If anyone has the resources to pull off the stars’ vanishing act, it’s Evans. He may also be able to have people scrubbed out of surveillance footage, as he appears to have done with the mystery woman who warned Auggie to shut her project down if she wants to stop her personal countdown from reaching zero. When she does so despite the dramatic success of her project — invisible nanofibers so strong and so fine that they can slice and dice diamonds with ease — the clock vanishes from her sight. For his part, Clarence cleverly verifies the existence of the mystery woman by noting how Auggie’s cigarette appears to light itself at one point in the footage.
Little does Clarence know another potential lead has presented itself. First Jin and then Jack begin playing with those strange virtual-reality video game headsets. Some elements of the game they play are pretty shopworn, in terms of how narrative fiction depicts video game storytelling techniques; screenwriters have been making jokes about NPCs (non-player characters) who appear lifelike but who spout obviously scripted dialogue explaining the rules and goals of the game in conversation for quite a while. (I remember this coming up in an old episode of the children’s cartoon “The Amazing World of Gumball” that my now-teenage kids used to watch, for example.)
This is not to say that the game they play isn’t weird. It’s weird all right, even by the standards of an art form whose most famous character is an Italian plumber who fights evil turtles and mushroom people. For one thing, it appears to transport the player to a medieval setting corresponding to their ethnicity, an idea that could have used another pass or two from a sensitivity reader during beta testing. For another, its technology is decades, maybe even over a century, ahead of the curve, as a giddy Jack tells Jin.
The game involves characters who can be dehydrated by the sun, rolled up like a blanket, and reanimated by water once again when the stars are right, only to be frozen solid by a different natural catastrophe moments later. It falls to Jin — and presumably Jack, who keeps trying to beat up his NPC interlocutor rather than listen — to try to save this strange civilization. Though she fails to do so, she does impress upon the game world’s emperor the need for science over mysticism, and thus she can advance to Level 2 to try again.
Clearly, fans of spooky technology have much to enjoy in this episode. On one side you’ve got the unfathomable sophisticated video game of unknown origin, and on the other a good old-fashioned scary radio transmission. The video game stuff, however, feels airless and stale, despite the gorgeous CGI vistas and bizarre body-horror moments. In a story where so many things are happening in the real world, it’s tough to get that worked up about the goings-on of a virtual one.
The “Do not answer” broadcast, on the other hand, fits into a long lineage of paranormal communications both on and off screen. It’s explicitly linked to the so-called “Wow signal,” the aforementioned anomaly detected by OSU, and it’s reminiscent of eerie phenomena like numbers stations, or staticky calls from disappearing planes above the mythic Bermuda Triangle. In movie terms, I couldn’t shake a flattering comparison to the dream broadcast from “Year One-Nine-Nine-Nine” in John Carpenter’s “Prince of Darkness.” But the horror trope of the final warning before the plunge is a nearly universal one, embodied by all the old men in slasher franchises who warn groups of oblivious teens not to travel to a masked killer’s stalking grounds. Perhaps a slasher on galactic scale is firing up his chain saw with Earth as his destination even now.
