Summary
The Institute finally reveals the broader plot in Episode 7. It’s tense and illuminating, but with these revelations, it’s hard to imagine how the whole thing might satisfactorily conclude.
“Out of the frying pan and into the fire” comes to mind when watching Episode 7 of The Institute. I did intimate in my recap of the previous episode that simply escaping the titular facility was only the start. “Hide”, which both Tim and Luke do for a while, though ultimately not for very long, makes it clear that the scale of the problem, the cover-up, and the potential ramifications are astronomically bigger than anyone anticipated. We finally know not just what happens in the Institute, but why it happens. And with that reality raised, the question of how all this might satisfactorily conclude seems more elusive than ever.
The slight upper hand that Tim and Luke had erodes immediately here. They walked into the sheriff’s department with irrefutable smoking-gun evidence of what was going on, and left with nothing. Chief Ashworth, whose earnest horror at the scenes Maureen captured on video before her death, felt reassuringly onside. Then Drew, of all people, shot him. It turns out Norbert wasn’t the only citizen of Dennison on the Institute’s payroll. And he probably won’t be the last.
Luckily, he’s useless. After shooting Ashworth in the back, he handcuffed Tim and Luke to a bench and set about disposing of the evidence, so he didn’t see Luke telekinetically summon a paperclip so Tim could pick the cuffs and get them both out of there. He has no idea about the video, either, so wherever Ashworth’s body ends up is also where the evidence of the Institute’s inner workings will be. I expect this detail to crop up again in a subsequent episode.
In the meantime, Tim and Luke go on the lam, aided in their efforts by the owner of the convenience store whose life Tim saved back in Episode 2, and then by Wendy, though the latter a bit more reluctantly. Her confusion doesn’t necessarily speak to a betrayal – I was wrong about Ashworth, for example, who I assumed would be on the take – but there’s a part of me that still thinks she might be a double agent. Tim resolutely doesn’t think so, which is why it’d be a good twist if she were. But there’s no confirmation of that here in “Hide”.
That episode title ceases to be relevant once Sigsby and Drew turn up at Wendy’s house and start rooting around. Tim is forced to confront them, and in a scuffle after Wendy’s half-hearted de-escalation attempts fail, he shoots Drew dead. Good riddance, if you ask me. Sigbys is too important to be so unceremoniously dispatched, though, so while Wendy patches up Tim’s gunshot wound – Drew was able to get a shot off, if nothing else – Sigsby finally lays out what the Institute is really up to.
For what it’s worth, this explanation does clarify a lot of things. In essence, the facility exists for two purposes: One, to groom “pre-cogs” by unlocking first their TK and TP abilities and steering them down the right track, and two, to use the information uncovered by the pre-cogs to carry out telekinetic assassinations on key targets without leaving any evidence behind. We knew about the assassinations, obviously. But what’s vital here is the function of the precognition in all this, since the targets the Institute chooses are dubbed “Hinges”; people who will, one way or another, bring about some kind of Armageddon.
Sigsby uses the senator who died in a plane crash as a case study. Apparently, if left unchecked, in nine years’ time he would have become Secretary of Defence and initiated a nuclear strike on North Korea that would be misinterpreted by old Russian early warning systems as an attack on them. They would have responded with their own nukes, and in moments, the human race would have been obliterated. So, the senator had to go. He was one in apparently 500 or so apocalyptic events that the Institute has prevented. It’s that old moral quandary of the many versus the few blown out to its most extreme.
And to Tim, someone who was willing to shoot a kid to prevent a mass shooting, the logic should make a perverse kind of sense. His counterpoint that if the facility’s goals were so altruistic, they should be made public so everyone can decide whether to participate in them is a good one, but it would fall apart under scrutiny. Sigsby’s angle is that people would never accept it, however valid it might be. The ends justify the means. It’s a bit of a stretch given how flagrantly sadistic we’ve seen everyone in the Institute be, since people like Tony and Stackhouse probably aren’t thinking a great deal about the greater good, but this is where we are.
If The Institute presents a lifeline in Episode 7, it isn’t Tim or Luke, but Avery. Since Stackhouse and Hendricks are still trying to fast-track him through the program, especially with the idea of the facility being shut down hovering on the horizon, we get to see that he isn’t an ordinary TP or TK. In fact, he’s so powerful that when he’s pushed to his limit, he shatters the glass testing box to pieces with his mind. It is, according to Hendricks, an unprecedented level of power. He knows, deep down, that the safest course of action would be to take him to the furnace immediately, but greed outweighs common sense, so instead he’s sent to the Back Half – where Nicky and Kalisha still are, though the latter seems catatonic at this point – to conduct the next assassination and power the hum. Since he and Luke still have a psychic connection, I’d be willing to bet that the Institute’s true downfall will come from the inside.
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