Posted by Truth be told, I was really enjoying Destiny 2‘s “Episode: Echoes” for what it was during its first two acts. Sure it wasn’t perfect, especially in terms of how the story was delivered in regards to timing, but it was enjoyable enough. I really liked the set-up of the Conductor and the new threat that this mysterious villain posed. Then act three happened and my interest and engagement in the episode began to dwindle until it was the final week of story content and I was genuinely angry with how awful the story was and how it was delivered.
SPOILERS FOLLOW
Act two ends with our guardian confronting the Conductor and discovering that it’s Maya Sundaresh: a character who’s been growing more prominent in the lore since Lightfall‘s release. Now, she commands legions of Vex and intends to use them and their network to establish her own Golden Age where the Collapse never happened and there was no Witness. At least, that’s what we were led to believe. By week two the story had devolved into Maya combing through timelines to find her dead wife. That was her Golden Age: reunification with her wife. I hated this story because of how utterly nonsensical, contrived, and pointless it all was. The whole reason Maya entered the Vex networked and abandoned her wife in the first place was because she was a scientist who wanted to use and experiment on the Vex. Now she’s coming back claiming that finding her wife again is her end goal even though Maya willingly pushed her away and abandoned her? It doesn’t make sense and feels like such an utterly wasted opportunity do something remotely interesting with a new villain.
Maya holds the Echo of Command, so she’s able to control other entities, including important characters like Ikora and Saint. It would have been so much more interesting, and threatening, if Maya’s plan instead consisted of trying to play God by using the Vex to mess with and distort our timeline to recreate or merge or replace it with another timeline where there was no Collapse, or she tries to exert universal control over everything with the Echo because she believes that she has the knowledge and power to right past wrongs, or she’s working with Clovis Bray to combine Vex tech with Exo tech to create a new super-race or something. Anything would have been better than the nonsensical garbage that we got. To add insult to injury, Ikora even name drops Clovis at the very end of the season when confronting Maya, comparing the two. The writers clearly remembered that Clovis existed, and with the Witness gone, he’d make for a potentially interesting villain that deserves some more exploration. But no, instead we get a nonsensical story about a character we’ve never met until now using immense power to find a wife she knowingly and uncaringly discarded. It’s stupid and poorly written garbage.
The gameplay and delivery of the story was also abysmal. It boiled down to “run the new exotic mission” every single week. Every. Single. Week. Each week the gameplay remained about the same while the narrative content somehow got worse. I remember being really interested the first week and seeing Vexified Exo bodies in Maya’s lab and wondering what was going to happen with them. By the end of week one and week two, I realized the direction the story was going in and my heart sank with how wasted it was going to be. The exotic mission in and of itself is fine, it’s just really annoying being forced to run it repeatedly. That being said, the new exotic weapon Choir of One is fantastic and has quickly become a favorite of mine.
The story was so predictable, contrived, and poorly written that by week three I was genuinely angry while playing through it, waiting for it to just be over. It ends with us hunting down the real Chioma Esi, Maya’s wife, from our timeline and we discover her discarded Exo frame in Maya’s laboratory. Then you complete the mission like normal and a cutscene plays where we’re suddenly at the area in the beginning of the mission for some reason. Our Guardian, Ikora, and Saint try to talk Maya down, telling her that she discarded her Chioma. Maya tries to control our little fireteam, but Saint breaks free by the power of plot convenience and hits her with a single sentinel shield, then Ikora nova bombs her and Maya falls in a river of radiolaria and drifts away. What is this utter mess you can barely call an ending? Nothing is accomplished. We talk to the villain, reveal information she probably already knows, then hit her twice in a cutscene and she’s gone? Is that it? Why didn’t we just attack her when we first encountered her? Nothing meaningful changed since then, so we should’ve been able to just kick her teeth in then and there. After this awful cutscene, I was ready to just be done with this awful episode and its utterly wasted story. But in one final middle finger, the game hits me with an error code Weasel as I’m in the middle of my last conversation with Saint. It’s like the game recognized how crappy the story was and was trying to expedite my departure. It was almost funny.
Overall, “Echoes” is a terribly written waste of an interesting story that started strong but got weighed down by a nonsensical motive for its main antagonist. Maya’s motive feels very out of character given what we knew about her, so her searching for Chioma feels out of place and disingenuous to her previously established character. Furthermore, the game does a really bad job of explaining why everything happening on Nessus is a bad thing. Maya controls the Vex and is terraforming Nessus. That’s conveyed, but what’s the significance? Why is it bad that Maya’s terraforming Nessus? It’s such a dead destination with nothing going on that I often forget it’s even in the game. By the end of the episode, Maya’s character assassination via her motive completely removes any and all threat that she may pose. There is no urgency in stopping her; she and her power exist as nothing more than a vague, nebulous threat. Her taking control of Saint earlier in the episode could’ve been an interesting moment of foreshadowing, but all it does is serve to rehash the tired Saint-Osiris relationship plot line that’s been done to death every other season. “Echoes” is more of the same, and not in a good way. Nothing meaningful or interesting happens in the final act, causing what could have been a really good set-up for a new antagonist with unique powers to fall apart under the weight of its own incompetence and end with all the fanfare and exuberance of a wet fart.
Broad Scope Entertainment 