We do have this WOJ.
quote=Jim Butcher]Q: What happened to the other Alphas?
A: Like happens with a lot of kids after college, they graduated and went their separate ways. Some of them wrote off the whole experience as the result of taking drugs in college. One ended up super religious. One ended up institutionalized. Given Kirby’s death, Billy is going to try to track down some of the group
What was the catalyst for this? People don't wind up super religious or institutionalised or in deep denial without some sort of catalyst.
Nothing in that WOJ is so unusual that it needs some big, group-wide "catalyst." People I knew ten years ago, today I wouldn't recognize. Hell, some people I knew 10 years ago as close friends are dead.
A guy I knew in high school was full-blown, gung-ho marine, Semper Fi never die. Now every time he posts on facebook, at least half a dozen of our mutual friends report him as a potential terrorist.
Another guy I knew even longer than that, he was one of my closest friends, and now he's on drugs and semi-regularly threatening another friend's mother.
(Yes, both have been reported to the authorities when these things happen).
Another guy was a pain in the ass to me throughout middle and high school, and the other day we reminisced together while I was walking my dog and he was doing yard work with his young son.
My mother has a friend who, in college, was a party-girl trouble-maker. Now she's a pastor, to the shock of everyone who knew her growing up, including her.
People grow up. Things happen. That's one of the things I love about The Dresden Files -- that the world turns, people grow and change, even when Harry isn't watching them. I don't see any reason to suspect that the WOJ was anything other than what actually happened.
As for Marci, y'all are forgetting the second bit about Murphy's "instincts."
All the same, I wasn’t sure. She sounded sincere to me, and I’m
pretty good at knowing when someone isn’t. But there’s always a
better liar out there. I just wasn’t sure.
But . . . you have to trust someone, sometime. Even when it
seems risky, when lives are on the line.
Maybe even especially then.
The takeaway from the scene is, explicitly, "Sometimes you have to trust people." And when Murphy trusts Marcy -- when she's not being uber-suspicious -- Marcy proves that she's on their side, a friend and helps at great personal risk and injury.
I don't see how the takeaway from that ever translates into, "Marcy is an evil shapeshifter vampire sleeper agent."
I trust Murphy's instincts and she was suspiscious that she showed up at an inconvenient time.
Plus you know she doesn't think with her dick, and think awww poor little female needs help. Even post Lash Harry doesn't always get that right, although admittedly he saw through Roseanna, just not Hannah Ascher.
Murphy's instincts in the same scene tell her, "Jesus Christ, all you're doing is scaring the crap out of this poor girl who came here to help, lighten the hell up."