Putting to Rest the Crazy Theory About Father

[ToroMontana]

From time to time I still find people saying that Shaun is not really Father, that it is all an elaborate lie (one that everyone in the Institute would have to be in on to make any sense by the way), that Kellogg mentions an "old man" (as if there is only one old man in the entire Institute, as if there have never been previous old male directors or heads of the SRB) or that Father's claims couldn't possibly be true because "Kellogg is young".

 

While there is no definitive proof that Father is Shaun, the alternative make even less sense to the point of complete absurdity:

- your infiltration of the Institute was not met with lethal force as Virgil predicted

- your weapons weren't confiscated

- the Director greets you personally unarmed

 

 

But one thing that people seem to ignore is that there is also conclusive evidence that Kellogg is in fact around 108 years old in 2287 which would fall in line with the timeline.

 

In the very first memory of Kellogg we access, Kellogg looks like he's around 10 years old and he hear this on his radio:

 

"All five states have now signed on, which means that as of this moment, we are all citizens of the New California Republic."

 

According to the wiki entry on the NCR:

 

"In 2186, the town of Shady Sands changed its name to "New California Republic" and formed a trial council government to draft a constitution. Four more settlements joined the council, and in 2189, the NCR was voted into existence as a sprawling federation of five states: Shady Sands, Los Angeles, Maxson, the Hub, and Dayglow.[2]"

 

So 98 years have passed in Fallout 4's timeline since the founding of the NCR and Kellogg was around 10 years old when this happened, making him 108 when he is killed by the Sole Survivor.

 

It also puts to rest the theory that the "old man" refers to the same person (not that it made much sense in the first place). Kellogg is the only person that ever got enhanced with cybernetics successfully, the program was shut down.

[montky]

While I personally hold as the authorial-intended 'canonical approach' that;

Father is 2077-shaun |Sole Survivor's Descendant|, a biological human

I do find this fan theory interesting.

 

The ^{_{'crazy-theory'}} reasonable doubt, alternative interpretation, 'resistant reading', stems from

the initial encounter with Robo-Shaun ;

"Excellent! You reacted to it as you would to me" "Please, take the android me - shaun - with you".

This plants the idea - If they can make one robo-doppelganger,

could they make more?

what is to stop them from making more than one?

could they both be robo-shauns?

could "Father" be a Gen-3 synth with a "cranium caddy", like a fancier robo-brain?

or, just a robo-impersonator/impressionist, approaching Sole Survivor as Shaun?

 

In the special case that, "Father" is a "Cranium Caddy" for

Shauns brain. then, "Father" is both Shaun and an Android.

 

 

But one thing that people seem to ignore is ... |truncated| ... Kellogg is in fact around 108 years old in 2287

This fact is not in dispute, in the alternative reading/ alt-fan theory

It is not relevant to the question: Is "Father", the same shaun from 2077 in the opening cutscene?

[metaphorset]

As funny as it is to see people arguing on the internet about video game theories and conspiracies, it's even funnier and much more disturbing to see other (or maybe even the same) people doing it in real life.

I'd rather have them arguing over video games than proven science in real life, especially now that it became dangerous for all the normal people out there.

[Moraelin]

Not sure how the two are even comparable. One, as you say, involves doubting science, while the other is trying to make some consistent sense of what little inconsistent information Beth gave us.

 

Or did you just want to hear yourself polishing your statue about how great you are that you don't do that? Well, you know, if you have to say yourself how totally smart you are... :tongue:

[dragonslayer2k12]

The writing in this game is so incredibly terrible I just try to ignore it and enjoy the gun mod porn we have available these days. Starfield is their last chance to make a guuuud game if they screw that up, most likely ES6 will be a bust too. I've been looking at some videos of rage 2 on youtube and thinking if only fallout 4 looked like that. All that great driving stuff going on too bad the npc AI in those videos seems to be so terrible. I'm guessing rage 2 is kind of how starfield will play with vehicles and far away travel that requires vehicles and most likely a future setting. I have been playing fallout 4 since maybe a month or two after it came out and I can say for sure that I have played too much fallout 4. Every new game that comes out has some crappy problem that ultimately ends my interest in it. I don't do battle royale games ever and I don't like games that feel so confined like metro exodus. I can't believe how good we have it with fallout 4 in some areas and how a four year old game is still beating other games and long term game play even with terrible writing. If we ever get fallout 4 new vegas that will be nearly impossible to top by other games and then fallout 4 miami or even fallout 3 in fallout 4.

 

This is a sad thing that a bethesda game is lasting this long against new games coming out even against another bethesda game fallout76. I had hoped by now to be playing something new and interesting but nope. Hopefully rage 2 doesn't turn out to be a politically charged badly written pile of crap because there has to be something else to play besides fallout 4 and soon.

 

 

I think the whole "old man" thing in this game is probably from cut content and they just forgot or didn't want to re record the lines. For example when maccreepy tags along to cabot house quest and says some odd line about how do you know they aren't when the player asks cabot about aliens making human civilization. His line sounds so totally out of place you can tell they had cut something big there. I'm sure it was supposed to be where mothership zeta DLC would have been inserted along with the crashing alien ship at level 20. The only way we will see a restored content DLC like that is from creation club at this point and that just sucks. None of the writing in this game makes any sense and the beginning is a real shoehorn I really can't stand it. There should have been multiple start characters whose stories intersected at some point in the middle of the main quest line. So you would meet some of the other start characters depending on who you started as and your story line choices throughout the game.

 

I'm so tired of watching kellog blow some poor woman's brains out while she is holding her only child in her arms, bethesda is really f*#@ed up in the writing department.

[MarkusTay]

Interesting - you just made me aware of a couple of things. Not only did Nick Valentine and DiMa escape the institute just one year after that scene with child-Kellogg, but Kellogg could theoretically be the son of the original protagonist of the original Fallout game (being the perfect age of around 10-12 or so). Could this be the 'secret hidden in plain sight' that Todd Howard and others have alluded to that no-one has uncovered yet?

 

The timeline says the Vault Dweller had a daughter in 2188, but he could have easily had a son long before that (a mere year or two after the ending of the 1st game).

 

Of course, I still think Dogmeat is a synth with Nora's brain, so what do I know? :tongue:

[nexbil01]

My crazy theory is that kid shaun" that escapes with you after the institute falls has the old man's mind implanted in him and is just waiting for the right moment to emerge

[ToroMontana]

My crazy theory is that kid shaun" that escapes with you after the institute falls has the old man's mind implanted in him and is just waiting for the right moment to emerge

It wouldn't be out of character for Father.

 

He played the long game for years before taking revenge on Kellogg.

 

That said, I have serious doubts you can transfer someone's real mind to a synth and still be that person. It would just be a synth with the same personality, thought patterns and memories as Father, but it wouldn't be Father. (He would still be as dangerous though.)

Edited March 25, 2019 by ToroMontana

[TheVampireDante]

 

 

That said, I have serious doubts you can transfer someone's real mind to a synth and still be that person. It would just be a synth with the same personality, thought patterns and memories as Father, but it wouldn't be Father. (He would still be as dangerous though.)

 

Nick would be a case for this happening.

 

Despite everything he went through since ending up topside - he eventually ended up a detective anyway like the man whose personality he was imprinted with. He's not the original, but he still seems to have the appropriate behaviours, memories (if somewhat scattered) and mindset of him.

[dragonslayer2k12]

I always thought they really missed a chance to tell a backstory about danse and how he ended up a synth. There could have been a quest to disable whatever secret thing he was supposed to do for the institute and to find out what happened to him. Maybe the real danse escaped the whole replacement thing by doing something at the last minute while in captivity secretly to transfer himself to the synth replacement and overwrite the synth's mind with his instead of just having his memories copied. Say he was tied to a table and the synth was on another table next to him and he managed to switch a cable or something with one free hand. There was a movie about this called freejack anyone remember it?

 

The quest could have involved danse doing something to help the player find and destroy some institute people snatcher location not simply the institute but some facility they run somewhere else. The quest could have explained why and how they replace people and really opened up the plot but nope we get some lame thing and done. The only small detail we get about this whole thing is in the main quest for far harbor but at least we don't have to play the killer people snatcher if we don't want to.