You Can’t Pretend You’re Dead Forever _ GTA Analysis Beyond The Mission

One Last Ride On The Road To GTA VI 📅 69 Days to launch

The obvious joke is that Michael is lying on a coroner’s table while two people calmly diagnose the fictional life he’s supposedly lived, but there’s a much better layer underneath it.

The pathologist describes this anonymous dead man as overweight, alcoholic, a smoker, reckless, promiscuous and convinced of his own immortality and Michael is lying there thinking: “Hang on… they’re talking about me.”

It’s almost a grotesque summary of the life Michael has been living. He’s wealthy, comfortable and supposedly retired, but he’s also drinking, smoking, cheating, committing crimes and repeatedly putting himself in situations where he could die.

The line; “Some people think they’re immortal.”, is particularly good because Michael has effectively been living under the illusion that he can keep reinventing himself without consequences. He already pretended to be dead once. Now he’s lying on a coroner’s table listening to strangers discuss his imaginary death.

The absurdity is the point.

This scene is actually a fantastic continuation of the “The Past Doesn’t Stay Buried” idea from the observatory. Davey has literally turned Michael into a corpse, but while Michael lies there, the coroner starts constructing a completely different story about his life.

And that’s interesting because Michael has spent years doing exactly the same thing to himself. He’s constructed a version of his life that sounds respectable:

Retired criminal.
Family man.
Successful businessman.
Living in Los Santos.

But underneath it? The same Michael is still there. The jewellery robbery proved it. Trevor’s return proved it. Now he’s literally lying on a slab pretending that Michael De Santa is dead.

There’s also some lovely foreshadowing in the coroner’s commentary. The doctors assume this man died because of the life he was living and Michael’s actual life is becoming increasingly dangerous for exactly the same reason.

He’s drinking, smoking, committing crimes, dealing with Trevor, working for Davey and repeatedly putting himself in situations where somebody could kill him. So the joke about the fictional dead man’s lifestyle becomes increasingly uncomfortable.

Michael isn’t actually dead but the life he pretended to leave behind isn’t dead either and that’s becoming the central problem.

One particularly good detail, the final line; “Only losers are the chumps who’ve got to cut him open to rule cause of death.”, is classic GTA dark humour, but it also makes Michael’s situation even funnier. The coroners think they’re about to perform an autopsy. Meanwhile, their “corpse” is lying there thinking: “If I move now, this gets considerably more complicated.”. That’s the perfect GTA V combination of physical comedy, character development and extremely dark irony. He’s spent years pretending to be someone he’s not. Now he’s literally pretending to be someone who isn’t alive.

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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