Headscratchers / Deponia

• Why did Cletus have a Heel–Face Turn?
  • Which instance do you mean? Although every time, the answer seems to be "He loves Goal." Or at least 2/3 of her... If he thinks he can get away with genocide without her knowing, he goes through with it, but if not he can be persuaded to do what she wants.
  • When he saves Rufus in Goodbye, it's because Argus betrayed them both. Cletus hates Rufus, but he hates being made a dupe of more and decided to take his opportunity for revenge.
  • On another note, how did Cletus get to Elysium to live out his childhood in the first place? Rufus and Argus's origins are explained, as they were adopted by Seagull and Ulysses, respectively, but, unless there's an optional dialogue hidden somewhere, there's no explanation as to how Cletus would go from the cloning lab all the way up to Elysium, especially with the travel restricted as it was by the Organon.
    • Well, presumably the rest of the Organon weren't around when Cletus was born, since he was a prototype to them. Maybe there was a little bit of travel between Deponia and Elysium?
• How do the brain implants work? Does everyone have them? Is the real Goal someone who was programmed in a computer or something and placed in a Goal body?
  • It's been a while for me but it seems like it's literally someone's mind (save, perhaps, for the parts like breathing and your heart beat) stored on a disk rather than on your actual brain. From the way Doc was talking about them, it sounds more like a fad that someone can have done to them than a common thing, so it's likely Goal had it done to her rather than originally being made on a computer, and not everyone has one. Maybe they're popular ways to prevent mental illness or improve your memory or something like that.
• Why did Hermes dye Donna's hair orange, and somehow make it so her hair is still orange when she is a baby?
  • Most likely Donnas hair was red all along and she just dyed it purple.
• Rufus cloned Hermes in triplicate to persuade him there was still hope. Two of those killed themselves and were recycled for cloning biomass. Why did Hermes and Rufus need to kill themselves for biomass? Donna's body was shown to still be on the cloning platform when the Rufus clones emerged, so why not use hers? Heck, there was enough to have *five* Rufus clones running around!
  • I was under the assumption that "recycling" biomass of bodies would never give you back as much material as what you started with. The more cloning you do, the more mass is slowly lost, so the fewer clones you wind up with in the end.
• Assuming travel back to Deponia is restored, why not just locate and use the cloning facility to get Rufus back? Cheap, yes, and he wouldn't have the memories of everything that happened in Porta Fisco or the highboat, but better than nothing...
  • Rufus was actually the only one who knew where it was.
  • You can always hope that they stumble on it someday, though.
• Are the tutorials canon or not? Rufus seems to recognize their setting as "hell" when he arrives there in Goodbye, which implies that they're at least a little canon. But they can't be completely canon for one or two reasons that shouldn't have to be said.
  • This might be a case of Dreaming of Times Gone By, given that Rufus was a prototype clone likely created within that very room, which would make it the first thing he saw in life. The machine he "respawns" at appears to be built for disposing of failed prototypes as well as creating new ones, reinforcing that possibility further.
• Why exactly does Elysium want to blow up Deponia to catapult themselves to Utopia as opposed to building a rocket? It would take a massive amount of energy to blow up Deponia, and nearly all of the energy in the explosion would be wasted and not hit Elysium. It would be exponentially more efficient to just build rocket engines. They could even just use Orion Pulse engines to take advantage of the bombs.
  • This could especially be an issue in Doomsday, as Elysium could have crashed into Utopia because they had no rockets to counter their momentum to land.
• Why and how did Hermes have a Goal corpse if she never died? Was he planning on pulling the Bait-and-Switch with Donna from the beginning?
  • I think the implication was that it was always a Donna corpse, and he just played around with the hair color before cloning her, not knowing it would make her look like somebody else. Or that's what the commentary said, although even he suggested we don't think too hard about it.
    • Even if it was Donna from he beginning, Hermes could not possibly know her name. Rufus always spoke about her as "Goal", so probably Hermes just assumed that this woman was the mentioned Goal that Rufus wanted back. He didn't realize that the mistake was with Rufus; he thought Rufus had recognized the baby as Goal - there was no Bait-and-Switch at work on his side.