Deus Ex: Invisible War/Headscratchers


 * Why is the Illuminati ending considered a downer? Its basically the same as the JC ending (the world is united under one benevolent banner), only the Illuminati are considerate enough to let us keep our free will.
 * I always considered the Illuminati ending to be the best ending. It's the only one that doesn't include some radical, fundamental change to the human race.
 * The Illuminati control everything by themselves. Helios at least gives everyone a voice in all decisions.
 * The ending however suggests this may have been rhetoric and Helios actually intends to remove individuality entirely.
 * Well both endings involve giving control to a single entity, be it an AI now or the head of an all-powerful organisation later. Both are risky and open to abuse since we can't be sure of the continual benevolence of either, but at least the Illuminati ending postpones this control until the Illuminati are fully established.
 * It may be that after 125 years of perfect democracy, peace and equality, the people knowingly consented to the next step of breaking down individual barriers. People still have free will and individuality, it's just that they value individuality less than we do because they cannot ignore their connection to the rest of humanity anymore. The Illuminati ending would be a continuation of the way the world is now and how it has been throughout the Deus Ex franchise: the rich stay in power by spreading disease and tricking the poor into fighting each other.
 * The Helios ending constantly keeps talking about "reaching consensus." If consensus is needed then people are still individuals, just unified ones. If it was a Hive Mind consensus would be the base state. Both that ending and the Illuminati ending are the "good" endings, both are utopias, but both have their downsides.
 * Am I the only one who got the distinct impression that the ending cutscenes must have been directed by a different person from whoever wrote the main script... and that the director strongly disagreed with the ideas presented by the author? Because that would certainly explain why, especially in JC's plotline and desired ending, all the words are so optimistic but the presentation is so astonishingly creepy.
 * That's definitely been known to happen, at least as far as the cutscene animators not communicating with the rest of the developers. Though they did hint at some profound and possibly undesirable changes to society, like when Eva told Alex that his/her old-fashioned notions of privacy would be out of place in Helios' world. Posthuman society would be as alien to us as we would seem to Australopithecus, so it might be the ending cutscene is exactly what the game designers wanted.
 * Why on earth would Billie Adams be so petty to side with the Templars, knowing they are prepared to blow up her hometown just to take out the people who fiddled with her DNA without asking? She seems utterly delusional to imagine they would let her live.
 * Stockholm's syndrome. After she had been kept under constant surveillance and experimented upon in Tarsus, Templars' openness about their goals and the rhetoric about the evils of augmentation technology would easily sink in. Also, while Templar Mooks would like to put a bullet in her head but  message in their Antarctica camp seems to imply that he has ordered her to be kept alive and rewarded even after she has done her job. Maybe they want to simply deactivate her augmentations once they achieve their goals.
 * There's also the possiblity that she is playing them or at least trying to. She never actually espouses their belief system, she just wants to stop JC from waking up. Since both Apostlecorp and the Illuminati want him awake she's working with the only group opposing it with every intention of hanging them out to dry later. Probably wouldn't work,is probably a bad idea, but still.
 * The Templars would rather "cure" modified humans than kill them, which is why they don't kill the cyborg who's been helping them. After the great flood all modified humans would become "normal".