Pinky wrote:Does anyone have any kind of idea what was actually going on with the Briggs plotline? A deal between Hastings, his secretary and the Major is ambushed by Mr C?
This is something that me and my viewing partner were really perplexed by on a recent rewatch, and we spent a lot of long walks teasing it out. I'm not sure if I can relay all the points we arrived at, because it felt like a gordian knot, where we started out thinking we understood it, but the more we pulled, the more it was like a damn chinese fingertrap.
We arrived at the conclusion that Mr. C did NOT ambush them. Ray spends an inordinate amount of time talking about Hastings' supposed secretary Betty, but he NEVER mentions the name Ruth Davenport once to Mr. C. And if you think further in that direction, it becomes hard to deny that it seems like Mr. C has NO IDEA about the whole thing with Ruth's missing head, body, or Brigg's body. It seems that there's a determined effort in fact to keep Mr. C off of that trail of information, potentially because they don't want him getting that particular set of coordinates, which he has to rely on Diane later transmitting to him, but only after she tags along with a secret Blue Rose mission and finally finds Ruth's body in this out of the way place. It seems Mr. C, again, had NO part in that whole thing. So who did? Well, when Hastings describes "so many people there," I can only think of the Woodsmen, who have shown a somewhat unnerving, hard-to-peg autonomy, and a certain knack for doing violence to heads.
But so, the secretary that Ray seemingly does sleight of hand with, who he keeps mentioning, we never actually see her. This leads me to believe she's just his way of covering up the aforementioned trail. If she exists, she has to be an unfortunate casualty. Hastings himself never once mentions her in relation to the Zone shenanigans. She only really exists in a pragmatic sense; for Ray, who is seemingly using her to cover up Ruth's involvement; and for Hastings, as an alibi on where he was at the time of Ruth's murder, an alibi which ultimately evaporates. And she's not mentioned at all in Frost's books. In fact, there's a weird discrepency. The only further information we get about her in TR, it's said by Macklay to Gordon et al that her car was blown up, mentioned at the same time it's mentioned that George, the lawyer, has been arrested and is currently in custody. Yet in the Frost books, it's NOT Betty who dies in the car explosion when Preston mentions it again. It's George, the lawyer, and Betty is not named at all. Strange, right?
This subplot made us paranoid and feel like we were crazy. I still get unnerved thinking about it. It's deceptively secretive.
Also, the Frost books clear up the thing with the government hacking. It suggests it was Briggs who directed them to info he hid in an "easy to access" space, sort of like "hiding things in the open," making it counter-intuitively more covert than if he tried to hide it under encryption. However, it's also revealed that much of the info that leads Hastings et al on their path seems to come from untrustworthy anonymous contacts (it was an internet-based shebang, after all) who just out of the blue fed them info. Who knows who was who. So the books complicate an already complicated subplot. It's also suggested in a general way the same thing you're wondering--that there's the implication the government, even the FBI our beloved characters work for, knows more than it's letting on about a lot.
It all comes together to paint for me a kind of patsy nature to Hastings, which that feeling is already there in TR, that he seems like he got caught up in a whole weird thing that saw him as disposable. It's worth noting, after all, that he dies because a Woodsman, seemingly acting autonomously, just goes on up and makes his head explode.