Well, obviously going through the same actions again and again when none of your choices ever seem to fix things doesn’t exactly do good things to a person’s mental health, but ISWM gives us a chance to see how various characters deal with the revelation. Glimpses that maybe give us a good idea of their character when they finally reach their breaking point.
The Captain, upon finding themselves back at the beginning after supposedly getting the colonists somewhere safe (or living out their days alone in an empty ship, or dying in what was supposed to just be a dream), immediately reacts with anger and disbelief before speedrunning their way out of the ship. Even in their next life, they’re still angry but determined to take on the wormhole by just jumping straight in before Mark and unnamed Lady intervene. Consequences don’t matter anymore, not when you’ll just have to do it all over again.
It’s Lady who we first meet at a breaking point, or close to it. Armed with a blaster, the first thing Lady does is threaten the Captain and tell them they are going to undo everything they’ve done. Returning again at the end, Lady shoots Mark (repeatedly) with no remorse and views us as nothing more than monsters carelessly destroying one universe after another. A far cry from the bureaucrat at the U.S.A. who awkwardly makes at an attempt at human rituals before politely trying to get at how, exactly, we managed to screw things up this bad.
Another person we meet at the U.S.A. is the Bandit, who appears to be smooth, confident, and one of the few people to call out how strange it is that the Captain is the one making all the decisions here. Upon seeing just how messed up the Invincible II is, her confidence clearly starts to drain, but should we catch up with her again after the door situation, that’s when we really see her breaking point. Realizing that she has memories of dying and how impossible that is, she wonders if this is a dream and desperately asks if any of our choices matter, looking to the Captain to confirm if this has already happened before or not.
Gunther B. Gunnerson is the first of the crew we run into who is aware of the situation, with memories of trying everything, up to and including jumping into the wormhole himself (which is probably why he remembers). Angry at the Captain for supposedly abandoning them, for destroying the ship and not thinking of the colonists, he’s decided the only option is to put the ship in more strong, capable hands (his own). Considering his reaction to any problem or door in his way before now has been to just shoot it, it’s interesting that his plan is to force the Captain to stand down and pass control of the ship over to him instead of just killing them outright, even when they activate the temporal displacement device right in front of him. Possibly he’s aware that their death will just reset the loop, or maybe Gunther just doesn’t have it in him to kill them if there’s still a chance of a better option.
Bert, in his efforts to figure out what’s going on, merges his psyche with that of the ship’s computer and, realizing the full scope of the situation and the seeming futility of it all, he admits to giving in to madness. He’s embraced the idea that there is no fixing this and decides the best course of action is to break the loop by creating a black hole that will consume the wormhole along with the ship and everyone on board. He’s past all point of being reasoned with, and considers human life and intelligence to be insignificant compared to all that he’s gained from having “touched the fabric of reality” and “drunk deep of the knowledge of infinity.” The universe and all reality with it is worth the lives of his people.
Celci, having realized that they’re in an endless looping nightmare, decides that it’s much better to put the ship in stasis and put everyone to sleep. From the way she talks, it sounds like Bert isn’t the only crew member who took a hit to their sanity, but she insists this is for our own good. She claims to have been the only one thinking of the colonists from the beginning, and that, sometimes, the best decision is for things to end. That it’s better for everything to stay unchanging and unmoving, when there is no hope or guarantee of finding a way to fix things.
(Don’t make comparisons to DAMIEN, don’t make comparisons to DAMIEN--)
And then there’s Mark. We actually see him reaching his breaking point multiple times, or getting pretty close to it. The first time is if you manage to fix all but the last problem on the ship in one go before restarting, meaning that for the Captain, it’s their first reset. But for Mark? He’s already outside of his cryo chamber before us, pointing a fire extinguisher at the panel before there’s any sign of a fire, and reciting all of the ship’s issues before the computer can. He’s been through this all, multiple times, to the point he feels like he’s going crazy and can remember timelines and choices that this Captain hasn’t experienced. Mark, desperate, begs the Captain to believe him, and eventually starts to calm down when they do.
The second time is when he and the Captain wake up after going through the wormhole. This time he’s very sure of what he remembers, including being slowly torn apart inside of a star. There’s glimpses that he’s grappling with that memory and the implications of what this all means, and he outright says these new powers will likely drive them both insane and away from everything and everyone they love before quickly brushing it off. His solution to the problem of the wormhole is that he and the Captain jump in headfirst, again and again and again. He’s got it this time Captain, he swears.
And then there’s old man Mark, who’s clearly been through all this before. His sanity seems to be wearing thin (and he often sounds a lot like Warfstache, including the inverse hug/apology we see Wilford give Abe in WMLW), likely from who knows how many years of everything repeating. He says he’s tried everything else while taking the steps that will result in the universe collapsing in on itself before rebooting, and admits that he’s sorry for a lot of things. What all he’s done to be sorry for we still don’t know, but it’s interesting that Mark was able to get old at all when, up until now, he’s been in the loop with us. Perhaps he was separated from the Captain at some point and left to live out his life in a timeline like they did before, only he was able to find his way back?
After all, we know there is a timeline where the Captain finds themselves alone, in a dark, empty, and dead ship. They send out a distress beacon and wait for who knows how long until they go into the light and return to the start of the loop. But what if Mark found himself in this version of the ship? Alone, without the Captain who once was able to hold him back from going into madness.
Alone for all those years, left to dwell on the Lady’s accusations against the Captain and all of those other doubts he may have picked up along the way (just how many times did he die before the two of you went into that wormhole?), and enough time to plan how he’ll fix things this time and stop the villain his friend has become. He is the head engineer and knows the ship better than anyone--perhaps he could do more than just make a single distress beacon. Maybe, with enough time and experimenting, he could find a way to go back, to finally put an end to all of this.
