Dead Space: Aftermath (2011 Film) Explained

Dead Space: Aftermath is an animated film released straight to video in January 2011, the same month as Dead Space 2. It's set weeks after the first game, in 2508, and follows the crew of the USG O'Bannon, a ship sent to the shattered planet Aegis VII to pick up what was left of the Marker. The story is told in flashback by the four survivors as they're interrogated, and it explains where Nolan Stross, Isaac Clarke's unstable ally in Dead Space 2, came from. This page covers the whole film, so it has full spoilers. (Dead Space: Aftermath)

Before the story begins#

At the end of Dead Space, Isaac returned Marker 3A to its pedestal on Aegis VII and escaped as the slab of crust the Ishimura had torn loose fell back onto the planet. The Hive Mind was dead and the Marker broken, but pieces of it were still down there. EarthGov had been studying the Markers in secret and wanted those pieces badly. (Dead Space; Dead Space: Aftermath)

The framing story#

The film opens with the EDF destroyer USM Abraxis arriving to find out why the O'Bannon has gone silent. Marines board and find four survivors in the engine room. One of them, Nickolas Kuttner, still raving, opens fire and kills a Marine, and the rest are stunned and dragged aboard. The Abraxis destroys the O'Bannon with its cannons and heads for Titan Station. A government interrogation team has seven hours to get each survivor's story, under the watch of a senior official known only as the Overseer. (Dead Space: Aftermath)

Each survivor tells part of what happened, and together their accounts build the whole story in order. (Dead Space: Aftermath)

Kuttner: the planet#

Kuttner was an ex-Marine working security on the O'Bannon. A few weeks earlier his young daughter, Vivian, had been killed in an accident. At the briefing, Captain Caleb Campbell gave the cover story: Aegis VII had been wrecked in a "mining accident" three weeks before, and the team would place gravity stabilisers to hold it together. Once the engineers left, the rest were told the real job. They were to find surviving fragments of the Marker, worth millions of credits. (Dead Space: Aftermath)

On the surface Kuttner found a shard and picked it up. At once he saw the Marker whole, towering over him, then Vivian, asking why he hadn't kept her safe, before watching her die again. The visions kept coming. He began to see his crewmates as shadowy monsters dragging Vivian away, and followed them into a stabiliser tower where engineers led by Alejandro Borges were working. He attacked them. When he went for the "monster" holding his daughter, who was really Borges's cousin, Noah Pawling, a missed blow smashed the stabiliser's controls. Pawling was killed, the planet tore itself apart, and almost everyone on the ground died. (Dead Space: Aftermath)

Borges: back to the ship#

Only four of the ground team made it back: Kuttner, Borges, Stross and Cho. The shockwave and debris had battered the O'Bannon and knocked out its ShockPoint drive, stranding it. Borges had suspected the engineers were cover for something else all along, and now he wanted Kuttner to pay for his cousin's death. (Dead Space: Aftermath)

The shard went to the captain, who explained its value to Borges in his cabin, then sent him and the remaining engineers to fix the drive. Campbell was starting to feel the shard's pull himself. Hours later Stross found him drinking alone and doubting the whole mission. Then the engine room called in screaming. Something was killing the engineers. (Dead Space: Aftermath)

Stross: the lab#

Stross was the ship's chief research scientist and, secretly, part of EarthGov's Marker programme. The O'Bannon had been chosen for the mission because he was already aboard. He'd also been having an affair with the chief medical officer, Isabel Cho, for months, and had promised to leave his wife. (Dead Space: Aftermath)

Studying the shard, he started to see visions: the blueprint of something living, which he took as a sign of God's hand. He took a body from the morgue below his lab and exposed it to the shard. It rose as the ship's first Necromorph, killing his assistant, Sandra Burns, and two engineers. Stross fled to his quarters in terror. There, in his madness, he saw his wife Alexis and their infant son as monsters, and killed them both. Afterwards he told himself he'd saved them, and that they were safe behind a locked door. (Dead Space: Aftermath)

Cho: the outbreak#

Cho and her medical team went down to check on the bodies from the impact and found the morgue empty. A dead doctor turned in front of them and killed everyone but Cho. She freed Kuttner from the infirmary and he fought the creature off. Together they reached Stross's quarters and found what he'd done. From then on Cho could barely look at him. (Dead Space: Aftermath)

They joined Campbell, Borges and two others, Lieutenant Marcus and a crewwoman called Lana. Kuttner tried shooting the shard and couldn't scratch it. Stross told them the only way to destroy it was to throw it into a star or the reactor core, so they set out for the engine room. Lana was caught by her roommate, now a Grabber, which spat acid in her face, and she later died in a grenade blast. Marcus was pulled out through a hull breach. Borges, despite everything, grabbed Kuttner before he went too. (Dead Space: Aftermath)

In the airlock, Stross found the seal was broken on their side. It could only be closed from outside. Campbell, blaming himself for every death since Aegis VII, volunteered. He told them to destroy the shard and to tell his wife she'd been right and he should have retired. Then he sealed the door, pulled an incendiary grenade and jumped into the Necromorphs, blowing a second breach that sucked them all into space. (Dead Space: Aftermath)

In the engine room, Stross held the shard over the core and couldn't let go, mesmerised by it. Cho hit him, snatched it and threw it into the reactor before it could take hold of her. The shard was destroyed, and every Necromorph aboard collapsed into a puddle of organic soup. (Dead Space: Aftermath)

The ending explained#

Back on the Abraxis, the survivors were dealt with one by one. Kuttner was tortured through his fear of fire until he talked. Then he broke free, grabbed a gun and followed a vision of Vivian through the ship, killing Marines as he went. Mortally wounded, he saw her floating outside, opened an airlock and blew himself and his pursuers into space, hugging his daughter's ghost as he drifted away. (Dead Space: Aftermath)

Borges told his story and was told he could go home, and as he walked away a guard shot him dead. Nothing in his account made him useful to the research. Stross told the interrogators that Convergence was coming and that he had to be with his family when the change came. He'd been in direct contact with the shard, and it had resonated with him, which made him valuable. He was put into cryogenic stasis. Among the stasis pods bound for Titan is one labelled with Isaac Clarke's name, and EarthGov's people talk about studying both men, Isaac being the crazed survivor they'd found stranded on a shuttle weeks before. (Dead Space: Aftermath)

Cho was last. The Overseer offered her a place on the Marker research project. She realised EarthGov had planned the O'Bannon's mission from the start and refused to keep quiet. He told her he was sorry she felt that way. She was taken and lobotomised, and the public was told she was a terrorist responsible for the "attacks" on Aegis VII, the Ishimura and the O'Bannon. Even the lead interrogator and his assistant were killed to keep the secret. (Dead Space: Aftermath)

What it means: Aftermath is about what EarthGov learned from Aegis VII, and the answer is nothing useful. The government saw two ships and a colony destroyed by the Marker and decided it wanted more. Its rule for the survivors was brutal and simple: anyone who'd touched the shard was worth keeping, and anyone else was a loose end. Cho, the one person who destroyed the thing and kept her head, was the one they silenced hardest. (Dead Space: Aftermath)

It also explains Stross. His belief that he saved his family, his guilt and his terror of facing Alexis all start here. In Dead Space 2 he still talks to her, still insists he'd never hurt her, and is still unable to look at what he did. (Dead Space: Aftermath; Dead Space 2)

Where it fits#

Aftermath bridges the first two games. It follows Dead Space story explained: plot summary and ending and comes before Dead Space: Ignition story explained, which opens three years later on the night the Necromorphs escape on Titan. The cover story built on Cho's name was still the official version then, and the survivors of the first outbreak, Gabe and Lexine Weller, kept their own story quiet while they lived there. Stross and Isaac's three years on Titan, and what EarthGov built from their minds, are the subject of Dead Space 2 story explained. The Dead Space timeline shows where it all falls. (Dead Space: Aftermath; Dead Space 2: Severed; Dead Space 2)