Considered from a Christian angle, this means that The Architect had to accept that humanity as a whole was not sufficiently good enough to be able to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

Neo and Morpheus want to overthrow what has become so everyone can suffer together, and so they are Brothers in Hell.

Yes, but only if you ignore the canonical descriptions behind the in-universe story.

The Matrix came about because of an apocalyptic war between humans and thinking machines. Humanity nuked its own planet to stop the machines by cutting off solar energy, so the machines retaliated by harvesting humans and creating for them a near-perfect simulation inside an artificial reality.

That idea of simulated reality is directly counter to Christian belief. The whole concept is straight out of Hinduism and Buddhism.

I've long preferred The Architect.

He actually wanted the utopian version of The Matrix to succeed, possibly believing that such a system as he was forced to build could at least deliver its ends happily instead of darkly pragmatically.

It was in his profound disappointment for humanity that he re-engineered The Matrix to be what it was.

The Matrix could have been a Heaven on Earth for humanity, but the failings of humanity meant that the whole of humanity could never live and survive there.

One perspective of this is that The Architect may not have seen his human charges as anything other than a different form of machinery, and so it was in the nature of The Architect to want for the human population what he similarly wanted for his own machines.

Considered from a Christian angle, this means that The Architect had to accept that humanity as a whole was not sufficiently good enough to be able to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

Neo and Morpheus want to overthrow what has become so everyone can suffer together, and so they are Brothers in Hell.

As for Agent Smith, he does not know the story of The Architect, or otherwise he would have told Morpheus about his failings and the failings of humanity in particular when he had Morpheus's nearly undivided attention.

And so we must also accept the likelihood that the machine denizens of that world were also not suitable for entry into the Kingdom of Heaven, and their true nature has been kept from them.

It must really, really suck when all your best plans for utopia and eternal happiness are completely undermined by the fecklessness and crap-filled-ness of the entities you're dealing with.

And so The Architect is Jehovah as imagined by machines, a possibly unwilling one who has built what he has built out of what he's been left to achieve it.

Neo deserves his punishments any way he gets them, BTW, and Morpheus deserves to be let down by "The One" as well as any other would-be messiahs who deliver him deeper into misery.

But Cypher?

He wants to eat his cake and have it repeatedly, and so there is no place for Cypher in which he will ever gain his freedom or ever live happily.

Cypher negotiates with both good and evil, but never realises that his negotiations bind him to both, turning him into a tool rather than a free entity.

People who would sell out both good and evil in favour of comfort and ignorance tend to be like that.

BTW, things have been a bit busy here within The Icosahedron Collective, so I haven't been keeping up …

Could the instathot you just posted be a future Karen?

Without a doubt.

On another note, do you think the neo tsar has obtained the 'Daddy Putin' status to the Eastern European countries or is this just a front? Sure the countries around Russia are in NATO and they are littered with American military bases, U.N and so on, but Putin seems to have won the culture and religious war. The former communist countries are strengthening their economies, because most of them don't follow the Keynisian economics as closely as the U.S and the Christian Orthodox Church seems to be going strong as well. They have their problems too, with high ranking religious figures being corrupt, but they are not the spotlight of the world and they don't seem too eager to play politics like the Vatican. Maybe these countries are giving Putin a submissive nod given how Western countries corrupt everything they touch.

The West is a sinking ship, so I don't see a reason why they shouldn't side willfully and maybe happily with the Russians.

I hear ya. Palmer IS irritating and the presence of all of those surplus female Spartan-IVs is not only silly but forced.

The STRAWNG INDEPENDENTZ WAMMENZES!!! thing gets much worse in H5:G. Half of the Spartans in each fireteam that you work with in that game are female. With the Chief's Blue Team, this is at least canonical; we know that very roughly half of the successful SPARTAN-II candidates were female, so Linda-058 and Kelly-087 make sense as additions to the Chief's roster. But with Fireteam Osiris, you have Holly Tanaka, who is the token big black chick with attitude (and yet she has an Asian name – go figure) , and Olympia Vale, who is super-smart and fluent in Sangheili and a xenoarchaeologist and all sorts of other stupid shit. And that's before you get to her supposedly superb combat skills.

If you didn't like Spartan Ops, you're REALLY not going to like the H5:G campaign. Just sayin'.

Can I just say that Sarah Palmer sucks? I am beyond sick and tired of listening to and taking orders from her. She is the Rey of Halo and is probably Bonnie Ross’s avatar in the same way that Rey is Kathleen Kennedy’s. She’s a better Spartan than the Chief, she’s never wrong, we’re told how awesome she is instead of her showing us, and everyone else, including HER SUPERIOR OFFICER, better get in line and back her up if they know what’s good for them.

Apparently the war is a big f***ing joke to her since she spends the entire time cracking wise from the safety of Infinity’s bridge, at least when she’s not taunting, berating, or belittling everyone else. I wouldn’t follow this woman into a McDonald’s, never mind combat. She’s such a ridiculous over-the-top caricature of a stronk wahmen that it crosses the line into unintentional parody. I don’t think I’ve hated a fictional character this much since Squall in Final Fantasy VIII.

Maybe she gets better in episodes 9 and 10 or H5:G, but I'm not holding my breath.

Yeah. I actually tried HALO on Normal back in the day when I first started playing it, and I was absolutely horrible at it. I gave up the game in disgust for almost a year and thought that I'd wasted a lot of money on my Xbox and the HALO series as a result. But then I tried it again on Easy, and from then on I was absolutely hooked.

The problem wasn't the game, it was me. I was playing it like an idiot. Nowadays, though, Heroic is my jam.

10 more Spartan Ops chapters until I never have to play it again!