Just how bad is The Combine?

[Music] rarely in my entire life have i ever seen humanity depicted in a worse situation than it's in in half-life 2. that might seem ridiculous to say half-life 2 isn't all that gritty a game but hear me out because while we only see a small fraction of this world over our time with gordon like everything in half-life the implications behind the things we see tell us so many things about the combine let's start at the beginning no matter how many times i've been relocated i never get used to it no matter how many times i get relocated i never get used to it there are a wealth of details in this first chapter point insertion but let's start with this relocation all we know so far is that this guy is getting relocated over and over again as we move through the first chapter we see that this is happening to everyone they're always departing but they never arrive and the ones that do arrive they never leave you never see them go they're always full no one ever gets on but they're always they're always departing but they never arrive every single person in this world is being moved from city to city over and over again some philosopher somewhere in history probably gave this a name but let's call it civil confusion like that guy on the train said he never gets used to it this is one of the combine's many ways of keeping people complacent and stopping them from formulating a plan or even thinking about formulating a plan as soon as the combine had established power it did the number one thing it needed to do to stop people from resisting they broke up the families and the friend groups every single person we see here is living amongst a bunch of total strangers and if it weren't for gordon they'd be surrounded by a totally new group of strangers by this time next month just as they were last month just in case any of them made any friends with which to scheme it's my third transfer this year just for a second imagine what this must be like for these citizens we don't spend enough time with any of them to really hear how hard it's been on them but if you've ever moved to a new area away from your friends or suddenly been put in a new school full of strangers well that feeling is their entire life only they don't know if their families are alive all they know is that even if the combine were to miraculously fall they'll probably never see them again these citizens they'll never be able to settle down no matter what happens that right there is how you control a population so that they die quietly the combine though they sure don't stop there i mean listen to what this woman says are you the only ones on that train you're on your way to parks unknown welcome overwatch stopped our train in the woods and took my husband for questioning they said he'd be on the next train i'm not sure when that was did they're they're being nice though letting me wait for him this woman's significant other through a mistake in bureaucracy ended up on the same train as her and so the combine stopped the train and took him away probably to be executed now that he's been reminded of what he has to fight for and odds are very good that the same will happen to her once they get around to it this is a seriously bad situation so how else do you promote civil confusion well as we see here the combine take the personal effects of everybody every time they're moved we see abandoned luggage all over the place at this train station i see they took your suitcase too they can't get away with this much longer i mean hell when we get into the back room behind barney's interrogation chamber we see a huge pile of confiscated luggage to no doubt be incinerated as soon as they get around to it you have absolutely nothing beyond what the combine gives you no family no friends no clothes no medicine no personal mementos nothing you couldn't carry a drawing that your deceased child drew you without it being ripped out of your hands and torn apart as soon as a cp unit decides to search you oh and your child is deceased the combine set up a suppression field that stops embryonic development not just in the cities but everywhere on earth we even hear the ghostly echoes of children's laughter if we get close enough to this playground [Music] humanity will as it is when we start half-life 2 never have another generation the entire species is on death's door well if humanity is angry enough people will plan some sort of rebellion regardless of how little time you give them to get acquainted with their surroundings word will get out and people will start to plan something regardless of what you do so how do we further this control well ruthless genocide remember how this apartment is raided and everybody in it is killed no more than a minute after gordon steps foot in it well the combine have some sort of ai that oversees humanity called overwatch and well listen to what it says here before the cp starts shooting what it's saying here essentially translates to we have detected one more person in your building than we expected we'll give you a decent day's meal if you lay down on the ground and confirm your identity with civil protection as soon as they've given the all clear but well that isn't what happens everybody's killed immediately and granted they didn't comply with what the cp said but as these two citizens outside of the building said they have no reason to come to our place don't worry they'll find one these cps aren't here to neutralize one rogue citizen they're here to kill everybody now that their civil status has been infected by a seditious individual why do you think they scream one for your life as soon as they hear the overwatch voice i mean even before this miscount is detected we see the cps raiding an apartment and killing everybody all because they didn't answer the door quickly enough so basically what this all boils down to is the moment we notice you you and everyone you've ever talked to is dead no questions asked good luck inspiring the people around you to resist under those conditions what are we going to do not only that this guy's lying don't drink the water they put something in it to make you forget i don't even remember how i got here implies that at least some of the citizens we see are being drugged up 24 hours a day they don't even remember that they had a life before the combine honestly the most unrealistic thing about half-life 2 is that anybody managed to escape this system before gordon while the overwatch soldiers we start fighting after we return from ravenholm are all augmented and have no free will these cps who are killing all of these civilians are all human hence barney is able to be undercover and isn't brainwashed so how the hell does it motivate these cps to go against their own species well like i said in this system you have absolutely nothing except for what the combine gives you that makes it pretty easy to motivate people to do what you want so what does it give the cps well first off right in the beginning of the game we hear a citizen and a food line say this i don't know about you i'm ready to join civil protection just to get a decent meal we don't know everything about cp coercion but we've got a couple of other things that we do know i'm sure a lot of you have heard this line i've before a lot of people say that this is the combine stimulating the pleasure centers of a cp's brain to create the sensation of sex but i offer a different explanation so first off the suppression field basically it stops embryonic development in all citizens and makes reproduction impossible we've already touched on the implications of that but to me this means that the combine would classify sex with a condom or birth control as a non-mechanical reproduction simulation it's a simulation of reproduction but without the mechanical element of a sperm cell entering an egg alright so if you do well as a cp the combine will let you get your rocks off what's so bad about that well here let's just let the cp kill us real quick family cohesion preserved well damn that has some messed up implications so what you're telling me is that there is a way to see your family in this world you just have to join the cps and help them stamp out the last slivers of human ambition and well if you fail in the line of duty then your family is executed and before you say that this family cohesion preserved line only means that the cp gets to continue seeing their family let's look at another line real quick when a protection team member dies you'll sometimes hear their squad mates say this non-cohesive so cohesion just means that everybody involved in the team is alive long story short every cp that gordon killed or evaded had their families executed if they had them god damn the combine and wrapping around to that non-mechanical reproduction simulation thing i guess this all boils down to one thing if a cp is in combat with a high value target like gordon they could either succeed and get to have sex with their spouse and more importantly see their spouse or fail and have their family executed probably along with themselves well what about the bachelors like barney probably is how do we stop more of them from revolting easy malnourishment take a listen to this line that plays when a cp is preparing for combat okay so it gives them drugs to get them fast and alert before combat makes sense but this is the combine you're talking about it's got your life functions monitored it knows exactly how much energy you need at any given time it wouldn't surprise me at all if most of these cps we see in non-confrontational situations like this one were just barely conscious given just the amount of chemical stimulation they need to continue to shout at civilians and chase them a short distance if anything goes wrong remember all that barney did before the uprising was open a door for you and walk to kleiner's lab meanwhile when this cp is performing the loyalty check on you his suit probably gave him a slight stim boost from the overwatch ai just moments before so basically you might join the cps for a promise of a decent meal every now and then but once you do the combine start holding a gun to your family's head you stay only slightly less malnourished than you were before and all you have to do to get this upgrade in life is be ready to kill or injure members of your own endangered species at a moment's notice these guys are so incredibly evil so that's all how the combine maintains a nice stockpile of humans to use for whatever purpose but let's talk about what comes once the humans are dead the transhumans and all the other abominable chimera that the combine manufacture see you might occasionally hear overwatch reminding cps that they can get a promotion if they opt for memory replacement well that's the first step to becoming an overwatch soldier now as far as i can tell these guys aren't a hive mind they've just had their mind scrubbed of every emotion memory and skill that isn't useful in combat they're hyper-organized i mean just look at some of these maneuvers they use two of them fire while the other one reloads they flush you out of cover with grenades or flank route they advance on you when you're wounded shotgunners don't use all of their ammo in one bout unless they have to snipers will destroy your cover and use ambient explosives against you now combine soldiers don't have great accuracy and gordon is a bit of a bullet sponge when he's got a decent charge on his suit even on hard mode those two things combined can definitely make these guys seem kind of dumb but this ai is actually pretty damn impressive there are some pathfinding issues which cause them to get to where they're going a bit slowly plus you're shooting at each other which kind of distracts you from the intricacies but these guys are genuinely super well coordinated take a look at how well they capitalize on their advantage here and almost getting killed [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] anyways the reason i'm getting so into this is to emphasize just how non-human these guys are the way they audibly count down the timer on their grenades the way they coordinate so cleanly with so little audible speech the way that they describe killing a man as amputating them from the populace malignant coagulate infection diagnose dissect sociocyter all of this medical language this is where we get to the most sinister aspect of the combine it views all of humanity as a single organism a single body it describes dissident citizens as malignant and when sentencing one it orders its troops to diagnose amputate and coagulate you might have noticed that i've been referring to the combine as the singular it over the course of this video rather than the plural vey well this is why it's why it's called the combine it combines everything it touches into one being a being which is simply called the combine as a human under the combine's rule you're little more than a white blood cell and if you act with any more free will than a white blood cell you're infected you're committing sociocidal acts and you need to be amputated this is why it always hits me so hard when i hear the overwatch address freeman as individuals he's one of if not the only human on earth who isn't a citizen of the combine he's the only one who is and the combine's eye and individual being like itself this whole story is in the combine's eye two beings going against each other it's gordon and it's the combine gordon is this foreign cancerous cell that somehow worked its way into the combine's bloodstream and is spreading its malignance throughout the entire body until eventually the whole of earth is as good as destroyed in the combine's eyes earth that's where we get to the parasitic nature of the combine that's where we get to this absolutely beautiful visual metaphor that's at play throughout the entirety of half-life 2. look at how the combine has sort of integrated itself into human society and architecture every human has some sort of id chip in their hand combine structures have sort of forced their way into human architecture all over the place restrictors burrow into the sand smart walls shake the earth beneath them preventing an antlion infestation and of course the combine's biggest tumor of all the citadel this gigantic blemish on the surface of the earth metaphorically draining her resources through these long tendrils that spread across the city again metaphorically speaking these tendrils might as well be the ones that have drained so much of earth's oceans speaking of the canals in city 17 are where this visual metaphor is at its best in my eye take a look at what this is these canals symbolize how humans once worked their way into earth's ecosystem and integrated themselves into it only now the combine is here the waters have been polluted and drained dead useless ships are all stranded in the newly drained canal left to rot and all that's left is the dried up husk of what was once a healthy body a healthy planet a healthy population and a few combine tumors dotted around the place training what little life this dead empty husk of a once biologically rich planet has to offer them that's what's so dark about the combine it doesn't just replace earth's infrastructure with its own it uses every last bit of it that is useful and it leaves the rest to die and rot the combine is a parasite sucking on the corpse of a once beautiful planet which was destroyed as it multiplied and spread itself across the entrails of an ecosystem on the smallest most insignificant level to the scale of the entire planet the combine has parasitized every last thing on this planet that could ever be considered alive and combined it into one so answer me this are you going to pick up that can called me a collaborator as if such a term were shameful i ask you what greater endeavor exists than that of collaboration in our current unparalleled enterprise refusal to collaborate is simply a refusal to grow an insistence on suicide if you will did the lung fish refuse to breathe air it did not it crept forth boldly while its brethren remained in the blackest ocean abyss with lidless eyes forever staring at the dark ignorant and doomed despite their eternal vigilance would we model ourselves on the trilobite are all the accomplishments of humanity fated to be nothing more than a layer of broken plastic shards thinly strewn across a fossil bed sandwiched between the burgess shale and an eons worth of mud in order to be true to our nature and our destiny we must aspire to greater things we have outgrown our cradle it is futile to cry for mother's milk when our true sustenance awaits us before i head out and get to playing lsd dream emulator i just like to go ahead and verbally thank my patrons especially those donating 10 or more monthly such as alex van der wood almost dead again anatoly volnov andrew melnick arthur d gonzalez martin benny big time jim bobby blitz colin gajek cosmo borsky daniel christman darius fazier david kaiser dr mein dominic johann duncan bristow fralem in bloom jack eisenberg jano john strange kale graybill mellow mixer rules money and muses moon patio furniture perks 3d ceilo tan man yemen she young master pig and zyrably i would also like to specify two things specifically to the patrons firstly after reading some of the messages i've received from you guys i'd like to specify that you really don't owe me anything your patronage is of course appreciated but you don't need to apologize if you can't keep it up or don't have the money to donate in the first place and secondly my patron list is getting to be a little bit of a mess the website doesn't really help me organize this stuff very much so if you ever catch me missing your name mispronouncing it or anything don't hesitate to send me a message and i'll happily correct it lastly i'd just like to thank you guys for the great amount of support i got on that grand theft auto 5 video that was my first one i've ever done with a sponsorship and the reception to that has been overwhelmingly positive needless to say it's made me feel a whole lot more secure after the turbulent months of december and january so thanks for everything guys i couldn't ask for a better community have a good week

Channel: Leadhead

Views: 1,199,330

Rating: 4.9618559 out of 5

Keywords: analysis, explained, essay, review

Id: g5Qdu7b6eGs

Length: 19min 10sec (1150 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 05 2021