We’re now in week five of Destiny 2’s Season of the Deep, the second season of Lightfall and the midway point between Lightfall and The Final Shape, and we’ve just been given the most important cutscene in Destiny’s entire history. You’ve probably heard similar claims being made if you’re plugged into the Destiny fandom, and it’s not an exaggeration. Thanks to this one cutscene, we now know quite a few key things, such as the origin of The Witness, Destiny 2’s ultimate Big Bad, the relationship between The Witness and the Traveler, the nature of the Veil, and most importantly, an understanding of the what the stakes are, now that we’ve failed to stop The Witness at the end of Lightfall.
That’s not an exhaustive list of things revealed in this week’s cutscene. The scene was an incredibly revealing plot point that both elucidates and complicates our understanding of Destiny’s world and its mythology. And while it asks as many questions as it answers, this was the kind of revelatory moment we’ve been waiting for ever since the Black Fleet revealed itself at the end of the Red War campaign six years ago. This is a huge moment in Destiny’s story. The only problem is it came four months too late.
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To briefly summarize what we learned from Ahsa on Titan this week: long ago, The Traveler was discovered buried on a planet (perhaps the Black Garden, but I’m speculating) by a race of people that lived there. As is always the case, The Traveler blessed these people with wonders and technologies that allowed them to thrive and prosper, though it did not give to them wisdom about the nature of the universe or the meaning of life. Seeking a greater purpose, the people sought out the Veil and learned from it the nature of Darkness. Through their study, they came to believe that The Traveler, or the Gardner as they called it, was chaos incarnate; a bestower of beauty and power, but also danger and suffering.
They discovered that they could wield the darkness to enforce order on the universe. By creating a link between The Traveler and The Veil, they intended to rewrite reality and organize it in such a way as to eliminate chaos entirely. No life, no death, no wonder, and no chaos. This is The Final Shape. The Traveler resisted their plan and fled, so to pursue it across the cosmos, the people sacrificed their bodies and formed a union as one. This is how The Witness was born, and it has spent a millenia pursuing The Traveler across the universe in order to link it to The Veil and create The Final Shape.
This is a bombshell reveal beyond anything we’ve learned in Destiny so far. It recontextualizes the origin myth of The Flower Game and tells us the true identity of The Witness, a foe we’ve been preparing for for years without knowing why. It gives us a clearer picture of the relationship between The Traveler and The Veil, and it finally establishes the stakes moving forward. It also leaves plenty of room for more questions to be answered in the future, but at least we have a foundation of understanding to move forward with. We now know who The Witness is, what it wants, and why we need to stop it - all the information we’ve been missing since The Witness arrived at the beginning of Lightfall.
I wish I could say this reveal was better late than never, but not having this information blunted the impact of Lightfall’s story. In the most recent expansion, we went to war with Calus in Neomuna, fighting over possession of The Veil - an object we have never seen, and were never told what it’s for. All we knew is that the bad guys wanted it, so we couldn’t let them have it. Even when we failed and The Witness got hold of The Veil, we still didn’t know what it does or what consequences we faced. By refusing to tell us what we were fighting for, the Lightfall campaign was missing a crucial story element. It’s not just that it’s frustrating to be in the dark, it’s that we had no way of understanding what was at stake. We can assume it was bad, but for all we knew the Witness wasn’t actually a threat. Maybe The Veil doesn’t do anything. Maybe The Witness just wanted The Traveler’s autograph. Without this information, we were just fighting without motivation.
This piece is a great bit of storytelling, and it both expands and complicates our understanding of Destiny’s world and history. It evokes questions about faith and purpose, it connects us, the Guardians of Light, to The Witness, who we can now think of as the original Lightbearer. There’s so much here to dive into and I’m finally excited about Destiny’s story again, but this reveal does not retroactively fix Lightfall’s major story problems. Lightfall was confusing, directionless, and felt like a big waste of time. Had we known then what we know now, it would have given an appropriate amount of weight to the events that were unfolding. Instead, all we can do is look back and try to imprint our current feelings on top of our past frustrations. A fruitless endeavor.
It’s a tough thing to criticize, because I’ve also been critical of the way past seasons have failed to connect with the overarching story, instead feeling like compartmentalized and disposable side plots. I never liked waiting for full expansions to see Destiny’s story move forward and I was excited when Bungie explained that Lightfall’s story would extend through each season. Dropping a massive story beat in the middle of a season is sort of what I wanted, but this isn’t the way it should have been handled. This can’t be a win for Season of the Deep if it’s at the expense of Lightfall’s story. I can’t appreciate a strong reveal that comes four months after a major disappointment.
Destiny 2’s serialized approach to storytelling is ambitious, experimental, and in many ways groundbreaking, but this was a huge miss that Bungie should have been able to see coming. There’s some threads its okay to leave dangling - lord knows how long we waited to find out the identity of the Exo Stranger - but if an entire expansion’s campaign is built around a conflict, one we’ve been building to for years, you can’t wait 16 weeks until a random Tuesday to tell us what we were even fighting for. Season of the Deep is going to vanish from existence when The Final Shape launches next year, and all we’ll be left with is Lightfall - a frustrating story with a lot of missing context.
Next:I Wanted Cayde-6 To Stay Dead, But Now I’m So Glad He’s Alive
