Reverie Recap: Point of Origin

Last week, Mara had learned that she had convinced Ray to shoot himself in the head after shooting Mara’s sister and niece. She and Paul went to the hospital where Ray was in a coma, implanted a BCI and entered his mind. Yikes. Let’s see where this is going.

‘Hello, Ray.’

So, Mara entered Ray’s mind. She has questions for Ray. She wants to understand.

Alexis goes home for her birthday. Her family has a house rule–she has to give up her phone while she’s there. Why do I sense this might not be the best thing this time?

There is only one of Dylan in the house.

Mara takes Ray into a reverie rendering of the old apartment the family lived in. Paul helped her make it. Mara asks Ray why he did it. Apparently, he got fired and was too embarrassed to tell Jaime, Mara’s sister. When she found out, she packed bags to leave. Ray felt powerless, and held her at gunpoint. Once the situation spiraled, he figured they’d all be better off dead.

Alexis is obviously uncomfortable. She asks why there’s only one picture of Dylan, and why they never put Dylan’s name on the birthday cake.

‘What did you want us to do, Lexie?’

They say they stopped talking about Dylan so as not to make her feel more guilty or hold her back. How did Dylan die?

Oliver shows up, and snatches Lexie when she goes to take out the garbage.

Back in Ray’s head, Ray tells Mara that she didn’t make him shoot himself, she just gve him permission. He already wanted to die–he still did. He keeps having dreams about his family. He’s forgetting what they look like. Mara gets upset and leaves the reverie.

When she comes out, Paul tells her Lexie is missing. Charlie has footage of Oliver at a local gas station. He’s called the police, but they can’t move fast enough. They’re going to get her themselves.

Charlie pushes Lexie into a reverie. It’s one of the DoD ones where she can’t leave.

‘Funny thing about Albert.’

Oliver starts lecturing her about the DoD usage. He says he’s not going to let her ruin reverie. Remembering he said he wanted to burn it all down, though….Lexie says her friends will find her, but Oliver says by then it will be too late. What’s he going to do with the source code? He leaves her locked inside the reverie.

Charlie, Paul and Mara find her, and since Oliver left, they can send Mara in. However, Oliver mentioned that the exit was keyed to his voice print. Will Mara be stuck?

Back in reality, Alexis’ login has turned off the air conditioning in the building. Did Oliver mean literally burn it down? Is he frying the servers? Oliver even locked out Dylan. Paul says if reverie crashes, it’ll fry the brains of any users in there.

When Mara goes in, she’s not directly taken to Alexis. Everything is dark and creepy and weird. Did Oliver anticipate this? She keeps running into creepy screaming ghost things.

Charlie tries to find more information about Oliver. He calls in Monica and Dylan to help him try to find Charlie.

‘How do I know you’re not an avatar?’

Mara finds Alexis. She can’t get into the room she’s in. They figure out how to make reverie work for them, and make a key to open the door of the room she’s in. Now they just have to find a way out.

Charlie, Dylan and Monica find something on where he might be. Paul recruits everyone in the building to cool the building and prevent more users from logging in. Meanwhile, Oliver is in the building dressed as a maintenance man.

In the reverie, Alexis explains to Mara that Oliver’s derealizations looked like the screaming ghosts they keep seeing.

Oliver gets into the server room claiming to be there to fix the AC, because the guy posted in there was careless. Ugh. He tells the guy to send everyone back upstairs? Then, he uses the key to lock down the main server room.

In the reverie, Alexis’ parents berate her for Dylan’s death. Wow, that’s sick. Since Mara is there, she gets Alexis past them easily. The exit is just beyond them. Or so they thought. Instead, they are in a frozen streetscape with people who have blank eyes.

‘He didn’t create this. I did.’

The streetscape represents a fear of Alexis’–that instead of bringing people together, Reverie would isolate them. Oliver is starting to really get into Lexie’s head. Mara tells Lexie about how reverie made her face what she told Ray to do, and it was able to connect her with Ray as well. They find the exit mandala. Charlie finds where Alexis’ body was hidden.

He also finds a lot of empty cans–ones that contain the components for thermite.

Charlie evacuates the building. Mara and Alexis bring Charlie in with them to try to save the servers–and the whole building, really. Since Oliver used her key, she can fight him. Mara tries to talk Oliver down. She finds out that the screaming apparitions were from a fire Oliver started in his youth. People died.

‘Do you have any idea what it’s like?’

Mara works her verbal magic. It doesn’t work. Oliver starts the fire, and flees into Reverie. Everyone makes it out, including a very burnt Oliver. He’s out in Reverie, however. Thankfully, they are able to isolate and prevent the fore from spreading. They save the rest of the servers, and the people that were logged into them.

When they begin testing the restore servers and the fixed 2.0, Mara goes back into Ray’s head. She gives him a picture of his family, so he can remember what they look like. He dies shortly afterward. It looks like not remembering what they looked like was what was keeping him alive.

Alexis fixes and upgrades Dylan. We find out how Dylan died–he was pestering her to play, and she was in the garage, working on something. She locked him out, and put in headphones so she didn’t hear him pounding on the door. He wanted to know what she was working on, so he climbed up the trellis…and fell through a skylight. She didn’t hear it, and he died. This was why she blamed herself. Her guilt and sadness what what spawned digital Dylan and Reverie. Dylan’s upgrade is to let him ‘grow up’. He gets a more mature voice.

Paul tells Mara he cares about her. AWWWWWWWW….that’s cute.

Reverie 2.0 is launched. Paul looks at a tablet, puzzled. When Mara asks him what’s up, he says Reverie shows her as being logged into the system. We see a messed up and pixelating Mara still crossing chalk x’s on doors in Oliver’s creepy reverie, as though she never made it out.

What the hell?

 

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