The Surprise ‘Destiny 2’ Plot Twist That Wasn’t

We have reached the end of Act 2 in Destiny 2’s first “Episode,” the seasonal replacement that has more content, but stretches things out longer than past seasons, including the story.

The Vex-focused plot teased us with a human-looking Vex figure right at launch, the Conductor, but the way the story structure has unfolded has left us hanging right up until now, the sixth week of story content and the ninth week of the season altogether, when this is when past season’s stories would have already ended.

The first five weeks of story dealt with Failsafe tracking radiolaria flows into Nessus and Saint having an existential crisis. But from moment one, we already knew this evil being was controlling the Echo and we’d have to fight them later. And Saint got over that crisis pretty quickly.

This week was also supposed to come with a surprise reveal, that the Conductor is actually none other than Maya Sundaresh, the Vex researcher turned Veil obsessive turned mostly Exo who we have read about in the lore and we were betrayed by her copy, Lakshmi-2, in a past season.

Now, the OG version, still wearing Lakshmi’s face, is back and wants humanity to enter a golden age by, you guessed it, giving the entire system over to Vex control and radiolaria infection. The problem with this is that essentially everyone guessed the Conductor was Sundaresh from the start. Either you had been following the story enough to know that this was almost certainly going to be her, or you are not really a lore person and this is a “Lex Luthor takes over Barry Allen’s body moment.”

My issue here is not that it’s Sundaresh. I think making her a Vex supervillain we can actually have a conversation with like Oryx, Eramis, Calus and so on, is a good idea. That’s something the Vex have always lacked. But the structure of this season should have been flipped. We should have had the reveal of Sundaresh as the Conductor essentially from moment one, given that everyone really already knew it was her, and she would have had nine weeks of story rather than now, a brief cutscene and and then just three weeks or story, presumably (maybe something in the exotic quest, if we’re lucky). And that’s starting at week twelve of the season.

Storytelling and timegating remains one of the Episode format’s greatest challenges. Yes, there were complaints about the 7-9 timegated weeks in a row of story stuff in seasons, but now, this 3 weeks on, 3 weeks off structure is jarring. And I think that what they’re trying next Episode, three weeks of story jammed into week 1, then a five week break three times, is actually going to feel worse if there’s no additional story movement during those times.

It’s a tough situation! I don’t envy Bungie trying to make these decisions, but this is why the Sundaresh reveal nine weeks in didn’t really land for me. Curious to see how things go next time around.

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