BioShock 2/Headscratchers

• So, seriously, what's up with the Big Sisters in this game? Reviews I've read say that they're never explained. Where did they come from? Why are they here, i.e. what's their purpose? Are they just a boss to fight when you've resolved all the Little Sisters in the area? I remember reading somewhere that they're grown up Little Sisters, or protectors of Little Sisters. If so, where did they get the armor? And why are there a bunch of new Little Sisters? I know Tenebaum left, but who would make new ones if she was the one who made them at first and ideally would stop anyone from making more?
  • They are, in fact, explained quite a few times in the game. Big Sisters are Little Sisters that have grown up and become mentally unstable during their stay in Rapture. Sofia Lamb got them outfitted in those divers suits and got them to go topside in order to abduct children around the world to turn into Little Sisters. The Big Sisters were then tasked with protecting the ecological balance of Rapture by protecting the Little Sisters.
  • Reviews I've read say that they're never explained. So wait. You're asking a question about a game you haven't even played? Bloody well play the game and find out for yourself.
    • Assumptions make an ass out of you and me. The review was in OXM. I never bothered to hunt down every audio tape which is why I didn't know. Looks like the reviewer didn't, either.
    • Okay...then, why is it a problem? There were plenty of things that went unexplained in Bioshock 1 if you skipped all the audio logs, and similarly plenty of things that went unexplained in Bioshock 2 if you did the same. Ignoring all the audio logs, most of which are in fairly easy-to-find places, is no more acceptable than falling asleep during cutscenes or muting dialogue if you expect to understand all the plot points.
• The butterflies. Are they real? If so that raises a lot of questions. How do they survive? What is there for them to eat? If they really are blue morphos, then wouldn't be much to cold for them?
  • Perhaps they have been genetically modified with ADAM.
• Why was it evil to kill Gil? His last conscious act was to beg for death. I think that it was too subjective to judge that on the level of Grace or Stanley.
  • The solution to crazy people is not, generally, "Shoot them", or in this case, "Boil them to death". Yes, he's a nut and mutated as hell, but there could be a cure out there -- which becomes irrelevant if Gil dies. Also, he's too funny to murder.
    • A crazy person who has been murdering other denizens of Rapture while actively trying to kill you and everyone you're involved with. Really pissed me off it was considered bad to do that.
      • The things he has done, including him going along with Lamb and him begging for death, may be the result of Project W-Y-K (Fontaine's "Would you kindly" treatment). He may have had no choice.
      • At no point is that implied. Ever.
      • Actually, there's an audiolog from Sofia Lamb stating that she also gave Gil a bit of W-Y-K-based conditioning to "promote the common good." Now, if you ascribe to the theory that Gilbert's suicidal behaviour was due to the W-Y-K, it would make sense that Lamb would want Gilbert dead- after all, he was a living example of how badly her experiments could go, not to mention insane. The conditioning was supposed to ensure that he would kill himself immediately after it became apparent that he was a failure; however, with the ADAM injections steadily turning his mind and body into unidentifiable mulch, the conditioning only partially worked: instead of just shooting himself, Gilbert went the most longwinded route possible, setting up all the cues to allow a rescuer the chance to kill him. Then of course, both his old personality and the conditioning was overwritten, turning Gilbert Alexander into "Alex the Great." What do you think?
        • I didn't see it as the morally correct choice, but the merciful one. If you killed Gil, then you're sending Eleanor a different message - that it was perfectly fine to kill people if you said so.
    • The game actually has an interesting way of dealing with this ambiguity - it is dependent on your other actions. If you save all the little sisters, then you only need to spare one of the three to get Eleanor to spare Sophia Lamb (in other words based on your otherwise good actions, you are given the benefit of the doubt with respect to the issue of forgiveness). If on the other hand you harvest at least one of the little sisters, then you have to spare all three (because your other actions are more ambiguous, Eleanor needs more reinforcement to accept the concept of forgiveness)
    • He also begs for his live if you hesitate to push the button. Even if he was slightly crazy, he still was sentient enough to consider his life worthy to be lived. Think about it: A person permanently lost his memories but is happy with his life. Now you find a message from that person, which reads "Kill me If I will lose my memories " Does that give u the right to kill that person?
• Where does Delta get the ability to rescue Little Sisters from? Jack, in the first game only has the ability thanks to a special gene tonic from Tenenbaum, and it's probably not a standard feature of an Alpha Series, or even something that would have been considered necessary while Delta was in active service.
  • Maybe when Delta was ressurected, Elenor incorpertated it into his structure.
  • It's mentioned in a log that Alphas would sometimes "save" their little sisters in order to give them a proper life. Although I'm not sure why alphas were given this ability. Some sort of failsafe? I dunno.
  • Maybe Tenenbaum had a finger in it. She seems to be the only person interested in even developing that plasmid, I suppose.
  • Agreed; after all, she was working with Eleanor to begin with.
• Why'd Tenenbaum just...disappear so soon? I'm barely in an hour into it, and it's implied that she'll help me like she did for Jack...only to hand mentoring over to Sinclair! Why waste a good character for this deadpan snarker? (did I describe him right, btw?)
  • The plot had significant changes made to it fairly late in development. Originally it was going to be focused on the same Little Sister hounding you throughout the game, kidnapping litle children to keep them 'safe', developing - thematically at least - alongside Tenebaum's own involvement in the creation process. We instead got the current plot arc, for good or for ill, with most of the original elements being exorcised.
    • And, let's face it, she'd be a lot sour if you harvest the Little Sisters instead of saving them, to the point that it'd make little to no sense to have her tutoring you. Sinclair, like Atlas, cared a lot less about that matter.
• Was Rapture eventually swallowed by the ocean regardless of the ending?
  • Depends on whether you think Andrew Ryan is dead or not. He's your father, and the Vita-Chambers are triggered by DNA keys, so it's possible he came back.
    • Andrew Ryan disables the Vita-Chamber in his room. That's a pretty strong argument in favor of him deliberately going to his death. Considering that he himself has betrayed his ideals in every way possible, I see no reason for him to have chosen anything other than to die to make a point. As for Rapture, hard to say. The Little Sisters do offer you the city, but what is there left? A domain of crazed mutants? Are there even any normal people left there to keep the city going?
      • He could have turned off his Vita-Chamber so that he would regenerate further away from the player.
        • Vita-Chambers don't work like that. Fontaine's apartment on Prometheus Point has no Vita-Chambers in it, so if you die there you're just dead (and have to reload a saved game). Moreover, it's pretty clear that the regeneration of the Vita-Chamber literally teleports your body to the Vita-Chamber's location, which is why if you play the game with Vita-Chambers you don't find Jack corpses littered all over the floor from your countless deaths, and why the stuff on your person (your shortwave radio, your guns, your ammo) reappear at the Vita-Chamber. The fact that you can see Ryan's corpse just lying on the ground, not shrouded in writhing green lightning and being sucked away, is evidence he's not going to regenerate.
  • One of the logs you find states that once Rapture starts to take on water, there will be no way to fix it. Couple that with the Big Daddies being too busy helping the Little Sisters to properly fix the place up and everyone else being driven insane and you have a big underwater graveyard.
  • What about the nuclear submarine in the bad Ending?
    • That's the implication of the bad ending. Jack knows that Rapture is a lost cause, so he's using what little time in Rapture he has left to capture the tools from the surface he needs to begin an invasion of the rest of the world.
• How does Subject Delta have a drill? Dr. Suchong was killed, and as the audio tape and the visual evidence proves, his drill broke off when he gored him. Yet, he has one firmly attached in the game. What, did it come out of his hammerspace? I mean, maybe he could have removed one from another Big Daddy, but aren't those specially built for the 2nd generation Big Daddies? It cost too much to make each Big Daddy wield a rivet gun and a drill, so they split them into the Rosies and Bouncers. Unless, he is a supergenius. One last thing: how is the drill still smoking? The tape is aged, after all. It happened before the civil war.
  • Mass-production Big Daddies of the bouncer's design have, indeed, a drill that completely replaces their right hands. Delta still has his two hands. His first drill never broke, he just left it after killing Suchong and got another one later to replace it. Delta was a prototype from before the Big Daddy designs were split between Rosies and Bouncers. He is much more flexible and can assume the role of both, thus the detachable drill. Considering he start with it and never find another one, it must be an extremely rare design however.
  • As far as I remember, Alexander's voice messages indicate that Delta was created after Suchong's death. He was killed by some earlier prototype.
  • "The Pair Bond is a success! If, somehow, an Alpha Series wanders too far from his Little Sister, our physical failsafe kicks in: a chemical trigger that induces coma. It is a symbiotic relationship, enforced by the girl's pheromone signature. The first successful candidate was... Delta, I believe. It is unfortunate that poor Dr. Suchong will not be here to raise a glass."
    • Is that meant to refute the above statement, or support it? On its own, it could be read either way. There's also a much earlier diary entry that references both the need to come up with a system to keep Big Daddies from ignoring their Little Sisters when not in immediate danger (which is what is currently happening) and Suchong's death. The overall progression of events seems to be: No bond -> Suchong's death + Bond that only works when Little Sister is in danger -> Physiological dependence on a specific Little Sister -> Rosie/Bouncer series. Obviously, Delta is in the second-to-last stage, but I don't know if it's specified whether he was created that way or if this was a modification they made to the existing Alpha series. Anyway, they could have just outfitted him with a new drill, as mentioned.
  • Actually, there's an even simpler explanation. Delta killing Suchong was taken as a sign of success and he was outfitted with a new drill and sent out into Rapture to protect Eleanor. He died with nothing but the drill on him (because what else does he really need?). When he was brought back to life, the Vita-Chamber restored it, just like it restores everything that Jack and Delta are carrying when they die.
• This has been bugging me since I started Bioshock 2, and I was hoping the game itself would give some kind of explanation, but it didn't seem to, or, at least, I didn't find it. When you start the game, you're a Big Daddy, doing your job: stopping people from harassing the Little Sisters. Then Sofia Lamb comes over and forces you to shoot yourself. Why?
  • Cause the Little Sister in question is none other than Eleanor, and her mother kinda needs her for her Instrumentality plan. Kinda hard to work on that when you're going on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge to stop her. Too bad that's what happens anyway, cause poor Eleanor really misses her daddy after ten years.
    • But it never gave me any impression you were going on any sort of rampage. Not even a minor one! It just showed you following the Little Sister around before Sofia comes around and makes you shoot yourself in the face.
    • Eleanor, the Little Sister you are protecting in the opening, and the person you spend the game trying to recover, is Sofia's daughter. Sofia wanted to take her back in the opening scene and had to get around you to do so. Since you are physiologically dependent on Eleanor, Sofia expected you to come after Eleanor if you had the chance later, and therefore she had you kill yourself. When you are revived, you do come after her for exactly that reason.
      • Totally glossed over the whole bond death/coma thing. Thanks.
  • Which version of the game are you playing? Because in the version I've got, it shows a group of Splicers trying to grab Eleanor and you pounding them to death. Is this one of those weird European versions that censors the violence? The rampage you go on is kind of graphic as it does involve Delta killing a Splicer with the drill at point-blank.
    • That's before Lamb and her thugs actually shows up. That's pretty much standard Big Daddy work. After you kill them, you and Eleanor go off on your merry way, before she's grabbed again.
    • No, those were Lamb's goons. The fact that one of the Splicers hits you with a hypnotize plasmid followed by Lamb showing up right afterward and making you kill yourself pretty much confirms that.
      • I must've blended in the actual intro with this trailer. D'oh.
• If you are a bona fide Big Daddy in the sequel, why can't you just coax Little Sisters out of their vents rather than killing their minders?
  • This is a fairly ridiculous Fan Wank which I haven't seen any evidence for in the series, but it's possible that the Alpha Series don't have the stinky smell that later Big Daddies do. Instead, they have a unique pheromone that only their Little Sister will hone in on. The Little Sisters would recognize you as their Daddy once they saw you because of their connection to Eleanor, but they weren't physically able to recognize your smell like she could. They only leave their vents when they smell the later Big Daddies, otherwise they'd all be eaten by splicers pounding on the vents. Incidentally, this is why NPC Daddy/Sister pairs don't get swarmed by splicers while gathering like you do; the stink masks the smell of the raw ADAM that seeps from the corpse when its most ADAM-rich parts are punctured. So why did Jack get swarmed in the last level of Bioshock? Because... shut up.
    • The smell part would make sense given that the Alpha Series Big Daddies were only meant to be bonded with a single little sisters. As for why they swarmed Jack (and later Delta) - the current Big Bad and/or Dragon sent them.
  • The Alphas appear to be different from the later-run Big Daddies. Note that none of the Alphas you encounter later on have any Little Sisters with them, period. Eleanor also mentions that you had to be modified specifically so that the other Little Sisters would recognize you.
    • The others don't have Sisters because their specific Sister was killed and they went berserk from the loss. Or cracked and turned into broken, crying wrecks from it, but those are presumably dead or out of the way at some Gatherer's Garden somewhere.
• Why don't you get swarmed when you are playing as the Little Sister and you harvest ADAM? Also, why don't any of the splicers standing around you attack you except the one in the prison cell?
  • The splicers are part of Lamb's "family", so they don't mess with the Little Sisters who are part of Lamb's operation. The one in the prison cell, appropriately, is not allied with them. Persephone is Lamb's main base of operations, so it makes sense that it lacks the 'feral' splicers sometimes seen attacking Big Daddies elsewhere.
  • There's also the fact that a Big Daddy is always around a Little Sister; they know that even if they don't see the Big Daddy, all it takes is one scream, and an asskicking is inbound in seconds
  • In the events of the first game, war and poverty made ADAM a very expensive and rare commodity. You'd find Splicers attacking Little Sisters because they had no other legitimate means of getting their next fix. However, in the second game, Lamb probably supplies Splicers of the Family with ADAM non-lethally Harvested from Little Sisters (via regurgitation). This ensures that Splicers remain loyal to the Family and won't hinder the Little Sisters on their Gathering because they already have a stable source of ADAM. The Splicers who still tango with Big Daddies are not apart of the Family.
• Those grungy little moppets howl for your death and order their Big Daddy to "unzip" you in Bioshock 2 whenever you're smashing her Big Daddy, but when old Tinhead goes down, she starts crying, turns to look at you.... and instantly accepts you as her new father. WHAT?!
  • At some point, it's explained that Eleanor Did It. Eleanor can see through the eyes of the Little Sisters and control them to some extent. When in the company of the normal Big Daddies, the Little Sisters' conditioning is too powerful to be overridden, but the moment you kill the Big Daddy, Eleanor's connection to Subject Delta transfers to the Little Sister, who then immediately trusts Delta. And he is still a Big Daddy.
  • It could just be that Little Sisters see every Big Daddy as the same and think that their Daddy was just brought back from the dead/never died in the first place. Quote; "Are we going to be together again, Daddy?" There must be something in their conditioning that makes them forget about the dead Daddies and trust the other Daddies as well.
  • Also, keep in mind that Little Sisters aren't entirely mentally stable. As a result, the battle could end up showing you revealing the old Big Daddy to be a fake or something.
  • In the first game, I seem to recall that killing a Big Daddy after their Little Sister goes into a tube doesn't count towards the "little sisters rescued" and, not long after, a new Big Daddy spawns, bangs on the wall and (presumably) the same little sister comes out and bonds with this new one just fine. It may well be that the girls bond with the nearest Big Daddy, who ever that might be, whatever he may have done.
    • A nice theory, except that it doesn't work. When you hypnotize a Big Daddy and set him against another, what happens after the battle is over? Exactly. The winner returns to his duty and the loser's Sister stays and laments her Daddy just as if you'd killed him. So, nope, adopting Sisters still makes no sense.
    • ....yes, it does. Did you not read what was pointed out above, that Eleanor was deliberately altering and controlling the Little Sisters so they would recognize Alpha as their Big Daddy?
    • Well, they do say "Daddy, you're all better!" as one of their quotes after killing a Big Daddy, so it's implied that Eleanor's mind controlling them to think the thing attacking their Daddy no longer exists, and you're just like their old daddy.
• If Suchong was killed by the first Big Daddy, how his body is still fresh?
  • He wasn't killed by the first Big Daddy, just the first one that had a connection with the little sister, which may have been shortly before Jack arrives in Rapture
    • Except that's false, because it's been established that Big Daddies were before Rapture's decline. Fridge Logic, there were no bugs or anything around his lab that would start the decomposition process. Maybe Ryan decided to turn down the temperature to preserve his body?
      • Uh, it was established Big Daddies were around first. What's your point? That doesn't change the fact the bonding process between them and Little Sisters hadn't been perfected by that point, which is what Suchong was working on when he was killed.
• In the neutral ending, where are the little sisters?
  • Eleanor killed them, obviously.
• Why does Sofia Lamb almost feel like a self insert character? Or, at the very least, kind of badly written, all things considered. She's in all these pictures, she's apparently won all these debates against Andrew Ryan, yet, in the first game, you hear absolutely nothing about her. I just wish they would've made her not that important pre-Rapture's fall rather than this huge figure. It makes the lack of any sign of her in the first game really hard to believe.
  • It bothered me too. She's way too important a character to have only been heard of now. It would have made more sense if she had been a minor agitator that Ryan locked up before she could get prominent enough - the first game spoke of political prisoners, so it wouldn't be so bad if she was simply one of those.
    • She was one of those. Ryan had Lamb locked up in Persephone. She only got out after Jack's departure.
      • She was locked up, but she was a major player prior to that, if the second game is to be believed. The point is that it's strange for such an important figure to never come up in the various audio logs expanding on Rapture's history in the first game. Also, while she's an obvious Retcon, I seriously doubt she's a self-insert.
        • While she's not actually one, she sure does feel like one at times.
        • An audio log from Ryan states that he didn't just want Lamb locked up, he wanted her erased. Apparently, his secret police did their job well on that call.
          • This is it here. Ryan wanted Lamb ERASED, GONE, to have never been known to exist.
  • What you also have to remember is that you only explored a small area of Rapture in the first game, and it was largely the more prestigious areas - even areas like Apollo Square were still a huge step up from the slums of Pauper's Drop or Siren Alley. As a radical collectivist who fought against "the elite", Lamb's support was mostly based around the poor, working-class areas of Rapture, so it makes sense that her presence would be mostly felt there, while, as mentioned above, Ryan's police would erase any records of her from the pristine "face" of Rapture that its elite citizens would see.
• Umm, how does Delta eat? Is he waltzing around through rapture, mashing the cans into his faceplate, or what?
  • He runs on the power of positive thinking. He smashes a bag of chips on his face, imagines it would taste nice, and so feels better.
  • The Alpha series can apparently take off their helmets like Delta did in the opening scene. I just figured that he took it off and scarfed it down.
    • Yeah, but you see what that looks like in the intro, and it's obvious he isn't removing his helmet every single time. It's just something they seem to have hoped nobody would notice.
    • He's not removing his helmet because spending ten seconds removing the helmet everytime you eat something would get annoying pretty damn fast. Especially considering Alpha can down an entire bag of chips in an instant. They don't show you removing the helmet for the same reason they don't show you ripping open Spider Splicers to get their hearts or rummaging through/taking apart containers or objects to get the items inside. The animation would slow the game down.
      • Then why have him constantly eating things? The developers made a conscious choice to have the character wear a diving helmet all the time; it's their problem that they didn't bother to rebalance or reimagine the health system so the character wasn't constantly eating food though osmosis.
      • So? It doesn't bother me in the slightest. I simply assume that Delta is pulling off his helmet when he eats, but the game's not showing it to keep up the game flow, the same way it doesn't show either Delta or Jack slicing open Spider Splicers' chests for their hearts or show them rummaging through an entire box for items inside. It's one of several Acceptable Breaks From Reality.
      • I always assumed that he had some system specifically designed to transfer food to him. There's no indication that Big Daddies don't need to eat, and Delta is designed with delivery systems for EVE and medical supplies. Why not food too?
      • Alternately, there could be a flap of sorts over Delta's jaw to allow him access to his mouth. Considering that Big Daddies probably do need food, as mentioned above, it would make sense to have some way for them to feed themselves. He only took his whole helmet off in the opening because he was being forced to kill himself, and a shot to the brain is surer than one to the mouth.
        • Not really. Putting a gun into your mouth and pressing the trigger is pretty much a guaranteed kill, where pressing the gun against your head still has a VERY slim chance of the bullet getting stuck before it can do any lethal damage.
• Also, is there a justification for Delta picking up audio diaries? Why would he care? As a Big Daddy, wouldn't his mind be scrubbed of urges like curiosity, and generally everything else that isn't "PROTECT ELEANOR."
  • Probably because he had nothing else to do in the long run. Nothing better to entertain one's self than hear people whine about the days before you stepped out of the Vita-Chamber.
  • As a Big Daddy, wouldn't his mind be scrubbed of urges like curiosity...? Did you miss the part where they explicitly said that Delta had been freed from Big Daddy-style compulsion and that he had free will?
  • Part of the point of the moral choice system was making it up to the player whether or not Delta was still a mindless (if dedicated) protector or if his death and rebirth had given him back at least some of the sentience he had in life, and his quest to find Eleanor was genuinely out of a sense of love for her beyond his mental conditioning.
• What is up with Subject Delta's timeline? Dr. Suchong only dreamed up the Big Daddy program in response to the civil war that broke out AFTER the New Year's Eve Riots. But we already see Delta up and operational on that very night!
  • Who said that party was New Years' Eve? It could have been any of a number of parties.
    • They are wearing the same signature masks plus the opening gives the date as 1958 so it couldn't be any later than that.
      • Those are your normal run-of-the-mill masquerade mask. They probably mass produce them for all sorts of occasions. For all we know, it was the Rapture equivalent of Mardi Gras, or just some random socialite throwing a dinner party.
        • But, again: the date given is 1958. That's a GIANT continuity problem.
  • Because he was a PROTO-type Big Daddy. Delta was the Alpha series. A series of test subjects and not a part of the production line that happened after the civil war started. Also, the exact time the protector program got started is unknown, but the time the production model Big Daddies is some time during the civil war.
  • Look at this quote from the first game; there were no Big Daddies until war had broken out, no one had conceived of them, prototype or not! Delta being up and about on New Year's 1958 is an impossibility.

Suchong: War a terrible thing. Japanese kill every man in my city, except for Suchong. Suchong have opium. Very good opium. This war, terrible thing, too, but not for Suchong. Everyone scared now. Everyone need ADAM. More than Little Sisters can make. Good news is war makes lots of corpses. Suchong knows way to recycle ADAM from corpse. But can't send Little Sister out to street unprotected. Suchong must think on this.

• • Actually, it can make sense if you consider the first-gen Big Daddies and look at Suchong's specific wording. Remember that the first-gen Big Daddies were highly unreliable, often leaving their Little Sisters behind or ignoring them, or going into berserk furies when their Sisters were killed. This means that the protection they offer would be inadequate, and the Alphas had to be retired. Thus the Sisters are left unprotected. Suchong's own words may well support this; it sounds to me like he was less dealing with the issue of "Little Sisters have no protection so I have to invent something" but rather "Protection is inadequate, so I have to go back to the drawing board." Thus, the second-gen Big Daddies were created to fill in the gap left by the first-gen.
  • Plus, according to official sources, Suchong was killed in 1958, evidently some time before the New Year's Eve attacks; given that Gilbert Alexander took his place and created the pair-bond between Delta and Eleanor, Delta being up and about on New Year's Eve '58 is very possible. In fact, it's safe to assume that the war Suchong was talking about was the ongoing gang war between Ryan and Fontaine, which produced plenty of corpses and had plenty of people scared (both of Fontaine and the possible results of working with him).
• Why do the little sisters look nothing like the first game? In the first game, they were 5-ish, with no real recognizable nationality, scruffy hair and pail, blotched skin. Now, they are all 7-to-8-ish, have pale but clear skin and well managed pony tails. AND THEY ARE ALL ENGLISH!
  • A) You're a Big Daddy, and therefore perceive things differently than Jack did. That's why the Little Sisters look more human. B) Lamb's more orderly regime is in charge, so these Little Sisters are different than the ones created by Ryan's government and subsequent breakdown.
  • Made by different people, converted at different ages, taken from different locations...the list of reasons goes on and on.
  • An interview stated that the little sister design was due to you being a big daddy. You see the little sisters as something more "normal". The same way little sisters see places as more "pretty" but get flashes of reality.
  • *shakes head* You're asking the wrong question. What you should be asking is: "Why do the Little Sisters all look like Eleanor?". Since Delta was her Big Daddy (which as mentiond above would change how you see the world) it makes sense that Eleanor Did It. She's the reason why the Little Sisters trust you after killing their Big Daddies. Not only that, but she talks to you telepathically, so who's to say it doesn't affect you too
• One of Eleanor's messages to Subject Delta seemed to imply that something had gone wrong with her mother's face. But when you meet her mother later on, her face looks fine. Or was I just mishearing Eleanor?
  • I can't remember what she actually said, but I took it to mean something figurative, not literal. Perhaps she saw a hint of the ruthlessness and fanaticism that dictated almost all of Sofia's actions-- something that would look "wrong" on a person who was supposed to be Eleanor's loving mother. I could also be misinterpreting Eleanor's words, though.