I don’t even remember that. Nice to know I might be right about something.
This must be a message to Dylan that Irv hid something behind the poster.
The last episode continues to expand the idea that somehow innie and outie Irv are communicating. There’s the paintings from season 1, outie Irv’s phone call this season (“my innie got the message”), and his dream in the latest episode where he sees Helly’s face with the letters Eagan on the computer screen.
Is it subconscious communication, like he paints the image of the room in his mind but doesn’t know how it got there (and is that why he drew so many pictures of Burt, to embed Burt in his memory)?
Or is it literal communication? Ben Stiller made some comment about people not paying attention to the watches that Irv and Mark swap out each time before going to the severed floor. Was Irv’s watch always showing the correct time, or could he be setting the time as some kind of code?
More thoughts and Internet speculation:
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Is the Freeze Frame protocol the way they got the innies out on the ice or cliff’s edge? It doesn’t seem likely the outies would willingly travel out there, so maybe Lumon has some way of “turning off” both innie and outie. Or maybe the Goldfish protocol, so the innies don’t remember being transported to the woods.
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ORTBO is a jumble for robot, which maybe ties in to the weird doppelgangers. And Dieter Eagan is a jumble for AI-generated.
Good catches.
Some useless info — the twin characters are referred to as shadows in the credits. Shadow Mark, Shadow Helly, etc. (And, maybe interestingly, not Shadow Helena.)
The mysterious “Man in Hallway” we saw looking in on Mark when he was in the now-shuttered Wellness department at the beginning of the first episode was apparently Shadow Mark, as it’s the same actor listed in the credits.
Is his comment from the first season or this season? I think one of the still-unexplained things from season one is that the first day in episode one, we see Mark in the morning put his watch in the tray and the watch face says that day is the 4th, but when he gathers his stuff up at the end of the day, the watch face now now says it’s the 5th. So ostensibly he was on the severed floor from 9am on the 4th to 5pm on the 5th. And that sort of dovetails with Mark later calling up Mrs. Selvig to tell her she put her bins in his space on the wrong day. And then later we see that he forgot about that night’s non-food-based-dinner. But it seems a stretch that outtie Mark somehow didn’t notice a missing day. The differing days on the watch face could have just been a production blooper.
And then also, Mark’s outtie watch is some Russian-made watch and Gemma was a professor of Russian literature. The Eagan worship stuff has a slightly Soviet/Leninist/Stalinist whiff to it. The tech we’ve seen mostly has a weird retro-not-really-advanced-look it. They live in a place that’s always cold, snowy and bleak. Make of all that what you will.
It was from a promo video last month where the cast was reading various fan theories and joking about them. At the end, Ben says “it’s interesting that nobody’s ever talked about Mark’s locker tray and the things that are in Mark’s locker tray."
So not Irv’s watch, or even specifically any watch. But there’s not much else in the tray. Like you say, it might just be a reference to missing time from S1. Or it might be something else. Or it might be Ben having a laugh.
Speaking of Shadow Helly, did she look like she had a broken neck?
Yeah she’s got her head cocked when she points them in the right direction and that last shot of them on top of the tallest waterfall on the planet her head is cocked even more. I thought there was something up with that, but dunno.
We also don’t see Shadow Irv helping keep them on the right path right? Just Shadows Mark, Helly and Dylan. if that means anything anyway. Maybe the seal was actually the remains of the first Shadow Irv after something went wrong and then they quickly had to produce a new one for the top-of-the-waterfall gathering. I’m definitely think about this too much.
Maybe a call back to her suicide attempt in season one?
That’s as good a guess as any.
I think maybe they are supposed to be animatronic robots. All of them move very oddly, and the crooked neck could be one malfunctioning.
In the 1st episode, one of the replacement MDR workers was talking about how her previous office had animatronic Eagens in their Perpetuity Hall.
Better than brooms with plates for faces.
Problem is that many of these fun details are indeed placed there on purpose, and there just to mess with us!
A few of the hypotheses floated around I believe.
The coma theme is real. Some innies’ outies are comatose. Gemma’s likely. Miss Huang probably. Maybe an Eagan or more than one is comatose but unable to have an innie body.
Innies retain procedural memory. Outie Irving has a spy level operative skill set and innie brought it in without conscious awareness, including reading code and “tells”. And their inherent baseline personalities are preserved - what they would be without the traumas that their outies have suffered and without the other trauma of severance.
I don’t think Helena knows everything that Lumon is up to. She might even suspect that. She seemed honestly surprised by the big goat room and the goat people, out of her play acting and amused baseline.
Do we know what outie Mark’s profession was before severance?
Any predictions of where the focus of the next episode will be? I’m thinking we return to a view from outie Mark’s, Ms. Corbel, and maybe Helena’s perspectives as the main line.
History teacher at a small college.
Presumably, outie Irving is still obsessively curious about Lumen and has the investigative chops to throw a wrench into the system especially now that he’s probably a very disgruntled (twice-over) former employee.
Episode 2x02 went into the past and showed events from episode 2x01 in a different perspective. So I suspect 2x05 might loop back and show what happened to Mark directly after the end of 2x03.
I’m not following this. I’m missing something simple, I’m sure of that.
If you’re in a coma on the outside, how could you do anything on the inside? If I’m a paraplegic on the outside, I still would be in the inside, right? This is how I understand it. I think I’m taking something too literal.
Unless you mean they just perpetually live on the severed floor and always have and/or there really is no outtie version.
The premise is that the procedure can undo the coma but at the cost of losing all episodic memory. Or that the procedure induces coma in some partly damaged when in outie state.
So those individuals would be innies 24/7, I assume.