Hector's Plan

[Kitab]

Hello.

 

I kept hearing such good things about this game and I finally bought it in 2007, but I've only just got around to playing it. Now that I've completed it, I have a question about the plot, and my searches on this and other websites failed to unearth the truth.

 

When Manny enters Hector's mausoleum, he summarises Hector's plot, saying something like "...stealing people's Double-N tickets, pretending to sell them but really hoarding them for yourself in a desperate attempt to leave the Land of the Dead". But I had previously been under the impression that Hector (and Domino) did not want to leave the Land of the Dead - I thought they used the money from selling counterfeit tickets to make the eighth underworld 'livable' and wanted to stay there (Domino says this, for example, in that 'hidden' dialogue). What Manny is suggesting is that Hector thought that amassing genuine Double-N tickets would pay off his enormous debt, similar to what Manny had to do in the DoD. So what was Hector's true plan?

 

And by the way, what was the purpose of Hector's mausoleum?

 

Sorry if the answers are obvious.

[Ronny]

I think that Hector just wanted to get out. The interesting thing about this game is that the villain is so myopic he doesn't realise his whole scheme is doomed.

You can't buy your way into paradise after all.

It was just a very refreshing, different approach.

[VampireNaomi]

I can't remember if it came up in discussions or someone's fanfic, but I recall someone suggesting that Hector wanted out but had led Domino to believe that they were only in it for the money. There's nothing in the game to support it, but I think the idea fits what we know of Hector. Maybe he was so desperate to get out and paranoid that he couldn't bring himself to trust even his second in command and conned Domino as well.

[Kitab]

Yes, it fits, but if that is the case, how did Manny figure it out?

[MeddlingMonk]

Hector's true plan is...what Manny thinks it is. There are two things that make Manny believe that Hector is trying to buy his way out of the Land of the Dead. One is that toward the end, in the cutscene where Hector takes Manny back to his old DOD office, Hector very clearly says that he needs the tickets to get himself out. The scheme wouldn't work, but he thinks that it will. The other thing actually happens toward the beginning, when Manny is brought into the LSA, Salvador says generically that there are people who try to buy their way into heaven. That statement is a bit of foreshadowing. What Sal says about "some", Hector applies to himself. So when Manny says what he does in the greenhouse, he isn't guessing. It's what Hector told him.

 

Domino has other ideas about what the plan is. He doesn't want to leave and he attributes his motives to Hector. There's a contradiction there which can be resolved by assuming that Hector didn't let Domino in on his private motives. I used that in the novel and VampireNaomi might be thinking of that; but it's a pretty obvious rationalization and any number of other people could have made it, too.

 

As for the purpose of the greenhouse (and the meadow): if you examine the water tank, Manny wonders if Hector sees the greenhouse as a monument or a memorial (or words to that effect). Hector is basically a very sick man. The greenhouse and meadow are really no different than any serial killer (the so-called Craiglist Killer being only the latest example) who collects tokens from his victims. I think only an expert in criminal psychology could really explain the why of that.

 

(Obviously, like malaria, I've come back.)

[Colossal]

I think in the puzzle document there is extra info on Hector's plan

[MeddlingMonk]

Yeah, the puzzle doc is interesting generally especially as a look into an early stage of the game and what the dev team's thinking on things was like. I wish I had had access to it back in 2000.