken as a whole, constitutes a Buddhist form of cyclical apocalypse.  In the first movie, people think they can live linear lives and succeed, but they are in error, just like Buddha taught that success in this world could never bring true joy.  No matter what one did in this world, one would still suffer, die, and reincarnate, doomed to change in minor details but never escaping from the horrors of this world.  The second movie makes this horror felt in the revelation that the machines have destroyed Zion several times in the past and have full confidence in themselves to continue obliterating humanity and allowing them to return under a new One.  The machines cannot be stopped because they are part of the cycle.  It is the cycle itself, not the machines, that is the real enemy.  In the end, Neo abandons hope for saving himself or even for fighting out of a desire to win.  To win, to finally break the system, he accepts his fate, he becomes nothingness, he allows himself to slip into the otherwise fearful embrace of a faceless existence with calm composure.  Yet it is through this self-abnegation (Neo’s enemy literally turns him into a copy of himself) that Neo wins.  Like Buddha, he does not simply sacrifice himself through death but gives his Self away and transcends.  The result is, like Buddha, the destruction of the whole cycle of death and rebirth, or Zion’s destruction and foundation, and of apocalypse and genesis.  The Matrix returns, Zion still lives, but both are suddenly new.  Not just reborn but completely altered from their former station: the Matrix will no longer be a prison and Zion will be at peace.  The world has transcended itself, and Neo has achieved Nirvana.

Finally, there is the example of the video game series Final Fantasy.  I do not wish to focus purely on one example from the series or discuss in detail specific apocalyptic themes contained therein, though that could be done.  Instead, I’d like to consider the series as a piece of media which has these elements in it.  yet to do that, first a very brief overview of these themes are necessary.  There are over a dozen Final Fantasy games, with most of them existing in completely different continuities or at least so distantly related as to be irrelevant for the most part.  Yet while the characters and plots might vary, the games tend to share many common elements.  Typically the story revolves around a band of heroes (chosen, prophesied, or impromptu) caught up in a series of escalating adventures that ultimately lead them to confront an evil so great that it has the power and will to destroy world or even unmake reality itself.  Normally the cosmic terror is only revealed late in the game, with the first half being devoted to defeating a relatively minor threat like an evil warlord, an oppressive government, and so forth.  Sometimes the two (the immediate and the cosmic threat) are joined together in some way, either the corrupt political/religious leader working for this great threat, exploiting fear of it among his subjects for his own benefit, or hoping for his own personal reasons that this enemy will actually succeed in its apocalyptic goals.  But beyond the the apocalyptic, the cyclical time is a recurrent theme in the series, often negatively so.  Sometimes, as in Pern or the Matrix, the world of Final Fantasy is based upon a great evil that is thought to be eternally recurrent; in these case, the heroes must be the ones who put a stop to this awful cycle.  In such cases, those who blindly follow a Nietzsche outlook that assumes fate must be satisfied are in the wrong.  On the other hand, sometimes the ultimate foe wants to destroy the world or unmake reality because of a misguided Buddhist-like desire to end suffering.  For these antagonists, life is indeed a never-ending cycle of pain and misery because of countless sins but especially war.  If they can end this cycle by causing or helping another being cause the deaths of all humanity, mankind would transcend all of these evils, or at least no long suffer them.  But the heroes must fight this enemy, too, and find hope in life.  Thus here, it is the Buddhist outlook, the desire to break the whole cycle, which is the enemy.  As can be seen, the Final Fantasy series is by no means simple in its message or story elements.

Nevertheless, though Final Fantasy games may alter how they discuss cyclical time or apocalyptic scenarios, what is clear is that the franchise is based in large part upon featuring these ideas in some form in almost all of their titles.  And that is what should be noted about Final Fantasy’s approach to the subject of cyclical apocalypses: the fact that it is a franchise catering to both an established fan base while trying to be engaging as new players come of age and pick up a controller.  Whatever the motivations of the villains or the nature of time in each title, in the end the events that the player experiences are definitive and ultimately linear.  Though there have been over a dozen games to bear the name Final Fantasy, there is never the thought that when one game is done that the ultimate evil will return to destroy the world.  The heroes of the story and the player have seen to it that there is a happy ending.  Yet oddly, it is because there is a happy ending that Final Fantasy has grown far beyond a single game.  With each game released, players expect there to be a world-ending threat, maybe one that (in-universe) has always existed and is believed will never end, yet their job is to make sure it does.  But with this accomplished, the player then has to wait with anticipation until the next linear apocalypse.  Without much exaggeration, it can be said that the player hopes for an endless cycle of linear apocalypses.  The eternal recurrence he hopes to stop in a fantasy world he wishes to perpetuate in the real world.  In the game, he is a Buddhist; out of the game, he is a Nietzschean.  He wants to save the world, once and for all, but he wants to continue doing so for all time.  And, what is most startling, he is satisfied in both of these desires.

This post, long as it is, has only scratched the surface of a variety of subjects.  Each individually deserves far more time than has been given to all of them together.  Perhaps in the future I will come back to Pern, the Matrix, or Final Fantasy, but for now I leave them as presented here.  Cyclical time also may make a comeback in future posts.  For now, however, what should be taken away from this concept is the fact that apocalypses do, in fact, easily fit into such a conception of time.  These three series, each taken from a completely different artistic medium, demonstrate in quite diverse ways how recent authors, movie makers, and game developers have approached the subject, yet they are only a select few among many more artists and commentators stretching back much further than the birth of either the video game, the movie, or even the printed novel.  Whether time is seen linearly or cyclically, the notion of an/the apocalypse is so large to encompass both with room to spare.  Hopefully by understanding cyclical apocalypses it will be possible to better appreciate linear apocalypses and how they express in their own unique way humanity’s many possible fates.

“In two thousand years, I will remember none of this.  But I will be reborn again here.  So even as you die again and again, I shall return!  Born again into this endless circle I have created!”  -Final Fantasy, 1987

Resolvng the Apocalypse in Civilization: Beyond Earth

From a discussion of creatures found in a 2000-year-old religious document, we turn abruptly to consider a video game released barely a month ago.  Sid Meier’s Civilization: Beyond Earth is a turn-based grand strategy game where the player controls one of several human colonial expeditions on an alien world.  The premise is that in the future humans on Earth are quickly becoming an endangered species due to The Great Mistake.  The explanation is incomplete, but the Great Mistake seems to have been a human-caused ecological catastrophe which has made Earth increasingly inhospitable.  Humanity’s only hope is to send out colony ships, sponsored by different national blocs, with the most cutting-edge technology to create a new home on a distant planet and somehow think of a way to save the humans left on Earth.

How the colonists, and the player, choose to solve humanity’s plight is based on the ideology they adopt, known in the game as affinities.  There are three affinities:  Purity, Harmony, and Supremacy.  Purity means humans stay as they are, trying to terraform the new planet to resemble Old Earth so that humans back home, when they arrive, will find themselves among familiar settings.  Harmony means the colonists have abandoned the idea of rescuing humans back on Old Earth and have instead chosen to integrate themselves biologically and genetically as much as possible into the new ecology of their adopted world.  Supremacy means that humans have decided to embrace the benefits of a purely digital and mechanical existence by uploading themselves into technology, and they plan to return to Old Earth to “liberate” flesh-bound humans from their imprisoning bodies.

From the premise alone, it is not difficult to imagine the creators of this game conceiving of it as an apocalyptic scenario.  The world is dying and humans, whether through pride, greed, or ignorance, are at fault for it.  It is not even clear if the Great Mistake refers to a single event or if it is an umbrella term for all the sins humanity has inflected upon the Earth which has led to the doomsday scenario in which they find themselves.  The only source of salvation is for humanity to turn to space, to find a New Earth beneath a New Heaven where the mistakes of the past, their sins, will no longer return to punish them.  If humanity survives this apocalypse and in what form depends entirely on the colonists and thus on the player.

The beauty of Civilization: Beyond Earth as an artistic representation of apocalyptic themes is how the developers fully embraced the multiplicity of views one might have undertaking such a venture.  In other words, they were not content to simply present the player with an apocalyptic scenario back home on Old Earth.  Many things throughout the game reinforce the idea that the colonists are wrestling with heady issues of religion, bioethics, the importance of the past (positive and negative), cultural adaptation, economic utility weighed against the worth of the individual, and other such topics.  These ideas are not linearly presented.  They occur as players progress and make branching choices in the development of their colonies.  The player is never told that there is a “right” choice, only that such a choice will advance them further along the path of a particular affinity.  For instance, the player can choose what to do about the local indigenous (non-sapient) alien population.  Choosing to exterminate them, befriend them, or domesticate them for labor purposes increases one’s Purity, Harmony, or Supremacy points, respectively.

As one progresses further down an affinity path, quotes from the colonists appear that express the emerging ideology the player is promoting through their choices.  These quotes are short but they provide an incredible degree of richness and immersion for those interested in such things.  The quotes touch on topics of religion, philosophy, regret, loneliness, responsibility, hope, banal daily interactions, colonial storytelling – all from the point of view of the chosen affinity.  For instance, the transhuman Supremacy affinity begins to take on a religious zeal to liberate humanity from flawed human bodies and upload into advanced machines.  One quote far down the Supremacy path is an adaptation of Matthew 26:41, “The spirit has always been willing.  The flesh has always been weak.”  This saying, in context, is a justification for privileging digitized humanity over organic people.  Alternatively, the Purity affinity has this to say, “Actual human beings everywhere now are more important than potential ‘improved’ humans that may or may not exist in the future.”  This quote comes from a holy figure in the game’s lore expressing the desire to remain human without tampering with the definition of “humanity” with either gene splicing (Harmony) or transhumanism (Supremacy).

The importance of these choices and the way Civilization: Beyond Earth implements them is that the player is left with the understanding that he or she is resolving an apocalypse that has permeated every aspect of life for the colonists.  The ideology chosen makes the entire culture adjust its attitudes, mobilizing the whole of society behind one idea, until it comes to a single conclusion on how to bring about humanity’s salvation.  For Purity, it is finding a way to make this New Earth what the old one should have been and bringing those suffering back home into this new paradise, rapturing them away from a fallen world.  For Harmony, it is abandoning humans on Old Earth to their fate because of their ecological sins – sins which will not be repeated on this new planet that has remained an Eden.  For Supremacy, it means returning home as crusaders with a new proselytizing religion of circuits and computer processors to uplift those who embrace it or crush those who refuse.  In short, the Great Mistake was not the apocalypse.  Rather, each of these affinity-specific outcomes is one kind of apocalypse for mankind, and the player gets to decide which one will happen.  The task of the game isn’t simply to save humanity.  It is to decide what Heaven will be like.

One final note.  Take a quick look at the game’s opening cinematic embedded below.  In it you will see a young woman, one of the few “chosen” worthy to leave behind an impoverished, lifeless world to be reborn in the heavens.  To me, the symbolism is not only possibly but explicitly apocalyptic in the full meaning of the word.  But, of course, I am rather biased.

If you have perspectives on what you have read, whether or not you have played Civilization: Beyond Earth, feel free to share your thoughts.