Is the key to saving Jack from Anti saving Dr. Schneeplestein?
I forgot to take my phone to work with me last night, and business was absolutely dead. My boss left at 5:30 and I was alone until closing at 9:30 by myself, so for upwards of three hours I spent time ruminating on the whole Anti ordeal and thinking about some of the theories I’d seen. Personally, although I have my own theories and thoughts about what other people are posting, I never really took the time to sit down and actually think through what we already know on my own. But given that I had about four hours last night to do exactly that, and that I’ve been going back and watching old videos featuring the egos, I figured I’d present you guys with my thoughts!! Heads up that this post is going to be a VERY long one, I ended up writing a university-worthy five page essay on what I think is going on behind the scenes, so please stick with it until the end!! I think you might find it interesting if you’re a lore detective like me haha
And who knows, maybe @therealjacksepticeye could share his own thoughts on some of this stuff!
I WOULD ALSO LIKE TO POINT OUT: This theory hinges on the speculation that the good doctor didn’t die at the end of the August 3rd video. I strongly believe he wasn’t killed: there wasn’t any evidence of his dying at the end, and the footage just cuts out. There isn’t any struggle, no signs that there’s anything wrong with Schneeplestein other than losing his patient. So I operate under the assumption that he is still alive.
This whole brainstorm session of mine started with one question: what IS Anti? Some people seem to think he might be a demon, others a sort of computer virus. Considering the fact that, so the story goes, the more you talk about him the stronger he gets, I’d long considered him a sort of ghost/entity. There’s a sort of poltergeist or spirit that functions much the same way, and although the name escapes me, I’d associated him with that sort of thing. But then someone in the tag brought up the RGB lighting, and Anti himself seemed to think that was “clever” (link). I’d been scribbling notes into my sketchbook while writing all these thoughts down, which is what I’m typing up right now into something more cohesive. In my notes, though, I’d written things like “is Anti a separate entity with Jack’s face? Probably not,” or “a (computer) virus? Infection?” I left these thoughts to stew and moved on. Whatever you choose to believe Anti is, the important part is that he is able to do two things, or interact with the other egos (and Jack) in two stages: corruption/control, and possession. Of the two, corrupting or controlling another ego would take the lesser amount of effort. If he acts like a type of virus, for example, corrupting another ego allows him to influence them. However, they still remain in control of their own bodies for the most part. I would like to think that his sort of behaviour manifests in the way the screen glitches when Anti isn’t visible, or when one of the other egos says or does something slightly out of character, reminiscent of Anti (for example, in Dream Daddy when Brian mentions “anti-jokes” and Jack looks at the camera, and deadpan emphasizes Anti, or the recent set of Instagram photos in which Dr. Schneeplestein is featured with a bleeding eye). The second of the two takes significantly more manpower from Anti: possession. Once another ego is corrupted and can be influenced, Anti then shares a link with that ego. Over time, he is able to push his way into the other ego and take control (like we see happen in the August 3rd BIO INC REDEMPTION video, when Dr. Schneeplestein starts to wrap the cord around his own neck, etc. Anti begins taking possession of the Doctor at around 7:45, and becomes increasingly in control. In this case, he was able to fight Anti off temporarily, but in the end Anti pushed through successfully. And of course, the main and most important instance of this type of possession is the SAY GOODBYE video in which Anti makes Jack slit his own throat (and “kills” him).
Now that these main points are established, I’d like to jump a little to another point: Dr. Schneeplestein seems to be a very important lynchpin this time around. Up until this point in time, I never really took Dr. Schneeplestein seriously. Throughout the episodes of Surgeon Simulator, he’s careless and acts unlike any doctor I’ve ever encountered before in my life. His poor patients can’t possibly have ever survived a single one of his operations. Everything is sure to go awry when Schneeplestein enters the room. But then I thought to myself, what if Schneeplestein is, in actuality, much smarter than I’ve given him credit for? What if his interactions with Peter are just plain horsing around? Perhaps we’ve never really seen him take something seriously, which I believe is supported by the way he spoke about his friends in the BIO INC REDEMPTION video. He seemed genuinely distressed to see “Jack’s” systems failing. Seemed pretty serious to me. Now, let’s take for fact, just for the sake of argument, that Schneeplestein is truly a great doctor when it counts. He mentions saving Jack, and gets so incredibly distressed when the systems all start failing: “I will not have you die… not again! I will not lose you. I almost lost you once before” (6:46). We see that he truly cares about Jack and is trying everything in his power to help him, even though clearly we know that this isn’t the real Jack, Schneeplestein gets increasingly agitated and anxious (“Tell me what to do, my friend!” (7:00)). Once Anti starts to take control, it gets increasingly harder and harder for Schneeplestein to fight Anti off, and he goes on to make multiple references to Anti through medications such as antidepressants and anticoagulants as Jack’s systems begin to fail one after another (“Antidepressants… Anti-Anti… we have to get him out of there.” (8:04) and “Yes. ANTI-coagulants.” (8:24))
So, we know that Schneeplestein has saved Jack once before, presumably when Anti slit his throat in the SAY GOODBYE video. I’d like to call to attention the phrasing that Schneeplestein uses. It’s very interesting to note that he says not again, as if implying that Jack died at that time. I’ll address this again in a moment, but there is certainly some ambiguity here. Did Jack really die, or was Schneeplestein over exaggerating? What are the implications if this is true, that Jack was dead and brought back to life? Does he simply mean that Jack flat-lined on the table and that Schneeplestein was able to bring him back? Perhaps the ambiguity is designed to keep us guessing, but based on what I’ve gathered, I’d be more inclined to believe that Jack didn’t actually die after the encounter with Anti, but that he was close to death when Schneeplestein saved him (again, supported by the second half of that quote: “I almost lost you once before!” - Almost).
Next, we also know that Schneeplestein saved Chase. He says as much in BIO INC REDEMPTION: “I saved Peter from the brink. I saved my very good friend Chase, Chase Brody. He went back, saw his family. Did they take him back? We may never know” (4:16). However, I don’t think this is exactly what it seems. When I first heard him say he saved Chase, I immediately thought back to the insanely morbid last few seconds of the Bro Average video, in which Chase seems to shoot himself in the head. Now, I did a little research, and according to this article (link) surviving a bullet to the brain requires a lot of conditions to be met, and even then when the patient survives, it isn’t without a significant amount of damage. According to the article, “a person’s chances of surviving such a trauma to the brain depend on the areas of the brain that are struck, the velocity of the bullet and whether the bullet exits the brain.” Looking at the video, Chase shoots himself at the side of his head, above the ear. The bullet would have passed through both halves of the brain, which would have caused more damage than if the bullet had only affected one of the hemispheres. Not to mention that if the bullet had stayed inside the head, there would again, be a lot more damage done. If he’d hit the thalamus or brainstem, which according to the article “are crucial to consciousness and basic functions such as controlling breathing and the heartbeat,” then his chances of surviving would have been extremely low. So the moral of this little study is this: there is almost no way in hell Schneeplestein could have saved Chase if he’d really shot himself in the head, unless the Doctor was there immediately after the incident and was able to provide a Level 1 Trauma Center’s equipment to deal with the injury. And Schneeplestein isn’t even a neurosurgeon!! And even if we play devil’s advocate and say that Chase did indeed get shot, and Schneeplestein DID save him, then that leads me to question the part of the BIO INC REDEMPTION video in which the good doctor says “I saved Peter from the brink. I saved my very good friend Chase, Chase Brody. He went back, saw his family. Did they take him back? We may never know” (4:16). After a brain injury and subsequent surgery such as this, I’ll be damned if Chase actually went to see his family. We’re talking MAJOR recovery time. I’d also like to point out that just before this point in the video, we see the “Drive-By,” in which Chase seems to be shooting some folks. Are we meant to assume that he shoots at Stacy because she’s divorcing him and taking his kids? Is he shooting at random passers-by? Is it even a real gun? It clearly states “Nerf Edition” below. And if it WAS meant to be a real gun, he went back to see his family so clearly it wasn’t them he shot at, and clearly is wasn’t anyone else since the boy isn’t in jail. Y’know, where he WOULD BE if we took it to be a real drive-by. In either of these cases, his family sure as hell wouldn’t let him come back to see them. Also taking into account that Chase then uses the exact same gun in the “Stacy, I love you, please don’t go” shot. So if it isn’t meant to be a real gun, like I heavily suspect it isn’t, Schneeplestein wouldn’t have any cause to operate or to “save Chase” because nothing happened. So then why does he say he saved Chase? My guess is that something happened off-camera that we didn’t see. The most plausible idea would be that, considering his divorce and his inability to see his kids, Chase fell into a bout of situational depression, which may have hit him hard enough to cause suicidal tendencies. If he mimed killing himself once, he may have actually tried to do so off-camera. If this is where Schneeplestein actually saved him, then perhaps he got Chase the help he needed. Then again, Anti could very well have tried to get to Chase as well, prompting Schneeplestein to have to save him, but we haven’t seen anything like that on screen, or had hints about anything like this dropped. We’d need more video and/or textual proof to really understand why and how Schneeplestein saved Chase. The point of the matter is that, even if Schneeplestein DIDN’T bring the two of them back to life, he’s still a major contender in Anti’s way. The good doctor certain is as his name implies, a good doctor. Just shy of resurrecting egos, he provides them with life-saving medical attention.
Next on the agenda is an interesting little something: Anti needs Dr. Schneeplestein. We saw in Anti’s captions that he was “stitched together,” following a picture posted of the doctor. Clearly Schneeplestein was a necessity, a good choice given the aforementioned detail of administering life-saving medical attention to different egos, as well as the man in charge – Jack. He seems to be the only person who can properly treat Anti. And actually, interestingly, that same photo of the doctor is the one where we see him bleeding from the eye. He’s been corrupted by Anti, influenced by him perhaps, in order for Anti to get him to stitch his neck up. This would explain why Anti hasn’t simply killed the doctor, but instead corrupted him. Also taking into account that Schneeplestein calls Jack his friend on multiple occasions in the BIO INC REDEMPTION video, we know that he would never voluntarily betray Jack. Therefore the only way for Anti to get what he wanted would be to turn Schneeplestein to his side, however briefly. One might argue that this briefness is a result of Schneeplestein’s profession. If, like I mentioned earlier, Anti acts like a disease, an illness, or a virus – computer or otherwise – Schneeplestein has the upper hand. He’s a doctor, and doctors fight viruses and infections. Although Anti eventually manages to take control, Schneeplestein isn’t easily controlled. But then, we also have to take into account that Schneeplestein says “I have never seen something attack a system like this before” (7:30), which would account for how much he has to struggle to keep Anti out (and his subsequent loss of ability to keep Anti from possessing him).
But then it begs the question: why didn’t Anti simply kill the good doctor after having his neck stitched up? My guess is that Anti continuously needs the doctor’s support. If you look back to Anti’s appearance in BIO INC REDEMPTION, his neck is bleeding again. Why would Anti post a photo of a stitched up neck, only to then show up bleeding again? I think that Anti is in constant need of medical attention, and that Schneeplestein is the only one who can give it to him. Perhaps, no matter what he does, the neck wound keeps opening up again and again, time after time. Let’s think about it this way: why does Anti even have that neck wound to begin with? Wasn’t it Jack who slit his own throat? My theory is that any injuries he sustained while inside Jack’s body would remain with him when eventually he came back out of Jack’s body. He tells us in the BIO INC REDEMPTION video that he was in control this entire time, but I’d be willing to bet my left leg that he only said that to make himself sound more powerful than he really is. But in fact, he was not in control the whole time, and he wasn’t in Jack’s body at all. He was weak and suffering and in need of a doctor. Schneeplestein even boasts of his own medical prowess as Anti tries to possess him: “When something gets inside your body and it wants to destroy you from the inside out, there is only one way to deal with it. And that is SCHNEEPLESTEIN” (5:03). Given, he IS talking about expelling Anti from one’s system, and although that would prove to be detrimental to Anti who is trying to take Schneeplestein’s body, it is precisely his skill as a doctor that Anti is in need of.
So then, if Anti is in constant need of medical attention, and has been corrupting Schneeplestein in order to get that medical attention, would it not be detrimental to himself to kill the doctor? So then why would it be our job to save Schneeplestein, if Anti doesn’t even want to kill him? Simple. While it’s true that Anti needs the doctor’s attention to keep stitching up that neck wound of his, it is quite possible that if Jack dies, Anti can simply take over his body permanently and become strong enough to exist on his own without any medical assistance. If he can only corrupt Schneeplestein for short periods of time before the doctor starts to fight back, this means that eventually Schneeplestein will heal whatever harm Anti tries to inflict on Jack. So then, the only way to successfully make the transition from some sort of entity without a body of his own to fully taking over a host body (Jack’s) is to quickly kill the doctor so that he is unable to heal Jack again, and then to deal with Jack before time is up. In this scenario, KILLING THE DOCTOR IS THE CATALYST THAT WOULD LEAD, IN THE END, TO JACK’S (PERMANENT) DEATH.
Given the desperation to Anti’s most recent video appearance, I’d say he’s just desperate enough to go for it. When he first appeared in SAY GOODBYE, Anti was rather calm. Although aggressive with his insistence that we let this happen, he was cocky and self-assured. He was convincing and manipulative. He believed that he was in control, after what he assumed to be a successful attempt to put an end to Jack’s life. He tells us that “his body was weak,” which I could very easily be persuaded to take to mean that Jack was weak, and that with Anti now inhabiting the body, he will be strong. Inside Jack’s body, while possessing him, he forced Jack to slit his own throat (and thus retained the injury when he was pushed from Jack’s body when he was saved by Dr. Schneeplestein). In comparison, this most recent video appearance by Anti is erratic and agitated. Before, he was cocky and comfortable. He thought Jack was dead, defeated, and he was feeling triumphant. But then Schneeplestein fixed Jack and Anti wasn’t able to hold his place in Jack’s body, and was consequently expelled from the body once again. There is significantly more glitching going on, Anti paces back and forth constantly. He seems genuinely angry. He proclaims that we’ve been seeing him all along, that it’s been him in control, when frankly it’s all been a crock of shit. Anti isn’t stronger than ever, he isn’t even in control. He’s desperate, and he knows he’s being pushed aside. He knows we mock him with Glitch Bitch, and it makes him absolutely downright furious. And as a result, he makes bold claims and sweeping grandiose gestures, trying much too aggressively to convince us that he still has the upper hand, to compensate for his uncertainty, when in actuality he’s slipping from his hold more and more.
The long and the short of it is that Anti is weak. He’s getting cagey and we’ve got him on his toes. If we keep Schneeplestein alive, we keep the rest of them alive. It’s quite possible that he keep threatening the other egos, Chase and Marvin, so that the audience is continuously set ablaze. The more agitated we get, the more we talk about Anti, and the stronger he becomes again. Perhaps if we stop reacting, stop giving him the satisfaction, eventually he’ll simply become what he fears the most: nothing.
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