The return of the O&D card that Dylan stole seems deeply tied in to the severance process. Gemma described it as ego death, the same guy fighting himself – much like the innies vs outies. Gemma then compared it to “one of those things where you draw a duck or rabbit,” which must be a reference to the famous drawing that looks like a duck or rabbit depending on your perception, kind of like a severed person is two different people at the same time
People with better attention to detail than me notes that Milchick has this sculpture on his desk.
One more thought: is it just a coincidence that Dichen Lachman is playing a character that can be programmed with different personalities that are completely separated with no awareness between them, while Dichen’s breakout U.S. role was in Dollhouse, a show where she was programmed with different personalities that are wiped clean between jobs?
I described this episode on another board as “the weirdest fucking episode of Dollhouse I have ever seen.” Re-reading a wiki article for Dollhouse 2x04, there are enough parallels that I should spoiler code them:
Sierra (Dichen Lachman’s character) paints out her trauma with black paint.
Adelle (the boss of the local Dollhouse, so basically Helena Eagan) is having a sexual affair with Victor, one of the dolls (and in this analogy, basically Mark). Victor is Sierra’s true love.
Assuming Lumon caused Gemma’s fertility issues, this is similar to how the evil doctor in Dollhouse also caused a medical problem for Sierra so he could present himself as the solution.
There’s always been a cultish angle to everything Kier, but Gemma holding the electrode dealies in her hands and getting audited by the nurse with the e-meter was about as plain as it gets.
Apparently she was also in Altered Carbon, another show were people were given different personalities. I don’t know her specific character as I only watched the show a few times
Playing the same character with different personalities seems to be a specialized skill set among actors. Britt Lower set a high bar for whoever was going to play Gemma, so the producers were probably thrilled to find an actor with a resume like Lachman’s.
If Tatiana Maslany ever shows up, we’ll know that it is ON…
I’ve just caught up with season 2, and I think it’s been fantastic… with the glaring exception of the outdoor stuff in episode 4. It just made no sense. How do they get an innie to wake up standing in the middle of a frozen lake? What happens if they just wander the wrong way? How did Dylan find the rest of them? Why didn’t they go poke at one of the mysterious clone-figures? How was that VCR plugged in? etc. As others have pointed out, it was compelling as a fever dream, but just nonsensical garbage in the context of the rules that have been established for how innies work, and how Lumon works. Really frustratingly stupid. Very Lost-and-not-in-a-good-way.
How so? It’s been established that (1) Lumon treats people in general but especially innies as objects (down to furry-innie-orgies as a performance incentive), (2) has lied about the need of geographic fencing to activate and innie, and, most recently but hardly world-shattering, (3) can actually create multiple splits yielding multiple “innies”.
Seems simple enough to have an alt-innie handle the intermediate steps between showing up to work and arriving in the middle of nowhere.
On a totally different subject, count me among those who thinks there is no question that a matter of days passed between the end of season 1 and the start of season 2. But, as far as the passage of time goes, I wouldn’t be shocked to learn that the innies work less than an 8 hour day, and that the remainder of the work day is spent putting them to other uses, or even just thoroughly inspecting them to ensure no material is transferred from the severed floor to the outside or vice versa.
Taking a step back, my complaints can broadly be divided into three parts:
(1) The seemingly extreme physical danger. These people, three of whom have never been outside in their entire existence, were tromping around on snow and ice on the tops of cliffs. They really don’t want Hellie to die. They clearly need Mark for Cold Harbor. And either of the other two dying would also be very bad for various reasons. There’s no reason why the ORTBO should be set up with icy cliffs as opposed to, say, grassy meadows.
(2) The extent to which it all depended on outies waking up and doing precisely what was predicted. Like, they had that VCR set up on top of a mountain. What if Mark, who woke up on the lake first (apparently) just started out walking some other direction? What if he didn’t climb up the cliff? It’s kind of like those scenes where there’s dialog like: “We’re going to go fight the bad guys” “what, are you going to lead us?” “No, she is”, and then at that exact moment, she (whoever she is) walks in through the door. Like, did they just set that up? Was she just waiting behind the door waiting for that line? What if the conversation played out differently?
(2.5) What if they had just walked over to those weird mannequin figures? And we know those innies are curious shit-stirrers. Why on earth didn’t they?
(3) The logistics of the waking up etc. Mark said he woke up in the middle of the lake. We know Irving woke up in the middle of the lake. So what would Mark have seen if he was looking at the lake? Irving just standing there? Or a second innie Irving who was 30 minutes old but was told to just walk from some hidden spot out to the middle of the lake and just stand there? And keep standing there until Mark got to the top of the cliff?
All the emotional beats would have worked just as well if, say, we’d seen all of them emerge from little Lumon huts, and if there had been no cliffs, and if they had been following a well laid-out path the entire time, and if instead of creepy mannequins there had just been posters or signs with their faces. Instead I feel like this episode utterly shattered the suspension-of-disbelief contract in which the show agrees that it takes place in a world where certain things are mysterious and magical, but it otherwise operates by the same rules as the world we know.
Did he? I guess I missed that line. I was under the impression they were placed and woke up at various spots along the cliff, and only Irving woke up on the frozen lake. Which, while hazardous, could be as much a comment on just how little Lumon thinks of mere employees in general as it could have been a signal that they consider Irving specifically to be (even more) expendable. No family that we know of, lives alone, lately somewhat hostile to the Eagan heiress, etc…
Always hard to tell how serious people are on the internet, but… my reading of that was that the things Milchick screwed up about the ORTBO, from Lumen’s perspective, were all the emotional things… Helena’s secret getting out, Irving being “killed”, etc. All of which would have just as much been screw-ups from a Lumon perspective if the whole ORTBO had been far more logistically plausible.
