So me and a friend were talking about the comic and a few interesting things came up. The most interesting of which revolves around Jack’s decision to get involved in the King’s Row incident at the end of the comic.
Now, the reason for his decision is very clearly laid out in the comic. Overwatch wants to help the people who are suffering and the only thing stopping them seems to be petty politics and to hell with that we have people to protect. The cause is noble and the reasons relatively selfless. Their reasons are more or less beyond reproach, but the issue is complicated.
What Jack does is grant himself the unilateral power Overwatch had been given under the crisis. He chose to ignore/invade the sovereignty of a nation because he alone decided that he could. The reason may be noble and his intentions pure, but this is still the act of a tyrant, one who can not give up power once they have it, regardless of why.
The thing that makes this interesting is not, oh Jack is a bad person, because he clearly is not, but rather the question of what if this is why 76 and Ana don’t like the idea of Overwatch coming back. They failed to keep Overwatch together sure and that is likely a part of it, but it might also represent how far they were willing to go in the name of their ideals in a way they do not wish to repeat, especially Jack.
Treating a nation’s sovereignty like it’s an annoyance that gets in the way is not a far cry from all sorts of scary things the same logic can convince you that it is okay to ignore. What if his desire to do the right thing didn’t just ruin the organization, but turned him into something he couldn’t stand in the end. Hell, maybe that’s why he ran away when people thought he had died.
Might be thinking to hard about this one, but it is interesting and I thinks lends some nuance to the characters and situation. Also, who doesn’t love over analyzing things?
This, exactly. When we look at Jack’s hesitation, we have to see both sides of what he’s weighingg. This isn’t “Jack hesitates to make the right call because he likes to obey orders.” This is “Jack hesitates to single-handedly make a decision that defies another country’s autonomy, breaks international law, and also threatens the continued existence of Overwatch because this is the kind of move that can start wars.”
But it’s also, as the others keep reiterating, many lives on the line.
It’s just, every solution here is a bad one. Letting people die: bad. Invading another country against their will: bad. Infiltrating another country after you’re told to stay out and doing whatever you like while hiding i t so no one can even hold you accountable for your actions (which seems to be Gabe’s approach): also bad, with an extra whiff of ‘CIA does what it likes.’
Honestly, the only way Overwatch could ever actually work is if everybody enthusiastically cooperated with them. And in the early days, it sounds like that’s what happened! After the Omnic Crisis, everybody trusted and loved them and couldn’t get enough of them intervening wherever they liked. But as the world settled down and countries got back to wanting to handle their problems their own way again, it became less charming to have the ‘heroes’ descend into the situation and impose their own solutions whether you liked them or not. And at the point where countries started telling them STAY OUT but they went in anyway, they were effectively acting either as vigilantes or dictators, depending on how you want to see the power dynamics involved. Scary stuff. When Jack claims in his Origins short that they were ‘calling for his head,’ he might have meant it fairly literally, because a number of countries might well have wanted to see him brought up on significant charges.
There absolutely seems to have been a need for Overwatch at one point, and it undoubtedly did enormous good in its time. But maybe it really was a concept that outlived the world’s need for it.
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/2nit8qQ