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Nezarec For Tea, Breaking Down Destiny 2's Odd, Touching New Cutscene

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Tuesday was the grand finale of Destiny 2’s Season of Plunder, after everyone had to wait over a month for the conclusion of the story. What we saw was a cutscene that seemed split in half between deeply weird storytelling decisions, and a touching moment years in the making.

Spoilers follow. Here’s the cutscene, which you can watch below:

All season long, we’ve been building toward a grand ritual performed with the relics of Nezarec, the darkness-infused remains of a fallen Disciple of legend. It’s implied the ritual is dangerous and powerful, and in the cutscene, we have Mithrax distilling the darkness and channeling it into…a cup of tea.

This cup of tea is then fed to the comatose Osiris, who is finally woken up, and has a tearful reunion with Saint-14, and the two share a helmet-less kiss onscreen for the first time. He also has information about a “secret power” on Neptune, which will lead us to the events of Lightfall and the Neomuna colony there.

The tea thing is…hard to get past. It was instantly turned into a meme with jokes like “Neztea” and “Nezcafe” floating around social media yesterday, and it just seemed hard to believe that the events of this full season were all distilled down to…Osiris drinking Nezarec darkness tea to wake up. Why…did that happen, exactly?

So, it’s actually kind of clear what Bungie’s writers were trying to do here if you have been closely following along with uh, every page of lore ever written this past year. Back during the Witch Queen, there was a lore page called Devotion which contained a conversation between Devrim Kay and Saint, who was mourning Osiris being locked in a coma.

In the scene, Saint explains the story of a teacup that he has that Osiris previously broke and had been since repaired. So the tea in the cutscene is meant to tie back to this moment here, which is why it’s used as a delivery vessel instead of say, injecting the Nezarec darkness into his body with a syringe or something.

That’s the “why” of it, but here I feel like we have a case of Destiny maybe trying to be a bit too literary with a callback like this, overlooking the fact that after fighting Fallen pirates and Hive Lightbearers for unstable pieces of a dead god of pain, distilling it into…tea feels a bit silly, and in the context of the season, like a Deus Ex Machina to revive Osiris when really, it did not feel like the season had properly built up to that.

I do not want to underplay the significance of the Saint and Osiris reunion. We have come a long way from Bungie being unable to highlight gay relationships in Destiny under Activision, lest the game not be able to launch in places like Russia or China. Saint and Osiris being confirmed as Destiny’s best power couple and sharing an onscreen kiss is a great, touching moment.

But the path to get here was strange, given the context of the Nezarec relics and ritual, and they feel like two pieces that did not fit together. The tea callback was not enough to bridge that gap, which is why the cutscene feels so strange on the whole, and it’s not a very good story beat in an era where generally, Destiny 2’s storytelling has improved from past years. There had to have been a better way to do this, and we certainly didn’t need to wait an entire month or more just to watch this cutscene.

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