Critics have denounced Big Boss's appearance as MGS4's greatest narrative blunder. If we go along with MGS4's formal rules – if we regard MGS4 as driven by form as well as by narrative – only Big Boss's appearance can free Solid Snake from a proxy's death. (This recalls MGS2's insistence that only the appearance of the real Solid Snake in MGS2 saved Raiden from becoming who he was not.)

MGS4 provides its most lucid confession of its formal rules through Big Boss. During MGS4's Debriefing segment, Big Boss describes the Patriots' growth through a digital creation myth, which outlines the process of the Saga's culmination as a set of tropes in MGS4.

Everything has its beginning, but it doesn't start at one. It starts long before that. The world is born from zero. The moment zero becomes one is the moment the world springs to life. One becomes two; two becomes ten; ten becomes one hundred. Taking it all back to one solves nothing. So long as zero remains, one will eventually grow to one hundred again.

Big Boss's myth corresponds with Ocelot's earlier history of the same process from a different perspective.

Zero sought to use his riches to achieve world domination. Our father – Big Boss – sought to free himself from that chokehold. His dream was to create an army of free citizens, one that answered to no government… Outer Heaven. But he failed, because of you. Nine years ago, I tried to free us from the control of our genes. Four years later, our dear brother – Solidus – sought to free us from the control of the Patriots' memes. All of that – all of it – was nothing more than a process of trial and error… The end result of which is Outer Haven. To be free from Sons of the Patriots, the ultimate form of external control imposed on the Patriots' soldiers.

The "process of trial and error" described by Ocelot is the escalation from zero to one hundred described by Big Boss. Big Boss emphasizes form while Ocelot emphasizes narrative, but both men outline the repetition of tropes at the core of the Metal Gear Saga, as well as their culmination in MGS4.

The number zero does not indicate an absence of quantity; rather, it represents the first possible quantity. To take a cue from binary code, zero means "No," and one means "Yes." "No" becomes meaningful as an answer – a form that acknowledges the existence of a question – much as zero can become meaningful as the start of a digital, numeric set. Zero is a quantity that represents the potential for culmination, as "No" might represent the potential for "Yes," making the existence of one, two, ten, and one-hundred possible.

Big Boss performs MGS4's ultimate defragmentation by taking zero (both the character and the concept) "back to nothing." Doing so erases the possibility of further recombination by erasing the premise upon which future iterations of the Saga's tropes might be based. Zero and Big Boss, monsters themselves, share the burden of being that premise.

Big Boss is a genetic patchwork of body parts harvested from his own clones, and, with his possession of The Boss's Patriot hand-rifle and Portable Ops's Gene's coat, he stands as the physical culmination of the Saga's villains. His character's history stands as a blend of motivations received from The Boss and finances received from Gene. His role and identity have varied according to whatever each Saga game needed. He supplied the main villain for the MSX Metal Gears, the physical cure for the Genome Army in MGS1, Solidus's ideological inspiration in MGS2, and the falling hero in MGS3. In his body, character motivations, and relationships to each game, Big Boss represents all tropes associated with the Saga's larger trope of The Insurrector.

Meanwhile, Zero represents the Saga's larger trope of the Force Risen Against. His character is a patchwork in the same manner as Big Boss's body. He attains his role as the Saga's final villain when MGS4 heaps upon him all the data about the Patriots culled from the margins of previous games. Each lingering conspiracy gels upon his character. His physical state recalls the invalid presence of MGS3's The End – a warrior from the previous generation whose death passes the baton to the next. His design also recalls that of MGS1's Armstech President Kenneth Baker: a bald, immobile old man who bore responsibility for multiple black projects. Zero is a monstrous compendium of the Saga's dark forces in a state of decay.

MGS4 communicates that defragmentation is complete by reprising the contents of its first Flashback Event, Big Boss's saluting the grave of The Boss. Now, though, MGS4 associates those dead images with live images of the correct character. Solid Snake's life as a proxyends, and the Saga's memory of Big Boss finally reattaches to Big Boss.

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