Recap / Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus

November 15, 1960: Wilhelm "Deathshead" Strasse is dead. William Joseph "B.J." Blazkowics is seriously injured. The Kreisau Circle resistance movement's commandeered submarine, the Eva's Hammer, is primed and ready to launch a nuke and destroy Deathshead's compound.

B.J. is resigned to his fate and, once his friends and allies are out of harms way, gives the "all clear" to reduce the compound to ash. Even so, his friends take the time to rescue him and bring him safely into the Eva's Hammer before launching a nuke and bringing an end to the last remnant of Deathshead's specter over the world.

For the next five months, B.J. is kept in the infirmary, fading in and out of consciousness: between brief moments of lucidity during which he learns that his lover, Anya Oliwa, is pregnant with twins, he also flashes back to his past, from the nightmares he witnessed within Deathshead's compound during the final days of World War II to his childhood, and the abuse he and his mother, Zofia, suffered as a result of his father, a racist business tycoon named Rip.

One fateful day, however, B.J. returns to his senses at the worst possible time. The Nazis had located the Eva's Hammer, and were being pursued by Obergruppenführer Irene Engel. In spite of injuries rendering him unable to walk or even stand, B.J. fights his way through the sub from a wheelchair. Learning that his old war buddies, Fergus Reid/Probst Wyatt III and Caroline Becker, had been captured by Frau Engel and are being detained in her nearby flying fortress, the Ausmauzer. B.J. charges in to save them, but is captured by Frau Engel.

At Frau Engel's mercy, B.J. is forced to watch as she abuses his captive friends. She tries to coax her daughter, Sigrun Engel, to participate by giving her an axe and instructing her to behead Caroline. Sigrun, having none of her mother's brutality, refuses, only for Frau Engel to taunt her before beheading Caroline herself. As she prepares to execute Fergus/Wyatt, Sigrun tackles her mother, distracting her and her soldiers while giving Fergus/Wyatt the chance he needs give B.J. the Da'at Yichud power suit that Caroline had been using. Now able to stand and fight back, B.J. rescues Fergus/Wyatt and Sigrun and drives off the Ausmauzer, returning with Caroline's body.

Their troubles are not yet over, however; according to Sigrun, there is a hidden compartment in the Eva's Hammer from where a group of Nazis were broadcasting the sub's location to the Ausmauzer, which was now bombarding the sub with depth charges. Based on Sigrun's information, B.J. delves into the hidden compartment, wipes out the Nazis, and gives the Kreisau Circle not only a chance to escape the Ausmauzer's detection, but a chance to hold a funeral for Caroline, the group's leader.

Caroline had made plans to expand the Resistance to the United States, from which she hoped to establish the Resistance as a global movement to defeat the Nazis. To that end, they would need to make contact with some rebels in New York, a city that now lies in irradiated ruins as a result of the atom bomb the Nazis used to force America's surrender. Thankfully, the Da'at Yichud power suit would protect B.J. from the lethal levels of radiation in the city.

On the upper floors of the Empire State Building, where the levels of radiation were greatly reduced, B.J. makes contact with two rebels: Grace Walker, an African-American woman who had long fought back against the Nazis; and Super Spesh, her lover and a lawyer-turned-conspiracy theorist. After bringing the two back onto the Eva's Hammer after escaping from the Nazis's clutches, B.J. appeals to Grace to help the Resistance. Grace is skeptical, however; America had not been good to minorities even before the Nazi occupation, and after their victory, "White America" folded under pressure and welcomed the Nazis. Things had gotten particularly bad, to the point where the Ku Klux Klan now walked in broad daylight, making nice with the fascist oppressors. B.J., however, remains determined, asking Grace to focus on the grassroots and, after admitting that he is "running on fumes", claims that he would fight like hell to regain America's freedom. Grace respects B.J.'s passion and offers a plan to deal a massive blow against the Nazis.

While retrieving a nuclear warhead from deep in the Eva's Hammer, Anya approaches B.J.; he had been acting very distant to her as of late. B.J. had been determined to spare Anya the pain of knowing he was dying, but could not keep the truth from her any longer. Even though he was resigned to his fate, however, Anya resolves never to give up on him.

With the nuclear warhead B.J. retrieved, Set Roth, a Da'at Yichud scientist and inventor, creates a small portable nuclear charge as part of Grace and Super Spesh's plan: to destroy the Oberkommando, the base of operations for many high-ranking Nazis, in Roswell, New Mexico. The Oberkommando was situated in the heart of an area where the Da'at Yichud, an ancient sect of Jewish scientists responsible for creating technological marvels, had built several caches, which the Nazis had exploited to give them the technological prowess that helped them conquer the world.

With Super Spesh's aid, B.J. sneaks into the Oberkommando, sets the bomb in the base's nuclear reactor, and escapes before setting it off. On his way to rendezvous with his friends, however, he takes a detour to his hometown of Mesquite, Texas, to stop at his childhood home. While exploring his old home, he flashes back to the friendship he fostered with an African-American girl named Billie; a friendship that cost him his beloved pet dog when his father found out. He also recalls more of the abuses Rip forced him to endure.

In his old room, B.J. finds his mother's engagement ring, an heirloom that he kept a secret, lest his father sell it off. He is then confronted by Rip, who claims to have a new ranch upstate. Rip chews out his son once more for causing him trouble and being "broke beyond repair", reprimanding him for leaving once he was old enough to join the Army and breaking his mother's heart. When B.J. asks what happened to his mother, Rip coldly explains how the Nazis came for their neighbors when they took over. B.J. realizes the worst: his father had sold his mother, a Jewish Pole, out to the Nazis, condemning her to die in a concentration camp.

Rip prepares to kill his son, but B.J. fights back and stabs his father with his hatchet, only to realize that a phone had been transmitting everything that transpired since he came. Mere moments after, the Ausmauzer rips the house out of the ground and into the air. B.J. fights back against the Nazis, but the fight ultimately proves futile; he falls back to the ground from high in the air and is incapacitated. The Nazis take his power suit while Frau Engel gloats over him, taking his mother's ring just to taunt him before tranquilizing him.

Frau Engel broadcasts B.J.'s capture to the world. Super Spesh attempts to help mount a rescue along with the other Resistance members, but Frau Engel anticipates his plan, kills him, and drives off the Resistance before B.J. is brought to a sham trial, declared guilty of crimes against the Reich, and sentenced to death. B.J. breaks free from his bindings, kills his captors, and fights his way out, only to find his mother Zofia. His head cradled in her lap, B.J. confesses that he is scared and cannot bear the thought of continuing to fight. Zofia assures him that he is strong, and tells him that he has one last hardship to overcome, shortly before B.J. returns to his senses; everything he thought happened was just his imagination. In truth, he was still at the Nazis's mercy.

Finally, the day of B.J.'s execution comes. At the Lincoln Memorial, in front of a crowd of millions with millions more watching on live international TV, Frau Engel carries out B.J.'s execution, decapitating him with her saber and dropping his head into the furnace below.

Little does Frau Engel know, the Kreisau Circle was prepared. When she dropped B.J.'s severed head, Set Roth had a drone waiting to catch it and bring it back to him. With only mere moments to spare, Set manages to reoxyginate B.J.'s brain, saving him from brain death. With B.J.'s death averted, Set uses Da'at Yichud technology to attach B.J.'s head to a Supersoldatan body.

Now, B.J. not only has a new lease on life, but his old vigor renewed, and then some! He charges headlong into New York and retrieves a dossier on New Orleans, which had become a walled-off ghetto after the Nazis took over, and where death squads were to be dispatched to purge the "undesirables". The city was a prime location for recruiting more rebels to the cause of American liberation, so B.J. travels to the ghetto to enlist the aid of Horton Boone, a socialist anarchist who leads the people of New Orleans.

In the heart of the New Orleans ghetto, B.J. meets Horton and his friends. Horton is reluctant to aid the resistance, since he had no love for what he describes as an "imperialist" America which sent the children of the "proletariat" to die in foreign wars while the rich and powerful lined their pockets. B.J. fires back that he had twins coming and that he would not see them raised in a world ruled by Nazis. Impressed by B.J.'s passion (and his ability to drink three cups of his homemade moonshine before passing out), Horton decides to aid B.J. and helps him extract the people of New Orleans from the ghetto before the two of them escape.

In the Eva's Hammer, Horton explains that Frau Engel had been using the Ausmauzer to hunt down resistance cells across the country. If there is to be any significant resistance against the Nazis, they would need to take the Ausmauzer out of the picture, ideally by stealing it. There was only one issue, however: the Ausmauzer was protected from outside interference by a defense system called "ODIN", and the only people who had the codes to ODIN were the Oberkommando. After the attack in Roswell, the remaining Oberkommando members had retreated to an off-world base on the planet Venus.

There is a way in, however; there would be auditions for a movie by famed director Helene Winter about "Terror-Billy", the Nazi-given nickname for B.J., on Venus. B.J. just so happened to bear a resemblance to actor Jules Redfield, a resemblance that becomes practically unimpeachable with died hair and a fake mustache. After kidnapping the real Jules Redfield and stealing his identification papers, B.J. infiltrates the Venus base and participates in the auditions, which are being overseen by the "Terror-Billy" movie's producer: none other than the Fuhrer himself, Adolf Hitler, now a doddering old man whose mental and physical faculties are failing him rapidly. After impressing the director and Hitler with an all-too-convincing fight audition (which leaves a Nazi dead), B.J. makes his way deeper into the Venus base, steals the ODIN codes, and returns to Earth.

After holding a party on the Eva's Hammer to celebrate their impending victory, the Kreisau Circle begins its assault on the Ausmauzer: with Frau Engel planning to appear on live TV for an interview, she would be in no position to stop them. With the codes stolen from the Venus base, the Ausmauzer is brought under the Resistance's control, the threat it posed to the rebels in America eliminated.

All that remains now is disposing of Frau Engel. As her interview is broadcast to televisions across the country and abroad, the Kreisau Circle storms the stage, with B.J. burying his hatchet in Engel's face and telling her in the moments before he splits her skull open like a watermelon: "You're among wolves now, and these are our woods."

Frau Engel's death on live TV is the spark that ignites the flames of rebellion across the country, with the Kreisau Circle fanning the flames, broadcasting a message encouraging Americans to rise up and fight back. The flames become a conflagration, a second American Revolution: the people take the fight against the Nazi occupiers, driving them off their shores and into the deepest reaches of space as B.J. takes his mother's ring back from Engel's corpse and proposes to the love of his life, Anya...