Spoiler alert, last warning:
For me it was after finishing the Voodo boys questline and one of my favorite parts in the game, when V just collapsed, Johnny took care of it saving our ass and then gave V his dog tag saying he will go down if the situation ever calls for it.
After saving me, I even told him I would take a bullet for him.
But seeing this scene again in a youtube video made me realize maybe I was a bit naive back then. When V wakes up and the pills are in his hand, I thought the 1st time playing the game “yeah its normal, Johnny took them to bring me to a safe place”. The 2nd time watching the video, I thought “wait a minute… maybe he was trying to continue taking them to stay in control forever?”.
This is why I love this game…
I think at the start Johnny is absoloutely untrustworthy, even when he doesn’t want to kill V he wants to use them. By the time the VDB and Helman questlines are done I’d say he actually likes V but he’s still Johnny. I can see him taking the pills for a few days and then realising he’s acting just like Arasaka and takeing the blockers himself, maybe writing a really shit apology note before doing so.
I think Johnny is ultimately just Johnny. His growth throughout the game is coming to terms with the fact that he lost the fight against the corps and that the ends never really justified the means when he hurt the people close to him. He has to accept that he was always just a scared kid in an unfamiliar country desperately pretending to be hard enough to survive.
So…I think you can trust him to fuck shit up and fight the corps basically as soon as he calms down from realizing he is still alive. If it carried even a slight chance of success, I think he’d happily walk into Arasaka tower on a suicide run the minute you see him in the diner.
I don’t think he’d hand your body back until you’re chooms though, which is really cemented in the grave scene.
