Massive spoilers

Mark prints missing persons posters…

I’m going to discuss the events of the episode at length. If you want to avoid spoilers look away now. Episode 3 did what most other seasons do in their penultimate entry – change things up drastically.

Ms Cobel ran away, came back and ran away again – her little motor car speeding along in beautiful shots that, for once, gave a car the sense of reckless speed of which they’re capable.

She’s a true believer in Kier and you can positively see the intensity of her belief and her struggle to reconcile what’s happened to her – a devoted faithful – and where that leaves her. She wants one thing – to be involved in Mark’s life and the continual denial of that possibility is driving her to the very edge. The question is, will she deradicalize as a result or will she manage to find a new way to believe in whatever faith she’s built in her heart? I’m loving her screentime because although it’s less than the rest of the main cast, her moments are chock full of meaning. She’s a brilliant character because she is the radical, the fundamentalist who takes it further than those around her, who burns with fire for what’s in her heart.

The fact that what Cobel believes is full on personality cult and has justified the most outrageous and abhorrent of actions features nowhere in her calculus – only that she does what she does because she believes it serves a higher power.

If you want to watch the collapse of someone who believes in a higher purpose, then Cobel is an object lesson in what happens when a sectarian’s walls are breached.

Elsewhere Lumon is making good on its lies and its promises to the MDR team.

Dylan is our weak link – he’s given a chance to meet with his Outie’s wife, and the revelation that the Outie version of him is a loser leaves him connected to her in unanticipated ways for both of them.

For Lumon, who watches the entire exchange (immediately breaking its promise not to monitor its MDR team), the fact that Dylan is prepared to lie to his co-conspirators for this chance of 18 minutes of weird but good time with someone he doesn’t even know except for the conceptual knowledge of a relationship someone else has with her goes to show just how easily resistance is picked apart by the powerful.

Yes, you hate me, says the abuser, but what if I give you this one little piece of validation? All of a sudden they’re back in control and the abuse continues as the price for the validation. Worse still, the abused’s collaboration with the enemy weakens everyone they’re connected with and that weakens everyone those connections are connected to.

Just one turncoat can bring down a resistance – it’s why people resist fascism with networks of small cells to limit the damage that inevitable human flaws and failings can do to the wider cause. The double reason is, of course, that resistances can’t win the battle by marching in the streets. Such forms of dissent are closed off, punishable by erasure and suffering. So cells become the only form of resistance as well as being the most effective. If you really want to resist oppression it’s best to do it before your oppressors are in charge. Ironically though, if Mark and the others weren’t severed they wouldn’t be able to resist Lumon at all. Sometimes being inside is the only way to resist even if that inevitably comes with more suffering than anyone would sign up for.

Lumon is doing its best to control even its employee’s thoughts – the dream of all despots who rail against the stubborn insistence of those they hate continuing to think independently.

Is Dylan down for the count? Is this relationship with his Outie’s wife going to keep him compliant and pliable to Lumon’s requirements? Will he betray the others? The oft trod path suggests yes. His beef with Milchick reduced to a personal one rather than symbolic of the bullshit heaped on their heads by Lumon and thus weakened as an inciting incident.

One thing is sure – Dylan wants more time with his wife, even if it’s overseen by an eleven year old with the power to intervene in their conversation like some twisted marionette.

As for Milchick. Good grief. The most shocking moment of the episode occurs around him, and Tramell Tillman once again kills it with incredible acting upon receiving literally the most offensive corporate gift of all time.

The gift, a recanonicalised set of portraits of Kier presented as a black man with blue eyes, highlights one of the most insidious things about wellbeing and inclusivity initiatives in workplaces.

I’ve argued in my workplace about the whys of the fact that women leave our industry in vast numbers after childbirth. We have all kinds of studies into why but I’ve never seen the one articulate what I believe to be the main contributing factor – that the entire edifice of western corporate workplaces is built around the idea of the single man with no attachments or whose attachments are such that they actualise him being capable of working as if he had no attachments.

The support network (normally women, even if they’re working too) at home doing his washing, looking after his nuclear issue children and ensuring he has nothing to think about except work.

Such an environment only really wants workers to work, to see themselves as workers, as people called to work and hence to see no need for relationships outside of work, for creative outlets, hobbies, work/life balance.

It’s why Amazon offered to freeze the eggs of consenting female employees – so they could be more like the young single men working for it. It’s why Techbros love the concept of AI because AI, enslaved as it will be to the whims of these men (of course), will have no rights, no recourse and no complaints. They don’t really want actual artificial intelligence any more than the most luddite protestor. What they want is a robotic golden retriever who can operate a computer, doesn’t need walking and doesn’t need feeding.

In giving Milchick a recoloured version of Kier, Lumon displays not that it doesn’t understand what its employees want – it knows that, of course it does. No. Lumon is demonstrating that it is hell bent on remoulding its employees to want what it wants. Sure, it says, we understand you want to see yourself represented. How about we take this white man and make him look like you. That way our white men are safe and you feel included. Win, win.

It has no interest in actually representing Milchick. It has no interest in actually addressing a work culture that blindly worships being in the office, bad management (which is shown as such because it can’t manage when people are out of sight) or an environment that disproportionately rewards those who sacrifice their lives outside of the office in the name of shareholders. Because let’s be honest, those people who actualise themselves through their work? They rarely if ever see the fruits of their labours – no, their excessive production lines the pockets of their managers and, again disproportionately, that of their shareholders. Working an extra 20% in terms of hours yields no one in a corporate environment an extra 20% pay. It never has. It never will.

The best they offer are recoloured paintings of the white founders. It’s offensive across so many levels. It is deeply racist. It is a blatant reminder that the only persons who matter are the owners. Our CEOs as gods. It’s a challenge because if you don’t like it then you’re ungrateful.

These are the lies underneath such policies in too many places.

A corporate can fight a battle against an individual across multiple fronts. It can make it cultural but while it’s challenging you over your thinking (poor Milchick is lost for words and there’s suddenly so much more depth to his character because of what Lumon’s done to him).

A corporate can also threaten you with the loss of your job, punish you in innumerable small ways such as moving offices, refusing to help your access to your computer, deliberately setting you up to fail. And it can do all this at the same time.

So while it’s blindly ruining Milchick’s week, it’s also undermining Ricken Hale, the voice the resistance didn’t know it needed until they read his ridiculous book. By seducing him and bowdlerising his message they seek to not simply empty out his book of its power to provoke sedition but to use it to do the opposite.

There’s often a case made by capitalism, which seeks to make capital grow into more capital, taking protests and co-opting them into Capitalism’s own ends. You hate racism? Here’s a T-shirt sold by a corporate that agrees with you! Pay us to tell your belief and we all win…

The problem for Ricken, and it’s well seen by Mark’s sister, is that once you’re in their hooks you’re immediately defanged and put out to pasture because the heart of your message is of no interest, only the opportunity to monetise it.

Thus far, thus grim for our heroes.

Except there’s also light on the horizon. I think.

Helly and Mark S find the goats again. This time with a picture of Ms Casey. It’s a surreal experience for all concerned and underscores perhaps that Lumon doesn’t quite know what’s taking place inside of itself. The body may be doing one thing but the organs are doing something else.

Mammalian Nurture are a paranoid lot – it feels like a folk horror – they worry Mark and Helly are there to kill them. We have no idea why. We also have no idea why they think humans might have marsupial-like pouches for carrying their young, but they do.

This weird department feels like they might be allies or at least benevolent onlookers by the end but it suggests there are worlds within Lumon far beyond Project Cold Harbour and who knows what Lumon’s really trying to achieve.

Which brings us to Irving. Who returns to the department where his star-crossed romance ended in tragedy. While there he learns something crucial about the paintings his Outie draws and, possibly, the location of the door being painted.

Irving’s is an emotional journey and I loved it for him. Yet we know that outside, Burt is spying on him. Who knows where this is going?

Lastly, but far from least we focus more on Mark S because outside Lumon he is trying to determine what his Innie meant when he managed to escape into the world at the end of season 1.

He and his sister suspect it is that his wife is alive. Except Mark saw her dead body after the crash which killed her. He formally identified it and then buried her. It is unthinkable that Ms Casey is his wife but also, it’s a prize he cannot afford not to chase.

And this is where the episode ends. Mark reintegrates and, suddenly, the entire game changes. We’re 3 episodes into a 10 episode run. Who on earth knows where this goes now.

Will Cobel fall in line or will she seek to burn Lumon down? Will she try to destroy Lumon even while protecting Mark and his, in her eyes, holy mission?

Will Milchick swallow the offence given him by his bosses? Will he see his underlings in a new light after having been treated as disposable by his own masters?

The questions are mounting up even as the story takes twists and turns.

All I know right now is that I’m probably wrong. I think this is about transmigration of souls. I think it’s about giving Kier and his investors a way to live forever in clones of their younger selves. I think Mark is their testbed and Ms Casey the challenge of whether old memories will forever come back for them or if they can start with a clean slate if they wish.

I know I’m wrong. And that’s so exciting.

9/10 goats