Thomas Zane

Thomas Zane
Biographical information
Profession:	Poet
Physical description
Gender:	Male
Hair Color:	Black
Vital statistics
First Appearance:	Epidode 1: Nightmare (Alan Wake)
Faction:	Light
Status:	Alive, trapped in Dark Place
Location:	Bright Falls (formerly) Dark Place
Family:	Barbara Jagger (wife)
Behind the Scenes

Note: this article is for the poet, for Finnish filmmaker of the same name see this page; for the paranatural entity who assumed his identity, see this page; for the movie, see this page.

 Beyond the shadow you settle for, there is a miracle illuminated. 

― Thomas Zane

Thomas Zane is a character mentioned in the Alan Wake franchise. He was a famous poet who settled in Bright Falls, Washington during the 1960s, where he met and fell in love with local young woman named Barbara Jagger. After she drowned, Zane attempted to bring her back to life using the supernatural power of Cauldron Lake. However, in doing so, he inadvertently released a dark presence from beyond the lake that took over his lover's body. In the end, Zane managed to vanish it back to the place it came from, but at the cost of almost all traces of his existence being erased. Although his body was taken over by a bright presence originating from the same dimension as the Dark Presence, his spirit and that of his lover were taken to a "baby universe" created by him.

Appearance

Thomas Zane was a Caucasian man with long black hair and a stubble. He wore a white shirt under a black jacket and matching black pants. For diving, Zane wore a white JIM diving suit.

Personality

As one of Alan Wake manuscript pages states, before meeting Barbara Jagger, Thomas Zane had never been a very happy man. It wasn't until he fell in love with her that he felt good for the first time in his life, becoming captivated by Jagger's vibrant and energetic personality. His love for her also made words flow, and because of this, he considered Jagger as his muse. Zane was also a diving enthusiast.

Biography

Early Life

 When Thomas Zane fell for Barbara Jagger, it happened fast. She was young, vibrant and beautiful, full of life. He had never been a very happy man, and without any seeming effort she had changed all that. 

― Excerpts from Departure by Alan Wake

Diver's Isle.

Thomas Zane was a well-known and successful, albeit unhappy, poet. Around the 1960s, he settled in the town of Bright Falls, Washington, where he met and quickly fell in love with young woman named Barbara Jagger. Without any effort, Jagger made Zane feel happy and inspired him to write new poems, becoming his muse. The two eventually moved to a cabin in a small island located in Cauldron Lake known as "Diver's Isle", name so due to Zane's enthusiasm for diving. Zane also had a young assistant named Emil Hartman. Both Jagger and Zane were also acquaintance with local reporter named Cynthia Weaver, who was secretly in love with the poet.

Bright Falls AWE

 No. You're not Barbara Jagger. I made a terrible mistake. I should have never written you back. You came back wrong. Your heart is filled with darkness.
Put that knife away, Thomas. Put it down.
Your heart is filled with darkness. I'll cut it out. And then I'll take you back to the depths you came from. 

― Thomas Zane and Barbara Jagger.

On July 10, 1970, Jagger died of an apparent drowning while swimming in Cauldron Lake. Devastated by to the loss of the love of his life, Zane decided to bring her back to life using the supernatural power of the lake to turn fiction into reality. As he did this, Zane felt the poems taking form and the power surging through the keys of the typewriter. However, he quickly became fearful of this, but Hartman encouraged him to continue. In the end, he was partially successful: Jagger came back to life, but her body was taken over by a Dark Presence that originated from the Dark Place beneath the lake.

The Clicker.

Cast under her spell, Zane was unable to see that she no longer was the woman he fell in love with until it was already too late. In an effort to rectify his mistake, the poet managed to capture the possessed Jagger and, after tying her to a chair, cut her heart out in effort to kill her, but he only found darkness inside her. Zane eventually understood the true nature of the Dark Presence and the Dark Place it came from and concluded that the only way to stop the presence that now inhabited his lover's body was to erase out of existence everything that had made its release possible, including himself. To accomplish this, Zane wrote another poem, a "master poem". However, knowing that the Dark Presence may one day return, Zane wrote an exception: any of his belongings stored in a shoe box would remain, and entrusted Weaver with one of these boxes, which contained a light switch, cut from Zane's Angel Lamp, known as "the Clicker". Zane also wrote that the box would one day be given to Alan Wake and that he would use the Clicker - which was also stated to be an object from his childhood given to him at the age of 7 by his mother to help him sleep at night - to vanish the Dark Presence.

The Bright Presence on Zane's body.

After putting on his diving suit, Zane untied the possessed Jagger and, as he struggled to hold her in his arms, dived into Cauldron Lake. As the two sank deeper, another, bright, presence surged up to meet them. While the poet surrendered his body to this other presence, which would later rose up to the surface to continue its eternal war against its dark counterpart, the couple's "essences" descended even deeper until Zane recited his "master poem", which created a "baby universe" that would allow them to escape to and safely live in. An earthquake also occurred on Cauldron Lake, which sank the isle and the cabin the couple had once lived in.

Legacy

 [...] there was an island there, owned by a guy called Thomas Zane. Now, some of the articles I found about him make him out to be a famous writer. But I ran a bunch of searches, couldn't find a single thing he wrote. 

― Barry Wheeler

The Dark Presence using Barbara Jagger's appearance.

While the majority of the population forgot that Thomas Zane had ever existed, this was not the case for some individuals, namely Emil Hartman and Cynthia Weaver. The poet's former assistant pursued a career in psychology and subsequently establish a psychiatric institution near Cauldron Lake to supposedly help troubled artists. In reality, however, his goal was to study the power of the lake, and for this he would use his patients as test subjects for his experiments. Meanwhile, a traumatized Weaver spent the next decades preparing for the imminent war between light and darkness, spreading stashes of supplies through the area of Bright Falls. She also hid the shoebox containing the Clicker in a room at Bright Falls Dam that she remodeled and named the "Well-Lit Room." A song inspired by Zane's story, titled The Poet and the Muse, was written by Bright Fall's resident musicians Tor and Odin Anderson. In 1976, the brothers accidentally released the Dark Presence from the lake once again. While they managed to repels its forces, the Dark Presence was able to remain to the surface, albeit in a weakened state.

Alan Wake

In 2010, writer Alan Wake traveled to Bright Falls with his wife, Alice, for a vacation. However, the couple was lured by the Dark Presence, under the guise of Jagger, to a resurfaced Diver's Isle. Alice was dragged into the lake while her husband, under the influence of the Dark Presence, wrote a manuscript that would free it from the Dark Place, but before completing it, Wake managed to regain his senses and escaped the cabin by writing the Bright Presence, in the form of Zane, into the story to free him. Over the course of the following week, Wake was hunted down relentlessly by Dark Presence before he and his allies learnt of the countermeasure that Zane had left for him. After reaching Weaver, Wake retrieved the Clicker and used it to destroy the Dark Presence's physical body. While he managed to free his wife from the Dark Place, the writer was forced to take her place.

The shoebox found by Samantha Wells.

Another one of Zane's shoeboxes, containing sheets of his poems and black and white photographs, was acquired, allegedly at a yard sale, by an woman living in the town of Ordinary, Maine. Around 2012, the woman's house was bought by a young woman named Samantha Wells, who found the shoebox while exploring the attic and later wrote about it on her blog, This House of Dreams. A week later, after Wells experienced a strange nightmare involving the box, she woke up to find that it had mysteriously disappeared. During following moths, Wells experienced more strange dreams and occurrences related with both the shoebox and Alan Wake. The young woman later found the box, however, it now contained a different set of poem sheets and an old black switch. During another dream, Wells was visited by the Bright Presence, who told her the story of Zane and Jagger and their ultimate fate.

The filmmaker

Around a decade after his disappearance, Wake met a Finnish filmmaker in Dark Place who claimed to be the actual Thomas Zane, with the poet supposedly being a character he had played on one of his films. In the real world, people now remembered Thomas Zane (born Thomas Seine) as being a well-known and respected auteur filmmaker who had immigrated from Finland to Bright Falls in the 60s with his girlfriend, Barbara Jagger (born Baba Jakala), and had established an artist commune known as the Oceanview Hotel before he mysteriously disappeared. Some people, however, such as Weaver, most likely due to the same reason she was able to remember the original Zane after he vanished, and Jesse Faden, possibly due to her being protected by a paranatural entity, still remembered Zane as being a poet. Whether the filmmaker is somehow responsible for these changes, is currently unknown.

Works

Zane's books in Bird Leg Cabin.

• The Labyrinth of Me
• The Temple of Shadow & Mist
• In Her Dreams to Prevail
• Kept from Sleep

Notes

• Alan Wake is refereed to as Tom by both the Anderson Brothers and Ahti. While this could simply be due to their physical similarities, it has repeatedly been implied that there is a deeper connection between the two.
• During the A Writer's Dream sequence in episode one, a movie poster with the title "Tom the Poet" can be found in the Huntsman's Cabin. This same poster can also be found in Alan Wake's American Nightmare the Drive-In Theater's projection booth.
• Before Alan restores the power inside the Bird Leg Cabin for Alice, he can find a shoebox containing Zane's books, and will claim that he had never heard of him before. By going to the study, he can also find an old picture of Zane in his diving suit.
• A quote from one of Zane's poems is seen in the plaque of the Cauldron Lake Lodge sundial: "Beyond the shadow you settle for, there's a miracle illuminated." This same quote is also heard in the Old Gods of Asgard song Balance Slays the Demon.
• A blackboard appearing in Remedy Entertainment's game, Quantum Break, is covered in references to Alan Wake, including a portion of the poem recited by the Bright Presence at the beginning of the game: "...deeper darker ocean green where the waves are both wilder are more serene." Quantum Break also features two characters named Beth Wilder and Paul Serene.

Behind the Scenes

• Thomas Zane is voiced by James McCaffrey, the voice actor of Max Payne in Remedy Entertainment's previous game installments. McCaffrey also voices Zachariah Trench in Control, and Alex Casey in Alan Wake and Alan Wake 2.

Appearances

• Alan Wake
  • Episode 1: Nightmare (mentioned)
  • Episode 3: Ransom (mentioned)
  • Episode 4: The Truth (mentioned)
  • Episode 5: The Clicker (mentioned)
  • Episode 6: Departure (mentioned)
  • Special 1: The Signal (mentioned)
  • Special 2: The Writer (mentioned)
• Psycho-Thriller (mentioned)
• Alan Wake's American Nightmare
  • Act I (name seen in a poster)
  • Act II (name seen in a poster)
  • Act III (name seen in a poster)
• Control
  • Expansion 2: AWE (mentioned)
• Alan Wake 2 (mentioned)

Gallery

The old photo of Thomas Zane in the typewriter room

See also

Manuscript pages:

• Thomas Zane in Love with Barbara Jagger
• Thomas Zane's Writing and Assistant
• Zane's Shoebox
• Thomas Zane's Last Dive
• Zane's Poem