Unintended And Unforeseen Consequences
This is my second time playing through the Imperial Agent story. The first time, I went goody-goody. This time I’m pretty ruthless in getting the job done. Collateral damage, whatever.
Usually you know the consequences of your actions. The NPC’s make that very clear when you are making your choices. If you don’t directly kill someone, you are well aware if your decision will nonetheless cause their death.
Then I got to Balmorra and my world got turned upside down.
***SPOILERS BELOW**** (Imperial agent storyline, Balmorra)
My job is to get in the good graces of the resistance cell leader so that I can off their head honcho who is in an undisclosed location. Sanju Pyne is my contact on the planet. He is quite squeamish about collateral damage and tries to soften the blows of my misdeeds that I must perpetrate in furtherance of my mission.
My first task is to obtain some batteries which, Sanju informs me, are going to be used to blow up people, woe woe woe. If I fail to hand them over, I jeopardize the mission. If I hand them over, people croak. His idea is to run them through some machine that will fry them, and we can just pretend they were broken when we got there. OK, fine, light side choice, dammit. The resistance cell leader isn’t particularly pleased, but it doesn’t blow my cover.
Same deal with my second mission. It’s a list of names of people who will be offed if we don’t warn them first. I’m like FINE, Sanju, warn them. So they are warned, the attacks on them are thwarted, the resistance isn’t particularly pleased, but don’t suspect my tampering.
(Incidentally, here, I should point out that there is almost never a downside to picking the light side choice. These choices had the potential to completely blow my cover, but my cover was not blown, people didn’t die, and I got to have my cake and eat it too. Munch munch.)
After all this, Sanju is making googly eyes at my operative. She’s making googly eyes at him and trying to ignore the hair. They go off holding hands, and I have no illusions that BSOCK occurred because, seriously, it’s Sanju the boy scout.

Second time around, my sniper is having none of Sanju’s hairbrained ideas. No, she responds both times, I can’t do anything to blow cover. Collateral damage happens, it’s part of the job. Sanju isn’t happy, but whatever.
So then I wonder if he’s going to want to go on a date after their little disagreements. The consequence I foresaw and was ready to accept is that he is disgusted and wanders off.
The consequence that I totally did not see coming is that the resistance cell leader, extra-pleased with my work since the goods came back intact this time, shot Sanju dead without any warning or dialogue choices from me. Apparently, he was unnecessary baggage since I was far better than him at doing resistance shit. In the previous version, I had botched my chores a little, so I guess Sanju was worth keeping around.
I didn’t get a screenshot because my jaw was just about on the floor. There will be no BSOCK in the evil version of things – at least not with Sanju Pyne, RIP.