Bear with me here for a minute. I've had threads discussing whether Flynn did the right thing, whether Quorra did, whether Sam did. Let's talk about Alan.

I thought about this because of another thread (you know how my mind will take one idea and spin off of it and run with it in several different directions).

Let's think about Alan's actions toward Sam. Alan's biggest role in T:L was to push Sam to follow in Flynn's footsteps and take over Encom.

So IOW, he wants to use Sam (and Sam's stock ownership) to push the company in the direction Alan wants. Sam has no desire to do this (Sam obviously has some feelings about Encom, but his participation may just be a sort of symbolic dig at his dad-- see, I'm gonna hurt the company you cared about and thereby hurt you).

Why push Sam to essentially be a reincarnation of his dad? Sam insists it's not what he wants to do with his life. And hell, who can blame him-- running a large company is a hard job even for someone who's really good at running companies. Sam's more like Flynn-- he's a dude who likes computers but that doesn't make him a businessman; he certainly hasn't got any experience even with running a small business (at least Flynn had that) and Alan wants to push him into a huge international company? (Frankly, I think he's setting Sam up to make the same mistakes Flynn did in T:B-- get into something way over his head and drown in it.) Even Alan admits it-- Sam says "do I really look ready to run a Fortune-500 company?" and Alan says "No."

I think Alan's as misguided as I've argued Flynn is. He's still carrying a torch, so much so that he wants to turn his friend's kid into a new version of his friend, to bring Flynn back through Sam. The two may have their personality similarities, but still. Sam just wants to be his own person. He's already been living in his dad's shadow all his life; he doesn't also need expectations that he will become a second incarnation of his father, like some sort of screwed-up Dr. Who, or to be more relevant to the franchise, like he's Kevin Flynn 2.0.

I think Alan's being very unfair. In the end, Sam does come around to that way of thinking but I don't think he ever would have done so if it were only up to Alan, who would have no idea that it would be a sense of closure over his dad that would get Sam there (and I guess I could also argue that at the point Sam declares he's taking over the company, he's tired and speaking emotionally rather than logically. I wonder how he'll feel about the idea in a week or a month when he's really had time to process it all and deal with the whole thing with his dad and realize exactly what he's taking on. It's a huge change from the Sam we see earlier-- it would be like someone who adamantly never wanted kids suddenly declaring they want one because they saw a cute baby and their hormones went haywire. You'd be like "um, yeah, you need to think about the implications a bit more rationally before you jump into this..." You don't make big decisions when you've just had an emotional upheaval-- hell, you ignore the urge to cut your hair after your relationship ends, so you certainly don't tie up your life in something where you have no qualifications after you watch your dad die and see every worldview you've ever had about yourself, your family, and your life turned upside down).



(Tangent: I could also see Dillinjr facing this same problem: everybody hears the name and might expect him to be a weaselly crook/ no-talent assclown like his father. That's another part of the reason I don't favor him being a "bad guy"-- I think it would be too good of a story to put him and Sam side-by-side and see how many similarities they have, what with essentially being without a father [I imagine DillinSr may've gone to jail for at least a while], having angst over said father, being expected to grow up to follow in said father's footsteps, etc. They're both fighting it, just in different ways. As I've pointed out before, they could've really played on the *Legacy* bit of the name and showed Sam's and Dillinjr's parallel-but-different struggles to defy the screwed-up situations their respective fathers left them and try to break out of the mold everyone expects them to keep to.

[See my story about Dillinjr for a bit of that idea, but I've also written parts of other stories where he has that same problem-- in one he rants to someone that he's had to work to clear his own name because of his dad, and that he works hard at Encom, while Sam does no more than play pranks on the company and acts like such a martyr when at least he didn't have to know his dad was a weaselly crook/no-talent assclown. In another he and Sam get into a shouting match-- and almost a fistfight-- about their dads; Sam asserts that his dad was better than DillinSr, and Dillinjr yells at Sam that at least Sam didn't have a father he had to be ashamed of.])

laphtiya Wrote: I don't think he wants to USE him in the sense of getting what he wants, he obviously shared Flynn's view of the company and cared for the man. Lets not forget he raised Flynn when his grandparents died so naturally he wants the best for him. He wants Sam to inherit what he naturally would have had if Flynn was not stuck in the Grid.

Yup. But the thing is... has Alan decided that what HE thinks is best for Sam and what HE thinks Sam should want, is the right thing? Does Sam get any say in the matter? It could be that Sam will indeed be happy with this new way of living. But whether he chose to do it, or to stay in his old life even though ultimately he would be less happy that way, should be something he does on his own, rather than Alan hounding him into it, y'know?

I don't think Alan has bad intentions, at all. He just doesn't realize he's being a bit overbearing and kinda trying force his ideas and beliefs on Sam, when really there's nothing wrong with the way Sam wants to live to begin with-- it's just not the way *Alan* thinks it should be.

(My former partner's mom is the same way. She's not malicious when she insists on things being a certain way-- she just genuinely feels that her solution is the best one, and therefore thinks everyone else is wrong, and will argue adamantly, when they say that they want something different. But she's still pushing her feelings on everyone else, even if she only has their best interest in mind...)

laphtiya Wrote:Something we never know, what did the page say? Why was Alan convinced that Sam would find something?

Yes, I would love to know this as well, as I've said a billion times. And, why was Alan convinced that Sam would find something that neither he nor the police ever found, and why was he convinced that it wasn't something he needed to check out himself?

Most of what we know about Alan is by watching his software. I always pegged the guy as the type who believes in an orderly universe. Maybe not God (he may be atheist or possibly Deist), but believing the universe operates by certain rules that it's a bad idea to break. And when someone is breaking the rules or something's not right with the universe, it bothers him until he can get that repaired.

For example: The first movie. He must have suspected something was up with Dillinger and the MCP, because a piece of software like Tron would have taken months to develop, and Tron was explicitly designed to find what was not right and not following rules and put a stop to it. The novelization puts the whole scene in the office on Dillinger's POV, and Dillinger is sneering at Alan for being a goody-goody Boy Scout that can't cut it in cutthroat corporate America. Well, the Boy Scout ends up throwing his lot in with his fiancee and her crazy ex to do about six felonies worth of corporate sabotage later, because he realized that Dillinger not only had stolen Flynn's work (not right, not playing by the rules), but that there was some incriminating data in the mainframe to make things right.

Betrayal era has him in a thankless job of trying to mediate between the increasingly eccentric Flynn (who follows no rules but his own. I wonder, did the repeated digitizations cause neurological changes?), getting very few answers about what is pal is really up to (not right). Flynn vanishes, which is more "not right" and things like this aren't supposed to happen; the universe is supposed to make sense. Making sense would be finding him murdered, or going nuts, or committing suicide; having a body to bury, a note left behind - something. And the Encom board starts veering harder into "not right" as we saw in the boardroom scene. We have a CEO that is a wiz with the market, but can't give so much as a plausible-sounding line of BS about the products he's selling.

So, we have a fellow whose entire concept of the universe is pretty much shot. He carries on for Flynn, as Flynn did for Gibbs, but who will carry on for him? Who will fix this if he can't?

Either timeline you play, he's pressuring the next generation to try and step up and help him fix this. In Legacy, he's trying to talk Sam out of emerging from the storage shed and taking over the company. In 2.0, he's trying to push Jet into management. Both the boys, being as stubborn as their fathers, are having none of it (2.0's flashback scene, the "page to adventure" in Legacy). Main difference in the timelines is that while Sam is going to step up, there's no indication Jet will take a more active role in Encom - helping defend the Digital Frontier, sure, but not a management position.

Kat Wrote: J Wrote:For example: The first movie. He must have suspected something was up with Dillinger and the MCP, because a piece of software like Tron would have taken months to develop, and Tron was explicitly designed to find what was not right and not following rules and put a stop to it. Oh, I absolutely always thought he was specifically gunning for the MCP. I'm sure MCP was a long time in development, and Alan was pissed about the increasing lack of freedom for a long time. I mean, Dillinger says "Oh, part of the MCP" and Alan says, very pointedly, in the most serious voice we've heard from him so far: "No, it'll watchdog the MCP as well." Oh yeah, that is EXACTLY what he had in mind. (though TBH with you? I still could take or leave Alan until that part at the arcade, where Flynn says he could hack into the mainframe... and Alan just smiles slowly, like he was just hoping someone would suggest getting into trouble.

Yeah I agree, Alan seems to have wrote Tron with the idea of keeping the MCP in line. In that one line you get a feeling that Alan has let slip his hatred towards that system and the way it runs watching everyone so he got his own back. Then when he had a chance to "shut the system down" he jumped at it, the idea of Flynns files being in there were secondary to shutting down the MCP.

You see this in Tron Legacy, getting his old Job back is secondary to getting Sam in the role Alan feels is Naturally Sams to take. Also you can look at it in this way, he sees something wrong with the way Encom is ran and he knows Sam is his key to putting this system right again.