We are getting back the bit of soul Uther was missing and helping him go through his regrets to find redemption. After some uneventful Torghast bullcorn that is shoehorned in there to show you that ‘ICYMI, Torghast is totally different now and fun we promise’, we get a peek into Uther’s memories, wherein lies our Weekly Retcon: Uther didn’t turn his back on the Culling of Stratholme as seen im WC3, he instead waded in there and murdered a couple dozen of Lordaeron soldiers and his own pupils from the Silver Hand. You know, he massacred his own men when they disobeyed him, the same exact thing Arthas did which made him such a bad guy. And no, this is never brought up, Uther is never shown to regret it or seek redemption for it. His only regret is that he said a mean thing to Arthas before he was ran through with Frostmourne.
We then accompany Polemarch Adrestes to the Citadel of Loyalty in order to find reconciliation with the Forsworn. As Adrestes puts it, ‘he comes with a message of compassion’. The way that compassion works is that we attack every single Forsworn in sight and viciously murder them unless they pledge everlasting loyalty to the Kyrian on the spot, in which case we just maim them to the point of near-death.
After that, Kyrestia and the Paragons shoot blue lasers out of their hands to make a new Sigil. To recap, the Venthyr crown is a sigil, Elune’s tear is a sigil and random Kyrian hand lasers are a sigil. It is very fortunate that we were never told what a Sigil is, what it does and why it is important, because otherwise all this ‘make a new sigil every week in whatever way is convenient at the time’ might have been seen as a lazy plot contrivance. Blizz writers sure dodged a bullet on that one.
After that, there is a ‘post credit scene’ in which Uther, fresh from a painful journey of regret and redemption for past sins, as a capstone to a story chapter supposedly about compassion and forgiveness, immedietely admits to tossing Arthas into literal Hell to suffer torments everlasting, but flat out refuses to take any responsibility for it in the very same sentence.
I am simply overjoyed that next week is the final chapter because I don’t think I could take this sewage spewing from me screen much longer. I look forward to pretending this is a lobby game with no story for the next several months. I truly think that everyone at Blizzard’s creative writing division should go back to fingerpainting and until they can figure that out, can we just have some raids and dungeons with no story please? This is barely an open world game any more, can we just drop the pretense already?
Failing that, if you still insist on having a ‘story’ in your lobby game, could I maybe get hired on the creative writing team? Back when I was in kindergarden, I would draw crayon comics about a stick figure having adventures while trying to find magic crystals in fantastical lands. You know, forest land, fire land, coffee bean land, ice cream land… I think my mother might have them somewhere. I could mail those to you guys, I think they’d fit this bold new direction for your franchise.
they didn’t retconned anything here