In today’s (late!) excerpt from my spoiler-filled interview with “Gears of War 2” lead creator Cliff Bleszinski, we’re talking about Dom’s big decision and why he made it.

I can’t say more, except that you should not read this one unless you’ve reached Dom’s big moment in the game. If you have and, like me, you weren’t sold on why Dom did what he did, read on for Bleszinski’s explanation:

This interview was conducted by telephone a few days before the release of “Gears of War 2.” I finished playing the game’s campaign over online co-op with Newsweek’s N’Gai Croal a day earlier, a session I referred to throughout the interview. N’Gai had played as “Gears” hero Marcus Fenix. I played as sidekick Dom.

Multiplayer: Dom knows he’s going into the underworld to rescue his wife. He discovers her. I really like how you did that scene, how she appears to be okay at first, and then you see how haggard and beaten down she is. But I didn’t understand why his impulse wasn’t to save her. What we see instead is a very powerful moment where he, essentially, is put in a position where he feels he has to kill her in order to take her out of her suffering. Why did you go that way and how come he didn’t just save her?

Cliff Bleszinski, Epic Games: It’s not black and white in regards to all of that. The entire set-up to that — and reading some of the things that are mentioned in the collectibles to Tai’s story arc — is that the Locust are breaking people irreversibly, to the point where they torture them, they isolate them, they turn them into mindless slaves and ultimately lobotomize them. We wanted to make sure that the scar was visible on her head in that cut-scene. She originally had a wrap on her head and people were like, “What’s the deal there?” And the other thing that sold that is that the eyes are cataracted over. It’s a dead stare. There’s nothing there. She is gone. So rather than have her live this life as the walking dead, [he shoots her.] There’s no way he could have gotten out of the underground carrying her because they would have fallen to the next batch of Locust that came [upon them] while he’s got this 80-pound sack of potatoes on his back.

The only humane thing to do was to just let it go and ultimately have that sense of closure in regard to what happened. Because if Tai, being the unkillable completely bad-ass guy — who actually has a very healthy outlook and everything — after a few hours would be broken enough to get to the point where he would take himself out, what chance did this woman stand who had been there for quite some time?

Multiplayer: So he would have been thinking that if he rescued her in better shape, he’s prepared to bring her back. It’s how badly broken she is at that point…

Bleszinski: It also re-establishes the Locust as — although there are things in the story that give you more of a clue as to why the Locust are bubbling up — it truly establishes them as evil and completely people you have absolutely no qualms about cutting in half and beating down and killing.

Related Posts:
Non-Spoiler Interview: Bleszinski Defends, Questions The ‘Rule Of Threes’
Spoiler Interview: Bleszinski Talks ‘Gears of War 2′ Bosses, Including That Last One
Spoiler Interview: Bleszinski Talks ‘Gears of War 2′ Driving Sequences