Sometimes the Good Guys Are Worse _ GTA Analysis Beyond The Mission

One Last Ride On The Road To GTA VI 📅 66 Days to launch

Sometimes the Good Guys Are Worse

The FIB are supposedly the good guys. They’re supposedly the people protecting the country and yet Michael arrives to find them using intimidation and torture to extract information. That creates a brilliant moral contrast.

Michael isn’t exactly an innocent man. He’s a professional criminal who’s murdered people, robbed banks and manipulated almost everyone around him. That’s the interesting part; Michael is a criminal working for the government, while the government agents are behaving like criminals. The labels have become almost meaningless.

The deeper connection

This scene is particularly interesting because of where Michael is in the story now. He’s no longer simply a criminal returning to his old profession. He’s become a tool for competing institutions. Davey uses him. Steve uses him. The FIB uses him. The Agency uses him and Michael uses his criminal skills to solve problems for all of them.

There’s a delicious irony here. Michael is supposedly the dangerous criminal. Yet when he arrives, the people already inside are torturing someone. Michael then smashes through the window and effectively says; “Right, I’m taking this guy”. It’s almost as though Michael has become the relatively reasonable person in the room.

That tells us something about GTA V’s world. The game constantly blurs the distinction between; criminals, cops, government agents and businessmen. Everyone has an agenda. Everyone is prepared to bend the rules. Everyone thinks their objective justifies what they’re doing. The difference is often simply who has the authority to call themselves legitimate.

Michael’s entrance is important. The timing of Michael crashing through the window isn’t just action-comedy. It also symbolises something we’ve been seeing throughout this part of the story. Michael is increasingly becoming the guy who cleans up everybody else’s mess. Davey creates a problem. Steve creates a problem. The FIB creates a problem. Michael gets sent in and because Michael is actually very good at improvising under pressure, he keeps surviving.

There’s a growing cost for Michael though. Every job pulls him further back into the world he supposedly escaped. Every favour creates another obligation and every institution he works for knows something they can use against him.

So this scene isn’t really about Michael rescuing Mr K. It’s another step toward the realisation that Michael hasn’t escaped anything. He’s simply changed employers and now he’s working for people who can legally do many of the things that would get him arrested.

That’s the GTA V joke underneath the violence; Michael thought retiring from crime would make him respectable. Instead, he discovered that sometimes crime just comes with a government salary.

With Grand Theft Auto VI on the horizon, I thought it was the perfect time to revisit one of the greatest games ever made. Over the days leading up to the launch of GTA VI, I’m returning to Los Santos for one last ride through the narrative.

In this new collection I’m analysing the story in the comments to tell you what I think is going on. Disagree with what I say? Get in there! My challenge is to get the whole game covered by GTAVI launch.

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