Recap / Destiny 2 Season Of The Deep

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All efforts to follow the Witness have failed, leaving the Coalition at loss on how to move forward. A transmission from Deputy Commander Sloane changes this, however, sending the Vanguard scrambling to the newly returned Titan. Sloane is revealed to have survived through her body becoming part Taken, but she remains on the Vanguard's side and has forged a connection with a creature in the methane oceans of Titan who is an ancient enemy of the Witness. But if they wish to understand this creature the Guardians must utilize Sloanes' new Taken qualities, which may have disastrous results. Xivu Arath has also set her sights on Titan, while the Lucent Brood is scouring the ocean floor for other mysteries.

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Season of the Deep contains examples of:

• All There in the Manual: The website page for the season reveals the Tirtha Bind and the Drowning are not products of the Titanian Pyramid's Hostile Terraforming, but are in fact part of the Pyramid itself and the impact crater respectively.
• Arc Words: "The Deep" through the Destiny saga is one of the many euphemisms of the Darkness, but is especially connected with the Hive worm gods. This season ends up peeling back a layer of what the Darkness is and what the Witness is seeking.
• Back from the Dead:
  • Ecthar and Šimmumah ur-Nokru are resurrected by Lucent Ghosts to help the Brood investigate Oryx's remains on Titan. In turn, Šimmumah also revives Vorlog from the Court of Oryx with his original body and memories intact as an integral part of the ritual they later commence to try and resurrect Oryx himself.
  • Val Ca'uor is resurrected by Xivu Arath, but is immediately Taken and stripped of all of his abilities to be used as a living battery.
• Back for the Dead:
  • Joxer, previously mentioned in Season of the Drifter teasers and Witherhoard's lore, returns in the lore tab of Akashic Revelation as one of the many casualties caused by trying to follow the Witness, with it being suggested he is the unfortunate Titan killed in the season's opening cutscene.
  • Shayura's fireteam comes back into focus for the Trials of Osiris lore, but reveals Reed-7 was the Titan seen killed at the start of Lightfall during the failed attack on the Witness in orbit.
• Blood Knight: Xivu Arath, obviously, but this time it comes across even more prominently now that she's actually speaking to us. She screams and roars, demanding you submit to her battlesong and murder in her name.
• Big Bad: Though not physically present still, Xivu Arath acts through her brood and her Taken, searching for whatever's buried in the depths of Titan, while also making attempts to properly Take Sloane.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: It's revealed that the Witness comes from the first civilization blessed by The Traveler. While access to the Light made them prosper infinitely and worshipped it as a god the citizens became wary of its power and never communicating what they should do. This made them seek the Darkness so they could more fully control the power of the Light. This provides some bit of irony, as the main characters have also had to acknowledge the inscrutable nature of the Traveler and the fact they perceived whatever they wanted it to be.
• The Bus Came Back: After being vaulted at the end of Season of Arrivals, Titan makes its return, and Deputy Commander Sloane with it. But while it uses the planets' aesthetics and architecture the actual patrol zone and strike from The Red War are not present, resulting in entirely new mission areas with similar visual designs instead of just utilizing the original destination.
  • The Lucent Brood return again, this time getting an entire dungeon dedicated to them as they seek out the remains of Oryx.
• Came Back Wrong: Val Ca'uor returns as a Taken Incendior, but the process has left him so weak and unimportant (he's essentially a living component of a Shielded Core Boss) so as to be completely unrecognizable. The biggest indicator of this is his model - he had a unique appearance in Spire of Stars, looking like a giant hybrid of Incendior and Centurion. His Taken form, on the other hand, just gives him a generic Taken Incendior look, completely wiping away his former identity.
• Canon Character All Along: The lore for the Exotic jumpship Valiant Memory reveals that it belonged to Reed-7, who died during the opening of Lightfall. The way his past moments are described reveals that he was the Titan the Witness cut to ribbons, implying that Shayura's fireteam is the one seen on the game's original cover.
• Chekhov's Gun: The emblems for Vow of the Disciple were initially suggested to be more of Rhulk's drawings aboard the Sunken Pyramid. Week 5 reveals their actual origins as how the Witness's creators portrayed the Light, additionally recontextualizing the name of the day 1 emblem ("The Cleaver") as the role they invented for themselves as the Witness, not Rhulk or the Hive.
• Colony Drop: After the Titanian Pyramid took Titan, it crashed itself into the ocean. It's later revealed that Deep Dives take place dangerously close to the impact crater, and the hidden Whetstone encounter takes place in the Tirtha Bind, the chamber of the Pyramid closest to an exposed pathway leading to the crater.
• Continuity Nod: In the section of the HELM dedicated to the ongoing Titan mission, there is a large water tank with a few sea creatures inside but also with both collectables and seasonal artifacts from the last several years of the game (ranging from the Hammer of Proving and the Pieces of Nezarec to a Calus bobblehead).
• Contrasting Sequel Antagonist: While there was no central villain for the Shadow Legion in Season of Defiance, Calus represented them for the Lightfall campaign and he was Faux Affably Evil who previously liked to view himself as a Friendly Enemy to the Vanguard. In this season, Xivu Arath, the Hive God of War, makes her first voiced presence in the game and quickly separates herself from almost all other Destiny villains with her violent screaming, promising to inflict untold pain upon us for getting in her way.
• The Corruption: Sloane is revealed to have been partially Taken. It's hit her with a double whammy of bad effects - not only is her Light suppressed, but she also is in Xivu Arath's crosshairs, and she risks becoming completely transformed if there isn't a way to save her.
• Creepy Good: Having been on Titan since the Witness took the moon, Sloane's Light was suppressed, allowing her to become partially Taken and essentially tune in to their equivalent of communications. In no way does this diminish her heroism.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: Two cases.
  • The Powered Armor Sloane used on Titan ended up running out of energy, locking her in. She says she was forced to pull herself out, mangling her insides in the process and needing her Ghost to revive her afterward.
  • Joxer gets a particularly nasty one. Attempting to travel through the portal over the Traveler causes him to be torn to pieces and violently merged with his own ship, due to a Time Crash-like effect yanking him across time before brutally killing him.
• Darker and Edgier: Defiance, while fairly serious, had some levity in between missions and was more standard "save civilians from evil" fare. Deep, by comparison, delves into the more eldritch and horror-themed part of Destiny, particularly with Xivu Arath and her Hive and Taken forces.
• Demonic Possession: Sloane being partially Taken allows her to commune with Ahsa but also puts her dangerously close to Xivu Araths' control. In the final weekly mission, Sloane is briefly possessed by Xivu Arath before managing to push her out and allow Ahsa to speak instead.
• De-power: Becoming partially Taken has suppressed Sloane's Light, forcing her to adopt other tactics to fight.
• Eldritch Ocean Abyss: Alongside Ahsa, the massive sea creature that Sloane's formed a bond with, the theme of the season involves making excursions into the methane oceans to find Golden Age equipment and tech, while fending off Xivu Arath's forces. With the Taken being a focus, alongside Ahsa and the increasing danger the further players go, it's definitely unnerving.
• Enemy Mine: With Ahsa revealing that Savathun knows how to follow the Witness, the Guardians realize that they're going to have to resurrect Savathun and work with her to stop the Witness. Zavala tells Saladin that this is how they're going to keep Immaru in line as well: the Lucent Brood are also enemies of the Witness, so it's in Savathun and Immaru's best interests to work with the Coalition. Saladin and Saint-14 express understandable doubts about this.
• Foreshadowing: Every message Ahsa relays in the first four weeks of the season hints at the Witness' past, which is only revealed in full in week five. Much of this information previously existed across numerous lore tabs, but this is the first to give definitive shape and context for all the Unreliable Narrator analogies and dozens of vague terminology.
  • The first message tells of wanderers in the desert finding hope in an oasis, only to become for widest taken by the Deep. The Witness originates from the first race to find the Traveler, which was buried in the sands of their Homeworld. Said race would also become the first to wield the Darkness.
  • Week two’s message mentions a city of Light and a garden, but also of unanswered questions and longing, ending with darkness falling as a new journey begins. The first race entered a golden age, but anguished over how the Traveler would not answer their questions and give them purpose, so they sought out its counterpart in Darkness after discovering that said entity existed.
  • Week three's message mentions darkness, "something more", halves of something, and being reunited. The Witness' people found the Veil and learned that it was the counterpart to the Traveler, and that if they were fused together, they could be used to reshape the universe.
  • The final message includes mentions of calamity, denial, betrayal, fleeing, and pursuing the Final Shape. Unwilling to help its first patrons any further, the Traveler fled, causing them to use the Darkness to fuse themselves into the Witness and chase it across the universe so that they could connect it to the Veil and enact the Final Shape.
• Fusion Dance: The Witness is revealed to be an entire ancient civilization merged into one being using the power of Darkness, for the purpose of chasing the Traveler across the cosmos. In lore tabs, once this knowledge is revealed Zavala wonders if all members of that race agreed to the procedure.
• Godzilla Threshold:
  • Once again, the Taken being anywhere near Titan at all counts for this, as they're allergic to methane. Only this time, with the Witness actively working to invoke the Final Shape and Ahsa returning to Sol, the stakes are even higher than when Savathun deployed the Taken during the Arrival.
  • Ahsa's final words before going into hibernation force the Vanguard to consider this: the only one who knows how to cross the portal the Witness created is Savathun, meaning the Coalition will have to resurrect one of their most personal foes to defeat their true enemy.
• Good Thing You Can Heal: This appears to be the reason Ecthar and Šimmumah were revived for the Lucent Brood's dive team on Titan, as by the time they're faced in Ghosts of the Deep, they're effectively locked in a flooding submarine thousands of meters under the ocean. There really isn't a way out of that unless the crew is able to revive on the spot somehow; Ecthar and the other Hive Guardians provide for themselves, while Šimmumah keeps everyone else alive.
• Gravity Screw: Titan has always been out of whack since the Collapse messed with its gravitational field, and going into the ocean causes some disorientation. Nonetheless, there are sometimes water barriers that simply exist and not technology or obvious magic holding it back.
• The Heretic: The Lucent Brood continue to show how eager they are to flip tons of middle fingers at the Hive's core philosophy - that if you died, you didn't deserve to exist anyway, and to resurrect those who died is the greatest sin one can commit. They do this by trying to forcibly resurrect Oryx, the once Taken King, presumably to make him into a Lightbearer. Doesn't get much heretical for the Hive than that.
• Hope Spot: A villainous example; Xivu Arath thinks her Xanatos Gambit from Season of the Seraph and the events of this season have finally paid off, as she has now manifested physically in Saturn's orbit. Then the Witness appears and informs her she's going to have to try a little harder than that, lest her ability to gain tribute from war reach its limit.
• Innocuously Important Episode:
  • The season started with a promise to reveal something important about the Witness, as Ahsa is said to be an ancient enemy of them. After Lightfall, which notably didn't answer much in that regard, this was expected to be a kernel of information about their power, motivations or what they are doing to the Traveler. Week five instead gives a complete outline of the origins of the Witness, the Black Fleet and what the Veil is, while indicating deeper concepts about the Traveler and the Light. This turns out to answer LONG held questions about the Destiny setting, in particular finally explain the conflict between the Traveler and the Dark Fleet which lead to the Collapse.
  • Centrifuse's lore tab, which is about how the gun was built as part of a secret superweapon project by the New Pacific Arcology that exploited the research of its scientists. We later learn that this is exactly why the Witness wants the Light extinguished forever — because it is driven by an utter lack of faith in the capacity for sapient life to do good on its own, with the NPA gearing up for interplanetary warfare in a time of peace being irrefutable proof of that.
• Kraken and Leviathan: The focus of the season is the Guardians trying to commune with an enormous creature in Titan's methane ocean, which Sloane claims is an enemy of the Witness. There's a heavy implication that it is the Leviathan mentioned in the Books of Sorrow, or at least a related individual.
• Lovecraft Lite: Due to focusing on the ocean depths in conjunction with the typical occult Hive theming, this season touches heavily on otherworldly creatures.
• Not Quite Dead: Played with for Oryx. His mind is genuinely dead and gone. His corpse, on the other hand, is exhibiting strange behavior, having grown larger after his demise instead of rotting away, and radiating dangerous energies, alongside causing hallucinations for anyone that draws near. Even while dead, he's evidently still problematic to get close to.
• Not So Invincible After All: The Witness reveals at the end of the lorebook "Purpose" that even though Xivu Arath's ability to use war as tribute seems like a Xanatos Gambit, her schemes with them are now running on borrowed time and are doomed to fail if the Guardians keep advancing on her fronts.
• Pet the Dog: The Drifter jumps in on the first mission to the return Titan, against the wishes of the Vanguard, apparently because he is good friends with Sloane and wanted to help rescue her.
• Ominous Crack: The player's visor will slowly crack and darken as the pressure intensifies when underwater, unless they find some bubbles to restore pressure resistance.
• Out of Focus: Fallen from the House of Dusk are also on Titan, but they're barely focused on in the overall story, only serving as an alternative faction to fight in Salvage and Deep Dive. It's the Hive and Taken which get the majority of focus instead.
• Oxygen Meter: Zigzagged. The threat of delving far into Titan's depths isn't a lack of oxygen, rather, it's the immense pressure that will readily crush and pulverize anything that isn't built to withstand it at such depths. In actual gameplay, going underwater involves having to find bubbles in the environment to repressurize, which still follows the idea of "grab this bubble to avoid dying underwater".
• Portal Slam: The opening cutscene for the season shows a titan guardian trying to enter the portal the Witness carved into the Traveler. After a hard cut to black, salvage crews find his body mangled and fused to wreckage of the ship.
• The Reveal:
  • The "original fireteam" from Destiny 1 and Shayura's fireteam are implied to be one and the same. Also, only the Titan, Reed-7, died, leaving the other two to wallow in the ensuing Survivor's Guilt.
  • Oryx's body landed on Titan after his death, and ended up buried very deep below the ocean. The Lucent Brood seek to resurrect him once they locate the place where he fell.
  • After Rasputin used TWILIGHT EXIGENT to kill the Arcology scientists who discovered the Black Fleet, the protocol remained active on the moon. As a result, he continued to shoot down and kill every last civilian who managed to escape during the Collapse.
  • The Witness and the Black Fleet are the remnants of the first civilization the Traveler blessed. Upon discovering the destructive potential of the Light, they had a crisis of faith so dire they immediately began looking for its opposites to neutralize it. They discovered the Darkness and the Traveler's actual antithesis, the Veil, and attempted to open the portal on the Traveler like the Witness did in Lightfall. However, the Traveler abandoned them in the process, and feeling vindicated, the civilization used the Darkness to transform themselves into the Witness and the Black Fleet to pursue the Traveler.
  • In light of the above, "Unveiling" is probably made-up, since the Witness's creators were the ones who invented the book's terminology to begin with.
  • The art aboard the Sunken Pyramid is how the Witness draws things, not Rhulk — meaning either the Witness was the one who actually put all of those murals up, or Rhulk picked up the style from it.
  • The Final Shape is not a single species, as was previously implied - it is (or rather, will be) a perfectly ordered state of existence created by combining the power of Light and Dark. The Witness wants to bring about the Final Shape because it wants meaning in a meaningless universe.
  • There is exactly one person who knows how to follow the Witness to wherever they went. Who is that? Savathun.
  • Lakshmi-2 was a data copy of Maya Sundaresh. This also means she was Not Brainwashed during Season of the Splicer — she has always been secretly a crazed, delusional scientist with a Lack of Empathy.
  • Should the Vex reach the Veil, they will be able to master paracausal simulations. This very critical piece of information appears to have been conveniently downplayed and/or dismissed by Neomuna.
• Scarred Equipment: The seasonal arsenal consists of six Season of the Drifter weapons corrupted by the Darkness, forcibly changing their behavior and damage elements. They also take ornaments for the original weapons, making this trope even more apparent.
• Scenery Gorn: More than any other returning location, the platforms and the Arcology on Titan are heavily broken up compared to their state before it vanished when the Black Fleet arrived. Individual sections might be recognizable, but much of the adventure is taking place inside the methane ocean.
• Scenery Porn: Beneath the waves of Titan are some truly gorgeous reefs and caverns full of undersea plant life and coral structures.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: The power suit Sloane found at the end of Season of Arrivals. Random post-mission dialogue in Salvage reveals that it ran out of power and stopped functioning, forcing Sloane to tear herself apart to remove it in order to keep fighting.
• Shoo Out the Clowns: Downplayed with Drifter. Normally an irreverent and laidback fellow who treats most ops as another opportunity to get paid, he drops the act and displays a more caring and sincere side to him in regards to Sloane. And while he still sometimes drops some quips during Salvage runs, they're few and far in between, showing how dire the situation is on Titan when even a jokester like him dials most of the quipping back.
• Silliness Switch: There is a fishing minigame taking place on multiple patrol destinations, which you can do in between exploring the hidden underwater chambers of Titan. There is some benefit to it, as you can exchange the fish you catch within the helm for gear and materials.
• Suddenly Voiced: Xivu Arath now speaks directly to us instead of only being described in text.
• Superdickery: A lore tab from Ghosts of the Deep shows Rasputin incinerating an evacuation shuttle with a Warsat as a horrified civilian watches. Flipping back to "Last Days of Kraken Mare," however, indicates this is an alternate perspective of when he killed a group of scientists for trying to escape with data on the Black Fleet, knowing that humanity would not survive in a state of mass panic.
• They Killed Kenny Again: Kelgorath reappears in the season, this time Taken by Xivu's brood in hopes of finding a more permanent solution to his Iron Butt Monkey status.
• Time Crash: It's revealed this is what's keeping matter out of the Traveler portal, as Joxer is mulched by it pulling himself and his Ghost across time while also briefly restoring his Past-Life Memories as a pre-Golden Age man named Eric.
• Under the Sea: To contact the enemy of the Witness on Titan, the Guardians are forced to descend into its methane ocean and fight the Hive, the Vex, and the Taken on the sea floor.
• Villainous Breakdown: If her memories in Ghosts of the Deep are any indication, Xivu Arath has been going through a very long one over the years ever since Oryx died. The Guardians' active refusal to take his place as Taken King after his death, alongside all the other losses the Hive have been dealt, have led Xivu into a Crisis of Faith, questioning if their entire culture and religion based around the Sword Logic has been a complete and utter lie from the very beginning. In essence, she's experiencing the same thing Savathun went through, but for a far longer time, even if she won't let it show.
• Villain Takes an Interest: Sloane's partial Taking has given her the unenviable position of being personally targeted by Xivu Arath. There is a very real risk of her succumbing to the overwhelming power of Xivu's battlesong, necessitating finding a way to undo her transformation while simultaneously salvaging what they can from the depths.
• Wham Episode:
  • Ghosts of the Deep, the dungeon for this season, has the Lucent Brood delve beneath the waves in search of something important. That something turns out to be Oryx, revealed to have landed on Titan after he died. Even as a corpse, he's dangerous, as he radiates Taken and Darkness energy. The Lucent Brood seek to bring him back to life forcibly, but they're stopped before it's achieved.
  • In Week Five, a cutscene explains the origin of The Witness and the significance of The Veil. The Traveler had blessed a civilization with the Light for eons and they accelerated into an advanced culture who created the Pyramid ships, but grew wary of the Travelers power and sought to use Darkness to control it. This is what instigated the pattern of the Traveler abandoning civilizations and fleeing once the Pyramid ships arrived, and is answers to the foundation of the Destiny setting.
• Wham Line:
  • In the main climax of the seasonal story, Sloane is able to commune with Ahsa so she could serve as a direct conduit for voice. Ahsa explains how to follow the Witness, by allowing Savathun to be resurrected. "The true path lies obscured, but she knows the way. She who hides truth... in deception. The Witch Queen must rise."
  • This is followed by the conclusion of the lorebook "Purpose," where the Witness tells Xivu Arath to her face that unless something changes, none of her plans are viable permanent solutions.
• Wham Shot: Following the Lucent Hive deep into the Arcology and down to the ocean floor it's discovered that they had discovered the body of Oryx, previously defeated on the Dreadnaught it had drifted around Saturn and landed on Titan. More disturbing is finding both a necromancer and Hive ghost messing with the corpse.

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MEAGER VICTORIES OF NO CONSEQUENCE; BLURRED BATTLES LOST WITHIN MY GREATER WAR.
-—No victory is of no consequence. They scheme.—-
WAR IS FED, REGARDLESS. THE SKY CAN GRANT NO PASSAGE.
-—That time will soon come to an end. Show her your love, Xi Ro.—-