Reverie Recap: No More Mr. Nice Guy
So far we’ve learned that Dylan is modeled on Alexis’ dead brother, and Mara is losing her hold on reality and seeing her niece–and this is simply referred to as a ‘side effect’. Yikes. Let’s see what’s next this week.
‘I’d like to make a withdrawal’
We start with a bank robbery that’s obviously inside a reverie. It looks like we can assume this is another guy wanting to escape reality when his wife discovers his sleeping body. His name is Nate.
Meanwhile Mara sees her niece again, and the kid communicates a little bit in yes and no nods. Mara goes to hug her, and the phone rings.
In the offices, we discover that Nate has been abandoning his job and wife, and the compny he works for will sue OniraTech if they cant bring Nate back. Hmm. Is the guy running away because he can’t face his child’s impending birth? Losing his house? His job?
Mara gets one day to bring him back.
‘He was a bank robber?’
Mara’s first time in isn’t exactly successful. As she commiserates with Paul, she finds out Lexie has a presentation to give to the investors, and he also suggests to Mara to try and get Nate to come to her.
Charlie and Paul chat about Mara’s health, and Charlie figures out who Mara might be seeing. Looks like he’s got a few ideas there…
Mara gets the idea to bait Nate with an armored truck. It works, and she gets a little time to talk to him. He’s in total denial that there’s a problem. He thinks his wife is better off without him. He ditches Mara by having an avatar drive the armored truck into a wall.
Mara talks to Nate’s wife, and she finds out that he’s been this way since the night they had a break-in. What happened during this break-in? The wife wasn’t in the room, so she doesn’t really know.
‘That’s a scary situation’
Mara puts Charlie on the job to find out everything he can on the break-in–ironically while he’s currently broken in to Mara’s place. Naughty, naughty. Why are you snooping?
Mara ruins some of Nate’s reverie riches to get his attention. While doing that, they get cornered by a huge, scary looking dude on a motorcycle who drags Nate away, chained to the back of the bike.
Where Mara comes out of the memory, she talks to Paul about the biker. The biker must be something significant to Nate. The program grabs things out of memory that people may subconsciously need. Paul demonstrates what he means by showing Mara one of his own reveries, where the program put his abusive alcoholic father from his past in a locked room because he needed to face his father to realize that his father was just a person, and he could conquer his fear.
Looks like Mara and Paul are getting a bit closer, hmm?
‘Wasn’t his first time, wasn’t his last’
Charlie finds the possible burglar, and tells Mara that Nate declined to identify the burglar to the cops. She figures out that the burglary definitely is at the root of why Nate is refusing to come out of the program.
Mara has a talk with Lexie about her presentation. She gives Lexie some advice on how to talk to the investors, and tells her to use how she really feels about reverie to make the presentation, not the dry and boring facts. Reverie is obviously really important to Alexis.
Charlie sets of a chance for Nate to identify the burglar to the cops. Mara talks to Nate, and found out that the reason Nate has been so involved in his reverie life is because he’s afraid. The burglar came back to his house after the break in and threatened him and his family if Nate went to the police. He felt like he couldn’t protect his family, so he felt like he didn’t deserve them. Like they’d be better off without them.
‘Do something about it’
Nate goes back, and IDs the burglar. Mara saves the day again.
Charlie confronts Mara about who she’s seeing in the derealization episodes. She admits it’s her niece, and that she hasn’t been taking the pills. She wants to see her niece.
After having talked to Nate and Paul about facing fears, she figures it’s time to face her own. She’d mentioned to Nate that she’d not even been back to the street her sister lived on, so she takes a pill and decides to confront her pain and go there. She goes to the house, walks in the front door, and starts confronting memories immediately.
She sees her niece, who tells her Mara is ‘here for a reason’. The house begins to pixelate and dissolve around her. The whole house is a derealization.
Yiiiiikes. Things are getting much, much worse. I really hope our Mara doesn’t lose her mind entirely. ‘Side effects’, they said. ‘Temporary’, they said. Hmm. Looks like a major case of ‘experiences may vary’. How far does this rabbit hole go?
Previous Episode: Bond. Jane Bond.
JL Jamieson is a strange book nerd who writes technical documents by day, and book news, reviews, and other assorted opinions for you by night. She is working on her own fiction, and spends time making jewelry to sell at local conventions, as well as stalking the social media accounts of all your favorite writers.