‘Bioshock Infinite’s multiversal ending, explained
This is going to get complicated. The crown jewel of the Bioshock trilogy is a beautiful horror game, inside and out. While any player with a heart can understand the ending emotionally, the finer intellectual details of the finale are baffling indeed. Here’s the ending of Bioshock Infinite, explained.
When they said “infinite,” they meant it
At the end of the game, muscleman Pinkerton protagonist Booker DeWitt discovers that he is ALSO the game’s antagonist: the monomaniacal leader of Columbia Zachary Comstock. Who? What? How? Bear with me. As you well know, Booker DeWitt is a man with a sordid past. He served in the U.S. military during the Battle of Wounded Knee, which was a massacre of Lakota people (mostly women and children) at the hands of American soldiers. He is offered a Christian baptism to be cleansed of his sins, but he refuses. He falls deep into depression, drinking, and gambling while attempting to scrape by with a new job as a Pinkerton detective. He’s contracted to “find the girl and wipe away the debt” at the game’s outset, and so his adventure in Columbia begins.
Or does it?
As it turns out, there is ANOTHER timeline of history where Booker accepted the offered baptism, and decides to erase his old identity and become “born again.” He takes a new name—Zachary Comstock—and goes on to become the founder of the city of sky zealots, Columbia. Unable to have children of his own, Comstock decides to steal his own daughter Anna from himself in another timeline, the timeline of Booker DeWitt. How? By using the “tears” in spacetime created by technology developed by quantum physicists Rosalind and Robert Lutece. Comstock then renames Booker’s daughter Elizabeth and raises her as his own in Columbia.
To no one’s surprise, a time-traveling, xenophobic, bigoted, heavily armed group of religious zealots piloting a floating sky city is not conducive to the health and happiness of humanity. After Elizabeth regains full control of her powers, peering across the infinite timelessness of the multiverse, she sees that Columbia spells trouble in each. The city always ends up blowing up or causing catastrophic destruction in the world below.
To rid the multiverse of Comstock for good, Elizabeth takes Booker to a sort of multiversal nexus point from which all other universes branch out: the river where Booker was baptized. Elizabeth, accompanied by Elizabeths from other timelines, then proceeds to drown Booker in the water, preventing Comstock from existing in all other timelines. The multiverse is saved, and The Avengers don’t even need to get involved.
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