The world of the sensates is broadening rapidly this season, and within this episode. Will finally breaks through the barrier of Whispers to reach a BPO executive and manages a meeting with Jonas, both of which prove very informative. Wolfgang meets a sensate from outside the cluster. But the new information comes with new dangers, and traps within traps are a major theme for this season.
Will and Whispers/Gibbons/Milton/Matheson/Brandt (How many aliases does this guy have?) are meeting in the nondescript room in London that they’ve talked in before. Whispers concedes that Will has compromised him, and tries to convince Will that they have more in common as two Homo sensorium than Will thinks. Will doesn’t buy the ruse. He wants to talk to Croome, the BPO executive in charge. Nomi feeds Will Croome’s personal information until Croome comes into the room. Whispers starts out relaying Will’s demands for a meeting, but balks when Will says that he wants Whispers out of his head. Nomi texts the message to Croome’s personal number, and also asks for a meeting with Jonas. Croome calls in guards who inject Whispers with a drug that renders him unconscious, and Will is finally free from Whispers’ surveillance.
The cluster is celebrating the win. Will looks like he’s back to normal, after the longest stake out of his life. Once Will’s done with Croome, he and the rest of the cluster go outside into the streets of Amsterdam for the first time in months.
Lito has a meeting with his managers, who tell him that he’s been dropped from his next film. The studio invoked the morals clause in his contract because of the nude photos. The managers tell him that he can pick a new project from the pile of scripts they hand him, but neither seems very enthusiastic. It doesn’t bode well for his career.
Nomi and Amanita decide to get all dressed up and go out to eat. Bug is very enthusiastic about the outfits. As they are on their way out the door, Sun appears, and asks Nomi to help her. Sun has just been taken from her room by strange guards in the middle of the night. She thinks they are going to kill her.
The dream team is on it. Will figures out that the guards aren’t from her prison. Bug and Amanita get into the prison’s security system and tell Sun when to fight. She fights for all she’s worth, but they taze her repeatedly. Everyone in the cluster is affected by the tasers. The guards drag Sun into a room, and close the door. She keeps fighting, but they get a noose around her neck and hang her. The entire cluster experiences being hung and the oxygen loss. Her cellmate Min-jung kills one of the guards and Sun is lowered to the floor. The sensates all help fight off the remaining two guards as Min-jung watches, stunned.
Sun thanks Min-jung quietly. Min-jung tells Sun that, as the men walked Sun by her in the hall, she saw the same look in their eyes that she used to see in her abusive husband’s eyes. She stopped her husband, and now they’ve been stopped, too.
Min-jung offers to take credit for the guards’ deaths, but Sun tells her they’re breaking out instead. The rest of the cluster checks Sun and the room out to make sure she’s okay. Min-jung is confused about what’s happening when Sun is interacting with the cluster.
The women make it to the parking garage, where Capheus and Bug help them steal a bus. Stealing a bus with Bug and Capheus should probably be a life goal for all of us. Bug sings Born Free once they’re clear of the prison.
The next stop is a parking lot to trade down for a smaller car. Min-jung grows more and more confused as Sun confidently steals the car, then continues talking to herself in a “lively conversation.” They need a place to hide out. Min-jung suggests a friend’s house.
Wolfgang and Felix arrive at Sebastian Fuchs house to discuss the club deal. Sebastian introduces them to Lila Facchini, his gorgeous Neopolitan (not Italian!) righthand man. As Felix and Sebastian discuss the club, Lila telepathically reveals to Wolfgang that she’s a sensate. And interested in public sex.
They continue their discussions and playtime over dinner on Sebastian’s patio. Sebastian wants a more elaborate deal than just running a club. Wolfgang is able to take in his plans despite Lila’s aggressive moves. He uses the club for international money laundering on a large-scale. Wolfgang agrees to consider the offer.
Lito, Hernando and Dani go apartment hunting. Since the downturn in Lito’s career, Lito and Hernando can no longer afford the kind of apartment they want on their own. They look at a more expensive apartment anyway, which Dani also falls in love with. She tells them that she wants the three of them to live there together. They agree that the fact that the apartment has a giant tub that will fit all three of them at once is a sign that it’s meant to be. Are they officially a threesome yet?
Will goes to a large train station for his meeting with Jonas. Jonas is being held in a dingy little room that’s basically a dungeon. He says that he couldn’t figure out why they were keeping him alive, but then he realized that they must not have caught Will yet. He doesn’t understand how Will has continued to escape Whispers, but he’s thrilled about it.
Will asks why they’re meeting in that particular train station. Jonas explains that he saw his sensate father for the first time there. And he also thought Will would be able to make a quick escape if necessary. Jonas’ father died some time ago, surrounded by all 80 of his children.
He explains some of the science to the sensates. Either gender can give birth to a cluster at any time in their lives. That’s part of why they’re feared, because the population can increase quickly. The current sensorium population is thought to be in the thousands or tens of thousands and is rising. Not anyone can be born sensate. The potential is genetically encoded. When Kala asks, he doesn’t say whether or not Angelica identified specific genes connected to being a sensate. Kala has a long list of questions that she doesn’t get to ask.
Jonas is the last living member of his cluster. They ask about Angelica’s first cluster, and Jonas describes the first one she gave birth to. She was full of joy as she interacted with them. One cluster member, Todd, hated being a sensate. We see him praying with a cross and hear him saying that he wants to be normal, and Angelica telling him that they are normal.
The cluster disappeared, one by one, until only one was left, a Mexican journalist named Raoul Pascal. Lito says that Raoul interviewed him once, and they had a connection. Jonas’ face and voice get really strange when he asks Lito if he knew Raoul. I hope someone isn’t listening in on this conversation who can use this information to try to track Lito.
Angelica went to Chicago to search for Raoul after he disappeared. That was when she began working with Whispers. We see Jonas arguing with her about going. We’ve been seeing images of the two of them kissing and being coupley throughout this conversation, yet we also saw Angelica and Whispers kiss. Did Jonas and Angelica have a falling out? Did Whispers use some form of mind control on Angelica?
The guards have come to stop Jonas from talking to Will and the cluster. Jonas cautions them against trusting Croome, or anyone from BPO, and only vaguely answers their questions about BPO. Sun said that she didn’t trust him, right around the time he was talking about Raul.
Sun and Min-jung arrive at Min-jung’s friend’s house. She takes them in. Later, they share a meal, and she describes how she was forced into drug smuggling in order to pay off her late husband’s gambling debts. She was eventually caught and sent to prison, where she was Min-jung’s cellmate. Her son has never forgiven her for being a drug smuggler. She says that life is a big trap, surrounded by little traps. Sometimes, if you listen, you can hear them snap shut.
Will meets with Croome in person in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, in front of Rembrandt’s famous painting The Night Watch. Croome tells the story of the painting, which was unappreciated in its day, and for many years afterwards. Pieces of it were cut off at one point. Yet today it’s considered a masterpiece. His point is that our senses and our common sense continue to evolve, and he thinks that Homo sensorium helps drive that change.
Will asks why BPO is so secretive and trying to wipe them out, if he feels so favorably toward them. Croome says that BPO was founded in the early 1960s by a woman who felt that Homo sapiens and sensorium were biologically dependent on each other for survival. But when the Cold War turned into the War on Terror, governments and spies became suspicious of sensates. Croome and his group within BPO want to change the organization back to its original purpose, but it will take time. As a sign of good faith, he gives Will a bottle of the blockers that Whispers takes. They shake hands.
Just then, Whispers shows up in the form of a mind controlled sensate, a woman who had been painting at an easel nearby. She stabs and kills Croome, and tries to kill Will. He fights her off, so Whispers makes her kill herself.
Will is left standing over two bodies.
The entire prison fight/hanging sequence was breathtaking, literally. I was on the edge of my seat, holding my breath. The editing, the cinematography, the music and sound, and the acting all came together to make it fast-paced and riveting, totally drawing in the viewer. All of the sensates were in danger, and, for the first time, none of them could help the others. The sensations Sun was experiencing were so intense that they were all overwhelmed. We’re seeing one of the downsides of Homo sensorium’s gifts. The question is, were they breathing? Would they all have died, if Sun died? Can they learn to disengage their telepathic involvement with each other enough to be able to function through an event like that?
I never get tired of seeing the jump-on-a-guy’s-shoulders, wrap-your-thighs-around-his-neck fight move that Black Widow is also partial to.
Southern Italy has been known during some periods of history as the Kingdom of Naples, and it’s people and language were/are Neopolitan. Is Lila Neopolitan because they’re setting up Naples to have been a Homo sensorium kingdom in the show’s mythology, or to have had a sensorium ruling family? She was so insistent that she’s Neopolitan that it’s got to mean something.
I’m not sure whether Croome was completely trustworthy or not. There are so many layers of deceit within BPO and its slaves that I don’t trust anyone connected to it completely. Not with mind control on the table. Who’s to say that Croome wasn’t also being controlled? We know that they’ve had some level of control over Jonas, so that he has to be very careful as he tries to help the cluster.
Someone who opposes Croome’s group must’ve woken up Whispers. How long was he awake before he made his presence known? What did he hear of the conversation with Jonas, and the conversation with Croome? Was he following Will before that?
This show is confronting existential questions this season. What is reality? Can we trust what we experience with our senses to be reality? Can we trust our judgements of those experiences to be sound? How do we know who to trust? Can we even trust ourselves, or those closest to us? What is true freedom? Is it better to be free in mind or body? Can we be free, even if we are imprisoned in a trap? Can we ever truly free ourselves from traps?
Jonas, Angelica, Will, and Sun have all managed to navigate these questions and find some form of freedom within their imprisonment. They’ve all had to negotiate their version of reality vs what someone else was trying to convince them was the true situation.
Metawitches 
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