You know, I was pretty happy with the ending I got in Baldur’s Gate 3 in my (so far) only playthrough. Everything seemed to work out pretty well for everyone. But, and spoilers ahead folks, I guess I was wrong.
The end I went with saw exiled Gith prince Orpheus freed from his dimensional time-prison, The Emperor roundly rebuffed, my character living happily ever after with Shadowheart, and all the rest of my companions generally pretty happy with themselves and the world. Except, well, except Karlach. I turned Karlach into a Mind Flayer.
Look, she offered, okay? And I would have done it myself, but it seemed like quite a mean thing to do to Shadowheart after I kind of sort of talked her into euthanising her parents. And hey, Karlach was on a ticking clock anyway, right? Her heart was going to give out and she preferred death to returning to Avernus. Mind-Flayerising her seemed like a great third way: she gets to live without having to return to hell. She’s also an octopus. That’s an issue, sure.
But she seemed pretty content, and I figured it was the best option for her. Apparently not, though, because in a chat with PCG’s Ted Litchfield, Karlach’s actor Samantha Béart talked about how they worked with BG3’s movement director to imbue the shuffles, shimmies, and covert fist-pumps of everyone’s favourite Tiefling with character. One of the things they went over in detail? Mind Flayer Karlach.
“If you choose to go down the Mind Flayer Karlach [route], we talked a lot about what that meant and how much Karlach is left.” The answer? “Not very much. This is now an impersonator playing Karlach,” a fact that Béart incorporated into their performance. And which I didn’t pick up on.
So, uh, sorry Karlach. Or sorry to the Mind-Flayer-shaped entity that previously housed Karlach’s soul, which I guess has now been shattered like bone china. To D&D heads, this might not be all that surprising—that the process of ceremorphosis pretty much obliterates all trace of the mind and soul of the host is an established bit of lore. But Mind Flayer Karlach did such a good job convincing me she A) was still Karlach, and B) was pretty content in her cephalopod form, that I honestly just kind of bought it. Whoops. Pobody’s nerfect.
Béart didn’t just discuss the precise ways in which I screwed up in their chat with PCG. The actor says that—the game dev pipeline being what it is—there wasn’t huge room to improvise, but they still slipped in a few excellent performance quirks. “When Karlach says ‘I love you too,’ I said it ‘ILOVEYOUTOO’—that was me. I said ‘I’m gonna do it as one word. It’s one word! It’s one word!'”
The same goes for the scene where Karlach, convinced she’s not long for this Earth, encourages the player to pursue other characters. “I very much did that ‘You have your fun,’ through gritted teeth,” says Béart. So if you felt guilty about it, blame them.
Given that these are defining Karlach moments for a lot of fans—around half a million views on this single YouTube clip of the ‘I love you too’ scene—I’d say Béart’s contributions were appreciated. Also, look, I’m sorry.
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