: So it appears that we just aren't in the M2 timeline in the new game, and
: that Leela didn't actually send her message to Earth -- presumably she
: sent it somewhere else by mistake, somewhere 92ly from Tau Ceti.
To elaborate on this as I have been doing in the Marathon Official discord server lately...
I think the most likely scenario to explain all the info we have so far is that:
- We’re supposed to be in the final timeline from Infinity, which is very different from the M2 timeline in some ways, and unknown in lots of other ways, and so lots of things said in M2 may or may not have happened, but still similar events went down at Lh’owon;
- Leela never actually sent a message to Earth in the first place, she erroneously sent it to the wrong place, somewhere 92ly away from Tau Ceti; and
- Bungie made some acceptable retcons that still fit with M1 canon (like implying the primary comms array was FTL), plus some careless small mistakes in their promotional material thus far (the exact date of the attack not agreeing with the Lost Network Packets, the claim to have received a distress signal that apparently wasn't Leela's message, etc), and of course artistic retcons like the design of the Marathon itself.
Leaving us in a world where the Pfhor did attack the Marathon, and the events of M1 and Infinity’s final timeline did happen, but the colony was not nuked down to bedrock three months later, Durandal never stopped by on his way to Lh'owon, Blake never returned from Lh'owon, and Leela’s message never arrived, so nobody at Sol has any idea about anything other than that the Marathon dropped out of contact in 2794.
But meanwhile the S’pht rebellion at Lh’owon did still happen in 2811 as per Infinity, and that presumably has something to do with the second calamity that befell Tau Ceti in 2812. The S’pht have probably been fighting the Pfhor without human intervention ever since, and they may or may not have still toppled the Pfhor empire by around 2881 as M2 claims, even without human help, though I’d wager not, so that that war can come into play in later seasons of the new game.
And meanwhile the colonists at Tau Ceti dug up some probably Jjaro artifacts by 2827, wiping out the last of themselves, and those will probably prove decisive in the war between the S’pht and Pfhor... especially if the free S’pht purposefully caused the 2812 calamity, so Tau Ceti has now been attacked separately by both the Pfhor and the S’pht, and now they’re at war with each other, and the Jjaro stuff on Tau Ceti can tip the scales, and humanity wil eventually have to decide which if either side to take.
