Who is Revolver Ocelot, anyway?
There will be spoilers, and plenty of 'em.
He's old, this is for sure. His face is craggy and worn by time, and his long white hair and handlebar mustache would make him look like a relic of the Old West even if he didn't affect a Western image with his method of dress - he wears spurs, a bandanna around his neck, and a long, brown duster. He's still incredibly fast and strong for his age, with a steady hand and a good aim.
His two passions are firearms and torture. His weapon of choice is the Colt Single Action Army Revolver, an old, outmoded weapon that he treats like a Holy Grail of firearms. His zeal for the methods of torture, surpassing his concern for its purpose, frequently leads him to accidentally kill a subject before he can extract the desired information from them.
He encountered Solid Snake in person twice on Shadow Moses Island. The first time was in the basement armory of the tank hangar/prison building, where Snake fought him with pistols. Though Ocelot was disabled by the Cyborg Ninja, who sliced off a good part of his right arm, Snake still failed to protect Kenneth Baker, president of ArmsTech - the Ninja sliced the tripwires attached to the plastic explosives around Baker. The second was in Ocelot's torture chamber one floor above, where Snake was taken after being captured by Sniper Wolf at the base of the communications tower. Ocelot talked to Snake at length while torturing him, and threatened that if Snake asked for mercy, Ocelot would spare him any more torture, but he would kill Meryl Silverburgh, the young soldier Snake had been protecting until she was shot by Wolf. After Snake escaped from the torture chamber's holding cell, he did not get another chance to fight Ocelot until years later, in Metal Gear Solid 2.
We are told that Ocelot is ex-Spetznaz, and he certainly has close ties with the remnants of the Soviet Union - in Metal Gear Solid, he seemed to be the liason between Liquid Snake's renegade FOX-HOUND team and Colonel Sergei Gurlukovich's renegade Russian military division. This supposedly fit in with his desire to revive a glorious, powerful Russia - but that supposed desire does not manifest itself much, if at all. He doesn't seem to be Russian at all, lacking the heavy, stereotypical accents of most Metal Gear Solid series characters that have a particular ethnic background. He does give a speech while Solid Snake is strapped to his torture bed about how modern Russia is a mess, without direction or an ideology, and how Liquid Snake is the only man who can make his dream a reality....
He was loyal to Liquid Snake, and supported Liquid's plan to revive Outer Heaven - Liquid even once specifically said to Ocelot that his dream has nothing to do with Russia, something that Ocelot accepts as if he knew it all along. However, he had more powerful superiors than Liquid. At the end of Metal Gear Solid, there's a clip of a phone conversation where Ocelot says that his cover is intact and his true identity is a secret, and professes his loyalty to the inaudible person on the other end of the phone conversation - the President of the United States, one Solidus Snake (later revealed as the third of the Les Enfants Terrible project's clones of super-soldier Big Boss, and known to the public as George Sears).
After the Shadow Moses incident, Ocelot was not seen again until the events of Metal Gear Solid 2, where he appeared (now known as Shalashaska) with Sergei Gurlukovich's troops, who were raiding a freighter carrying the new Metal Gear Ray prototype. Again proving his supposed devotion to the revival of Russia false, he betrayed the renegade Russian soldiers, shot their commander, and made off with the Ray himself.
At this point, the first glimpse was given of a new bond between Ocelot and his former comrade Liquid Snake - Ocelot had had Liquid's right arm grafted onto his body to replace the one that Grey Fox/Frank Jaeger/Cyborg Ninja had slashed, and Liquid's consciousness somehow survived and could temporarily control Ocelot, in a manner much like the classic idea of demonic possession, through the arm.
As the plot of the game unfolded, Ocelot's old boss, Solidus Snake, came into the spotlight. After finishing his term as President George Sears, he became part of the Dead Cell anti-terrorist team that he had formed, using his Les Enfants Terribles codename. It is presumably at this point that Ocelot stopped working for him, as the members of Dead Cell slowly became unhinged, eventually becoming a maverick group more similar to the terrorists they were meant to fight than to their namesake.
The kicker here is that Solidus looks almost exactly like a younger version of Ocelot. Though he was supposedly created at the same time as or shortly after Solid and Liquid, as a perfect, balanced clone of Big Boss unlike their two extremes, he looks older than either of them. He doesn't look nearly as old as Ocelot - but he has the same cast to his face as Ocelot, and the same long white hair and mustache. Solidus is, as Ocelot says after the ex-President is injured and fitted with an eyepatch, "The spitting image of Big Boss." The irony is thick, since Ocelot looks almost exactly like the legendary soldier and villain himself.
Ocelot assisted Solidus in his rebellion against the Patriots, a supposed organization of puppet-masters who control the United States in secret, and they stole the the Patriots' newest implementation of control, the giant floating fortress and information-control device called Arsenal Gear. Ocelot was about to destroy his enemies, Solid Snake and Raiden, once and for all, but at the controls of a mass-produced Metal Gear Ray mech he was again possessed by Liquid Snake, and as Solid Snake leaped off Arsenal Gear's deck Liquid/Ocelot pursued him. Even after Snake returned to land, Liquid's/Ocelot's whereabouts were unknown, as he presumably escaped in the amphibious Ray.
The question is, as I said initially, who is he?
- He is not a Russian extremist seeking a new Soviet or Czarist empire, it's clear that that was just a cover for his true intentions.
- He seemingly embraced Liquid Snake's dream of reviving Big Boss's dream - Outer Heaven.
- He is not one of the Les Enfants Terribles clones, as far as anyone knows-
- -but he looks just like Big Boss and just like the third clone of the man, and he is compatible at least in blood type if not in genetic material with one of the other clones - he recieved an arm transplant from Liquid's corpse.
- He is well-connected in the U.S. government, in military aspects of the international community, and among rebel and terrorist groups worldwide.
- He's always intertwined deeply with Solid Snake's enemies, and always somehow makes it out safely in the end.
Because of all this, I believe that Revolver Ocelot is Big Boss. He is alive. While the U.S. government must have the man's genetic material, because they cloned him three times, their claim of having his corpse could easily not be true. Ocelot has Big Boss's motivations, his standard position in the Metal Gear series as a manipulator behind the scenes, his visage, and apparantly his genetic material.
Thanks to Nich Maragos's "Big Boss Conspiracy FAQ" (http://www.thegia.com/psx/mgs/info/bigbossc.txt), on the now-defunct GIA, for getting this idea into my head in the first place.
There have been two action figures made of Revolver Ocelot, both by McFarlane Toys. The first, the Metal Gear Solid version, depicted Ocelot in his outfit from the original game, and included a pair of revolvers (which could be held in either hand or placed in his holster) and his torture bed, which could be stood up vertically and had adjustable wrist and ankle straps on swiveling bars, to accomodate another figure as a torture victim. The second, the Metal Gear Solid 2 version, depicted Ocelot in his Gurlukovich Army woodland camouflage BDUs and his duster, and included both his revolvers (again holdable and holsterable) and the right leg of the Metal Gear Ray action figure, which was distributed in pieces with the rest of the MGS2 toyline.