Clearance code levels are from level 1 to max level 6. Hiss enemy levels are also from level 1 to max level 6.
Jesse is the new Director yet still has to do the most work. Usually a Executive Director assigns tasks to personnel and only deals with the most important issues. There are two fridge moments to point out.
Jesse is the new Director. She travels around the Oldest House fighting Hiss and meeting her employees. As the Director, she would need to learn how the Oldest House operates and what each of her employees does. She would not be able to make decisions otherwise, such as making Emily Pope the new head of research.
The Hiss invasion is the most important issue they are dealing with. As such, it is crucial for the Director to get directly involved. Often times, the Director or person in charge is the only person with enough authority or power to take care of a problematic situation. Jesse is both.
Most of the Bureau staff are dead and while the surviving Rangers are doing their best, are clearly incapable of being the One-Man Army that Jesse is once equipped with the Service Weapon as well as her later telekinetic powers.
Control:
The theme of the game is, well, control, but the word has more than one meaning. It's not just about Dylan lacking control over his life, Jesse seizing control of the Bureau, Trench's obsession with controlling everything, Northmoor being unable to control his power, etc.
We are told at one point that Jesse was being watched by the Bureau for quite some time, yet they focused on Dylan as the P6, never bringing her in. Jesse was the control sample, developing both her powers and as a person naturally as opposed to Dylan's... Threshold Kids-filled childhood.
Jesse's 11th-Hour Superpower kicks in when she accepts her responsibility as Director, essentially agreeing to Take Control.
A bit of a smaller one, but why does the game have an Improbably Female Cast? Because all of the enemies you face are male. The Hiss seems to have a preference for male hosts, going by the enemies encountered. Assuming that they know of this from previous encounters, this might imply that either the FBC has taken to placing females in positions of power so their department heads are less likely to be taken over in the event of a Hiss outbreak, or that any male department heads have been taken over by the Hiss and/or moved to a safe location, leaving the less-vulnerable female staff in the spotlight. That or Darling's not as good at making friends with men as women.
Not all of the enemies are male. Some of the guards look female (though it's hard to tell with their unisex outfits and them shooting at you), and the Hiss distorted are probably all women (given that they are wearing stiletto heels). Most of the enemies that use weapons are male, but they're also all people who had some sort of combat skills before being taken over by the Hiss, so it's probably just that there were more men with that skill set than women. The (non-Hiss) survivors are all people wearing HRAs (except Jesse, who's protected by Polaris, and Ahti, who's protected by being Ahti), so the Hiss took over everyone that was unprotected in the Oldest House. It just leaves those who can't fight floating and chanting. I believe the only female department head at the beginning (that we know of) is Helen Marshall.
One memo you can find about the Hiss indicates that Hiss with unique names are especially dangerous, giving an In-Universe justification for why bosses are more deadly than garden-variety Mooks.
A file about the Oceanview Motel remarks that it's oddly named, considering it's supposedly located within a landlocked state. Now consider the final line of Alan Wake; "It's not a lake, it's an ocean." The motel's "view" is of the many intersecting realities and dimensions it can be accessed through.
One of the clearest signs of the Oldest House's age is the trees in the atrium in Research: fully-grown redwoods.
Ashtray:
Director Trench is always smoking a cigarette in the hotline, despite constant notices around the Bureau forbidding it. It originally passes as Trench's personal Screw the Rules, I Make Them!Until you reach the Ashtray Maze, the only Object of Power that Trench admits to using aside from the Service Weapon. In order to use an Object of Power, the user must bind to it. The Object of Power that creates the maze is an Ashtray, and a Cigarette that never goes out. Trench has been holding onto an Object of Power in plain sight.
Additionally, the first time you're directed to the Ashtray Maze by the main questline, Ahti explicitly calls the maze "broke" and tells Jesse to come see him for a way through. The Ashtray generates its maze effect with itself in the center, inaccessible to any but the binder or those with permission to cross. Since Trench, the previous binder, is dead, the OoP currently has no binder and cannot be recovered from the maze while it is active to turn it off - effectively, it's broken and cannot be traversed except by someone who, to quote Jesse, "has the keys".
Hedron's home dimension, "Slidescape 36," is described as a desert that is totally soundless. Strange that they'd find a being of resonance in there, right? But when a sound and its counter-wave are mixed, you get silence. Hedron was nullifying all of the Hiss in that dimension, except for the tiny, tiny bit of it that somehow slipped into Trench's ear...
Polaris didn't lead Jesse to the Bureau and Dylan until the Hiss invasion. This makes sense when you realize had she just walked into the Bureau when it was in full operation, she likely would've just been captured like Dylan was. By only leading her there once the Hiss had invaded, Polaris brought Jesse there at the only time she would actually be able to accomplish something.
The Bureau had been watching Jesse for some time, so it seems like they were happy to just keep an eye on her. She may have been, as mentioned elsewhere here, a control sample to compare to Dylan. Polaris may have not led her there before because Jesse wouldn't have gotten anywhere (they've have either kicked her out or taken her), but at least part of the reason Polaris led her there during the Hiss invasion was probably that Hedron was in danger.
The Hiss bears more than a few similarities to The Dark Presence, being an invisible Eldritch Abomination that attacks by possessing people to fight for it and making them speak in nonsensical phrases. This makes a lot more sense after playing the AWE expansion, given the implication that Alan created the Hiss as a crisis for Jesse to fight so that she would become strong enough to rescue him from The Dark Place. He modeled her Starter Villain (such as it is) after the same enemy he eventually intended for her to face.
The Hiss and the Dark Presence don't mix well despite all their similarities, for a couple of reasons. The first is that the darkness tends to adhere to whatever ground rules the artists it uses create, turning their words and ideas into reality but also making itself real in the process, like a long shadow cast by a bright light. Compare that to the Hiss, which just makes people utter pure nonsense; it's far more chaotic than the Dark Presense. The second is more straightforward: the Hiss may be "noise", but it also manifests as searing red light, and even evil red light doesn't go well with pure darkness.
Jesse is able to get into the Oldest House while it's under lockdown. Considering how pervasive the Hiss is, even opening the front doors would normally be an invitation for it to escape into the wider world, but this isn't a problem, because one of the first things you see in the Lobby is a giant Hedron Resonance Amplifier dish dressed up to look like art. Polaris swirls around it to get your attention to it. That thing is probably the only thing keeping the Hiss from leaking out the front door.
This is probably the 'large-scale HRA' Darling refers to in one of his videos...
The large-scale HRA was actually the one protecting the door to Hedron.
"Threshold Kids" was a project doomed from the outset. Topher was probably supposed to be the character Dylan was meant to identify with, but they went and made Meg, the more sensible character meant to act as a guide, a redhead. You know, like the sister Dylan resents for "abandoning" him?
Jesse uses telekinesis to open containers before she even binds the diskette. She was already telekinetic due to Polaris’s influence and the disc just gave her a massive boost to the amount of weight she could throw around rather than just give her a new power. Which would be part of the reason she’s levels beyond Northmoor who had the previous record of a bowling ball, partially Polaris but also she already had an idea of what she was doing to begin with.
The idea that the Former was part of the Board fits perfectly with US iconography. The Former's most defining feature is its singular, radiant eye. The Board is symbolized by an inverted pyramid. What imagery combines a pyramid with a radiant eye? Hint, it's on the dollar bill.
So, riddle me this: what does “Ashtray” sound like? “Ash Tree.” The Board refers to the Oldest House as a “Tree” at one point. What’s another notable ash tree? An interesting play on words, I must say.
Each Director of the FBC that has wielded the Service Weapon embodies a part of the SCP Foundation’s ethos in their use of Altered Items and Objects of Power:
Northmoor embodied ‘Secure’, wanting to secure as many Altered Items and Objects of Power as possible, keeping the, in the FBC.
Trench embodied ‘Contain’, wanting to contain all the Altered Items and Objects of Power to keep them from being used.
Jesse embodies ‘Protect’, using the Altered Items and Objects of Power to protect the FBC and the people in it.
The realization that this takes place in a Shared Universe of Remedy games means and the larger backstory of the Control game that events like Alan Wake and Quantum Break are fairly routine events in the setting.
Alan Wake creating the Hiss results in a massive amount of dead FBC employees and threatens the entirety of the world even if he also potentially made Jesse and the FBC in the first place. The thing is, this isn't actually out of character. He made the events of the original game to contain the Dark Presence and is implied to have done the same thing with American Nightmare.
