Oh damn may I ask what happened to Sammie? Could she be thawed or did she die in hibernation for *side-eyes Phineas* various reasons?
(Under the cut for Outer Worlds spoilers, which will be tagged ow spoilers from now on, but given I'm new to this fandom Here's The Warning that i might be posting spoilers in future)
See, Jazz is only doing the main quest to save Sammie. She doesn’t like or trust Phineas, but he’s the only chance she can see for getting her best friend back. She lets the test subjects in Byzantium die to get all the Dimethyl Sulfoxide possible, and tells herself she doesn’t care if it maximises the chance of saving Sammie. She tells Phineas she’s not endangering her life to skip the Hope to Terra 2, unless he swears that Sammie will be the first person he revives. And sure, Jazz has had a lot of development in, “caring about other people and doing the right thing,” but looking at her narrative arc… there came a point towards the end of Kept Secret But Not Forgotten where I realised Sammie had to die.
I think she was one of Phineas’ first attempts at revival. Once the Hope is free of Board agents and they’ve succeeded in skipping to Terra 2, Jazz goes to find Sammie and, well, it’s not a fun time. The reason she did all this was taken from her before she even began and there’s no way in hell she’d walk into the utmost high security prison in the solar system to rescue the guy who murdered her best friend. Except that, y’know, it’s the right thing to do.
Sammie’s death gives Jazz a reason to care about what Phineas did (and reflect on how she did pretty much the same thing with the Dimethyl Sulfoxide, and all those people could have been someone’s Sammie too). It also means I can give Jazz a Lowest Point/Darkest Hour Crisis, where she’s lost everything she was fighting for, the one person she relied on… and then finally make the choice to try and save Halcyon anyway. And tell her companions she can drop them off somewhere relatively safe before doing this, and have them tell her that they’re doing this with her, that they’re family and they’re not abandoning her.
The Groundbreaker, Iconoclasts and MSI turning up to help, because for all her cynicism about how nothing was going to work out, Jazz helped them and they appreciated it, was really unexpected and touching. (Completely unnecessary and kind of got in the way, because Jazz is built for stealth, but, y’know, touching.) Because sometimes there are good people in the world, and at your lowest point there can still be people to help you!
And I think Sammie’s death fits in well with the conclusion of the game--there’s no perfect, happy ending, where everything’s okay now and everyone gets what they want. It’s going to take years of work for Halcyon to recover, and likely just as long for Jazz to recover. But slowly, things do get better, because there are people who care and are willing to help.
I am kind of thinking of doing a second playthrough as Sammie, and who knows how she’ll develop and whether Jazz will survive in her world. But for Jazz’s story, I think it’s a far stronger ending if she isn’t saved.