I just recently finished playing the DLC for Bioshock Infinite. While I felt that the game play was much improved, particularly in Episode 2, something about it was bothering me. That something is that it makes Zero Fucking Sense.
This is going to contain HUGE GIGANTIC SPOILERS for Bioshock and Bioshock Inifinite. Maybe Bioshock 2, but I don’t know because I didn’t play that one. Anyway, you’ve been warned.
So, Bioshock Infinite ends with Booker drowning himself because it will undo all the Bookers and therefore Elizabeths in all the multiverses. It ends with them all fading away. Only not really! Booker and Elizabeth are back in Episode 1, this time in Rapture! Which takes place during a later time period, so I guess the Lutece device also does time travel? Whatever. It doesn’t matter!
We find out this is Booker/Comstock, only instead of baby finger taking Comstack this is baby decapitating Comstock and Elizabeth tracked him down to exact the most convoluted and contrived revenge I’ve ever seen. Basically if even one thing went ever so slightly wrong with her plan, Booker/Comstock would never have the realization he had. If the Big Daddy was not in that exact spot he wouldn’t get his justly earned gigantic drill bit spinal tap. It just seems like a lot of effort to drive home the fact that the guy is a dick right before he dies.
In episode 2, we come to find out she didn’t even plan all that well, because after hollowing out Booker/Comstock for use as a punch bowl, it turned on Elizabeth and killed her. That leaves sheer blind luck as the only explanation for how the events in episode 1 played out. Also, why didn’t she just escape through a tear in reality? She can do that. Also, why didn’t the Lutece twins get a taste of some drill bit action? You know what? It doesn’t matter. A different version of her comes to that same reality, and somehow ends up in the exact place Booker/Comstock died, unconscious next to his body. Only there is no lighthouse that leads directly there, so that means she entered Rapture, fought her way back down to where Booker/Comstock was, and decided to take a nap. It is there she learns that she no longer has access to all her powers because she entered a reality in which a version of her has died. What that has to do with anything I have no idea. When Comstock tried to kill the Lutece’s it simply scattered them throughout time and the multiverses, but I guess that involved one of their devices exploding.
In episode 2 a big point is made about getting the Big Daddy’s to imprint on the little sisters, only… if they were not already imprinted, why was that Big Daddy in episode 1 so hell bent on murdering Booker/Comstock when he tried to grab the little sister? She even calls it Mr. Bubbles, like the little sisters in Bioshock 1, which occurs chronologically later.
And if you can time travel, why not just go to the exact moment before Booker/Comstock loses the girl, get her yourself, then make a show about what a dick he is before shooting him in the face? It seems like a whole lot of effort for the sake of a poetic death.
In the end, the DLC attempts to tie Bioshock Infinite in with the events of Bioshock 1, therefore lessening your agency in the first game. It was all a master(?) stroke by Elizabeth and/or the Lutece twins to save one particular little sister. Nevermind the scores of others that died during the fall of Rapture. They don’t count. It also supposes you did the honorable thing with the little sisters in that game, which not everyone did.
It takes an already confusing game and adds another layer of complexity on top of the narrative, a narrative that was already straining its ability to contain itself.