The one thing that always bothered me was that Shepherd seems to abruptly betray Task Force 141 out of nowhere. Now it’s just a nitpick for me but it always just seemed like the writers didn’t know where to go so they just went: “and then BOOM General Shepherd shoots Ghost and Roach. Plot twist!!” We kind of just accepted at face value that Shepherd’s the bad guy now.

Now from the amount of Googling I’ve done since playing the MW2 campaign, it seems that Shepherd betrayed TF141 right there and then because the DSM contained information about Shepherd leaking to Makarov that Alexei Borodin was PFC Joseph Allen and therefore the true culprit behind triggering World War III. Sorry, I can’t really buy that General Shepherd was stingy and wanted to claim all for himself the glory of apprehending Makarov.

Now what did I just realize was missing? The mystery of how Makarov knew Alexei Borodin was an American. I think there should have been more dialogue like “how did Makarov know?”, “it just doesn’t make sense, someone on our side must have told him”, “we (including General Shepherd) don’t know who to trust so our conversations MUST stay between us”. The question of “how and where did it go wrong” should have been prevalent throughout the story so that Shepherd’s betrayal would be less abrupt and more something that the background whodunit mystery would have built up to.