The farm. The extraordinary mid-game respite — Ellie and Dina and JJ, the chickens, the domestic life, the specific texture of a future being attempted. It is the most hopeful sequence in the game and the game knows it is going to take it away. The dreaming of the future is what Jackson was, what the farm briefly is. The bleeding into it is what Tommy's arrival brings back.

The game puts this here — so late, so brief — as a measure of what is at stake in the final movement. The future was possible. It was being built. The violence that Ellie cannot put down is not just destroying her. It is destroying the specific future that was within reach.