Hello again and welcome to the latest edition of Bridging the Gap! This is a slower-paced issue than the last few, but as usual McCann and Esquejo have left plenty of bread crumbs about. Let’s make like seagulls and, uh, get pecking.
Cast Clues
This issue’s cast page has a couple of interesting hints. Miles is labeled “Player or pawn?”, Edward Sr. is “innocent yet guilty”, and Eddie Jr. is, once again, “bored”. I’ll address these three hints as they come up over the course of the issue.
Timeline Goodness
As Matt has emphasized in earlier columns, McCann and Esquejo are very careful with clocks. When you see one, it’s usually an important clue.
That said, there’s only one clock in this issue, and it places this particular waiting room conversation at 4:15 a.m. Thursday morning. (EDIT: Okay, there’s another one, in the excerpt below, and it reads 4:50ish). As Dr. Geller later confirms, that means it’s been about four hours since Jo and Elle/Katie left the hospital together. Nothing too Earth-shattering here, but, you know. I’m assuming Jo and Elle/Katie’s actual jaunt took less than half an hour, and the rest of the time was spent running tests and the like once Elle/Katie was brought back in.
To refresh your memory on the projected course of the Jairus Project (and please do check out my previous columns if you don’t know what I mean by that), Elle was attacked on Tuesday afternoon roundabouts 4:00 p.m., and the “second phase” – whatever that means – is supposed to begin four days after the original attack, on Saturday. If she wakes up on this fourth day, Elle will “live without change”; if she wakes up on the fifth day, Sunday, she’s got a 9/10 chance of living through the following year. The nature of this “life”, of course, is unclear.
The last page of the issue informs us that we’ve been following the story for 2 days and 13:22 hours, so it must be closer to 5:30 a.m. at the end of this issue.
Bored Eddie
It looks like Min is about to refer to the Jairus Project here, but then Dr. Hammond and Eddie share a glance and Eddie excuses himself. It’s clear Eddie’s not supposed to be hearing any of this, and he knows it – and this actually kind of fits in with what we know about Min so far. As main orchestrator of this operation – or, at least, the parts that involve Hoodie – she has the power to keep someone out of it if she wishes, and maybe she’s trying to protect Eddie in doing so. But then, Eddie must have figured some of it out by now, or he wouldn’t be so gracious here (well, relatively speaking).
The part that’s suspicious is how bored he is. People get bored when they know what’s going to happen and things are getting tedious, not when they’re being kept in suspense. Unless it’s a show, and Eddie’s trying to make it look like he knows more than he does – and this definitely is a possibility – it could be that Eddie knows as much as anybody else.
Min and Edward
Min and Edward have two pretty intense conversations while checking in with Dr. Hammond, and they shed a lot of light on their differing degrees of involvement in the Jairus Project. Meanwhile, Hammond confirms that Elle’s brain signs are what they should be, while Edward worries about “clots forming”. This may be one of the biggest clues in the issue, so I’ll copy it out in full:
Once Elle – once this begins, her blood and organs will need to be open to receptors at every cellular level.
It’s hard to figure out exactly what this means, but it does seem to lend leverage to the Elle-is-a-psychic-weapon theory, if only because the focus is on Elle as some kind of vessel. Anyway, this sets Min off, and she implies that Elle’s cells being open to receptors is somehow related to Edward doing his part in the conspiracy.
Continued belowMoving along to their second conversation:
Edward thinks things have escalated beyond Min’s control, and reminds her of Lonnie’s troubling presence – which we suspect Min’s already dealing with. Interestingly, Edward’s wording here would seem to suggest that he is “The First” in the same way the Fifth is, well, the fifth – that is, that he, Edward, is at the top of some kind of hierarchy. He also says he’s being afforded the most protection, which would also seem to suggest that he has a higher status than the others – even though, as he says here, he was the last person to be brought in to the conspiracy. I’m not sure what the numeric order could mean, in that case. “The First” to do what?
But hey now: if the Jairus Project was in motion since Elle’s birth, then Edward could have been “the first” major player involved with it, knowingly or no. Could his genetic material be particularly important here, perhaps even instrumental to the whole operation? That would explain his particular protected status – and gesture toward a way in which he could be “innocent yet guilty”.
A “Brief” Glance
As Dr. Geller runs through her theory about Elle and Katie being somehow connected, she says, “we only deal with science here”, and everybody else looks at the briefcase. Clearly, there’s something not-so-scientific – maybe something closer to supernatural – hiding in there. Again, it appears that the Jairus Project does have some psychic, or at the very most, borderline-scientific, aspect to it.
Lonnie’s About To Get Iced!
This process was already set in motion last issue: Min saw Lonnie hanging around Elle suspiciously, then made a hurried call to The Fifth. Now she’s giving Hoodie instructions, and this guy’s in serious trouble.
Frankie Catches On
Both Matt and I have raised some questions as to whether Frankie and Bobby are the same person, and his sudden astuteness here does seem to point in that direction. The fact that he accurately connects the incident with Esteban – which he had no way of knowing Elle was involved with – to the Elle/Katie phenomenon, certainly suggests that he knows more than he’s letting on.
Elle Is Incredibly Unhelpful
Why is it that Elle’s always juuusst drifting off when Jo asks an important question? The answer she gives here when Jo asks her what happned the day she was attacked is woefully ambiguous: “…subway… tried to stop this… wore a hoodie”. The only vaguely interesting bit here is that “tried to stop this”, which sounds a lot like somebody – either her or Hoodie – was trying to stop the Jairus Project from being set in motion. I’m actually pretty open to the idea of it being Elle herself. Her memory in her dream-state isn’t terribly reliable; for all we know, she could have been an active participant in the Jairus Project, until whatever happened during her attack. I mean, it doesn’t seem terribly likely, but it can’t be ruled out, either.
It’s also important to note that Elle can’t really answer any of Jo’s questions before this because, as she says, she’s kind of stuck in her Katie-state, and can’t recall much beyond the immediate circumstances involving her and this body.
9PFT
These three letters and a number seemed like a complete mystery until – a novel course of action – I Googled it. It stands for “Nine People’s Favourite Thing”, and it’s a song from – wait for it – a musical named [title of show]! Which played at the Vineyard Theatre! We’ve been seeing references to [title of show] for the last couple of issues, but for some reason my Google-fu never actually managed to turn up the fact that it’s an actual show. So that’s embarrassing, but at least we know which show was wrapping up the night Elle was attacked.
Using a reference to this play would, of course, be a natural way for Dane to send a message to Elle, so this little exchange all of a sudden makes a kind of sense. If Miles isn’t one of their 9PFT… well, the song itself puts it best:
Continued belowWe can either follow our instinct
Or take advice from every joker
We can either be distinct
Or wind up merely mediocre
***
I’d rather be nine people’s favorite thing
Than a hundred people’s ninth favorite thing
Dane seems to be sending the message that Miles is nobody’s favourite thing, somebody who’s winding up “merely mediocre” by, it seems, trying to please too many people – or holding too many allegiances. (I’m assuming that Dane learned or guessed this during their holding-cell conversation, which was just beginning at the end of issue #6.) Remember: “Miles” means “soldier” in Latin. It’s looking more and more likely that this guy is a pawn, rather than a player, and not likely someone you’d want to give too much information to, regardless of how much agency he has personally. I mean, we already know that he reports to Hoodie. That should make him seem sketchy enough.
That said, Miles’ actions could be read in another light – more on that in the next section.
There’s another reference to a song from [title of show] in this exchange: the “way back to then” is an allusion to a song of that title. The song is sung by an aspiring actor who dreams of recapturing the optimism and imagination of her childhood. But what is the equivalent of this “happy place” for Jo, and why does Dane need her to get back there? Could it merely be a solid state of happiness between her and Elle and Dane? In that case, wanting Jo to re-attain it could simply be a plea from Dane to consider his situation sympathetically, as an old friend and not a new enemy would. This seems to fit pretty nicely with the love triangle thing that’s going on between them, so I’ll stick to this reading for the moment.
The one thing about the sequence above that doesn’t quite make sense yet is Miles’ reference to Jo’s sister (she has a sister?) and some kind of trauma that passing along Dane’s full message might awaken. But this is definitely worth filing away for reference later.
Miles and Elle
Remember last issue’s WTF-worthy panel, in which Katie/Elle looked over at Miles and said “It’s me”? Well, here’s a thought, which the above panel could possibly support: what if Elle has possessed Miles’ body as well as Katie’s? If she can break out of her dream state in the first place, it’s not all that hard to believe that she could break out of it and move back in time a little bit, too. In that case, an Elle from a couple days down the line, who might know a little more about the whole situation, could inhabit Miles as he is now, when he’s still in a position to change things. In that case, Katie/Elle might be getting a general feeling that this Miles character is, in fact, her – I mean, wouldn’t you recognize your own mannerisms and such in somebody else?
Anyway, if this were to be the case, it would certainly shed a different light on Miles’ interactions with Hoodie. Especially since Elle — once she’s back in her dream state — seems to know exactly who this guy is.
Recap
We’ve learned:
– that Edward is particularly important to the Jairus Project, whether he wants to be or not;
– that Jo has a sister, and there’s some kind of trauma associated with her;
– that Elle has a bone to pick with Miles;
– that Min and Hoodie are mobilizing against Lonnie.
I suspect:
– that something supernatural-ish is in the Jairus briefcase;
– that Miles actually is Elle, at least for the moment.
All told, we’re not too too much farther ahead at the end of this issue than we were at the beginning – which is to say, it’s not really as much of an infodump as #6 or #7 were. But we’ve certainly got lots of new possibilities to mull over. Be sure and leave some thoughts below!
