Lore'd to Death

The Combine [Half Life 2]

• Brett

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This week we dive back into the world of Half Life to dig into the roots of the Combine to figure out who this mysterious inter dimensional entity is and why they are travelling the multiverse committing atrocities.

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Hey there, welcome to the Lore’d to Death podcast– a deep dive into the lore of your favourite games, movies, shows, and more! My name is Brett, and today I wanted to celebrate getting our first email suggestion for an episode! We had an email from someone who wanted a followup to the episode on Black Mesa from Half Life, seeing as there wasn’t really anything in that episode about Half Life 2. And so they suggested that I do an episode on the Combine, which I think is a great idea. So, thank you for emailing the suggestion; I really appreciate you taking the time out of your day to send in a request. And so we’re diving back into the world of Half Life in today’s episode.

Before we started I just wanted to ask that you rate this podcast 5 stars wherever you’re listening to it, or like and subscribe if you’re on Youtube. The only way I know that you’re enjoying the content I’m making is if you let me know! So rate the show, leave a comment, or send an email to loredtodeath@gmail.com to suggest an episode, or just say hi! So with that out of the way, let’s get on with the episode.

There are plenty of different places that we can start this episode in trying to figure out the who, what, when, where and why the Combine are what they are, but I think the best place to start is at the end of the previous episode about Black Mesa. If you haven’t listened to that episode, please go do so; it’s a direct predecessor to this episode, and it’s got a lot of good information in there. And so, like I said, we’re going to start with Black Mesa– and in particular, the Black Mesa incident.

The Black Mesa Incident, also known as the Lambda Incident, was the catastrophic event of the first Half Life in which Black Mesa scientists triggered a Resonance Cascade which ruptured the space-time continuum, allowing extra dimensional beings to create rifts that they used to invade Earth. In the wake of this event, Earth was stretched to its limit in trying to stop these extra terrestrial beings from taking over the planet. And just as they thought that they were free from the threat of being overrun, there was another force who was waiting for their chance to strike.

A vast interdimensional empire known as the Combine caught wind of the rifts caused by the Black Mesa incident and used them to launch an invasion. Humankind probably thought that they were in the clear after the Xenians were taken care of, and like I mentioned their resources were stretched pretty thin. So this invasion caught them off guard with their pants down, and they were not prepared to fight against it. And thus started what would be known as the Seven Hour War. And, yes, that means exactly what you think it means.

Humanity, in its fragile state, lasted about seven hours against the Combine. It’s theorised that even if Earth had their full combined military strength that they would have lost to the Combine regardless. They might have lasted some days against the onslaught, putting up a good fight instead of whimpering out like a candle’s flame against a monsoon, but this war was over far before it began. The Combine came in hot and started killing everything that moved, whether it be military or civilian, and the world leaders knew that their time was going to come to a swift end if they did not find a way to stop the onslaught. And so it was Dr. Wallace Breen, the former Black Mesa administrator, that discovered a way to communicate directly with the Combine. Once that line of communication had been established, the United Nations gave Dr. Breen the green light to begin negotiations and mitigate damages by any means necessary.

Breen was able to negotiate a peace with the Combine by offering humanity’s complete and unconditional surrender. They would meet any demands that were made in an effort to save what was left of the human race. In a double edged sword act of mercy, the Combine agreed to their surrender and ended the seven hour war. They were granted their lives, but exchanged their freedoms for it. Dr. Breen was given the position of Interim Administrator of Earth, which was a largely ceremonial title just to say that he was the one who was able to negotiate a surrender. He didn’t have any power in his administrative position, but was rather a puppet that relayed information from their new overlords.

“This is all happening so fast,” as quoted by one Fern Barker in a newspaper clipping. “It’s possible everything could turn out fine.” And I love Fern’s stern optimism, but they were sorely wrong. Nothing was fine. The humans that still lived were quickly gathered into reorganised city centres while outside of these centres wildlife from other dimensions began making it their home. This made the areas outside of the city centres extremely dangerous, especially for an ordinary citizen with no military training. And so people were advised not to make rash decisions and to go along with their imprisonment lest they be killed by the Combine or sent out into the wilderness to be slaughtered by god knows what. These cities that humans were gathered into were nameless and relatively lifeless, having only numbers to identify them. They turned into dystopian police states full of pro-Combine propaganda which held up the theme of mass oppression. They’re called cities, but they’re more like mass prisons than anything else.

These city centres were seemingly controlled by an immense building known as a Citadel. I’m not sure if all cities are controlled by a Citadel or if it’s just the larger or more important ones that have a Citadel, but it would seem that most cities have one. In the case of City 17, where the events of Half Life 2 begin, the Citadel there is the residence of Dr. Breen and the main headquarters for the Combine’s Earth military operations. These Citadels are, like I said, immense buildings that are situated right in the centre of the city which resembled a skyscraper. The sheer size of the Citadel is likely another fear mongering tactic. From any given point in the city, you could probably look out and see the Citadel on the horizon acting as a grim reminder of your new overlords.

Not only did they span thousands of feet into the air, but went deep underground as well. Immense barely begins to cover the scale of these buildings. The one in City 17, again as that’s our only reference, was triangular in shape when viewed from above (so, obviously tied to the illuminati) and housed a giant dark fusion reactor at the top of it. This dark fusion reactor was associated with a portal that allowed the Combine forces on Earth to communicate with Combine forces in other dimensions, so it was fairly important. The building was also partially mechanised, meaning that entire sections could be changed on the fly to accommodate different needs. For instance, there’s a setting that the Citadel can be put into when it is under a threat. During this time, some of the outer plates shifted in a way that allowed for a larger opening so that troops, both air and ground, could move in and out in large numbers. This allowed for greater fortification of defences. Again, not to say that all of the Citadels have this same setup, but I would imagine they were all relatively similar. 

As for the Combine, it seemed like they were made up of many different races; presumably those who they conquered and assimilated into their workforce. The Combine itself is quite the enigma as there is very little known about how it started or what their overall goals were. It seems like the only thing that they had on their agenda was interdimensional domination. From what we know, it seems like the Combine visit different dimensions and find intelligent life that they can conquer and, like I said just now, assimilate into their workforce and military. So I would guess that the reason they came to Earth guns blazing without a single word was probably so that they could catch their prey unaware as to make the most out of their initial attack, and then hope for a surrender. In the case of humanity’s unconditional surrender, I think that was the best case scenario for the Combine. Basically no resistance, and as much fodder for their war engine as they could ask for.

It seems like their next step is removing the possibility of a revolution against the Combine. Being an entity that spans across potentially infinite dimensions, you can imagine it would be pretty hard to make sure that every indentured population was kept in control. And so they manufactured a peace so as to make sure that they didn’t revolt. In the case of Earth, they did this by imposing a suppression field, which was there to enforce population control. As per the name, it would suppress human birth rate to zero by prohibiting the formation of certain protein chains important to the process of embryonic development, as we learn from Dr. Kleiner. The effects of this are evident in the fact that when Gordon, our protagonist, arrives in City 17 two decades after the Black Mesa Incident, there are no children to be seen anywhere in the city. There’s an interesting tidbit in that Dr. Breen sends out a communication to the people after receiving a letter from a concerned citizen about the suppression field that he is assured it will be removed once the people prove that they no longer need it. He also states that the field is meant to simply suppress the urge to procreate, implying that it doesn’t actually inhibit the process of procreation, which is contradicted in many ways. But we don’t need to get into that.

Another facet of controlling the population is the implication that the Combine had been putting something in the water to make people forget things. To make their memory unreliable, thus making them more pliable and likely to assimilate into the Combine’s way of being. There’s not a lot of information regarding that statement, but it would make sense that if you were going to attempt to exert total control over a population that you would implement sedation.

There was also the promise of a better life under the combine which was spread through their massive propaganda machine. We hear in the train station plaza in City 17 that there are promises of immortality under Combine rule. Dr. Breen spreads this idea that if humanity cooperates with the Combine that they will share their technology and vast knowledge to make humanity immortal through evolution. That may not be untrue, given what we know of the Synths. Technically, a Synth can live forever, as far as we know. Through maintenance and constant evolution, we don’t know that the Synths can’t live forever, and I feel like that’s the monkey’s paw that the Combine is offering. You hear immortality and you might think of a fountain of youth, but in reality it just means that you’re going to become a machine.

And then the final portion of control over humans is the military, or more specifically the Earth-based Combine Overwatch. The Combine took some humans that they deemed worthy and both physically and mentally augmented them through various surgeries to be more obedient, physically able, and resilient than your typical human in facilities like Nova Prospekt. Those in the Combine Overwatch essentially turned against their own kind, enslaving their fellow humans. Whether or not they are conscious of the things that they are doing is up for debate, I think, but I would imagine that through the Combine conditioning, they are all made to be a carbon copy of the same generic, obedient soldier. Whoever they were before the Combine arrived was long gone, and all that remained was the Overwatch soldier.

In addition to being stationed primarily on Earth, the Combine Overwatch were also made to be resilient enough to survive in other dimensions where the Combine have taken over. And as much as some people might long for interdimensional or interplanetary travel, being sent to another planet was seen as a punishment. There are various references in their dialogue to “permanent off-world assignments” which are seen as a sort of probationary punishment, and no one seems to want to be tasked with heading to another planet. This is probably because other planets are likely to be inhospitable to humans. Because, remember, these Combine Overwatch soldiers are just human. So they can’t just survive on other planets without their life-support systems, and I doubt that the Combine is going to take special precautionary measures to make sure that their stay on another planet is going to be comfortable for them.

There is also a branch of the Combine Overwatch that is dedicated to civil service, much like a police officer. These Officers of Civil Protection, as they are called, are responsible for making sure that the general law is being enforced, and they do so with a pretty heavy hand. It wouldn’t be strange to see an officer physically assaulting civilians, or even executing them on occasion. Like I said, this is a dystopian police state. If you’re caught not following the rules to a tee, then you’re basically opening yourself up to brutality. These harsh methods are likely used as a strict means of encouraging people to not break the rules. If someone broke your nose every time that you stepped outside of curfew, you probably wouldn’t do it more than once.

Playing along with the rules is also incentivised by offering better living situations and more food to those who are loyal to the Combine. One of the reasons that someone decided to offer themselves to be one of these officers is that they could be paid handsomely in rations, and maybe upgraded to a suite where the floor isn’t rotting. The only building that was kept up in any way, shape, or form was the Citadel. Everything else was left in a state of disarray, and there wasn’t any incentive to make sure that it was kept any other way. Because of the way things were, there weren’t any farmers providing food to supermarkets, but rather the Combine was in charge of handing out food rations, which on their base level weren’t enough to get all of the nutrients that you needed in a day. The Combine uses this as another means of controlling the population by incentivizing good behaviour with more rations, and penalising poor behaviour with less rations.

The icing on the cake in this whole situation is that surveillance isn’t just limited to the officers patrolling the streets. The Combine had a wide network of surveillance through city scanners, which are lightly armoured flying security cameras. These little nasties are equipped with a searchlight in addition to their camera, which was so bright that it could blind someone who looked directly into it. If a scanner is damaged or witnesses a crime, it will emit a piercing alarm that will attract any officers in the area so that they can take preventative measures against the assailant. Anyone caught breaking the law, in addition to potentially having their rations taken away from them, are subject to plenty of different punishments. They could be merely beaten or killed, or they could be surgically altered and conscripted into the military. They could also be subjected to an even more brutal mutilation where they lose most of their function and are forced to serve as slave drones.

So to sum it up, after the invasion and surrender of Earth the human race was rounded up and put into city centres. Of those people, some were chosen to be reconditioned as soldiers for the Combine Overwatch, and everyone else made infertile and were potentially drugged to make them more subservient. Citizens of Earth no longer had any basic human rights, and any deviation from Combine laws was punishable by death at best, and prolonged suffering at worst. And this has happened to countless other races in the multiverse as well. And, like I mentioned before, we don’t have a ton of information about why this is happening. But we do get a little tidbit as to what the underlying reasoning might be through beings known as synths.

Synths are easily described as self-replicating robots that evolve. They were created by the Combine and enslaved during their conquests and wars. Synths are anything from small, bipedal creatures to flying scanning drones to large gunships and plenty of things in between. And all of these synths are biomechanical beings, meaning that they were created from the DNA of other aliens. It seems like, through the same methods that they make the members of the Combine Overwatch to be something greater than their human stock, the Combine have been taking various alien DNA and fusing them with robotic components to make them into their perfect war machines.

So what does this mean for the Combine? Well, there’s something unusual about all of these synths that I noticed and it’s that they all follow the same aesthetics that make them distinctly synths. They all tend to have the same organic, sandy shades of skin (with very few exceptions). They all have segmented limbs and compound eyes. I’m assuming that the Synths are the product of countless other races that the Combine have enslaved, and you would think that would make for some diversity amongst their synths, but they all follow the same basic structures. This makes me think that the Combine have some idea of “perfection” and the synths are a direct product of that fascination. They seem to have this fixation on making everything in the multiverse conform to what they consider to be the “right” form. Why else would they continually observe other dimensions, invade, enslave and genetically modify other races? You could argue that the synths are just what they consider to be more efficient or just what they’re used to, but I think it goes a little deeper than that. I definitely think that they have a fixation on making the multiverse a perfect organism, and likely consider themselves to be that perfect mould to cast everything in.

After the combine had dealt with the people and made them subservient to their cause, they began to strip Earth for its resources. I would assume that this was a typical process on other planets as well, as it would make sense that they would need resources to commit other atrocities. And it seems like they do so with reckless abandon, and when I say strip Earth of its resources, it really seems like they have no interest in the sustainability or repercussions of taking all of the resources that Earth has to offer. One instance can be seen where the Combine started draining Earth’s lakes and oceans for its mineral-rich water. To the point where once sat a lush waterfront and pier sat an empty and dilapidated desert, free of water and wildlife. But how exactly are they draining the Earth of its water? It’s actually kind of hilarious, but they use teleporters. Basically, they put a teleporter at the bottom of a body of water and use it like a drain. There is another teleporter linked up on another Combine-controlled world, and the water that gets drained from Earth just goes straight there. It’s like draining a bathtub, but on a comically huge scale.

I would have to imagine that this stripping of resources is another way to cripple the native population and force a dependency on them. If the Combine takes away all of Earth’s resources, the people would have nothing left if the Combine were to leave. They would all die out relatively quickly with how damaged Earth has been left. So by doing this, they’re essentially sterilising Earth to make it so that nothing can live there without external help, thus creating that dependency on the Combine.

That, and the Combine is able to basically just use the areas that aren’t city centres as their own personal dumpsters. I mentioned how there isn’t a lot of wildlife outside of the city centres and that’s partly due to invasive species like headcrabs floating around everywhere, but it’s also because the landscape is just flooded with toxic waste. 

So with all of that being said you might be wondering, “how would humanity even begin to get out of Combine control?” And the answer is, not very easily. There is a resistance, as we see in Half Life 2. But in a world where you’re being constantly surveilled and any threat to the Combine is swiftly dealt with, the resistance cannot have a central command centre or any sort of propaganda promoting the resistance. That would almost certainly lead to the immediate snuffing out of any resistance movement. On top of that, most people aren’t willing to even take a chance on forming a proper resistance to the Combine.

Eli Vance, a former Black Mesa researcher and physicist, is the closest that there is to a resistance leader. He is the one who is staging most of the attacks on the Combine that we know of, but even then he’s not a public figure of the resistance like Che Guevara or someone of that calibre. But despite the fact that they have to work in the shadows and can’t be too organised without risking being discovered, the resistance was able to have a full military and research corps. A lot of what the resistance does is steal combine technology, decipher it, and figure out how to use it against their creators. They also engage in espionage by planting members in the civil protection units to both assist civilians and attempt to keep the brainwashed Combine soldiers away from places like Dr. Kleiner’s lab which is integral to the resistance, and could turn the whole operation on its head if discovered.

However, I feel like there’s a lot to go over with the resistance, and I don’t want to go too deep into the weeds because we’re here to talk about the Combine. While the resistance is important to the Combine as a whole, there are plenty of members and operations happening under that umbrella that I could probably go on for an hour just talking about the resistance. But the point that I wanted to make was that there were groups of humanity who were planning a silent revolt. I’m sure that there weren’t many sane people who fully supported the Combine, even Dr. Breen who was probably just blatantly lying to save his own skin. Most people probably want out of their Combine enslavement, but don’t know how to act against it as that would likely just lead to death or worse.

And that’s pretty much what’s happening to the people of Earth. We get a pretty good idea of what the Combine’s goals and ambitions are, as well as an overview of their methodologies just by seeing what they did to Earth. It seems like their goal is really just mass genocide. As much as I wish that we knew more about their desires, we don’t really know much more beyond what they did to Earth. But we’ve really only been talking about Earth so far and how the Combine have affected the planet. But that’s because we don’t really know much about the origins of the Combine. I tried to dig a little bit deeper and try to find out something about what the original race of the Combine was, and I came across a Reddit thread where someone was asking the same question that I was, “we only ever see the Combine in the games as transhuman Combine military forces, or the synths. So what was the original race?” And someone brilliantly answered, “why do you think they’re called the Combine?”

And I think that’s so fascinating, and it caused me to sort of think differently about the Combine and what that word actually means. And, the word actually means two or three different things depending if you put the emphasis on the first or second syllable. Leave it to English to have the same spelling of a word to have multiple meanings.

The first would be com-BINE, which is a synonym for merge, pretty much, which is to unite two or more things into one like mixing sugar and flour or even in maths to combine something like fractions to simplify the equation. 

The second would be COM-bine, which is how we’re pronouncing this entity. And basically it’s a shortened version of the word combination, which is to unite two different entities. You’d mostly use this in a business sense where two companies merging together would be a combine.

The third is a big old harvesting machine- an industrial combine. Something like what you would use to harvest grains which is really just combining the elements that you would want from a crop into one area so that all of the crops in a field are merged into one place.

Now, hold up a minute. You used the word merge in all of those, so don’t all three of those examples mean the same thing? I’m so glad you asked that, because the answer is yes! They’re all effectively the same thing, except for the tractor… you really have to stretch it a bit to make the farm equipment work, but it does still technically work in that definition. And it was named that for a reason, so if you want to argue semantics with someone then take it up with the farmers. The difference between the different pronunciations are actually just the difference between verb and noun. To com-BINE something is the act of merging entities together as a verb, and a COM-bine is the noun. So I guess technically a cake is a COM-bine, and I’m going to call it that from now on.

But, why does any of this matter, and how does it relate to the Combine?

It’s just the frame of mind that I was put on once I read that answer on the Reddit thread; “why do you think they’re called the Combine?” It’s because they’re a combination of multiple different races and beings that form one large Combine. I don’t think that the Combine exists as just one entity that we can trace the roots of. So the answer to my question is that there likely isn’t one race that this all started from, and the existence of the Combine can only have existed once they were already composed of multiple races.

If I had to guess, I would say that there was one race initially who figured out interdimensional travel. This group of beings would have likely been under some sort of tyrannical dictatorship which caused them to seek out other dimensions to take over. Or perhaps they were a doomed race who stripped their planet of resources and was simply seeking an alternative home or somewhere that they could funnel resources from. These beings discovered interdimensional travel, much like the humans did, and used that as a means to an end. Whether the initial goal was to perform a hostile takeover of another race, or they were just looking for a new home, the end result would have been the same. They found another intelligent race who had a planet full of resources that they could exploit. In the case of the latter, they might have stumbled upon this planet and were met with hostility and had to perform a hostile takeover in order to get that planet’s resources. Maybe they started mining somewhere and didn’t realise that the planet was inhabited. The race they encountered was either wiped out or enslaved in either case, and the cycle repeated itself once the new planet was bled dry. And eventually, over enough time, they became a combination of different races and the ones in power decided to found the Combine, and they probably named it after its subjects.

That’s all speculation, of course, and there’s no way that we would know unless we got Half Life 3 that decided to take the fight to the Combine directly. My point is that there’s probably no one race that controls the Combine. My best guess is that they’re probably all synthetic created out of a soup of other beings who have forcefully evolved themselves into something that they believe is better than any other race, and they want to make sure that everything in the multiverse is converted to their version of perfection.

I know that went into the weeds a little bit, but it’s a fun thought experiment. And considering that we don’t actually know anything about the origins, it’s kind of fun to speculate about what they might have been. As much as I don’t really like to speculate a ton on this podcast and I try to stick to the facts, I feel like it’s worth it in this case.

The last thing that I can talk about without getting into too much more hypothetical nonsense is talking about their technology. And suffice it to say that humanity never really got a grip on exactly how their technology worked the way it did, but we have some ideas. We know that their society was largely powered by dark energy, which we addressed before with City 17’s Citadel’s dark energy core and fusion reactor. Theoretically, it’s the most abundant source of energy that there is, so why wouldn’t they use it to power everything from their teleportation devices and buildings to their vehicles and weapons? And we can start at really any of those options, but I think that teleportation is the one to start from.

So, we know that they can teleport through dimensions and they use teleportation so liberally that they set up teleportation devices at the bottom of lakes to drain them of their water and transfer it to another dimension. However, despite their liberal use of the technology, it has its limits. And it's that they can’t really teleport locally. Or at least, not consistently. It seems that teleporting within one dimension is actually much harder than it seems. When humans first discovered it, they ended up finding the Xen dimension rather than finding somewhere on the other side of our own planet. And I think that’s because it’s somehow easier to find a place like Xen and use it as a sort of dimensional slingshot to get to another dimension which is what the resistance ended up doing. The Combine managed to find a way to get past the layover in Xen, and instead just went one direct flight to their destination, but again it only ever really worked between dimensions, not locally. So on Earth they have to rely on mechanical forms of transportation like their own synth carriers or manmade systems like trains.

However, it seems that the form of teleportation that mankind ended up creating was different from that of the type the Combine used. It turns out that the way that humans did it was actually much better at achieving local teleportation, and it might have been a fluke that their first foray into using it ended up with a connection to Xen. And so the Combine made it their mission on Earth to find out as much as they could about the teleportation devices that mankind had come up with, and used Eli Vance as a means to attempt to learn more about it. Maybe this is why they decided to spare humanity and instead eliminate them en-masse because if they just killed them all, they would never get the opportunity to learn more about what they had discovered, as local teleportation would be a huge asset to the Combine.

But like I said, they also power some weapons and vehicles with dark energy. We know this from the Combine Pulse Rifle, which is basically their equivalent of a standard human assault rifle. The main difference being that it doesn’t shoot bullets, but rather uses dark energy to create condensed energy which it shoots at the target, potentially disintegrating them on contact. Less obscure would be the vehicles which would likely harness dark energy in order to power them. I would imagine that they wouldn’t need as much power to get a synth going, like the gunship, because it’s biomechanical. The synths would have their own innate bio energy keeping them going, while the dark matter was likely used as a fuel to keep them going for longer and power all of the mechanical portions of the ships. But, that might just be me talking ever so slightly out of my ass because there isn’t a ton of information about the inner workings of the synths.

And that’s pretty much all I have to say on the topic of the Combine. There’s not much else to say, hence why I went down a rabbit hole of the made-up origins of the combine. So I suppose that brings me to the portion of the episode where we ask, what did you think?

What are your theories on the Combine? What do you think that their goals are? Do you think that their goal is just a flat-out genocide, or do you think that they’re trying to build to something bigger?

You can find us online @loredtodeath on your favourite social media apps, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We’re also on Youtube, so if you head over there and hit subscribe I would really appreciate it. If you have any questions or suggestions for topics, please send me a message wherever you can find me or at loredtodeath@gmail.com. If you’re using the Spotify app, there’s a comment section attached to the episode where you can submit any questions or topics. If you’re on Youtube… you know what to do. I would love to hear from you!

And remember, if we ever get visited by aliens and they immediately come in like Frank and start blasting, you’re probably best trying to get caught in the crossfire of the initial invasion. I don’t think that there are many good outcomes of finding a “peace” with a bunch of interdimensional or intergalactic beings who decided that the best way to say hello is to start a genocide.

And I’ll lore you to death in the next one. C’ya.

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