Fight for the Borderlands

It started with an evil, corrupt corporation who wanted to mine the planet of Pandora, looking for a legendary mystical vault. The Atlas Corporation was not what we came to know it as. A nerdy dork of a CEO did not run it, but a money hungry and bloodthirsty man who only saw things in tints of green and red. Who had an army on his payroll that could march through anywhere and destroy it. We even got to meet and play as some of these former soldiers in the games, Roland and Athena. But it wasn’t just the deadly soldiers and assassins you needed to watch out for with Atlas, no. They had a bigger threat behind the scenes. Commandant Steele. She was a siren. Though we never learned what her powers were, we can assume they were powerful enough to keep the Borderlands under Atlas’s command for years.

They came to Pandora for glory, and basically got their asses handed to them. Which is the story of the game, actually. You follow the vault hunter you choose around, and you realize the planet is under the control of the Atlas corporation, and they are looking for pieces of a key that is said to unlock a vault full of treasures and weapons unlike anything the Borderlands had ever seen. Of course, the vault is a total trap and is, in fact, the home of The Destroyer. But that really isn’t the point. Once you’ve realized that Atlas is basically ruining the planet, you take up the charge against them and while still trying to stop them from opening the vault, you also want to get them the heck off Pandora. Which you do, well, for the ones who are alive, anyway.

Athena, one assassin that you meet during the first game, actually assists you in taking down some of her former employers after she realizes they knew her sister was in a village that was to be destroyed. Yeah, Atlas made her kill her own sister, and she didn’t even know it until it was over and done with, with the kills all only using thermals, so no one could tell who was in the village. Atlas was a class act back then, for sure.

But it sent them packing off of Pandora. The day was won and it should have been a peaceful time. Well, as peaceful as Pandora ever gets, anyway. The planet is a rotting stink pot of death, and nearly everything and everyone wants to kill you, so it’s never truly peaceful.

Now the Pre-Sequel showed us something different, it showed up the rise of a villain, or how a villain came to be. If you haven’t played it, I recommend it. If only for the story line and the campy fun. The game play is funky, but the characters you get to play as make it worth your while. Plus, you can most always get it on a deal on whatever system you want (including Switch now which is like so cool). But this game has a special place in my heart because really, it is the first time that we get to see the most famous villain of the entire series before he was a villain.

Now I know, this whole thing is an article comparing villains, so I won’t go into how amazing Jack could have been if a certain redhead hadn’t blasted a freaking vault relic into his face. Instead, we’ll look at how he descended into his madness. You can see it starting from the get-go. Right from the start when you pick your vault hunter and come to save him. He gives sass to his boss and leads you basically into the belly of a beast. Helios is a wreck, and it’s no thanks to him. Jack was supposed to be in charge of the place, and it was supposed to be a “research” facility where they just monitor Pandora, but that wasn’t what he was doing. He was using the entire project for his own gain. We find out later that Jack already knew about the vaults and the one on Pandora, because when we finally get to the center of Helios, what’s waiting for us?

The eye of the damn Destroyer. Jack had stolen the eye of the worst creature we had yet seen in the series and hooked it up to a death laser. Why? Well, to destroy the bandits on Pandora, of course. It was his plan all along, but it was destroyed by Moxxi and her merry band of Crimson Raiders. Did that stop him? Nope. He continued on with his plan to find the vault on Elpis and get the vault relic there, thinking that it was going to be a better weapon. Instead, what he found was a sort of knowledge library, which when Jack came in contact with it, showed him the weapon that he really wanted: The Warrior.

It was then that Lilith showed up, and well, we got to meet the Jack we all know and love. Handsome Jack was born in that moment and he single-handedly became one of the best villains in video games. He ends up killing his boss, and taking over all of Hyperion. He doesn’t leave Helios or Pandora. Instead, he focuses all of Hyperion’s attention on the planet below. He sends robot armies to the planet to take out the bandit camps and villages and starts a war with the Crimson Raiders.

Jack tortures and burns a path through Pandora, making sure every person knows his name and fears it. Not that it’s very hard for him. The help from the Crimson Raiders doesn’t do much for the people of Pandora, and Jack can hold the entire planet in a tight fear grip for a good amount of time before he starts his quest again for the vaults and The Warrior.

He believes the Warrior is the one who would bring him his ultimate revenge against the bandits of the universe (spoiler alert—bandits handled the death of his first wife and that is why he hates them). In Jack’s mind, the mistake of those few bandits was the mistake of every single bandit and they were all alike, and the Warrior would fix them all. But to find the vault, he needed more than just his robots from Hyperion. He needed the help of actually Vault Hunters. So he enlisted some help of the best he could find and then tried to kill them.

This, of course, set those vault hunters up on a race to stop Jack from getting to the Warrior and destroying Pandora. They would team up with the Crimson Raiders to take him down, and along the way would learn how deep Jack had truly fallen. They learned that the supposed AI that had been helping them from the start was actually a siren and she was, in fact, Jack’s daughter. Who he had locked up and hooked up into the Hyperion network as a young girl. Even going so far as to never allow her out of the chamber, he locked her in. She was allowed nowhere else and could only do his bidding. She was his slave, his own daughter.

His original plan to save Pandora, or what he told people, was his plan, was a lie. He wanted revenge for destroying his family when, in reality; he had been the one to do that. Sure, bandits had kidnapped his young siren daughter and forced her hand to kill her own mother. But Jack himself had been the one to lock his baby girl away from the universe. He was the one who made an enemy of his own daughter and set her on a path that would lead her to helping the Crimson Raiders and the vault hunters to take him down.

Eventually, when Jack fell, it wasn’t even the end. Jack’s influence within Helios continued and the people who followed him still thrived off of Jack’s teachings. They wanted the vault keys for power and fame, and thought they would become the next “Handsome Jack” if they had what he had. But they were all wrong. What Jack had that other did not, was a charismatic personality that was unmatched. While unhinged and unstable mentally, Jack could easily speak his way into and out of any situation. He was a brilliant programmer and knew the inner workings of the human mind and what made a human tick. While he might not have understood some of the more basic things of humanity, he knew enough to be a master manipulator.

Jack was a force of nature unlike any other, whose influence over the Borderlands was left unmatched.

Even as the years ticked by and the universe and Borderlands shifted, no one could match his wit and charm. The bandit clans on Pandora ended up banding together under a new banner eventually, and soon they banded with others throughout all the Borderlands. This would signal the rise of the largest threat to the whole of the Borderlands.

While Dahl, Atlas, and Hyperion had focused only on Pandora and its wealth of alien artifacts and mystery, this newest threat was doing something that none of them had thought of. They were joining all of those who had felt trapped and lost by the corporations.

Tyreen and Troy Calypso were twin sirens from the lost planet and home of the alien race, Eridians, Nekrotafeyo. Their father was the very first vault hunter, Typhon Deleon. Typhon wanted nothing for his children but to protect them from the dangers of the Borderlands. Dangers than he knew would come for them, especially because his children were born different. His daughter was born a siren, and her twin brother had to be cut from her. Her leeching off of him from birth. But this connection between the two would connect them for the rest of their lives. Making the twins inseparable.

Soon enough, like with most teenagers, living in captivity got to them. Tyreen, having killed her own mother because of misunderstanding her own powers, was sick of being treated like a monster by her own father and wanted to be away from him. Troy, not wanting to be away from his sister, went along with her plan. Troy built them a ship and got them off of the planet and away from their father, traveling as far away as they could. The two would end up on Pandora and would soon spread the tales of a Great Vault and a power unlike any other.

These were stories they had been raised with. Their mother had told them stories of The Destroyer and the Great Vault from the time they were young, and their father had backed up everything. Both twins knew the vault was real and vowed to anyone who would listen that they were going to find the vault and finally bring true chaos to the Borderlands.

Tyreen and Troy became to the Borderlands what Jack had always claimed to be, royalty. They were the God King and Queen of the Children of the Vault. A cult of bandits who would do anything for the twins, no matter how dangerous it seemed. Even the Crimson Raiders were at a loss for how to battle this new threat, and they had to seek help from other planets and allies from all over the Borderlands. But it didn’t stop Tyreen and Troy, who with an army that spanned multiple planets and whose influence seemed unstoppable, were one step ahead of them at every turn.

Even new vault hunters, who might be the deadliest that had ever been seen in the Crimson Raiders, couldn’t stop them. They took out the Firehawk, ended Maya’s life, nearly destroyed three planets, and put a stop to the famous first vault hunter himself. Even with the death of the God King, it didn’t slow the CoV down. It seemed to push them more.

Tyreen got her vault. The Destroyer won and claimed her siren body as his and an epic battle had to take place to stop her.

In the end, the heroes won, because they do always win in the end. Even though the Borderlands series is a different sort of video game, they kept that one little trope. No matter how dark the day got. You know the hero will always come out on top.

With Wonderlands on the horizon and a bright future still ahead for the franchise, I can only hope that we haven’t seen the last of the epic villains from this incredible series. Sure, I skipped a few, but honestly, I could have just written an entire article on Jack or the Calypsos, and maybe in the future I will. For now, I leave you with this:

“The more successful the villain, the more successful the picture (video game).”

- Alfred Hitchcock

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