But did they win, though? We still don’t know exactly what their plan is/was, so it’s hard to say how close they were to completion.
But they didn’t kill everyone in the building. In fact, it seemed to me that they were actually being selective in who they shot, passing up a chance to shoot one person to go after another. The woman literally walked right past Toby Siegler on her way out of the office, and didn’t bother to even try to shoot him. How much of this was just random violence, and how much was targeted assassinations?
And what was up with the one guy snorting something that looked like drugs before they left to infiltrate the HQ building? They made a point of showing that, but there was no (obvious) pay off. I thought at the time this might have been him deliberately infecting himself with something, but then the plan seemed to involve them trying to open the doors to the other side, for some reason.
Here’s a thought: maybe he deliberately infected himself, then tried to get over to the other side, knowing that they would do some sort of tox screening on him. They’ll find the exact strain of the virus that killed so many of their people, leading them to conclude that it really was engineered by the Alpha universe as a weapon. The Fanatics already believe this, but maybe they’re trying to convince everyone else on their side, so they can finally engage in open warfare.
Am I the only one thinking that his goal was to die on the border? The way he was acting earlier, compared to the other two, made me think he knew it was a suicide mission. We know from the earlier episodes that only one person is allowed to cross the border at a time, and housekeeping said not to get him because he was on the border. Maybe his body being left there screws up the nature of the crossing itself.
If he wanted to infect himself, I think he’d inject himself with a serum instead of snorting powder. I assumed the drugs were meant to get him into the mindset for killing, similar to soldiers taking amphetamines.
I wonder if the killers transmitted a message expressing guilt for having caused the flu outbreak on the other side. That could launch a war.
At first, I wondered why they spared Fancher. Then it occurred to me that they replaced his daughter, so he and Quayle need to live.
Part 2 is the season finale. This episode was Part 1.
If this isn’t renewed I’m going to be very upset. As confusing as the story has been for me thus far, it’s also very addicting in a way. I can’t explain it.
I think you are correct. The goal was clearly to die on the border crossing and there are clearly implications. Whether they are political or technical, we don’t know yet. (We can’t touch him now. “Can’t” or “won’t”? Whatever. Pick one.)
They were clearly targeting specific individuals and not others.
Clearly all these years of planning and preparation had to be for something much larger than just shooting up an office.
“All out war” doesn’t really seem practical either. How would that work, given that there is a single bottleneck for going between worlds? Most likely the end goal would have to be “make it all public” or “shut it all down”.
The whole Indigo School plan doesn’t make sense IMHO. They are starting with the kids when they are very young. How do they know in 10 to 15 years those kid’s “other” will be in a position where it’s worthwhile to replace them? They lucked out with Clare in that Clare Alpha is the daughter of the OI Director of Diplomacy and was engaged to a rising star in OI while Clare Prime was orphaned by the superplague. But how often is that going to happen? What good does it do to replace someone who grows up to be some low-level nobody in some nothing job?
I’m not so sure about that. They put in a lot of effort to ensure they were better armed than anyone else in the building, and the only reason they got killed is because Howard et al. had figured out at least part of their plan. If their plan all along was to die, how would that have worked if they hadn’t been found out?
I think the dying was a last minute improvisation.
But notice what the guy was doing in the control room, with the keys to the various doors limiting access to the portal. He was opening every one, and then breaking off the keys in the locks, so as to hinder attempts to close them again.
There’s an old military rule I recall reading about: the best way to attack a bridge is from both ends at once.
The portal is their bridge, and if they can achieve control of both ends, they can send through as many people as they want, just as fast as they can run through the hallway. Who knows how many shock troops The School Faction has available?
It’s an interesting military problem: How do you contain a bridgehead in which the opposing forces have a literally impregnable staging/fallback position? You can’t bomb their rear areas, you have no advance warning of what they’re sending, and their bridgehead is in a building that was designed to be as close to absolutely secure as possible.
There’s going to be some luck involved but not quite what you describeI don’t think. She wasn’t engaged to a rising star, his star only rose because she was engaged to him - at least partially. And we are dealing with a ruthless organization, we don’t need to assume all the kids were conveniently already orphans. You could make some educated guesses about who is on a useful career path or might be in a useful family and tailor your end game to fit your good guesses.
I imagine there are a good amount of kids who just never crossover, just because it doesn’t work out well. Or some kids who cross over early and then get a job in a position they need. Some don’t even need the full intensity of training that Claire got. The three shooters were only out in public for a few hours.
I wonder if some of the adults we saw at school were kids who never crossed for some reason or another.
I think they had to assume that at some point they would be overrun by red shirted guards. He very clearly made sure he was on the border line when he died. If it wasn’t critical to the story, he could just have easily died upstairs.
I wasn’t really sure what they were doing.
Yes, I remember Robert Redford saying something like that in “A Bridge Too Far”.
I took it as more he was trying to kill a ton of people and when he got shot, instead of being captured he was trying to make it back to his own side. That he died on the boarder wasn’t what he was looking for, it’s just what happened.
It raises a question of how much infiltration they’ve done on the Alpha side. Rather than hoping for the best, they might steer things on this side to their advantage.
For example, Clare Alpha was probably unnoticed until Clare Prime was enrolled in the school. School administrators let this side know who their students were, then operatives on this side found their counterpart. If possible, they build a profile and synchronize lives and injuries. On the Alpha side, operatives may help steer Clare towards a position where she may be useful. The can seek friendship, make introductions, open doors, offer jobs - the law of averages says they should be able to recruit enough people to the office to make the body switch plan practical.
In any case, I think the Prime world would try to direct the potential candidates based on who they have in the school rather than hoping for luck.
I would absolutely expect the two worlds to begin diverging, and probably in dramatic ways. Society is a complex system, and complex systems feature nonlinear responses and high sensitivity to initial conditions. Take that flu - in one universe, a change as small as a flu carrier deciding not to go to a party full of overseas guests could change the world dramatically. In one world, Steve Jobs might have just chanced across a friend who offered him a job in another industry, while in the other he looked in the other direction while walking and didn’t see the friend. So one side gets iPhones and the other doesn’t, and the billions that would have gone to Apple go instead somewhere else, creating entire new industries.
We like to think the world is predictable and the future is a single path. In fact, it’s a random walk and utterly unknowable. That fact alone guarantees that the two sides would immediately start to diverge.
I assume there’s a Pope counterpart in our world. If I had to guess, I’d say he’s part of management. In any case, the “plan” is in play so I suspect next season will have more background, and support from familiars on this side
The New York Times has a Q&A with the creator and showrunner. Among other things, he suggests that freeze-framing during the scenes set in the tunnel and in the conference rooms during the meeting with “Management” will be rewarding.
I haven’t tried it yet but if anyone does so, please let me know what you find.
BTW, that meeting with “Management” was weird. I was wondering if “Management” was deformed somehow in the experiment that created the crossing, and that’s why we never see him/her.
Redditors are theorizing that Management/4th Floor is a single entity leading both sides – perhaps the original scientists who duplicated the world by accident weren’t duplicated themselves, and they were able to set themselves up in a way to influence both sides simultaneously. Notice that they had the exact same projector setup, and the long pauses may have been time for them to confer and respond to both conferences at the same time.
