[Theory] Molly and Jace know each other, possible Molly motivations

[Glacia]

Im playing again Wintermute, trying to explore the game lore and characters motivations.

After playing again episode 3, i have taken special attention to molly, because i think it's the most controversial character of the entire game. There is even posts on reddit complaining several things about her, even some people giving the game a bad review because they don't like molly actions.

There is something i think nobody noticed or have imagined, thats about the telephone line of great bear island.

Currently, Molly and Jace are the only characters in the game who knows how to use the telephone line (And use it).

Some details about how the telephone line works:

- The telephone line on the island works because it's older than the electricity itself, however it don't work perfectly. If you use the phone, you call all the phones, likely in every place of the island.

- If you play episode 2, the telephone rings when you are leaving the broken railroad lodge (A creepy moment, also). When you play as will in episode 2, Astrid is currently having their elegy at pleasant valley (episode 3).  So, you are receiving a call from Molly, but you can't reach the phone at time, because astrid does it first.

Broken railroad is an isolated region, very far to pleasant valley. This mean, is likely the phones are ringing in most of the regions, even blackrock.

My theory:

When Astrid ask molly why she don't ask for help with the phone, she says 'No one will answer, no one who can help us'. This means, she maybe have used the telephone before and talked to something.  Also, ¿How is it possible that she knows the phone works if she never test it before?.

At episode 3, several inmates are scattered in pleasant valley, someones following mathis, others on their own.  They also killed a prison guard, who can be founded near the farmstead.  

¿Why molly is hunting down the inmates?

Not just because she hates mens due to the violence suffered from her husband, but because she knows what the inmates are doing to the great bear island people.

Jace reach blackrock and seed a terrible scene, of every prison guard/employee being brutally executed. Also, she knows most of the inmates are extremetly dangerous killers and psychopaths.   Jace knows how to use the phone, and i think she warned molly of the danger of the free prisoners, and the things they do to the prison guards.

Also, a prison guard is killed very near to the farmstead, and she knows Astrid have suffered due to the inmates.

 

I think Molly is protecting the pleasant valley people from the atrocities of the inmates, hunting them down.

They let people burn in a school, they tried to murder a blind woman, they attacked astrid and will, they killed several random people across the island, they torture and kidnapped persons, and they commited ¿Cop genocide?, along with many other things that of course, we don't know yet.

Maybe molly is a misanthrope and a misandry, but she (And Jace, of course) are the closest things of heroes on the island, because literally no one is safe from the inmates depravity.

 

Bonus info:

Molly knows how the aurora works, she send Astrid to the radio tower in a attempt to help her (Also she kills an inmate at the place).  Maybe jace even share their discoveries of the aurora with Molly, what would explain she sends astrid to the tower.

 

 

[ajb1978]

56 minutes ago, Glacia said:

- The telephone line on the island works because it's older than the electricity itself, however it don't work perfectly. If you use the phone, you call all the phones, likely in every place of the island.

Telephones always used electricity as their basis. The phone line Molly uses is an old party line. (Even though the phones we see in the game are not party line phones.) The way they worked was you would pick up, put the earpiece to your ear, and turn the crank. This powered a dynamo that would cause all phones connected to that same circuit to ring. Everyone would pick up, you would listen in to see if the call was for you. If not, you would politely hang up. Or maybe you impolitely eavesdropped on someone else's conversation. Either way, it was an analog system that used hand-powered dynamos to generate the ring, and your voice itself provided the power to operate the phone. It was a sound-powered phone, where your voice vibrates the speaker, which interacts with magnets and wires to generate a slight current, that  vibrates the speaker on all other connected phones. Even to this day the US Navy still uses sound-powered phones for shipboard communication. If your ship takes a hit and the power goes out, you can still shout into a voice-powered phone and get your message through to the bridge, engine room, or wherever.

The circuit between Pleasant Valley and Mystery Lake might have been connected, but that doesn't mean the Blackrock region was part of the same circuit. It could very easily have been on its own separate circuit, allowing Will and Jace to communicate in a way that Molly/Astrid had no access to.

[Glacia]

20 minutes ago, ajb1978 said:

Telephones always used electricity as their basis.

Yes, thats my fault. Molly speaks about technology, not electricity!

Very interesting info, it's amazing how a phone can work using sound as power.

22 minutes ago, ajb1978 said:

The circuit between Pleasant Valley and Mystery Lake might have been connected, but that doesn't mean the Blackrock region was part of the same circuit. It could very easily have been on its own separate circuit, allowing Will and Jace to communicate in a way that Molly/Astrid had no access to.

Indeed, we can't exactly know.  Thats exactly why this is a theory 😄

Also, Jace is a kind of ¿Hacker?. We don't even know how she is capable of operate and watch remotely the prison.

Another clue may be, blackrock it's a very old prison whit old systems. The '¿Olderness?' may hint blackrock is connected to the other regions of the game, at least the phone line.

 

[ajb1978]

17 hours ago, Glacia said:

Also, Jace is a kind of ¿Hacker?. We don't even know how she is capable of operate and watch remotely the prison.

Another clue may be, blackrock it's a very old prison whit old systems. The '¿Olderness?' may hint blackrock is connected to the other regions of the game, at least the phone line.

My educational background is in information security with a focus on white-hat hacking. Basically, I find ways to break your shit, so you can fix your shit in a way I can't break.

So yeah, Jace's position is a very, very liberal interpretation of hacking, with the intent of moving the story forward at the understandable expense of accuracy. If we were interpreting this with strict realism, there's just no way Jace could be hacking anything. The fact that the electronics only work when the aurora is in the sky is a huge detriment. And I don't care how skilled you are as a person, if you're encountering a network for the first time, you just suck. You just can't possibly know all the weaknesses. That takes weeks, months, possibly years to fully ascertain. So right off the bat, it's just not happening at all. And add into that the fact that Blackrock is a self-admitted amalgam of different eras of technology. Steam tech physical access, analog electrical telecom, digital electrical PC networking. You're just not going to find that in the real world. At all.

But I can suspend disbelief for the sake of the game, same as I can suspend disbelief when someone in a movie "Hacks the mainframe to disable power and open the locks." If you dig into it, there's probably a hundred reasons why it  can't happen. But it's a work of fiction. You suspend disbelief in order to enjoy the story.

[Razum]

Lol, this really makes some sense. I discussed in this post [https://hinterlandforums.com/forums/topic/41973-where-did-molly-find-astrid/] that the tunnel where Molly found Astrid (leading to Milton) is likely the one in Keepers Pass South. We wondered there, why Molly was so far away from Farmstead just for hunting. But she probably searched for the inmates. Why? How does this make sense?

So obviously the prisoners came to PV before or at least at the same time as Astrid, since we as Astrid find all the dead corpses in ep 3. Since they obviously didnt follow Astrid through the tunnel, they must have found another way. This must practically be something we don't know (yet). There are 2 prisoner corpses and the one guard. My prediction is, that the 2 prisoners and the guard split from the group. They then killed the guard by the heartbreak bridge (for whatever reason) or he just collapsed when Molly was near and shot the one prisoner who then just stumbles into the near shed (blood trace). The second ran away and made a fire at the forest cave, where he got shot when Molly found him. The cache is from the other prisoners who then went to carter hydro dam.

It seems like carter hydro dam was an important location to them (Not sure, if that is mentioned, possibly for the stuff Mackenzie was after, too). They went a long distant to it before going to Blackrock. Very likely they were there a while before we got to know Mathis, they were just trapped in the lower part, because the elevator wasn't working. Then they probably went back through PV again to go to Blackrock and episode 4 then starts in Keepers Pass North where we hear the "arrow in the chest man" quote, because they found the 2 prisoners with arrows in the chest.

Assuming that all, we go on. After Molly shot the prisoners (the ones splitting up, the others went to CHD) she went to the tunnel where she found Astrid to see, whether there are more prisoners. And after the post above I think it's possible, that Molly became aware of the prisoners by a call (maybe from Jace?) telling what went on in Milton. So I think considering all this (it might not have happened exactly the way I described, theres some margin) it's very plausible that Jace and Molly know each other.

Now I have a pretty bad prediction. Assuming Jace and Molly know each other and Jace knowing about Mathis' plans, she might have send Molly to look for the prisoners in CHD and stop them. In the first call of Jace and Mackenzie, Mackenzie tells her of Mathis being here and trying to free Donner and Jace responds with "Shit shit shit!". Maybe the women Mathis talks about who he shut up and didn't look so pretty anymore and stuff was Molly trying to stop them. When Jace learned that Mathis is in Blackrock Prison, she then would have known, Molly couldn't stop them and so might be dead. Just a thought.

What speaks against all of this is the comment from Molly "it's just nice to have someone to talk to" (or something like this) in the end of episode 3. No proof against, but just a point.

[Guest jeffpeng]

On 6/16/2022 at 2:26 AM, Glacia said:

The telephone line on the island works because it's older than the electricity itself, however it don't work perfectly. If you use the phone, you call all the phones, likely in every place of the island.

I just had this complex network of really tightly knit strings spanning the entire island in my mind. Man, childhood was great.

On 6/16/2022 at 9:36 PM, ajb1978 said:

But I can suspend disbelief for the sake of the game, same as I can suspend disbelief when someone in a movie "Hacks the mainframe to disable power and open the locks." If you dig into it, there's probably a hundred reasons why it  can't happen. But it's a work of fiction. You suspend disbelief in order to enjoy the story.

Ah yeah, it's always just amazing how stupified hacking is in popular fiction. Here, I have this thing which has an old Nokia telephone PCB duct taped to it and this 1982 MFM hard disk cable which is wound around this credit card which I insert into the ATM. And now I competently randomly type something really fast on my bulky laptop while wearing a hoodie and having a lot of piercings. See, it's easy. 🤣

 

[ajb1978]

11 hours ago, jeffpeng said:

Ah yeah, it's always just amazing how stupified hacking is in popular fiction. Here, I have this thing which has an old Nokia telephone PCB duct taped to it and this 1982 MFM hard disk cable which is wound around this credit card which I insert into the ATM. And now I competently randomly type something really fast on my bulky laptop while wearing a hoodie and having a lot of piercings. See, it's easy. 🤣

Well to be perfectly fair that Atari Portfolio was pretty portable! It only took 3 AAA batteries to run that thing. As far as hacking scenes go, well yeah it's easy to shoot it full of holes, but it looked good. Way better than anything we saw in the movie literally named Hackers. Or the Unix system in Jurassic Park, I think that was the first time I cussed at a movie in front of my mom.

[Guest jeffpeng]

6 hours ago, ajb1978 said:

Or the Unix system in Jurassic Park, I think that was the first time I cussed at a movie in front of my mom.

😄 I can relate.