This Is How It Ends: Big Boss Part 2

1990 saw the MSX2 exclusive release of Hideo Kojima's follow-up to his sneak classic Metal Gear: Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake. Solid Snake is plucked out of his Canadian wilderness retirement to infiltrate the fictional Central Asian country of Zanzibar Land, again, controlled by Freudian nasty pop: Big Boss.



How did Big Boss survive Outer Heaven's destruction? We're never told. He's just wily like that. Accept it! Rescued hostages recount to Snake that Boss may no longer be entirely human either; sly allusions to Kojima's synthetic human point and clicker game: Snatcher, and his RoboCop-esque fate in unofficial Western market only sequel: Snake's Revenge abound during in-game Codec calls.



Seizing control of the fictional country, Big Boss recruits war orphans from all over the world to be molded and raised in his image; the foundation for a great military empire that will venerate and honour their warriors. In order to create this techno-Sparta, Big Boss has captured several tinker-king scientists, and commissioned another Cold War tipping nuclear tank: Metal Gear D. It's Snake's job to blow everything up and rescue the hostages.



Sounds simple eh? It isn't. Clear cut good and evil? Nope. The first boss Snake encounters on his sneak mission is disguise master ninja: Black Color. Black Color is the last remaining member of a NASA special forces unit created to fight in extraterrestrial environments (fight them Chinese on the Moon!), cybernetically enhanced and doped up to the eyeballs; Black Color teleports and hurls shurikans in a psychotic froth. Upon defeating this cyborg menace it is revealed that your enemy is none other than Kyle Schneider, an ally from the previous game.



Schneider was snatched up against his will surely? He fought alongside you against Big Boss in the previous game! He hated Outer Heaven! Schneider reveals that after Snake successfully completed the first game's mission, NATO carpet bombed the entire area to nothing. Their goal was to wipe out everything to do with Outer Heaven - including Schneider's resistance army. Schneider was captured and subjected to torture ascension implants for a short-lived experimental space combat unit. NASA disbanded the unit for being too cool, and Schneider managed to escape the purge. He was offered sanctuary in Zanzibar Land and took it, growing to admire his former enemy, primarily for taking in all survivors of the Outer Heaven incident - including resistance members. These are the actions of the 'bad-guy'.

Tune in about 5:45 - This is how it ends for Kyle Schneider.

This is a common theme throughout the Metal Gear series: Big Boss as a champion of the downtrodden. In Metal Gear Solid, Kurdish guerrilla Sniper Wolf considers Big Boss to be a hero. She recounts her life as a child soldier and her eventual rescue and molding by Big Boss. She calls him Saladin, after the 12th century Muslim political and military leader.



Is Snake's mission just? Or just a loyalty bending wetwork clean-up? Wouldn't it be better to let Big Boss live and really stick it to the corrupt Western powers? Following the character's gross disillusion with the US at Metal Gear Solid 3's conclusion, it looked like this was precisely the line of thought going to be expressed in the PSP spin-off Portable Ops, especially considering the announced recruitment mechanic. Sadly that didn't quite happen - instead you formed the FOXHOUND unit from the ground up to combat your gone rogue predecessors. Ah well.



Schneider aside, another former comrade sympathetic to Big Boss' agenda is Frank Jaeger / Gray Fox / Null. Phew!



Jaeger was the FOXHOUND agent originally assigned to infiltrate Outer Heaven, his failure ensured the re-assigning of new recruit: Solid Snake. Following the destruction of the Metal Gear tank and the fortress nation, Jaeger absconded with Big Boss, deserting his former unit. Jaeger became Boss' right hand man, leading the specialist Dogs of War unit, and piloting Metal Gear D during the second game's conclusion.



This is (sort of) how it ends for Frank Jaeger: A one on one fist fight in a minefield.

Jaeger'd be back as a cyborg ninja too. A recurrent fate for Snake's soldier friends.

Anyway, I'm getting way off the point. This is all dressing. This a Big Boss article after all. It's hard not to get sidetracked by Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake. The more I see and read of the game, the richer it seems. See? It's happened again. More than being a template for the subsequent Metal Gear Solid series, it neatly comments on, and upturns our assumptions on who these characters are / were their loyalties lie. In that sense it has much in common with Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, MGS2's relationship with Metal Gear Solid is almost post-modernist deconstruction. Snake is largely abscent, and your left with blonde doll Raiden as he muddles through a samey adventure, that eventually turns this (minute) shortcoming into central text: a despotic AI system specifically engineered the situation to be an exact replica of the previous game to create another, more pliant, super soldier. Literal cloning had failed, so now psychological conditioning was the order of the day. In Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake friends are enemies, and enemies are philanthropists.

So how does Big Boss finally get it once and for all?

During your fight with Grey Fox your backpack is set aflame forcing you to ditch all your weapons / supplies. You muddle down a dark corridor, tech-naked, to tackle your ex-commander / retcon clone father. Big Boss chases you (using doors!) around a maze of rooms as you desperately try to find something, anything to take him on with. Tense, haphazard and overwhelmingly unfair - it's a fitting end to the original series.



This is how it ends: Solid Snake's final battle with Big Boss.

Come the Solid series, Big Boss would be recast several more times. His phantom spectre looms over the first installment, the Liquid son attempts to fulfil his dream of a soldier paradise - even invoking the mantra name: Outer Heaven. The Liquid son also demands the return of the retrieved and cryo-frozen father's body - he wants to harvest it for soldier genes and mutate his faceless guinea pig army.



Sons of Liberty visually introduces a third 'perfect' clone son: Solidus (the state between a liquid and a solid), the image of the father. Codenamed King and a former President of the United States, Solidus is still just a puppet outmaneuvered and manipulated by the Solid series' unseen esoteric antagonists: The Patriots. Both these sons are unable to pass beyond legacy aspirations, and are undone by legacy oversights: discarded family. Respectively: the Solid son and Raiden - Solidus' literal adopted son, and the product of Solidus' small boy unit - assigned to the Liberian civil war. It'll be interesting to see if Metal Gear Solid 4 recons Patriot involvement / aggression onto either the Outer Heaven or Zanzibar Land incidents, perhaps the garrison countries were built to stand against their meme plutocracy?



Big Boss features in the third Solid game, this time as the hero. Cast into the midst of a Cold War favour plot a young Big Boss, codenamed: Naked Snake must rescue a scientist, destroy a bastard nuclear tank, and murder his mentor / lover - who has defected to the USSR.



Starting out as a patriotic taciturn green beret, by game's close Naked Snake is deeply dissatisfied with his soldier's lot. Even going as far as snubbing the director general of the CIA during his 'crowning' ceremony. As it turns out the mission has very little to do with heroism and everything to do with a secret unclaimed slush fund belonging to a group of self-proclaimed Philosophers, the renegade American branch of which would become the AI overlord entity: The Patriots.



All the little Snake toys dance to their merry jig.