Can Someone Explain the Plots of Dead Space 2/1? [Spoilers!]

[The Grim Squeaker]

So, after having played Dead Space 2 (fun game), i'm confused concernnig plot changes vis a vis the original.

The first game had the Red Marker being a copy of the black marker which had been found and moved from Earth, (location unknown), and the red marker's removal from the planet caused the Necromorph outbreak. It's return stopped the Necromorphs' hive mind, but it's destruction caused the destruction of all Necromorphs on the planet and the Ishimura (DS2).
The second game has the marker(s) causing the Necromorphs outbreak, and animating them (the second game mentions that the Necromorphs onboard the Ishimura turned to sludge when removed from the effects of the marker's "field"), while the first game has the marker preventing the reanimation of dead tissue into necromorphs (the logs from the planet).
In terms of goals there's also a switch, the first game has the hallucinations caused by the marker helping prevent the Necromorph outbreak via helping get it back to the planet, while the second game and the movie outbreak has the Marker causing outbreaks.
So, huh? Did I miss something about corruption of the markers caused by human copies, or what?
(I'm confused by the markers going from "Their field prevents the Necromorphs reanimating and help stop them" to "Their fields cause all dead flesh to reanimate into Necromorphs and they cause the Necromorph outbreaks (and want to make everything melt together in convergence)".

[Zixinus]

I think you are confused what "dead space" is for the Marker: there is a zone in the Marker that makes the the Necromorphs dead. At least, I recall that being said in the notes.

What I understand is that the Marker will also LIE to you, as in Dead Space 2. It wanted to be "whole" in the first game and it wanted to trigger a Convergence event in the second game.

[Molyneux]

I believe the problem also may be that the markers are working at cross purposes...though I haven't played much of DS2.

[General Zod]

I wouldn't think too hard about the plot from Dead Space. Most of it was pretty campy and you can sum it up as the Markers are trying to achieve convergence (whatever that is) by using whoever they can to get them to help with whatever tactic they think will work at the time. Isaac just happens to be the most convenient poor bastard available who can remain sane long enough to be useful.

[ShadowDragon8685]

Well, my first theory, based on D.S. 1, was that the Markers were a warning beacon and a ward against the Necromorphs, made by a third party.

IE, that the Markers recorded the DNA of the necromorph entity, and they look so damn ominous because the people who made them thought "yeah... This looks scary. Nobody in their right mind could look at this and realize that it means anything but bad news." Basically a science-fiction version of how they're trying to figure out how to mark nuclear waste disposal sites so that future primitive humans following the collapse of our society and the loss of all our knowledge will instinctively "get" that they need to stay away from nuclear waste disposal sites.

Basically, that the Markers were a message: We are/were a space-faring race who consider ourselves powerful and advanced. The life-form whose genetic structure is encoded upon this monument is one that we consider to be a clear and present danger to ourselves and all other forms of life. If you find it, destroy it.

They made this a triple-redundancy, because not only was the marker goddamn ominous in the first place, but it also gives psychic messages of exactly what the necromorph life-form will fucking do if it gets out: making a lot of corpses, then making them into horrific reanimated murderbeasts and try to converge into a hive-mind.

Thirdly, and should all else fail, the Marker itself projects a powerful field around it that fucks with the necromorph life-form, preventing it from recombining dead flesh.

My theory for what went wrong was that the aliens who made the marker never considered the possibility that the person who saw the psychic visions might be mentally unfit to see them (IE, insane,) and worse, might think the Marker itself was holy and the visions it was giving him were a divine thing to be desired, not a hateful thing to be feared and warned against. Possibly their entire species was psychic and this method of communication was, to them, as clear and as simple as writing something in text: we would never consider the possibility that an alien race might view our writing as some kind of nearly mind-warping amazing thing that could heavily influence them.

Compounding upon that, when the humans recreated the Red Marker, they fucked it up, and it's anti-necromorph field was very, very weak - in fact localized to the Marker itself, and in close proximity to the Hivemind incapable of even repelling the completed forms of Necromorphs - to explain why in the movie the necromorphs were held at bay by the Marker in the cargo hold of the Ishimura, but on Aegis VII they can attack Isaac even if he's standing next to it. No explanation for how they can attack Isaac if he's standing next to it on the Ishimura, but chalk that one up as a wash due to gameplay concerns, or the Hivemind growing stronger as more bodies are added to it.

Also, it should be pointed out that, in Dead Space, I considered the Marker to be an ally. When all else had failed, when Kendra stabbed Isaac in the back, when all other allies or sources of aid were gone, the Marker itself stepped in to keep Isaac going; bringing the Marker back to the planet, where it could interfere with the Hivemind, putting it back on the amplifier, whereupon it clearly repelled the Hivemind and the necromorphs (until that treasonous bitch Kendra took it off again.)

It did this by sending Nicole to aid Isaac - and remember, this wasn't just hallucinations of Nicole. At two separate points in the game, "Nicole" takes physical action to assist Isaac; in the mining decks Isaac was caught on the far side of a chasm from the controls needed to open the door to access the storage room where the emergency beacon was located, and with no way whatsoever to access that chasm. "Nicole" shows up, and needs to be defended against successive waves of Necromorphs attacking her - her RIG is showing she starts at full health, and if you let them attack her, she will die. Later on, after Kendra steals the shuttle, Nicole works a console to help Isaac remote control the shuttle back into the bay; Kendra ejects, leaving Nicole and Isaac to board the shuttle and fly down to finish this. She was already dead, but something that was doing a very good job of masquerading as her was rendering unto Isaac material support that was in all evidence clearly in opposition to the desires of the Hivemind. (After all, if Isaac was being tricked into helping them, you'd think they'd put a lot fewer necromorphs in his way.)

From this, I had concluded that the Marker itself had chosen to reanimate Nicole Brennan as an avatar before the Hivemind could start to alter her; and having access to her memories (and knowing Isaac was one of like, three bastards who just warped in strong enough to fight the Necromorphs,) it decided to let her think she was still alive and helping it.



Now, Dead Space 2 comes along, and things change. I don't honestly know how to reconcile my old theories with the new facts in evidence. There was apparently no Hivemind on the Sprawl, and even if there had been one it would have been in a nascent form. The Marker itself seems to be a much more malevolent figure, actively part of the Necromorph life-cycle instead of a deterrent against it. In the end, Isaac destroys it, after having been evidently betrayed by the hallucinations of Nicole which he had been coming to terms with and even starting to accept; and having fought off the hallucination of her - actually attacking his memory of Nicole - with heavy weapons.


The only things I can think of is that the Marker's psychic influence is so strong that, for many humans, it drives them insane. The only way they can reconcile its extreme mental effects and the visions they get is to believe that these visions are desirable outcomes and cause them to work actively towards those goals. Other than that, the Aegis VII marker was apparently constructed, while the subsequent markers were grown. They were grown with some kind of seed that started with memories extracted from Isaac Clarke and Nolan Stross, among others. It's possible that the mental imprint on Isaac was not solely that of the Marker but also the Hivemind, which had perverted the purpose of the Markers he was capable of creating from being a ward and a warning against Necromorphs to actively attempting to recreate it.


It's complicated.