The expedition is the first Death Stranding, Sam's journey across post-stranding America rendered as backstory — the thing that already happened, that produced the world the game begins in. Amelie went west and connected what she could, and Sam followed because Sam always follows Amelie, because the connection between them is the game's deepest strand and its most complicated one. Survivor communities are what the country became when the political structure dissolved: pockets of people organized around whatever resources and leadership were available, disconnected from each other in ways that made the connection meaningful when it arrived.

The expedition is also a trap, though the game is patient about revealing this. What Amelie went looking for and what she found are not the same thing, and the gap between them is where Death Stranding's cosmological revelation lives.