Apex antagonist Duardo Silva might not be the real Duardo Silva, new quest reveals

That wasn’t quite the secret evil plan the legends expected to uncover.
Screengrab via Respawn Entertainment

Apex Legends has been building up its newest big bad, pharmaceutical CEO Duardo Silva, for many seasons now. But the latest plot twist revealed in today’s episode of The Perfect Son seasonal quest might have turned everything we thought we knew about the man on its head.

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Lifeline, while rifling through a safe supposedly belonging to Duardo Silva, finds what the man stole from Olympus during the season’s opening cinematic: a death certificate. The death certificate for the real Duardo Silva, who it turns out has been dead for years.

It’s a shocking revelation when seeing how deep this false Duardo Silva’s impact on Apex’s narrative has been. In the season seven comic Family Portrait, it was revealed that Duardo Silva had hired the terrorists behind the hostage crisis the legends had to contend with. In season nine, it was revealed through The Legacy Antigen that he had grand plans to take over the Syndicate—the Outlands’ leading government force—in a partnership with Lifeline’s mother, Cherisse Che. More recently, he was behind Mad Maggie’s transfer from a death by firing squad to an Apex Games competitor, all to use her as cover for his infiltration of Olympus.

After Mad Maggie explained that she was set up to Octane and Lifeline, they teamed up with her this season to get to the bottom of Duardo Silva’s plans. The reveal that this Duardo Silva is an imposter and has been for years is a tough emotional blow for Octane, who suddenly has to contend with the fact that his real father has been dead for years. Octane and Duardo’s relationship has always been complicated and often involved abuse, but this reveal now puts into question how much of that abuse was from the real Duardo or this false antagonist.

This isn’t helped by the vulnerable state Octane is in when the episode begins, having been pretending to work with his fake father for the past few episodes to spy on him. With an expectation for Duardo Silva to be comically evil or aggressive throughout their time together, Octane’s impressions of his distant father come into question when instead Duardo appears to be doing good and staying honest with Octane.

When he meets up with Lifeline at the beginning of today’s episode, he’s confused at her anger when he says that Duardo donated a large sum of money to Lifeline’s Frontier Corps organization. “It’s your dad, Silva. There’s always strings. We need to try and figure out what he’s tryin’ to do,” she explains. Octane is frustrated at Lifeline’s lack of enthusiasm for the work he’s done spying on Duardo, but tags along with his old friend nevertheless as she sets a plan into motion. “He’s distracting you from the safe. What we need is in there,” referencing a safe in Duardo’s office that the pharmaceutical CEO had previously stopped Octane from investigating.

That safe inevitably contains the death certificate that proves Duardo Silva isn’t really Duardo Silva at all, but a fraud using his name in the hunt for power. “Silva, you gotta see this. Your father… he’s NOT Eduardo Silva…!!” Lifeline calls out to Octane, but he’s distracted by a video file he found on the false Duardo’s computer nearby—one that only makes his emotional dilemma surrounding his relationship with his father even worse.

In the video file, the false father answers a question from the press about how he balances supporting a family with so much time spent on his work. While Octane has only ever been used to hearing his father’s insults and anger and disappointment with him, here, this version of Eduardo Silva appears to be talking about how much he loves his family—and how much he loves his son. “Family is extremely important to me as is my work, but the most important thing, I hope he could understand, is how much I love him,” plays the audio. The combined discovery of his real father’s fate with this undated old speech recording seems to be too much for Octane to handle.

Lifeline shuts the computer down to snap Octane back to reality, telling him that they’re going to use the death certificate to bring this fraudulent antagonist down before he can seize the Syndicate. But Octane says something he’s never said to Lifeline before. “No,” is his reply.

What he wants to do with this new information is unknown, a mystery to be unfurled in next week’s episode of the seasonal quest.

There are very few clues to go on as to who exactly is impersonating Duardo Silva, but the ease with which they’ve gotten away with it might suggest it is a biological relative, making use of a familial connection to claim Duardo’s exorbitant wealth for himself. But with so little knowledge of Octane’s extended family or characters who had connections to the real Duardo, we’re in the dark as to who our big bad really is.


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Author
Alexis Walker
Alexis is a freelance journalist hailing from the UK. After a number of years competing on international esports stages, she transitioned into writing about the industry in 2021 and quickly found a home to call her own within the vibrant communities of the looter shooter genre. Now she provides coverage for games such as Destiny 2, Halo Infinite and Apex Legends.