Headscratchers / Disco Elysium

• If the Ancient Reptilian Brain and Limbic System are trying to get you to kill yourself, why are they suppressing the memory of Dora? That would speed up the process.
  • Are they? It seems like they’re trying to protect Harry, hence why they refuse to let him get any good sleep. Their references to non-existence seems less like craving death and more a state where there isn’t any pain.
    • The Ancient Reptillian Brain and the Limbic System explicitly say they're actually trying to protect you from "the Final Dream." It's implied that the "Final Dream" is death in the beginning, but later revealed that the "Final Dream" they're referring to is the recurring dream of your wife. They're suppressing the memory of Dora because they're trying, explicitly, to keep you from seeing her again.
• If Harry did use the pale to cause his amnesia why did he still got back to his hotel room to commit suicide and/or masturbate? How would he know he had a hotel room?
  • The hotel key identifies both the hotel and his room number, all he had to do was check his pockets.
  • The pale causing the amnesia is only one theory. Others include getting so blackout drunk you just wiped your mind or, as stated by Jean in the ending, just breaking from the stress. Jean even more-or-less states that it’s happened before in response to some really serious cases and Harry just relapsed back to his awful behavior regardless.
    • Harry has had blackouts before, but he has also been to the church before - during the RCM raid. He didn't enter the church in the last week (it's locked up), but something of the pale may have stayed with him for a while now.
• Given how desperately she's trying to avoid Coalition attention, and how rarely the RCM go to Martinaise, why did Klaasje call the RCM about the killing? She claims it's because she couldn't stand seeing the corpse of the mercenary hanging in the yard every day, but she's on good terms with the Hardie Boys, who would probably take the corpse down if she asked.
  • If the corpse is taken down by anyone other than the police, it would probably ruin her plans to cover her tracks. Plus asking them to do this would potentially implicate her if anyone overheard, leading to her getting processed by the RCM, and then dying.
  • Klaasje also really did want to see his body taken and dealt with for the victim's sake.
    • To elaborate on the above point, the whole ruse of “he was hung, not shot” relies on tricking detectives into making this conclusion themselves and then making it official record, permanently pinning the blame on the union and making her a non factor beyond a random witness instead of someone present at the scene and time of the murder.
• If the pale distorts all reality how is water able to get through it without becoming undone? How is there water left anywhere in the world?
  • Same way there is air.
  • Things seem to reconstitute themselves as they leave the Pale, its just that it’s usually not made of the same parts it had going in. For a human brain this is a huge deal and leads to ghost memories and insanity, but water is just water and you can swap the “parts” around freely.
• What caused the ghostly message in the doorbell? It seems to be a recording, but the things the woman is saying point to her suffering pale exposure, and the Pale can cause ancient memories to resurface years later. Even Kim is unnerved, commenting that it’s incredibly unlikely for a recording to have survived so long (over a hundred years if I remember).
  • If you talk to Soona the Lead Programmer about it she says it's not a person it's the Pale connecting to the intercom.
  • It's shown in the Moralist vision quest that a properly built radio transceiver can pick up and retain conversations in their system; the ineffable nature of the Pale even makes this possible to hear a conversation that "hasn't happened yet" so a hundred-year old recording is relatively normal.
• How does Kim get in and out the area with his car?
  • The union probably had the drawbridge lifted to create more of a problem for the truck drivers stuck in the roundabout (they can't get into the harbor with the gates closed and, with the bridge lifted, they can't leave). Kim convinced someone in the city to lower it for him, with some difficulty.
  • This is addressed in a conversation with Joyce Messier. She had the drawbridge raised to cause a traffic jam and make it easier to investigate the Union's potential drug trafficking. Kim had to convince someone in the city to lower it for him, and he wasn't happy about it.
• Kortenaer's Last Breath Bullet being impossible to dodge at first seems to make sense: Harry was still recomposing from a bullet he had just dodged (Or blocked through the armor he acquired beforehand) and he wasn't expecting him to pull this trick after going down, and unlike the Krenel Mercenaries he didn't seen to be drunk. However, at this point he could have been possibly set on fire, with all the pain and agony that would come with it, alongside being in a very disadvantageous position to take the shot, with his back against the ground and barely having any energy left to fire his bullet and Harry could be wearing the Fairweather T-500 armor that only has one vulnerable spot to shoot. Given all of these factors against him, why is he always able to hit Harry no matter what?
  • He hits Harry on the outside of the thigh, which is the one spot that he can never cover with the armor - best case he has the greaves, gauntlets and cuirass, leaving his thighs unprotected. That’s a fairly large vulnerable spot, which at least removes one of the factors against him.
• Why does Titus relent and let you see Klaasje? Harry and Kim's argument to see her revolves around counseling her after her sexual assault, but Titus knows no sexual assault took place. The most ideal scenario is that Klaasje commits to their cover story, but her ostensible rape isn't a mitigating factor in the Hardie Boy's legal jeopardy nor is it any kind of protection for Ruby. It's not as if Titus doesn't feel like he can stonewall the police on this issue, given that he's already done so at every turn. And it takes some serious convincing to let you see Klaasje in the first place, so it's not like it's part of Titus' strategy.
  • Titus absolutely believed a sexual assault took place but you make it abundantly clear that it didn't. Titus even gives you the tape because he believes it 100% proves the victim was an evil rapist. Titus is deluding himself that a rape happened because he is in love with Klaasje. In fact, it was just the victim having a tendency to violent dirty talk, which Klaasje admits. If you tell Titus that Klassje says she wasn't assaulted, he breaks down.