Episode 5 Discussion (spoilers)

Welp, that was an episode. Before I get onto my theories and my overall thoughts on The Wolf Among Us, I'll list how my ending resolved.

-Georgie/Vivian died (this might happen regardless of your choices)

-Handcuffed the Crooked Man

-Spared the Crooked Man

-Colin stays with Fabletown, Toad goes to Farm

Okay, so as a finale to The Wolf Among Us, I quite enjoyed this episode. It's not my favourite of the bunch, and it might have been a little too on-rails, but I think it was fitting end to the series that did not disappoint. Overall, I loved The Wolf Among Us. I think it's my favourite game by Telltate, as it's definitely going to be a contender for my favourite game of 2014. Backed-up by wonderfully strange source material, I adore the sense of style it has in everything. The music, the setting, the colours, even the U.I, all support this very cool neo-noir story.

As for the ending, I think Faith was glamoured as Narrisa. Between the surprise the Crooked Man shows when he sees Narrisa, the "I'm sorry" letter she leaves for her husband, and the fact that we never found the body of "Faith". I think the body we find in the beginning was Narissa.

Gallery

Unsurprisingly, they really liked laying the glamour plot twists on thick...

Anyway, since this is now over, TWAU is officially my GOTY at the moment. I really wish we got to see the farm though :(

kinda hard to play this game since i've read the comics

all i can say is it need more little boy blue

-Georgie and Vivian died for me too. I left Georgie there though.

-I handcuffed the crooked man, but not before knocking away the gun and punching him.

-I sub-zero'd the crooked man. I was just going to toss him down the well, but then he went and tried to kill me again.

-Colin stayed, Toad went to the farm, but I felt pretty bad about it.

As for the Nerissa/Faith thing, I think Nerissa at the end was Nerissa, but that Faith had been Nerissa when you met her. The reason the crooked man is surprised is because he realized that after Nerissa, Faith and Lily's initial plan failed, Nerissa had manipulated things in order to get Bigby to care about Faith's case, since without that personal interaction, the authorities would never have even cared about the murder/disappearance to begin with.

- I killed Georgie. I'm sure that's part of the story for everybody, but I chose to end his suffering

- I brought Crooked Man back alive. I was mainly interested in hearing what he had to say. It also seemed like the right thing to do.

- I threw the Crooked Man down the Witching Well. I think imprisoning him would've been too risky, especially with Aunty Greenleaf taking his side. He deserved it too, even it was the result of Nerissa's lying.

- I accepted TJ's gift, and you're a horrible person if you didn't.

- I ran after Nerissa

I enjoyed every minute of this episode. It was really refreshing after the disappointment that was episode 4. Other than that episode, this was a great game. I can't wait for season 2, which must happen.

I think it'd be more realistic to say that Nerissa was glamoured as Faith. Why would Faith fake her own death, then go through the trouble of bringing it to Bigby's attention?

Interesting!

Basically what I took away from the ending is that sh*t's f*cked up. Happy endings are a farce.

Did anyone get all the fable book entries? I'm missing what I belive to be the third one

The problem with this sort of drawn-out episodic content is that I can barely remember any of the shit that happened in previous episodes so I have no idea what the Keyser Söze moment at the end was all about. Interesting theories here but I can't weigh in on any of them.

That said, I probably liked this episode the least out of all of them. I guess mostly the ending felt incredibly flat. It didn't have any fun intrigue. There was no real tension to the "trial". The Crooked Man didn't come off as clever enough to be this criminal mastermind. Things never felt like they were getting out of hand. There were no stakes. It was an incredibly disappointing "climax" to an ~8-hour buildup.

Also did anyone else feel like Georgie died way too easily?

It's explained in the comics that the popularity of your fairy tale determines how resilient you are. I guess Georgie isn't that popular.

Edit: Okay, yeah, now I'm leaning towards it being Narissa who glamoured as Faith. I recall Woody being upset at the Faith we see in the first episode because she didn't know who he was. I'm assuming it was the original Faith that agreed to cover for Lily that night, so naturally Narissa wouldn't know who Woody was.

Now comes the fun part: playing it again while sort of knowing what is going on! Detective stories.

Absolutely loved this. Liked it better than The Walking Dead but that's probably more to do with me actually caring for the source material and loving synths. Felt there was too much combat in episode 5 but other than that a perfect representation of the Fable comics.

I mercy killed Georgie and threw the Crooked Man down the Witching Well because the Negative Zone isn't very secure.

Other than those 2 I did the "nice guy" choices throughout the season except for a few where I got fed up like with Toad in Episode 1.

Faith was totally Nerissa with a glamour though.

Thats a very good point, I forgot about that.

I tried to kill the Crooked Man before taking him to trial, but that resulted in a failed game. Was really jarring for a game that seemed to respect player choice.

At least I got to tear his head off instead of just throwing him down the well.

Soo good. So effin good. Nerissa pulling Bigby's strings... man.

What? You must've done something wrong, because the game definitely continues if you kill him.

It seems as though its scripted to have Toad sent to the Farm no matter what you do. I was hoping if you "confiscated" enough money you could buy a glamour for him and T.J. It sucks that no matter what you do it'll end in Toad hating you. Maybe I'm wrong.

Loved the game. Loved the characters and setting enough to read the comic and am loving that now too.

I can't wait for Activision to make an FPS based on the same source material.

I loved it as a visual novel, but I wish they wouldn't push the choice angle. Your actions do almost nothing, this isn't Mass Effect. Just keep the dialogue references to your choices and don't pretend you're shaping the story.

I don't even care listing my choices, the end is still on my mind and I am starving for answers. Its either Faith was glamoured as Narissa or the other way around? Fuck, I hope they make a season 2.

@2headedninja said:

It's a bad comparison because your choices don't actually change the overall story in Mass Effect either. There are characters that can die in both games. The conversations are what change (on different scales).

So did anyone notice they completely dropped the inventory farce this episode? They finally stopped with all the point n' click tropes, and I don't think the episode was lacking without them. I'd totally be up for an entire season like this episode (probably with less quicktime events though), just to see if it'd let Telltale focus more on the player choice stuff. Seeing "Georgie will remember that." pop up while he lay dying made me roll my eyes a bit (I think the very next choice even was "kill/leave to die").

Also, did anyone get any resolution to the Tweedles/Jersey devil? They all just kinda disappeared after the initial fight scene, and it seems kinda weird they never got any kind of resolution. Maybe that's a comic thing, though.

I think they meant that Woody thought Faith was Lily wearing a glamour.

@teddie: 90% of the characters in the game are new. Bigby, Snow, Flycatcher, Bluebeard, Swineheart, Bufkin, The Mirror, Beauty, Beast and Jack are the only characters that are in the comics.

So did Narissa orchestrate Bigby's investigation, just to get revenge on the Crooked Man and Georgie? She probably owed them big for getting real legs and as she hinted, had no choice on working at the strip club.

Overall, a really awesome season. Though I thought that some of the decisions I made would be reflected a little better in the ending.

I really didn't get the ending with nerissa. When bigby was recalling things she said to him and then you have the choice to run after her. It's probably obvious and Ill look like an idiot, but whatever they were getting at flew over my head.

She was saying the exact same lines as Faith did earlier, hinting that she is/was either Faith or Nerissa glamoured as the other.

I either need to play the whole season as one thing to get the context of this, or just forget it ever happened and move on. The episode thing worked with the walking dead because everything about it was so shocking and memorable, but with this... It became a chore to properly follow what was going on. It's a shame, because I bet there's a great experience to be found within it, but the way I experienced it didn't allow for that.

- Georgie/Vivian died for me (is it possible to avoid slicing up Georgie, if you choose to hit someone else in the CM's lair? All I was doing during that section, was prioritizing targets based on how armed they were)
- Chose to spare the CM but brought him to justice, and knocked the gun away. Chose to imprison him even after he tried to kill me again.
- Told Snow I killed Georgie, since it was true, but figured I'd get the chance to explain that I was easing his suffering. Snow is one judgmental fucker, considering the shit Bigby goes through in this game.
- Saved Colin from the farm, but couldn't save Toad. Tried to get him a glamour in the previous episode, but had no money (gave my cash to Faith in Ep.1). Felt bad for TJ, but Toad was kind of an asshole considering all of the stuff you overlook for him.

Jammed a knife in one of the Tweedle twins during the fight against CM's goons, but no idea what became of that.

Basically tried to play this game as a paragon of true justice, but it was hard to thread that needle sometimes. Might go back and do a "take no prisoners" playthrough.

I liked this game, but frankly, I was hoping for more resolution from Ep5. I hope we get another season.

I tried it three times, making different choices in the conversation. He shot me dead every time.

Wow that was a great way to end the season!

-I let Georgie bleed out and Vivian pulled the ribbon on herself

-Cuffed the Crooked Man after pushing him as far as I safely thought I could since I promised Snow I'd bring him in alive and then tossed his sorry @$$ down the well

-accepted TJ's gift, wasn't able to save Toad but was able to save Colin from the Farm

-chased after Nerissa(?)

So is Nerissa really a glamoured Faith or vice versa or maybe just maybe Red Riding Hood?

Certainly seemed like Faith was actually behind the entire plot. She's maybe directly responsible for Nerissa and Lilly's deaths.

Fine by me, I suppose. The Crooked Man was a scumbag. Faith gamed the system, and someone truly terrible got his. It's a perfectly thematically satisfying ending to a game about being a political tool. Someone's always using Bigby for something.

Narissa was actually Faith all along, using a glamour to hide her identity and escape like she did with the donkey skin.

She's definitely not Red Riding Hood. Red doesn't show up until a ways into the comics, and it's revealed that it isn't even plausible for her to be in New York during the game.

well, just finished it

- Georgie died

-Crooked man got a fair trail

- I imprisoned the crooked man

- I accepted TJ's give

- and I left Nerissa go

You know, I was surprised more about this game. Half the time with these games there's that point you make a choice and the character yells like a rabid dog. It was well handled all the choices if you wanted to be the big bad wolf or the sheriff. And even this chapter with it's quick time events there was a lot of personality and emotions, just kept thinking more about just the larger scale emotional involvement especially when Crooked Man Spoke. It was well handled and less manipulative then Walking Dead. It was really interesting how different this game was.

I loved it

I tried not bringing crooked man in, because well...his power is trickery after all. He's the successful crime boss version of Jack. But you just get killed. And killed. And not skipping the cutscene, killed again. So you just have to convince people. But I threw him down the well all the same. Not gonna make it savage society nor trust the person he had the most influence over to imprison him. Probably make a Just in case backdoor. I kinda feel bad for bigby in how things turned out with Snow, but it seems "realistic" with the miniature government that runs this shaky place. On the whole Narissa/Faith thing, I felt the entire scene was a little bit of an epilogue and the silent consideration over the crooked man was a better ending. There's often no happiness in true justice, just closure. Anyway, they really pushed the point last minute of similarities in a Keyser Soze(?) kinda way. It puts all the trust onto Georgie's dying words which aren't wholly trustable but good enough for me. Especially seeing how The Crooked Man twists the scenarios of every other event relative to his reply with Georgie. So I don't know if Faith was even alive when we first saw her; Narissa's whole story also becomes suspect with the only honest point being that she wanted the crooked man gone.

So I take the Curious Bad cop route. Ok with questionable justice, but needing to see the whole story through.

I'm surprised people are dying to CM, because I distinctly remember choking him to death.

I like turning into a giant wolf. That was cool.

But the rest was meh, and there was a HUGE FUCKING PROBLEM in the final confrontation with the Crooked Man:

He begins to make the argument that should he be held accountable for his employees actions, then Snow White should be held accountable for Bigby's. That does make sense. His only example is that Bigby beat the shit out of Tweedledee, which is quickly discredited due to Crane being in charge then and not Snow White. Okay, argument debunked...

EXCEPT HE KEEPS PUSHING THAT FALSE ARGUMENT THAT WE JUST DISCREDITED. Awful, awful, awful. That whole sequence is just poorly written to push Telltale's agenda to make the player question who is in the right and who is in the wrong, but there's not nearly enough there to hold that angle up. To invest so much time (it was awfully drawn out) in that angle and then have Nerissa come in and say "LOL NAH HE'S A SHITHEAD" was just ughhhhh. If they were going to do that, they should have stuck to their guns and made us question our choice to kill the Crooked Man, not quickly just give us all the justification to do so.

As for the Nerissa/Faith thing... Why does it even matter? Faith is still the dead one, and Nerissa already told us that she was manipulating Bigby all along. It was a hamfistedly delivered twist for the sake of a twist, and it would have been far better had it been delivered with subtlety rather than "HEY REMEMBER ALL THE THINGS NERISSA AND FAITH SAID HEY THEY WERE KIND OF SIMILAR DO YOU GET IT YET DO YOU?"

I enjoyed the rest of the season, but this episode was just bad.

1. Yeah, that was dumb since I played good cop during the interrogation since Black Beard was intent on beating him up.

2. Narissa was is the dead one, not Faith. Faith is glamoured to look like Narissa now.

That's really really weird, I went back to see what happens when you kill him (a totally less satisfying final scene) and it worked for me. Told him he wasn't going back, knocked the gun out of his hand, and choked him to death.

In the scene that happens instead of the trial if you kill him, you can make Bigby look like a massive dick, growling and threatening to kill people in their sleep. I thought the trial was a much better ending to the game.

I had a problem with this episode, it was full of bugs. Besides truly appalling loading times, the game froze to me several times and many of my decisions didn't carry over. During the flashbacks and the trial, they make it appear as if I burned Greenleaf's tree and was an asshole to Collin, Toad and even the Crooked Man, when in truth I did not do any of those things. A pity because a lot of this episode rests of past decisions coming to bite you during the trial.

On with the particulars:

• Georgie and Vivian died. At this point, it looks like they are meant to die either way. I did finish off Georgie (after making him suffer a bit) and Vivian killed herself.
• I gave the Crooked Man a fair trial. It wasn't easy, as I was one choice away from killing him.
• I had some problems during the trial, in part because of the bug that make them accuse me of things I didn't do.
• I dropped the Crooked Man down the well.
• I couldn't save Collin and Toad from the farm. I maybe I could, but since the game took some decisions for me from the previous episode, I wouldn't know.
• I went after "Nerissa".

While I agree that some aspects of the trial are done badly, and some of the argumentation is just plain illogical, I still very much enjoyed the way this episode/season played out.

As for my choices this time around:

• I killed Georgie. (Without torturing him first, since I kinda felt sorry for him, after I convinced Vivian that killing herself would be for the best.)
• I gave the Crooked man a trial. (I wanted answers, and was convinced that I'd get a chance to off him later on anyways.
• I threw him down the well. (Seemed more cruel to me, than just ripping off his damn head. Imprisonment was never an option, really.)
• I accepted TJ's gift, as he and his father went to the farm. (Tried to help them last episode, but oh well, Toad's a moron, so who cares? I pretended to not have seen Collin.)
• I went after Nerissa. (Obviously.)

So, I'm still not really sure what to think about the whole Nerissa/Faith thing, as I'm just not sure which of them actually is alive now. I think it's more likely that it's Nerissa, though, who earlier on was posing as Faith.

After all Lily's glamour wore off eventually too, so shouldn't that have happened with Faith's corpse also, if she was really Nerissa?

It wore off after the wood tube was opened. Narissa's was probably on her body which is at the bottom of the lake, which is why her head still looked like Faith.

Snow also mentions the doctor needed to run more tests on the head, so it was never truly confirmed to be Faith.

@bacon: Okay, misremembered that. But wouldn't it have to wear of eventually anyway, since it got stated again and again, that continuously buying glamours was terribly expensive. (See Toad and Collin.)

Well, but that of course leaves the chance that it takes quiet a while, and no one kept checking in on the head, because they didn't really have a reason to. I hope this gets addressed in season 2.

@sessh: The body was the real Faith, when you met Faith at Woody's place that was Narrissa in a glamour. At least that's how I interpreted it.

You guys are ignoring Faith's fairytale (hiding in plain sight under a donkey skin to escape and have a fresh start). Also, her "I'm sorry" note to her husband, etc.

Faith is definitely alive, glamoured as Narissa to start a new life. If it was Narissa just glamored as Faith to get Bigby on the case, why would he consider running after her at the end?

My broader point was that it doesn't matter; regardless of who it is, the one we've been interacting with the whole time - presumably Faith, then - is still alive, and the dead one is still dead. And the fact that it's so easy to get it confused just works in favour that it should have been a more subtle point.

Another point:

Episode 1: Huntsman survives an AXE TO THE HEAD.

Episode 2-4: "Fables are really hard to kill, guys!" "You can't kill Fables easily!" "It takes a ton to kill a Fable!"

Episode 5: Georgie bleeds out from a stab to the stomach... And even if there's a "SURPRISE! I DIDN'T DIE!" moment in Season 2, we're supposed to believe that George and Bigby both thought he would die despite Huntsman SURVIVING A FUCKING AXE TO THE HEAD.

The more I think about it, the more utterly dismayed I am at the lazy writing of this episode.

@gunslingerpanda: Apparently it's explained in the comics that you are as resilient as your Fable.

So the Woodsman is pretty invincible from the fact that Red Riding Hood is one of the most popular stories in the world. Georgie on the other hand isn't as well known thus he can die from less abuse.

@jabbawocky: This is exactly it, Snow White took a 50 cal to the head and lived. Lesser characters are basically human.

I keep seeing people say Swineheart had Faith's body, but when did they find it? I think I completely missed that part.

@fleabeard: Beginning of Episode 4 when he's patching Bigby up. He had the head not the body though.

At the end I gave Crooked Man a fair trial and had all of Fabletown on my side at the end.

I accidentally selected pull crooked man's head off thinking it's kinda weird that this specific of an option would be available. After selecting that it kind of gave me a re-do selection and by that time nobody was questioning which decision I made. My final decision was throw him down the well.

The part where you deal with taking characters up to the farm, I gave Collin a free pass and pretended I never saw him in the Woodland Apartments. Was really heartbreaking that I couldn't do more for Toad and Jr and wonder if there was anyway to spare them from being sent up. I was hoping that wad of cash I had taken from Crane's jacket last episode could be given to them to buy up some glamours or something but was never presented with that option.

Still pretty confused about Nerissa's character, as I've read some theories out there pointing to the fact Nerissa at some point was Faith in glamour. Kinda sucky cliffhanger might I point out since I'm thinking they probably won't start season 2 from that point since every other major plotline has been tied up.