Thomas Zane
Biographical information
Profession:	Writer
Physical description
Gender:	Male
Vital statistics
First Appearance:	Nightmare (AW)
Faction:	Light
Status:	Unknown
Location:	Bright Falls
[Source]

Thomas Zane was a best selling poet who visited Bright Falls in the 1970s who wrote about fantasy tales about the Cauldron Lake. He owned the Bird Leg Cabin, the same cabin that Alan Wake is currently vacationing in.

Contents 1 Background 2 Alan Wake (Season 1) 3 Works 4 Trivia 5 Speculation 6 Unanswered questions 7 Answered questions 8 Gallery

BackgroundEdit

Thomas Zane was a writer of fantasy stories and poems about creatures and Cauldron Lake with the help of his lover, Barbara Jagger. But as the years went by he became a fearful of the lake's power and stopped writing. One morning Barbara went swimming and drowned under mysterious circumstances. After she died, Emil Hartman, then his assistant writer, convinced him to write her back to life. Although he was successful, the Dark Presence came back with her. When he realized that the Barbara that lived with him was not the real one, he cut out her heart. She didn't seem to have a heart, but only darkness. He wanted to make sure that everything that caused these events was destroyed. It could be that it was his writing that caused the volcano eruption that sank Diver's Isle and their former home. Thomas then chose Alan to defeat the Dark Presence by writing one last page. He wrote that Alan had nightmares and a fear of the dark. To help him overcome his fear Alan's mother gave him a light clicker pretending it was magical and it could defeat the monster from the dark. The page then said Alan remembered this when years later he stood at the bank of Cauldron Lake holding the clicker in his hand just as he was about to jump into the Lake to defeat the Dark Presence. As his final act, he put on his diving suit, took the possessed form of Barbara and jumped into the lake while holding her tight. In the game he appears as the Light Presence that helps Alan. Alan wrote Thomas Zane into the story to stop Alan from completing the manuscript by shining his light on him. Alan said that his act has plunged Thomas even deeper into the nightmare the Dark Presence keeps him in. He later appears to Alan as a shining light and in the final episode as a diving suit with a bright light shining out of the helmet. Although far weaker than the Dark Presence, he is capable of suppressing and warding the Dark Presence away. He is also capable of removing the Dark Presence's poltergeist abilities just by appearing.

Alan Wake (Season 1)Edit

Zane makes his first appearance in Episode 1: Nightmare, where he appears in Alan's nightmare. Zane appears as a bright, shining light in the sky who saves Alan from the murderous hitchhiker by shining light over a house Wake is trapped in. This causes the hitchhiker to retreat. Zane provides light for Alan, healing him. Afterward, Zane gives Alan a message in poetry:

For he did not know, that beyond the lake he called home,
There lied a deeper, and darker ocean green.
Where waves are both wilder and serene.
To its ports I've been,
To its ports I've been.

Wake does not understand this, but Zane moves on. He quickly teaches Alan how he will fight with the Taken, which he will have to do in real life. Zane supplies Alan with a high-powered revolver and a flashlight, and then leaves, giving Wake back his dream.

As the game unfolds, Zane's presence becomes more and more felt. He is responsible for leaving the manuscript pages for Wake to find, scattering them through the trails that Wake will take. He may be behind the Safe Havens that Wake takes cover in, seeing how once in a while, a light pole will turn on unexpectedly.

Eventually, Wake pieces together what happened on the night his wife Alice was taken away. When the Dark Presence, in the form of Barbara Jagger, tricked Wake into writing a horror story for it, Wake became aware of its goal to kill everyone in the town (and possibly take over the world). Knowing that he could not get out himself, he wrote Zane into the story to come and free him with his power, and then take the manuscript pages and help him reveal the Dark Presences intentions to himself. Thomas did like the story asked, and used his power to drive the Dark Presence away from Bird Leg Cabin. He then freed Wake, and took the manuscript pages just as Barbara Jagger reasserted herself in the cabin. Zane escaped, and then proceeded to help Wake throughout the story.

It is revealed that Zane has created a weapon for Alan to end the Dark Presence with, The Clicker. When Alan was a young boy, his mother gave him a broken-off light switch, which he named The Clicker. Every time Wake would push the button, an imaginary light would turn on, and the "monsters" would go away. When Wake enters the Well-Lit Room with his friends, he amazingly finds the Clicker. Wake then set out to destroy the Dark Presence by diving into Cauldron Lake and ending Barbara Jagger.

As Alan succeeds in reaching the lake and diving in, Zane floats around in the water slowly around Alan, where he tells Alan to use the clicker to destroy Barbara Jagger, to "fill her heart with light." Before leaving, he introduces Wake to Mr. Scratch, a clone of Alan. Zane has created Scratch so that when Alan is under the lake, he will return to his friends. Zane then leaves abruptly, leaving Alan to kill Barbara Jagger and write the ending to the story.

Zane later talks to Alan to keep his focus, warning him that he should not go any further. He shows him a video of Alan struggling with reality and even telling of recent events. Later, he and Alan meet each other in Alan's own home, tells him its not the Dark Presence that's causing this but himself is responsible for making this happened-he is trapped in his own nightmares and fighting himself. After Alan angrily refuses to believe he is indeed responsible for this, Zane is forcibly pushed away before Alan's battle with the televisions.

Zane appears as a light through a window at Couldron Lake Lodge, informs Alan that he must reach the Lighthouse and by giving him a manuscript page allows him to bring out words to form a path. He also tells Alan that he is the part of Alan that doesn't want to give up and that the real Alan Wake is at Divers Isle, currently lost in the darkness and going insane after completing his puzzles. Along the way to Divers Isle, Barry states that Alan has ditched him as a friend, feeling replaced with Zane and gets enraged.

WorksEdit

According to the books found in Bird Leg Cabin by Alan Wake in Nightmare:

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

TriviaEdit

• When Alan meets the Anderson Brothers in the Oh Deer Diner, they call him Tom, which could speculate that Alan is a reincarnated version of Tom or looks exactly like him. Alan seems to take the name as if they were just old people using "Tom" as a nickname.
• The theory that Alan Wake is a reincarnated version of Tom is further backed up by the fact that after beating the darkness tornado you can hear Tom and Barbra talking from when Tom killed Barbra after realizing it was not her; Tom's voice sounds exactly like Alan's.
• Thomas Zane is voiced by James McCaffrey, the voice actor of Alex Casey, and Max Payne in Remedy's previous game installments.
• During the Nightmare sequence in episode one, there are many references to Thomas Zane's character. There are at least two posters that portray his diving suit, one of which bears the title "Tom the Poet".
• Several of the books in the Bird Leg Cabin are attributed to Zane, and he seems to have found something when he mysteriously disappeared. When you try to inspect the books, Alan will claim he's never heard of the writer before.
• Zane's works are always found inside a shoebox, including the collection found in Bird's Leg Cabin. This follows Zane's 'exception' that his possessions can be preserved as long as they are in a shoebox, including the box in the well lit room.

  

• Thomas Zane was an avid diver and he dived in the lake on a regular basis; thus the small island he lived on came to be known as Diver's Isle.
• The diving suit Thomas Zane appears in strongly resembles that of one used in the James Bond film 'For Your Eyes Only'.
• In Episode 5, Sarah Breaker says that Thomas Zane was a myth. Alan relates by saying that Zane was real.
• Zane's face is never seen.
• He takes his diver suit form the most in the Signal and the Writer DLC.
• Whenever Zane appears, there is always the sound of deep water and the breathing sound of the diving suit indicating that Thomas Zane is still in the lake.
• Tom makes a sort of appearance in Alan Wake's American Nightmare, he can be seen on a movie poster for "Tom the Poet" towards the end of the Drive-In Theater sequence.

SpeculationEdit

1. It is speculated that Thomas was actually Alan's father, before moving to Cauldron Lake and meeting Barbara. This would explain how he was able to shape Alan's childhood (he would then only need to apply the idea that, for example, the clicker is a magical artifact, rather than writing the memory into existence), without having Alan as a completely written-to-existence character. You know, within the game. Also, in The Signal DLC, Alan's TV self reveals that Wakes father left him at one point. The TV tells that Wake would play alone at playgrounds as a child, pretending that he didn't miss his father, that he never knew.
2. Thomas Zane seems to have great insights into the future. He knew that Alan Wake would come to Bright Falls, that Alice would get taken by the Dark Presence and Alan Wake would be searching for a way to defeat the Dark Presence. It's unknown if he simply knew these facts or manipulated them like the Clicker. It could be that Thomas using the power of the lake, made the events from the last page become real, giving Alan his name and bringing him to Bright Falls to destroy the Dark Presence.
3. Thomas donned the diving suit to sink into Cauldron Lake, in an attempt to save Barbara Jagger (the real one), which explains why he is only seen while wearing the suit. Incidentally, it is thought that he became the embodiment of light after diving into the lake.
4. Alan Wake novels tell stories about a New York Detective named Alex Casey. During a flashback in Episode 2, Wake can walk into a room in his apartment which has several copies of Casey novels. Two manuscript pages, The Sudden Stop 1 and The Sudden Stop 2, are part of a novel by Wake that kills off the protagonist Alex Casey. Both Casey and Thomas Zane are voiced by the same actor, James McCaffey. While Casey may be reference to Max Payne, he may also be a reference to Thomas Zane, because he was a diver, he also lost his wife.
5. Thomas Zane could be named after a polish poet Tomasz Zan.
6. Alan Wake may only be a character written by Thomas Zane. Therefore, everything that has happened to Wake was originally scripted by Zane, and Wake is only acting leading role in a story created by Zane. This would explain how Zane wrote about Wake seven years before Wake was born. It would also mean that Alan Wake as a character exists only to defeat the darkness.
7. When Wake leaves the Oh Deer Diner after getting the keys to the cabin, Jagger says "He is here." Could Zane have just written that, at some point, another writer would come to the town and defeat the Dark Presence? The Dark Presence being aware of this, could it now know that the one Zane foretold of has finally come when Alan arrives?
8. Zane is voiced by James McCaffrey, who also voiced the title character in Max Payne, Remedy's prior game. Could this be Remedy's hint to Zane's identity; if Zane is Alan's father or past incarnation, then McCaffrey could be a link between the two titles, as Max Payne was the predecessor to Alan Wake in the same way that Zane was predecessor to Wake.
9. Thomas Zane could be an evil entity (like a demon) that has learned to use the Light to keep Alan Wake on a constant diversion away from his goal-- saving Alice.

Unanswered questionsEdit

• Did Thomas create the Dark Presence or was it always there?
• How does Thomas know so much about future events?
• The Dark Presence is keeping him inside the lake, how much power does he still have left?
• Why do the Anderson's call Alan "Tom"? Could Alan be a child of, or perhaps a reincarnation of Thomas Zane?
• Did Thomas write Mr. Scratch into existence and if he did, then did he know that Alan would not make it back?
• Is there any relation between Alex Casey and Thomas Zane?
• Is Thomas responsible for the destruction of Bird Leg Cabin and the volcanic eruption that destroyed Diver's Isle?
• Does Zane have god-like powers?
• Did Zane write that Alan Wake would come to Bright Falls and defeat the Dark Presence? Was the page in the Well-Lit Room (written by Zane) describing Wake's life the only one?

Answered questionsEdit

• How did Emil Hartman know about the lake's powers? Emil Hartman is said to be Thomas Zane assistant when he lived in Bright Falls and to be the one who incouraged him to bring Barbara Jagger back to life through writing a poem.

GalleryEdit