1899: Episode 8

8. The Key

Henry tells Elliot the truth about the simulation being a prison made by his mother for him in a drastic attempt not to let him go. Eyk transfers to the Kerberos and Maura informs everyone about what she knows so far but they think she’s just crazy and they all try to get off the ship. Maura and Eyk go to Daniel’s memory and find a way back to the asylum as everything starts to glitch. They are cornered by Sebastian who deactivates Eyk with his device and takes Maura back to her father. They inject her with the serum but instead of the simulation restarting, she ends up in Elliot’s room under the cross where Daniel meets her after he hacks the mainframe and changes the values of the pyramid and the key. He hands over a new pyramid to her. Using their wedding ring as the new key, she finally wakes up in a spaceship called Prometheus. The year is 2099 and she sees the Survivors unconscious and attached to machines. She receives a message from her brother Ciaran on the monitor welcoming her to reality.

I liked my Alzheimer’s theory in episode 6 better. Nonetheless, my mind is still blown by that twist ending. “The Matrix meets Passengers” is probably the best way to summarize the storyline without getting a migraine trying to explain it. And since those eight episodes have been nothing but layers and layers of illusions or simulations or what have you that triggered trust issues in me, I don’t even know whether I want to believe that they are really onboard a spaceship in 2099 or this is yet ANOTHER SIMULATION in this delightfully weird sibling rivalry. We haven’t met Ciaran yet so if there is a Season 2, which I will be mightily pissed at should Netflix decide not to follow through, then we can expect a new face moving forward. If they go with the spaceship subplot as reality then the questions we can look forward to are curiosities about what happened back on Earth. If this is yet another simulation, then the writers can go on forever because they just have to change the setting each season until either Maura or Ciaran outwits the other.

“Our brain is a very complicated construct. As much as we can try to forget the things we don't want to remember, we will never be able to delete them entirely. They're part of who we are. Woven into our very fabric.” –Henry

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