Lies, Spies, and traitors oh my!!!

[Jdawg]

it seemed half the crew on the concordia was a traitor, just loo kat how many bombs went off on the flight deck in a yr I counted 3 lol. just from playing the games and reading one book, I can name 4 traitors right off, jazz, minx, hobbes, the presidents aide (from fleet action her name escapes me). Just wondering did confed ever have any high ranking spies in the ruling houses of the kilrathi empire?

also in one scene in SO2 a spy was contacting a kilrathi agent and he wanted the morningstar ship, who was he talking to, was it minx, it didnt sound like her

 

[capi3101]

... the presidents aide (from fleet action her name escapes me)

Rhonda Jamison, and she was the Foreign Minister (i.e. Secretary of State), not the President's Aide.

Just wondering did confed ever have any high ranking spies in the ruling houses of the kilrathi empire?

It's possible, but we're never really explicitly told about any. Might be an interesting topic for a historical discussion at some point - American spies / sympathizers in Japan. Closest you probably had in the books was Baron Jukaga; he wasn't a spy but he definitely didn't want to see humanity annihilated either (just enslaved, IIRC).

also in one scene in SO2 a spy was contacting a kilrathi agent and he wanted the morningstar ship, who was he talking to, was it minx, it didnt sound like her

You're talking about the SO2 opener. I think it's heavily implied that it's Minx given the later events of SO2, but then again that whole scene has always kinda bothered me (largely the script and the way it was delivered; always struck me as needlessly melodramatic). I mean, it's most likely that the Cat in question was supposed to be Thrakhath, but the Cat neither looked like the way he appeared in the rest of WC2 nor did he sound the same, and yet who else in the series do we know of at that point that might be interested in an advanced Confederation fighter design for their own use?

Jukaga maybe...I dunno. Anybody got a script of that scene archived anywhere?

 

[Jdawg]

Rhonda Jamison, and she was the Foreign Minister (i.e. Secretary of State), not the President's Aide.



It's possible, but we're never really explicitly told about any. Might be an interesting topic for a historical discussion at some point - American spies / sympathizers in Japan. Closest you probably had in the books was Baron Jukaga; he wasn't a spy but he definitely didn't want to see humanity annihilated either (just enslaved, IIRC).



You're talking about the SO2 opener. I think it's heavily implied that it's Minx given the later events of SO2, but then again that whole scene has always kinda bothered me (largely the script and the way it was delivered; always struck me as needlessly melodramatic). I mean, it's most likely that the Cat in question was supposed to be Thrakhath, but the Cat neither looked like the way he appeared in the rest of WC2 nor did he sound the same, and yet who else in the series do we know of at that point that might be interested in an advanced Confederation fighter design for their own use?

Jukaga maybe...I dunno. Anybody got a script of that scene archived anywhere?

im 99 percent sure it was not thrakhath, just a kilrathi agent, and it didnt sound like minx, and plus I dont think she was quite on the concordia yet

the only agent we see is scorpion (and he is a human) aboard ayers rock, but it seems hinted at the Paladin might have so top ranked kilrathi spies

 

[Bandit LOAF]

“Add a traitor!” was a running joke back in the day. It wasn’t exclusive to Chris Roberts games (although it shows up in Wing Commander II, Strike Commander, Wing Commander III, Wing Commander IV, etc.) but throughout Origin Systems. The big surprise being that there’s a traitor in your midst is used in Wings of Glory and a stack of Ultimas (Ultimae?) (In all honesty, it’s something that makes a lot of sense in game design, especially game design in the early 1990s that was limited to diskettes… because fighting the same bitmaps you use as your wingmen for the rest of the game saves space.)

As for human treason in the Wing Commander universe, a few more examples would be…

* “Burroughs” – the disgruntled flight simulator programmer in “Red and Blue.”

* “Ortiz” – from the WC:CCG’s Kilrathi ‘Traitor’ card. No details beyond that he wears a WC3-era uniform without an apparent rank insignia. (You can read his name on his uniform, which is the same as the artist who painted the card…)

* Admiral Wilson and Captain Sansky – Confederation officers of Pilgrim descent in the Wing Commander movie who sold out to the Kilrathi, provided the NavCom AI and so on.

* Amity Aristee and her crew in Pilgrim Stars and Truth; they didn’t sell out to the Kilrathi… but they did betray and attack the Confederation in the middle of the war.

* The Church of Man in Privateer, especially Righteous Fire (in which the Kilrathi provide them with surplus Salthi to conduct more advanced terrorist attacks in the Gemini Sector.)

* The crew of the Gwenhyvar… or the Johann… or whatever it was. For whatever reason, the dialogue in The Secret Missions suggests that the Kilrathi were forcing the crew to betray the Confederation rather than that they were simply killed and their fighters flown by kils.

And then you get into more broad territory. Does Tolwyn count for betraying the Confederation? What about Doctor Singh for attempting to dose a captured Kilrathi with an infectious agent in On Both Your Houses? And there’s non-humans, like Vidkun the Dolosian leader who sells out the Confederation to the Kilrathi at the 2654 Sivar-Eshrad. False Colors was full of traitors, too! (The whole Y-12 group.)


And as for Kilrathi who were turned, it did happen. There’s even a Confederation ‘Traitor’ card in the CCG that shows one of them. Get a shirt, cat dude: http://ccg.jetlag.us/index.php/All/c-lu-traitor

There was also a defecting scientist talked about in the Wing Commander Academy (game) manual, Hajjnah. And then there’s the rebels on GHorah Khar, Natanya, Sariha and K'arakh. There’s Bhok nar Ragitagha in The Price of Victory, who attempts to defect to Blair but is ultimately killed. (One big commonality for these Kilrathi traitors seems to be that they have some fairly-unrelated alternative motive… Jukaga wants to get ready for the next war, the rebels don’t love the Confederation so much as they hate the Emperor… Bhok hated the move away from unified clans…)

 

[Jdawg]

“Add a traitor!” was a running joke back in the day. It wasn’t exclusive to Chris Roberts games (although it shows up in Wing Commander II, Strike Commander, Wing Commander III, Wing Commander IV, etc.) but throughout Origin Systems. The big surprise being that there’s a traitor in your midst is used in Wings of Glory and a stack of Ultimas (Ultimae?) (In all honesty, it’s something that makes a lot of sense in game design, especially game design in the early 1990s that was limited to diskettes… because fighting the same bitmaps you use as your wingmen for the rest of the game saves space.)

As for human treason in the Wing Commander universe, a few more examples would be…

* “Burroughs” – the disgruntled flight simulator programmer in “Red and Blue.”

* “Ortiz” – from the WC:CCG’s Kilrathi ‘Traitor’ card. No details beyond that he wears a WC3-era uniform without an apparent rank insignia. (You can read his name on his uniform, which is the same as the artist who painted the card…)

* Admiral Wilson and Captain Sansky – Confederation officers of Pilgrim descent in the Wing Commander movie who sold out to the Kilrathi, provided the NavCom AI and so on.

* Amity Aristee and her crew in Pilgrim Stars and Truth; they didn’t sell out to the Kilrathi… but they did betray and attack the Confederation in the middle of the war.

* The Church of Man in Privateer, especially Righteous Fire (in which the Kilrathi provide them with surplus Salthi to conduct more advanced terrorist attacks in the Gemini Sector.)

* The crew of the Gwenhyvar… or the Johann… or whatever it was. For whatever reason, the dialogue in The Secret Missions suggests that the Kilrathi were forcing the crew to betray the Confederation rather than that they were simply killed and their fighters flown by kils.

And then you get into more broad territory. Does Tolwyn count for betraying the Confederation? What about Doctor Singh for attempting to dose a captured Kilrathi with an infectious agent in On Both Your Houses? And there’s non-humans, like Vidkun the Dolosian leader who sells out the Confederation to the Kilrathi at the 2654 Sivar-Eshrad. False Colors was full of traitors, too! (The whole Y-12 group.)


And as for Kilrathi who were turned, it did happen. There’s even a Confederation ‘Traitor’ card in the CCG that shows one of them. Get a shirt, cat dude: http://ccg.jetlag.us/index.php/All/c-lu-traitor

There was also a defecting scientist talked about in the Wing Commander Academy (game) manual, Hajjnah. And then there’s the rebels on GHorah Khar, Natanya, Sariha and K'arakh. There’s Bhok nar Ragitagha in The Price of Victory, who attempts to defect to Blair but is ultimately killed. (One big commonality for these Kilrathi traitors seems to be that they have some fairly-unrelated alternative motive… Jukaga wants to get ready for the next war, the rebels don’t love the Confederation so much as they hate the Emperor… Bhok hated the move away from unified clans…)

thanks ben was it minx at the start of so2 in wing commander 2 talking to the kilrathi agent

 

[Bandit LOAF]

thanks ben was it minx at the start of so2 in wing commander 2 talking to the kilrathi agent

I am going to say no. My logic:

- The voice is G.P. Austin, who is a dude.
- They are credited as "Mandarin #1138."
- They refer to the Morningstar test pilots in the third person. If it were Minx, the line makes no sense. "A squadron of test pilots... OF WHOM I AM ONE."
- There's no indication later that Minx is particularly bloodthirsty; she's seemingly more interested in impressing Jazz and the Kilrathi.
- They're apparently onboard the TCS Centurion, which doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the Morningstar project (it's simply where Jazz is being tried.)

We know there are other Mandarins present; Jazz is soon transferred to the TCS Bastille... which is then taken over by Mandarin hijackers (plural.) It's certainly possible (though the vibe I get is that they're supposed to be a deep cover agent embedded near Tolwyn and reporting to the Kilrathi on command decisions.)