Episode five: “Signals”
“Cosmically speaking, they are already dead, and I don’t waste time on ghosts. But you’re no ghost, are you?”
Two counts of blackmail
After talking with Warren Chambers in the last episode, Lia intends to speak with R.B. Villard (Hiro Kanagawa), the mysterious financier of Limetown and the experiments. In order to secure an interview, she calls his publicist and threatens to put out Warren Chambers’ interview mentioning him. Lia’s girlfriend tells her she supports her work, and not to stop trying to find the truth, no matter who threatens her.
Despite this step forward, Lia’s boss Gina wants her to step away from the story. Of course, Lia isn’t going to take that, so she blackmails Gina with knowledge of a work affair, threatening to tell her husband. This is definitely starting a trend of behavior from Lia, who will do anything, no matter how immoral, to get the truth.
A strange encounter in a bunker in the middle of Kansas
After getting a time and place for her talk with Villard, Lia ventures to a secure bunker in Kansas, armed with her recording gear. She goes through intense security measures, then finally comes face to face with the man himself. He tells Lia that this will be the last time he talks to someone outside of the bunker, and Lia notes that he is an immortalist, someone trying to live forever through science.
Villard reveals that he was in Limetown for a few days, to see Oskar Totem’s experiments. He confirms that Totem was trying to create a way to speak mind-to-mind. After a convincing experience, Villard agreed to fund the project. At the end of the conversation, he says to Lia, “I only mourn Max Finlayson,” the neuroscientist who created the technology for Totem’s project.
A threat and a message
There are a few moments that hint at more of Lia’s history, but we still don’t know much else about her father. Lia has been consistently ignoring her mother’s calls, but she’s forced to face her when she appears at the office and won’t leave. The encounter is intense, as Lia’s mother warns her away from her work, telling her she has to stop or more people will die. But just like her daughter, Alison Haddock is smart, and so she writes the truth on a notepad, telling Lia that people are listening.
Alison shows her the wire she’s wearing, and so Lia plays along, faking a conversation while they talk through writing. Alison tells Lia that she doesn’t know who the people threatening her are. When Lia asks her what she should do, a strangely vulnerable moment for her, Alison writes to “keep GOING,” before leaving.
Episode six: “A Simple Life”
“Goodbye, Dorothy.”
The next survivor: Max Finlayson
This episode starts off a little different, beginning with a personal flashback from Max Finlayson (Louis Ferreira), a survivor, of the night everyone disappeared from Limetown. There was chaos and strange uniformed men, and he was separated from his wife, Deidre Wells, and threatened with her death if he looked for her.
Back to Lia, she has messed with Villard’s recording in order to get Max’s attention, and it worked. He calls her requesting to meet and set the story straight. Lia brings Mark with her to meet him at his house in the woods. Max is intelligent, and quickly connects with Lia’s blunt personality. He openly talks about his work in Limetown. He was the neuroscientist behind the implants, while Totem was just the face of it. Both his and Oskar Totem’s egos caused them to clash sometimes.
The experiments and the night it all ended
Lia continues on from Warren and Winona’s stories, asking about the human trials of the experiment. Max says that two people named Frankie B. and Eloise M. Lia pushes for more information. Max tells them how everyone who had the implant were separated and relocated. He has no idea where his wife is.
He recounts that night, when Totem died and everyone left, and how they could hear and feel everything Totem felt as he was killed. Max suspects that Totem was being courted by outside companies for the technology, and that might be what got him murdered. Throughout all of this, Max has told Lia that he knows what will probably happen to him after speaking out. He is ready.
During the conversation with Max, Mark takes a phone call, waiting for Lia outside afterwards. Turns out, he asked a colleague to listen to the raw interview with Villard, and he found out about Lia’s tampering. Mark confronts her. He asks how she can be okaying with lying when she works as a journalist to uncover the truth. Sounds a bit hypocritical.
Don’t try to run.
As they drive back home, Lia and Mark begin to have a tense conversation about Lia’s moral choices. Then her phone rings and it’s Max. At first they can’t hear anything besides the blaring sirens that Max told them about, so Lia knows something is wrong. With someone holding the phone and and a gun to his head, Max says goodbye to Lia, and gives her a message. He warns her not to run, right before a gunshot rings out.
