YMMV / Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom

• Alternate Character Interpretation: Is Admiral Tolwyn a full-on A Nazi by Any Other Name or has he genuinely lost his mind when confronted with the reality of threats even worse than the Kilrathi? The games and the novelization disagree. And was Tolwyn Driven to Suicide? Or did he decide that it was Better to Die than Be Killed?
  • Did Maniac defect to the Border Worlds because of moral reasons or because he was sick of Dude, Where's My Respect??
  • Were the prison guards really so careless as to leave a Death Row inmate alone with two potential methods of suicide (a sturdy bedsheet and his belt)? Or did they secretly sympathize with his goals and want to give him the opportunity to escape what they saw as an unjust execution?
• It Was His Sled: Tolwyn instigated the events of Wing Commander IV. The game plays it up as a mystery, but everyone knows it by now.
• Moral Event Horizon: The Border Worlds appear to cross it in the beginning by attacking an unarmed medical frigate before slaughtering everyone onboard. This is a False Flag Operation set up by the Black Lance to induce war.
  • Admiral Tolwyn crosses it when the Black Lance uses their super-weapon to wipe out 90% of a colony with their genetic bomb to "purify" the human race of weakness. After this point, the Nazi comparisons are no longer skin-deep. The novelization takes it further by pointing out that most of the survivors, despite meeting the villain's ideals of genetic superiority, are likely to die due to secondary infections from all of the sick and dying people around them, or due to suicide.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Casper Van Dien is in an early scene on the Lexington shaking the hands of Colonel Blair, as a young Confed pilot in awe of 'The Heart of the Tiger', while Maniac was trying to attract attention to himself.
  • A couple missions later, a very young Mark Dacascos shows up Ensign Newbie Troy "Catscratch" Carter.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Though probably limited by production costs and memory size of CDs when the game was made; instead of the game forcing you to defect to the Border Worlds, they could have continued that branch of the storyline with Blair remaining fiercely loyal to the Confederation and hunting down his former friends who did defect, and show the consequences of that decision. A fan edit was made to show what that storyline could look like.

---