Summary
Luke’s great escape from The Institute in Episode 6 goes wrong pretty much immediately, which was to be expected, but on the upside, it does allow our protagonists to cross paths for the first time.
Breaking out of The Institute has been such a fixed goal for so long that I’d forgotten — and presumably Luke had, too, or had perhaps never realized in the first place — that it was only the first step to freedom. Episode 6, aptly titled “Run”, is a nice reminder of that fact. Scrabbling through the hole in the Back Half fence is just about the only thing that goes off without a hitch. Everything else is one problem after another, each foreshadowing a new issue, the most pressing of which is that the senior staff of the Institute has influence and control over much more than the facility itself. And that includes key personnel in Dennison, which Luke had idealized as his safe haven.
Thank goodness for Tim, then. Stackhouse describes him appropriately to Sigsby, recognising his type from the armed services and “other places”. He might not be a double agent or an inside man, but he has the scent of a conspiracy, and nothing’s going to dissuade him from digging deeper. Stackhouse would have happily had him killed, which means it’s almost lucky for Tim that he stumbled on Luke, accelerating his knowledge of the Institute before he could poke his nose in the wrong place. They’ve only just met, and they’ve already “saved” each other, so to speak.
But more saving will no doubt be necessary. We already know the Institute isn’t above assassinating families and pinning the blame for it on the children they kidnap, which Luke discovered in the previous episode, and they also aren’t shy about working kids to death on off-the-books assassinations and then piling them into a furnace. The fact they have at least one Dennison citizen on the payroll doesn’t bode well for Luke and Tim, and that’d be bad enough if Luke’s preservation instincts weren’t basically nil, but unfortunately, smart as he is, escaping places subtly is not his strong suit.
This is one of the only major knocks against The Institute Episode 6. Luke’s escape is as noisy as humanly possible, and he illogically throws a pair of scissors back into the facility so that Sigsby can discover them later. It’s not a huge deal, but it’s the kind of annoying writing quirk that springs up because nobody realised Sigsby had no logical way of finding out about the plan. It makes Luke look moronic, which is a bit detrimental for a character whose whole shtick is being the smartest person in the room.
There’s a bit of this with Maureen as well, but it’s more forgivable since her whole shtick is being incredibly everyday (in this universe, being everyday is a good thing, since this is what makes her the only person with a working moral compass). As soon as she’s called to a meeting with Stackhouse, she reckons she’s rumbled and places a frantic call to the only person she believes can meet Luke in her stead and blow the whistle on the story – Kate, Stackhouse’s pet journalist. Again, minor thing, but given how much Maureen, of all people, knows about what’s going on inside the facility, the idea that she’d trust anyone with information this sensitive is a bit of a reach. And she pays the price for it.
With Maureen dead, Kate heads to the rendezvous in an effort to unalive Luke, but unfortunately for her, she finds him with Tim. This, for what it’s worth, seems pretty well-handled to me. Tim doesn’t believe everything Luke says – which is understandable, since a lot of it, like telekinesis and telepathy, is a bit far-fetched – but he intuits immediately that there’s some truth to his story, and he springs into action. There’s nothing more frustrating than characters refusing to believe information that the audience knows to be true, so I’m really pleased that The Institute essentially skipped this step entirely.
I’m pleased to see Kate dead, too. A telekinetic branch and a tackle from Tim see her off in unceremonious fashion, which is all she really deserves. But she’s the tip of the iceberg, I suspect. Stackhouse already had a backup team in play, which included Sigsby, so there’s plenty of cannon fodder for Tim to be dealing with, and Episode 6 also reveals that Norbert, the owner of the motel where Tim technically lives, is in cahoots with The Institute. This supports my personal theory that everyone in Dennison is on the payroll, perhaps even including Chief Ashworth – the second Tim said he was solid, I suspected he wasn’t – and Wendy.
I’m also curious how we’re going to return to the other kids. Kalisha and Nicky are still stuck in the Back Half, and Avery is in the Front Half, and since they were all co-conspirators, presumably Sigsby is going to look to them for more information about Luke. We also don’t know what’s on the flash drive that Luke spirited out of the facility, though based on what was going on inside, I suspect it isn’t anything cheery. Either way, The Institute has reached a key turning point here, and the direction it chooses to go in from this point will likely determine whether or not it can stick the landing.
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