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"They told me you were dead, Dad. They told me you'd been killed. "
― Sarah Fisher, while talking to her father on the phone in Splinter Cell: Conviction.

Sarah Fisher (formerly Sarah Burns)[4] is the daughter of Sam Fisher and the only surviving member of his family. Sarah has a distant, but steady, relationship with her father due to his line of work, though he loves her dearly. During the Red Mercury Plot and Third Echelon Conspiracy, her death was faked by Third Echelon Director Irving Lambert in order to root out a mole in Third Echelon who wanted leverage over Fisher. After Lambert's death, she was protected by Anna Grímsdóttir.

Biography

Early life

The Fisher Family

A photo of Sarah Fisher (age 6) held by her father, Sam.

"Daddy?....Daddy?...Daddy!?"
― Sarah calls out to her father.

Sarah Fisher[1][2][3] was born on May 31, 1985,[1][2][3][4] on a U.S. military base in Frankfurt, Germany,[1][2][4] where her father, Sam, was deployed as a "diplomatic aide."[2] She was named after Sam's paternal grandmother, Sarah.

Her parents separated after three years of marriage. Her mother, Regan, went back to the United States and took Sarah with her, reclaiming her maiden name and changing Sarah's surname. When Sarah was fifteen, her mother died from ovarian cancer.[6] Sam became Sarah's legal guardian and he took a bureaucratic job with the CIA, where he worked in weapons development and studied experimental weaponry and information warfare, in order to spend more time with her as well as focusing on her upbringing.[7]. Sarah continued to use her mother's surname for security reasons. Throughout her childhood, Sarah encountered many tough times with her father, especially when he went on his missions. She was not always aware what kind of work her father did, but she knew it was government-related. She would be alone and would have fears about losing him since his missions were dangerous.

Sarah eventually became aware of her father's work which helped her understand that it wasn't Sam's fault why he was always away. In 2003, she graduated from Brown High School in Towson, Maryland, and went on to attend Central University in Evanston, Illinois, where she majored in International Relations with a minor in Art History. After graduating from college, Sarah returned to Maryland to be closer to her father, and in spite of his objections she started using her real surname.

2004: Georgian Information Crisis

Version 1 (Xbox/PC/PS3)

Sarah fisher

Sarah in 2004

"Dad, what's so funny? You haven't laughed since the Reagan administration."
― Sarah questioning her father's laughter at the end of Splinter Cell.

Sarah Fisher was first shown during a conversation she had with Sam through a direct communication line that Anna Grímsdóttir set up. During this time, Sarah still didn't know what Sam did exactly however she was able to speak with him on occasion before some of his missions.

Version 2 (PS2/GameCube)

In October of 2004, Sarah was on an expedition with her father somewhere in the Pacific, when Vernon Wilkes, Jr. showed up to retrieve Sam for briefing by Irving Lambert. After the mission Sam returned to the boat and his daughter, discussing the recent events.

2006: Indonesian crisis/Biological Warfare

In Tom Clancy's splinter cell Pandora Tomorrow she got mentioned a few times by Frances Coen and Douglas Shetland. Before the start of the kundang camp mission where Fisher infiltrates the camp, Coen calls Sarah on the phone but she did not answer the phone. During the kundang camp she was mentioned by Fisher's old friend and president of Displace International: Douglas Shetland. Fisher was just about to ask a few questions about the ghost army buisness. But before that Shetland told Fisher that he hoped that they nextly meet will be at the state side and get a beer for Fisher and talk about how Sarah is doing.

2005: First kidnapping

Sarah and her best friend were kidnapped while on vacation in Israel in order to draw out her father. Soon after her best friend was killed, Sam finally discovered where she was being held and saved her.

2007: Second kidnapping

Sarah Fisher and two of her friends were kidnapped coming home from a club in Washington, D.C. and were stashed in a van, then taken aboard a cargo ship. Sam Fisher learned of the kidnapping and on his own initiative boarded the ship to rescue his daughter. Fisher retrieved his daughter and her friends and discovered it had been arranged by Raheem Kadir to capture the daughter of a Swiss diplomat.

2008: Faked Death

SarahGrave

Official death records (arranged by Third Echelon) stated that Sarah was "killed" when she was hit by a "drunk driver" while her father was away on a mission in Iceland. This event affected Sam emotionally which caused him to go into a deep depression to the point that he started fighting in the streets and took "the most dangerous mission of his career". Sarah's body was buried in the Elysian Fields Cemetery in Washington, D.C.

2009: Memorial

Sam Fisher returned to Elysian Fields Cemetery in Washington, D.C. to visit his daughter's gravesite on the anniversary of her death, January 2009. After making his way through the graveyard to her gravestone, he was captured by NSA agents and taken to Fort Meade.

2011: Reunion

In 2011, Sam found out, through Grim and confirmation, that his daughter was, in fact, alive and made it his mission to reunite with her. In his quest, he discovered more about the story of her supposed death. Sam found out that an arms dealer/drug trafficker named Andriy Kobin was paid to provide a body for Third Echelon, and he does not know who hired him. Kobin was also instructed to lie, saying that he fulfilled a hit contract on her (thus the hit-and-run accident). Soon after he found this out, Sam listened to a posthumous message from his friend and boss, former Director Irving Lambert, which explained that Lambert had learned a mole in Third Echelon whom he believed was going to kidnap Sarah and use her as leverage against Sam. In order to prevent this, he made the tough choice - to separate the two, and tell each that the other was dead. Sarah was then moved to an apartment in Washington, D.C., which was watched over by Grim.

Finally, in an abandoned reservoir, Sam's old friend Victor Coste had managed to find out where Sarah was located and reunite her with her father just in time to get an aerial view from the helicopter of Washington being hit by the EMP. They then moved to land near the White House in order to stop Reed, but were shot down by a missile defense system. They crash landed in a theater, where Sam left Sarah in Victor's custody as he made his way on foot to the White House through downtown Washington. It is presumed she and Victor make it to safety. After the events that took place during the Third Echelon Conspiracy, Sarah and Sam move away together to catch up, Sarah currently lives in Atlanta, Georgia, and works in New York (shown in the 2013 graphic novel Splinter Cell: Echoes).

2013: The Blacklist

Following the start of The Blacklist and the wounding of Victor Coste, her father returned to duty to try and stop the attacks. He called her after missions to check up on her, and Sarah told him about the conditions back home. Its possible to contact her after every campaign mission. At one point, she had spoken to Coste, who awoke for five minutes. After Fisher returned from Guantanamo Bay, he told her he wanted a member of Paladin Nine Security to watch over her.

Following the defeat of Majid Sadiq and the last Blacklist attack prevented, Fisher called Sarah and told her it was over but that the job was continuing. She joked that she had eaten all the turkey leftovers, with Sam responding that avoiding them was his plan all along.

2015: Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Firewall

By 2015, Sarah is recruited into Fourth Echelon and worked with her father to end a cyberwarfare weapon Gordian Sword.

Developer commentary

Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory

The Fairer Sects: "There was no mention of Sarah in this game. Was this something that was planned from the beginning or did she unfortunately ended up on the cutting room floor due to time concerns etc...?"
Clint Hocking: "We talked a lot about what to do with Sarah in the early stages. Sarah was originally created to make Sam feel more human, and I think that we succeeded there. Unfortunately, the best thing we could come up with for her was ‘what if she gets killed’, or ‘what if she gets kidnapped’. Both of these scenarios are horribly cliché and predictable and don’t further humanize Sam at all. They are so cliché that these scenarios dehumanize him. They turn Sarah into an obvious dramatic device.

We decided that we would allude to the idea that Sam and Sarah had become estranged, and that Sam was basically too emotionally distant to be a good father - but at the same time aware of that fact. There were a few short conversations about this in the script, but none of them made the final game.

One of them was an in-game conversation between Sam and Captain Partridge where Fisher is uncomfortable when the Captain is asking about Sarah and admits that he hasn’t seen her in a couple of years, but the section of the game that takes place on the USS Walsh got cut.

Another instance was in the Battery mission. The US was originally going to bomb the bunker after Sam had disabled the surface-to-air missile, and he had only a short time to escape. If the player didn’t reach a critical point before a certain time there was a short dialogue between him and Lambert where they both realize that he can’t get out of the bunker on time and as a kind of ‘prelude to game over’ Sam was telling Lambert to try and make peace with Sarah. Sadly, for different reasons, this sequence got cut also.

We did record the first one with Partridge though, and I had the pleasure of being patched into the recording studio in a conference call while Michael Ironside was reading the lines. It was brilliant stuff, because I think Michael felt the script had gotten deeper into Sam’s character with some of that material. Previously , something like 50% of Sam’s dialogue was ‘Yes sir’ and ‘On my way’ kind of one-liners in response to Lambert, but there is about 5 times as much material for him in SCCT. Some of it was personal, like the stuff about Sarah, and some of it was quirky and dark.
"
― The Fairer Sects interview with Clint Hocking, the Creative Director, Scriptwriter and Lead Level Designer of Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory.[8]

Appearances in Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell media

Games

Novels

Graphic novels

Appearances in other brand media

Trivia

  • While Version 1 of Splinter Cell: Double Agent placed Sarah's "death" in 2007 (September 3rd, 2007), in-game cutscenes of Conviction say that she died in 2008 which confirmed that at least that element of Double Agent Version 2 and Essentials (Sarah's death on January 3rd, 2008) is canon.
  • Sarah's newspaper obituary says that she died at the age of 23, however, in both versions of Double Agent and Essentials, Sarah was actually still 22 years old at the time of her declared death.
  • During the "Kobin's Mansion" level and Tom Reed's interrogation in Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Conviction, Sarah "appears" to Sam [the player] through background imagery of the past. When Sam was looking for his daughter's killer in Kobin's Mansion and also on the Oval Office wall, images were displayed of Sarah and a car, and showing her grave.
  • In the flashback to 20 years ago in Conviction, six-year-old Sarah's bedroom door, stuffed toy and pajamas have a three dot pattern like the iconic goggles.
  • In Conviction, a police officer can be seen looking at a picture of Sarah on a laptop computer during the "Washington Monument" level.
  • When Sam is in Grim's office during the "Third Echelon Headquarters" of Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Conviction, he can hear Sarah screaming "Daddy, Daddy, Daddy". The screams are similar to the ones Sam hears earlier in the game, in a flashback in the "Merchant's Street Market" level.
  • During the interrogation of Tom Reed at the oval office, where the player decides whether to execute him or not, behind Reed on the table's surface, a projection of six year-old, scared Sarah is seen along with the cut scene of Sam killing the burglars. This is to tempt the player in giving a moral choice about killing to "protect his family".
  • Sarah Fisher in Conviction is voiced by two actresses, Teale Bishopric as "Young Sarah" in Sam's flashback and Victoria Sanchez as Sarah in the present.
  • In Blacklist, it is implied that Charlie is romantically interested in Sarah as he asked Sam in the prologue if she's single. Sam replied to Charlie by telling him to "stop hacking base IT."
  • During the credits in Blacklist, a phone conversation plays between her and her father.
  • Sarah appears in the mobile game Tom Clancy's Elite Squad, where she has followed in her father's footsteps as a Splinter Cell with Fourth Echelon.

Gallery

References

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