The most shocking moment of this week’s PlayStation Showcase was, without a doubt, the resurrection of Destiny’s long-deceased Hunter Vanguard, Cayde-6. In a teaser trailer for next year’s Destiny 2 expansion, The Final Shape, it was revealed that Ikora will reunite with Cayde on the other side of the portal that the Witness carved into The Traveler at the end of the Lightfall campaign. Cayde’s mysterious return more than five years after his execution at the hands of Uldren Sov is a huge surprise, and one that Destiny fans will surely have mixed feelings about. I never wanted Cayde to come back from the dead, but I’m so happy that he did.
If you had asked me a week ago if I thought it was a good idea to resurrect Cayde, I would have answered with an emphatic no. For Destiny fans, losing Cayde was a devastating moment in the ongoing story, and a plot point that has only become more impactful over time. Destiny’s evolving narrative is one of the big things that sets it apart from other live-service games, and the death of Cayde-6 has remained a pivotal moment for the story with far reaching consequences. Bringing him back in the Final Shape undermines the significance of his death and lowers the stakes for other deaths in the future, but I'm not convinced that’s a bad thing.
I’m a lifelong comic book fan, so I’m no stranger to the character deaths that don’t stick. It’s a cliche any time a superhero dies now, because everyone knows it's just a cheap way to temporarily increase book sales. No one in DC or Marvel ever stays dead for long, so their deaths never feel sad and their sacrifices never feel great. This has been happening in comics since the 90s with The Death of Superman, and it’s still going on today. Kamala Khan was just killed in the pages of Amazing Spider-Man, but everyone knows she’ll be back before the end of the year, so no one cares.
I was devastated when Cayde was killed in Forsaken, but I also recognized it as one of Destiny’s boldest and most successful storytelling decisions. Killing Destiny’s most beloved hero was a ruthless decision from Bungie, and even if you didn’t like it, you had to respect it. People have speculated that Bungie had to kill Cayde because it couldn’t afford Nathan Fillion’s rate to play the character anymore, but I’ve always seen it as a deliberate choice. His death allowed Destiny to explore grief and loss in a way that a game about immortal superheroes couldn’t have otherwise, and it created the catalyst for Uldren/Crow’s redemption story. Destiny has never fully moved on from Cayde’s death, even though his life has been erased by the content vault.
I am no fan of the content vault, but the one positive thing I can say about it is that it has made Cayde’s death feel even more real and meaningful. Other games have had heartbreaking death’s too, but they're never truly gone because their stories still exist. You can always replay The Last of Us to see Joel, or spend time with Aerith in Final Fantasy 7, but Cayde is gone from Destiny 2 completely. You won’t see him in the tower or hear his voice, and you can’t replay old missions from when he was still alive. When Cayde died he was actually gone. All we have left of him now are our memories and the people whose lives he impacted.
But now he’s back, so what did it all mean? By resurrecting him, Bungie has fallen into the comic book trap. When death is only temporary, there’s no weight to the losses we suffer and no way to create real tension. Why should we be sad to lose Amanda Holiday, or fear for Osiris’ last life, when we now know that it can all be undone with the stroke of a pen?
These are the arguments I would have made before The Final Shape’s trailer debuted, but I’m just so happy to see Cayde again that I simply do not care about the compromises. Because I believed he was truly dead, I was able to feel genuine relief and joy to know that he’s alive and well. By burying Cayde and resisting the urge to give us any hint that he could return for the last five years, Bungie was able to explore grief and loss and still deliver this surprising and joyful reveal. Part of me is mad that it didn’t stick, but I can’t be mad that my favorite character lives again.
I’d like to think that Bungie had this planned from the beginning, and while we don’t know the circumstances of his return just yet, we’re at a point in the story where something as monumental as a messianic resurrection feels fitting. For all we know, the Traveller’s portal leads to the afterlife, or a world where memories become real, or maybe he’s an illusion created by the Witness to manipulate Ikora. During Lightfall we came to understand the forces of Light and Dark as the relationship between the real and the metaphysical. There's likely a lot more to Cayde’s return than a simple resurrection. Just because Cayde’s here doesn’t mean he’s permanently returned to the story, and despite my misgivings about Lightfall’s story, I still trust Bungie to handle this story carefully and responsibly.
But if Cayde is just back, somehow resurrected by the Traveler’s space magic, I still won’t complain. His death already served its purpose, and at the end of the day, I’d rather him be alive than dead. We all experience tremendous loss throughout our lives, that’s just part of being alive. So as much as I appreciate the way Destiny has represented grief through Cayde’s death, if they want to give him back to us, I’m not going to complain.