Summary
“They Are Among Us” makes the fantasty elements more explicit as Eric begins tumbling down a rabbit hole — but what is his real significance?
This recap of Invisible City season 1, episode 3, “They Are Among Us”, contains spoilers.
Things aren’t going well for Eric in Invisible City episode 3, though admittedly they could be worse. Yes, as we saw in the ending of the previous episode, he has been dragged to the watery depths by Camila, or the mythological Iara, but luckily for him, it didn’t quite take. For reasons that nobody yet seems to understand, he emerges very soggy but otherwise unharmed.
What’s beginning here is the idea that Eric is special in some way, related to the deities, or at least possessed of a power that renders him immune to theirs. It’s all tied up in a past that the end of “They Are Among Us” hints at but doesn’t explain, so it’s something for later episodes to unpack. But either way, the news is difficult for Camila and co. to process. After Tutu finds her in her mermaid form, washed up on a rock, she returns to the bar and expresses confusion at Eric’s survival, as well as claiming she doesn’t believe he’s responsible.
Inês makes her presence felt more when she’s interrogated at the Environmental Police HQ by Eric and Marcia, though the interview goes a bit awry when Eric starts to lose it. I like how his relationship with Marcia comes across here. She’s able to talk him down when he gets carried away, insists on taking the lead on the interrogation, and warns him about how difficult it was to get Ivo to authorize the investigation in the first place.
As it happens, that investigation hits a bit of a standstill thanks to some obvious corruption, and the construction company is quickly ruled as having absolutely no involvement in any of the goings-on whatsoever, which is obviously suspicious on its face and is by no means enough for Eric. It is enough, though, for several of the villagers, who’re beginning to be swayed to João’s point of view, especially since he now has papers proving (apparently) that the fish weren’t poisoned. Only Ciço and Fabiana remain in opposition.
Eric corners the former when he returns to the village and demands to know what’s happening, including confessing to seeing the dolphin turn into Manaus and his encounter with a mermaid. “They Are Among Us” is something Ciço says to him, claiming that “they” live among them and are mirrors of them, though he doesn’t offer anything more concrete.
The increasing weirdness of the investigation is getting to Eric in Invisible City season 1, episode 3, and causing him to inadvertently neglect Luna. But the pull of the truth is too strong to ignore, and it leads Eric back to the bar’s basement, where Inês pulls off some witchy business with the help of more nice-looking computer-generated butterfly transitions and transports Eric into what is perhaps a memory, or maybe some kind of surreal pocket dimension. Nevertheless, though, Eric, in what looks like a younger version of himself, is able to reject the hypnosis. In the real world, the force of his rejection sends Inês flying across the room, and Eric’s eyes snap open.
