Ahti and the Beauty of Explaining Absolutely Nothing

Perhaps one of my favorite characters in all of fiction is one Tom Bombadil. A magical singing man that appears in Fellowship of the Ring, Tom Bombadil is an enigma wrapped in a mystery wrapped in a children's story. He is seemingly impervious to the effects of the One Ring, has complete control over his domain, has a beautiful wife named Goldberry, and helps our lovely Hobbits on their adventure. He manipulates the world through song, getting Old Man Willow to set the Hobbits free and banishing the Barrow Wights back to their graves. He’s jolly, delightful, dressed in bright blue and yellow, and all together an excellent figure. We also have no idea what exactly he is, why he can do all the things he can do, and quite frankly what he’s doing in the woods to begin with.

Enter Ahti, the kind yet deeply confusing, seemingly Finnish, janitor of the Federal Bureau of Control, or FBC, as seen in the game Control. Ahti is the first NPC the player meets (excluding Polaris, who is in protagonist Jesse Faden’s head and therefore only kind of counts). He welcomes Jesse as his new assistant, a role Jesse never applied for but nonetheless accepts, reckoning you should always be friends with the Janitor. 

Despite Jesse quickly becoming Director of the FBC and the main warrior against the invading Hiss, Ahti never once acknowledges Jesse as anything other than his assistant, nor does he ever really seem to acknowledge the Hiss. He is the only person besides Jesse that is immune to the Hiss despite wearing no protective equipment, is able to freely walk through the entire Bureau without worrying about any of the restricted areas (including a maze that is meant to be completely impassable to any not specified by the creator), and even talks to Jesse in her head at times. No one within the Bureau seems to know who he is or how he got there, with various memos talking about how employees should always just let him do his thing, and the first people to ever find The Oldest House (the main building of the bureau) just sort of finding him already there, being the janitor. 

Control as a whole deals with the inexplicable. The entire purpose of the FBC is to explain the unexplainable, searching for how each strange altered item and object of power functions, where these things originate from, and why these phenomena act in the way that they do. While they are not always successful, there is a certain amount of logic that can be found, identifying how objects act, how the Hiss and Polaris operate, and even the nature of some of the mysterious planes the Oldest House connects to. Even if we don’t know exactly why the Hiss does what it does, we know to a degree where it comes from and what it does. Even if we’re not sure exactly what the deal with Former and the Board is, we can get a decent idea (Plus a DLC to dive deeper in). Ahti though? Fuck that, we get nothing and it rules.

At no point does the game even try to explain Ahti. He hangs around for a bit, gives Jesse some tasks in Maintenance, has a clear enmity for a paranatural being called The Clog, and then fucks off to go on vacation. Where? According to him, it’s a cabin in Watery, Washington. But when you go to search for him, he’s in the foundation of the Oldest House, where it overlaps with the Astral Plane. When you go to find him for help down there, he…sort of appears, gives you a cassette tape with a banger metal song on it called Take Control by the Old Gods of Asgard, and then fucks off again! Now this does lead to one of the sickest sequences of a video game I’ve ever played as you run through the evershifting Ash Tray Maze, killing Hiss infected while rocking out, but it sure doesn’t explain anything. You never get more information, you never get an origin, and you never even get a hint of what exactly Ahti’s whole deal is. For all I know, he’s just Tom Bombadil's older Finnish cousin!

There’s something beautiful that happens when a piece of media just refuses to explain something within it. There’s a reason we all love David Lynch not elaborating on why Eraserhead is his most spiritual film. It lets us interact with it on our own terms, searching for potential answers on what it all could be or mean, without leaving us wondering what the real true answer is. So often we want to know every little bit of worldbuilding and mythos, to have it all catalogued in a wiki that can be easily found and searched through, such that our understanding is complete and correct. I know I’m certainly guilty of it. But sometimes, we need something to just…be. No reason, no one true correct answer to be found, just endless theorizing, wondering, analyzing, and imagining. It lets us participate in the beauty of the world’s creation, as opposed to just its discovery.

Personally, I hope we continue to get no explanation on Ahti in Control: Resonant. I hope he just shows up, still in his janitor outfit, still being kind of creepy but incredibly helpful, and that’s it. I don’t want him to have some tragic backstory or secret purpose to save the world that only he knows about. I certainly don’t need an MCU spinoff tv show about little Ahti and how he grew up and what adventures he’s going on so that I can understand the eventual Control 56: Ahti’s Revenge. 

Some things are simply better when we just leave them be. We just accept that Tom Bombadil is a strange singing man who may or may not be able to 1v1 Morgoth. Sure he could be Father Time or the World Soul or Jesus or Eru Iluvatar, but I certainly don’t need to know which one it is and I’m happier for it. I don’t know if Ahti could be some advanced resonance based being or Cthulhu or God or Remedy Entertainment itself, and quite frankly I don’t care. So long as there is no clear answer to that question, he can be whatever I want him to be, and that’s a funny little guy who has excellent taste in music and a janitor’s closet in a weird interdimensional motel. He’s weird, wonderful, and offers no explanation for literally anything ever. Truly an icon we should all aspire to be like.