1899 thoughts
January - June 2023
EP 1
is this a poem from somewhere? i'm getting emily dickinson vibes. HOLY SHIT IM A GENIUS it is emily dickinson. okay anyway, emily dickinson. era appropriate. lesbian, shut in vibes. themes of imagination despite feeling trapped.
are you asleep and do you remember and where are you. she puts the photo of the prometheus (bound, chained, tortured, tried to give humanity light and fire and got punished eternally for it) over a diagram of the brain.
how many brothers? the letter is addressed to henry, from a brother. grounding statements. "i am maura. i am not crazy"
theme song refs alice in wonderland. another girl who travels in imagination.
french, chinese, spanish, polish, english, danish, german. everyone taking a sip at the same time???? that's so fucking cool !!!!
[later: wait okay so i'm listening to mindscape ep 41 w steven strogatz and he's talking about how firefly flashes get in sync. what if they're in sync somehow. because in the next episode beetles pop up, so maybe they're part of some organism/organization somehow?????]
lower class man begs for help and the old stupid doctor does nothing because obviously. there's something on the ship?
is there something weird about the baby?? other woman says it's god's baby, is that just a general child of god thing or is there something up with that baby? because the brother was like "you're killing us" so. i vote it's a creepy baby.
i feel a black man on a ship with almost all white passengers in 1899 is in danger.
the fucking audacity of lucien
what does polish boiler room guy know? he's worried about them turning the ship. has a photo of the statue of liberty
spanish brothers afraid of going back, right after the non-priest was like "i have no fear"
german captain has a photo of a family, and a chekov's gun probably. his letter addressed to eyk has an envelope exactly the same as maura's henry letter. "what is lost, will be found"
why doesn't mrs wilson want the chinese women to talk??
hm ship name is kerberos. who named these?
the crew seem afraid of the prometheus and what might be on it. what do they think could be on it? the first mate doesn't want them to go. they want the priest to go?? is the priest really a priest or is it a disguise?
god the isolation and fear of not fucking understanding anything that's going on because no one speaks your language
well this is homoerotic. but also the freedom to say whatever the hell you want because no one speaks your language. where's the scar from?
this ship looks in way worse shape than i would expect for only having been missing for four months. or does the humidity and cold of the sea make the deterioration faster?
eyk recognizes the embroidery?
did that person just crawl out of the fucking ocean?????? is the ship a decoy, a bait? where do you get an iridescent beetle in the middle of the ocean?
1011 that's something, right? 11 in binary?
what's with the beetle? a curse? does the mystery man control them? what's with the pyramid??
EP 2
eyk's family died in a fire? assuming this is memory not wild dream. does no one on this ship sleep in pajamas? (maura woke up from a nap also already dressed.) he kept the embroidery
how sure are we that the message from the company is actually from the company?
they're in no man's land. the compasses are all broken. lost at sea, baby!!
is the pyramid protection? a key? it looks beat up, maybe. or just old? the show logo has an upside down pyramid
"or maybe wolves" "do you know how many wolves it takes to kill 1000 people?" lmao my dudes where would the wolves come from???? also i hope they're right
captain is asking some good questions
that man is definitely not the neighbor, right? i thought he was the one who came out of the sea?
is jérôme a stowaway? what's with the medal? did clémence recognize it? is jérôme delivering it for someone?
trapped in a memory. eyk's wife is haunted by shadows- cf the danish sister talking about shadows in a ship. the beetle's back!! too brightly colored for the grays of the ship. it's the white rabbit?
!!! the upside down triangle on the secret door!! whose cabin is this??
okay creepy boy has the triangle tattoo behind his ear, and when maura goes to ask he motions for her to be silent, right after maura says "i was mad at him for taking away the one moment i thought i wasn't being watched." so. is the boy somehow connected to something Else, listening in? and that's why he doesn't want to talk?
is that spider embroidery on clémence's neck collar??? that's cool as hell. oooooo jérôme's using tu with her !!
okay so how does a portuguese servant end up posing as ángel's priest brother. holy shit what's up with ángel's back??
oh the marks are on the carpets too. did maura notice?
daniel has a photo of maura?? THEYRE BEING FUCKING WATCHED?????
EP 3
okay so the triangle is on ling yi's robe. was it always there? marking her as property
"sometimes we misinterpret those impulses" sure but the ribbon is real and in her hand, right?
she's pretending to be a different prostitute?? is she taking someone else's place? oh yes.
oh so is maura married? or was she? if she had a miscarriage in the past? "why are you afraid to go back home?" "because i lost everything" lost baby, lost husband (?), lost family? natural miscarriage or did something happen to her?
lost at sea. compasses broken, fog. was this what happens to the prometheus too? were they drawn off course by something too?
ah yes the trope of the woman in the box. what does olek think ling yi was doing? he helps her hide though
tove with her hair down. i feel like a woman of her social class/age should not have her hair down like this in 1899? oh it's a pieta parallel, carrying her sister in her arms
ángel and krester. through a grate, speaking of masks, can't verbally communicate, only actions. hm, krester name origin is follower of christ. and ángel is ángel of course. is ángel an angel to krester? dressed in fancy white clothes, speaking in tongues, knows about krester's desires.
are the prometheus and kerberos laid out exactly the same? at least there's the same weird trap door in both captain's quarters. should i interpret this black glossy tile as being anachronistic? idk enough about 19th century building materials to say. a tunnel out of time?
the beetle comes before daniel. wait okay is there a possibility that creepy boy is daniel but younger?? wait never mind, different colored eyes. but they know each other—daniel asks if he's "found it".
wait. henry singleton. coincidence that maura's envelope is also addressed to henry?? same henry? maura = maura singleton, maybe?
the fog comes into the hold (?) area where ling yi is. is the fog. magic?? or drugs?? also. a couple pairings now where people don't speak the same language, but are trying to communicate—ling yi in cantonese versus olek in polish, ángel and krester. oh okay so mei mei was supposed to be the prostitute on the prometheus?? was a friend of ling yi's? and she killed her. by accident.
what does olek think is happening?? "we are not supposed to have dreams" says ling yi. is that like a generic expression of pessimism like "dreams unfilled hurt, so we shouldn't dream of better times, because trying to reach them and failing hurts, and trying to reach them causes pain e.g. accidentally murdering a friend"? or is that a specific "i was promised by someone that by doing whatever it is that i am doing on this boat i wouldn't have dreams of these terrible memories"? is olek aware that she is supposed to be a prostitute?
ah yes the terrible awkwardness of coming back from your secret handjob to find your dead sister. what's behind the door he's trying to open/why is it locked? "we have to open the window or her soul won't leave"
oh shit more dead people. so. is this what happened on the prometheus? people slowing dropping dead? but i thought daniel killed tove's sister
maura thinks they burned all the bodies?? a book????? there's no way that should have been able to survive if the thing was on. so someone threw it in later? but eyk hides it from maura. because he saw a name on it?
lucien has a hand tremor, and a black edged envelope too. what was in the vial that he didn't want clémence to see?
virginia has cash, and a black edged envelope.
ling yi wearing the kimono to perform for lucien. but ling yi speaks cantonese so i feel like i can assume she's chinese and kimonos are japanese, right? is she just performing exoticism for a white man who can't tell the difference? or is there something happening there?
so lucien. doesn't want to have sex with her? is lucien having a seizure?? also. seems to be echoing ling yi's "we're not supposed to have dreams" motto
bloody faced sailor man brings up a good point. the company told them to sink the prometheus, and his theory is that they didn't want whatever was on the prometheus getting out. so. is the prometheus a failed experiment of some kind?
hm. tove knows how to load/shoot a gun. a bit unexpected.
ramiro's facial hair looks like the triangle symbol. hm ramiro killed someone too. and so did ling yi. did they all? a ship of murderers?
hmmmmmm maura's name is on the prometheus manifest. so. was she supposed to be there and never made it, and that's why she's so invested in it? or is maura not really maura at all, somebody else pretending to be her?
"as if someone sent this fog on purpose" i bet daniel is telling the truth. someone sent that fog on purpose
ramiro tries to warn eyk, but eyk can't speak portuguese. once again, trying to help but unable to communicate
daniel's got a fancy thing. it looks like one of those fifteen slider puzzles, seems to connect to the weird machine that was supposed to keep track of the fuel. which seems wildly too advanced for 1899—wireless devices?? holy shit. did daniel just disappear the kerebos??
EP 4
sand dunes!! oceans of sand in contrast to a ship on the water! idk enough about late 19th c world history to know where this is supposed to be happening. is this egypt or something? or is that lucien? "come back to reality my friend" hm. okay so lucien's framed as a bit of a coward, jérôme is the loyal soldier.
also. so far everyone's only been dreaming of memories. are we going to get any true dream sequences?
hm a lot of dead people on board. so franz thinks maybe they died of some disease, if he doesn't want to touch the bodies and makes olek and jérôme do it instead. also. i though daniel disappeared one of the ships at the end of last episode. are we going to talk about that or what? oh okay yes.
subtitled norwegian and russian. this is truly a cosmopolitan boat. is that. normal?
they were facing east, now they're facing west. they've been reset to their earlier position.
tove doesn't want to translate what the crew guy said about the creepy boy causing the deaths. is tove sympathetic to the boy? iben puts her hand on tove's stomach. i still want to know what is up with her baby. also, tove's not married, right?
why is ramiro helping eyk? like what's his motivation here? doesn't he want to get to america too?
okay so what's wrong with lucien exactly? like he's playing the bastard, is he just not dealing well with the fact that he's dying? related to his war memories? a massive case of karma?
"god doesn't talk to me like he does to your mother". literally?? why doesn't tove want to creepy boy to be evil? because if the boy is evil, then her unborn baby is also evil? with her hair down => sign of unmarried woman (??) => are we supposed to see her as a mary figure?
crawling through the tunnels on the ship :) one of my fav tropes
superstitious coal shoveler i looove youuu
olek i love you too. always trying to help even though he has no idea what's going on or what anyone is saying to him ever. this breathy chanting is great too. v atmospheric
nice hairpin clémence!! upside down triangle appears once more
oh ángel you stupid boy getting krester in trouble. "i wish he had taken you instead of ada" fucking cold thing to say to your son. i feel like the subtext her is that krester has been caught with a man before, like the mom definitely knows
oh so creepy boy also has the iridescent beetles, like daniel. oh the carpet !! lmao no one can fucking stay put on this ship
a traumatized german captain, fake portuguese priest, french veteran, and the best dressed lady on board, unite !
okay so jérôme put the medal in lucien's cabin. to remind him? to warn? threaten? and lucien throws it into the ocean, like jérôme and olek threw bodies into the ocean.
why was it necessary for lucien to lock jérôme away to go back as a lieutenant? why did he want to be on board? get revenge on lucien?
they all go mad. why does daniel care about maura?
maura: "like he accepted it was coming." did the boy know it was coming?? OH SHIT THE BOY'S IN THE CABINET JUST LIKE ON THE PROMETHEUS. he hugs maura ?????
EP 5
maura in the middle of nowhere, marks on her wrists, grave with a cross. like she was dropped from a mental hospital. "wake up" on the cross feels reminiscent of the "eat me" labels on alice's potions. or maybe that's too far a stretch?
today and everyday we say fuck you to involuntary hospitalizations
oh her room in the asylum is 1011, same as on the ship?? i'm assuming this isn't all just happening in her head though, right?
"wake up" comes a voice, but her eyes are already open. whose voice is it supposed to be?
tove says iben hearing voices is a sign of madness, not god. does she know the boy has reappeared? "it's not like you haven't killed before" says krester to tove. so far lots of murderers on this boat. what happened there?
clémence thinks maybe lucien never loved her. so why did they get married? lucien's background is full of lies, but he loves her
frozen in time !!!!! who triggered that? daniel trying to keep maura safe? the boy who didn't want to get shot? the pyramid?
the alarm ringing. who set it off? why is it stopped?? oh god they all drop their weapons and walk. except for a few. why yuk je and not ling yi ??? they're part of something, something has been activated. why some and not others? just throwing themselves into the water??? what the fuck????
are these other people considered dead weight somehow?
oh someone IS listening!! who is the creator? "don't be afraid" very ominous my dude.
i feel like daniel is way more invested in maura's wellbeing than i would have originally thought. did he already know her before this? and she forgot? "it knows we're here now." "we've never made it this far. maybe it will work this time." OH MY GOD ARE WE IN A TIMELOOP???
and yet they're still running out of time. they're on the run from someone—the creator?
is there something different this time around? how much of this has happened before? jérôme is trying to save lucien and clémence by tying them up, because he thinks the "jump overboard" thing is contagious. is he right? why would he want to save lucien? has jérôme been on the ship before?
why is the ticking only affecting some and not others? like generally speaking most of the unaffected are the narratively important ones—except for yuk je and krester. also i feel like initially daniel was framed as a sinister character, now it seems like he's trying to save (?) the ship (?) or at least maura. what makes him and the boy special?
cairn?? oh is also a brother. the "father" is looking for something. daniel and the boy were looking for something too. oh SHE is henry. four months = same amount of time the prometheus has been missing and the time that she lost her—cuts off. lost her baby??
the beetle is not just the white rabbit, it is also a key?
the shaft under maura's bed leads to the hills, the shaft under eyk's bed brings him to his old house. the ship is. the in-between place? maybe shafts in lucien's to egypt, ling li's to china?
that other crew member also has one of those fancy devices like daniel does, to make a crew member fall asleep. is he helping run the experiment? or is he working with daniel?
oh NOW iben cries for krester?
okay i tried decoding that message if it's morse code and either the right side up triangles or upside down triangles were dots or dashes but that didn't get me anywhere i think.
okay so old henry wants the boy and has a huge pyramid outside his window. interesting.
EP 6
okay eyk mr captain man taking charge. tricky to coordinate a bunch of passengers though when there's no shared language
and now iben thinks tove is chosen. i would say maybe there's a shaft under tove's bed to the forest from her dream of ada, but she was in steerage, right?
"could someone please explain what the fuck is happening?" ángel ur the best. also—gray crystalline structures growing out of the ship. something is decaying? growing? also why is ling yi with the men? just doesn't want to leave olek's side. daniel stops them from touching it—does he know what it is?
"well then who's dreaming it then? you or me?" excellent question maura. shared hallucination?
also i LOVE the visual of the black square hanging in the sky. reminds me of this print i have. also—crawling through tunnels as another alice in wonderland parallel?
does time move differently when they're in their memory shaft landscapes? every time the light of the sky seems the same.
two more months on the baby. i still want to know if there's something weird with the baby.
yeah clémence, putting on the pants. black pants too, the opposite of her white skirt. it's time to RUN baby !!
ling yi says "you will NOT be leaving me alone with those strange men, you're the only strange man i want to see." olek has a postcard from his brother—but no black edged envelope that we've seen so far, right?
okay so IF we're in a time loop situation, have ling yi and olek fallen in love before?
wait, i didn't see eyk/maura's lanterns in the tunnel when daniel crawled out. did they disappear??
"my father built this [mental hospital] for my mother"?? and they say romance is dead. big empty room with the single chair. partially in and out of the ship—ship's hull behind the windows and walls. it's bigger on the inside than it is on the outside
anker giving confession, in danish, to a fake portuguese priest who can't understand him at all. but it doesn't matter.
is it weird that iben is still on the ship? she was part of the group that was trying to jump. the weird stalactite stuff turning virginia to stone (?) like in the title credits !!
oh okay interesting. when tove revisits her memory, she's not pregnant anymore. so it's bringing her back to the remembered body too. wait i'm bad with faces, did krester's DAD shoot him in the face ?????? no definitely not, that was some other man
cabin 2102, does that mean anything to tove?
"maybe we've both gone mad" -> alice in wonderland says "maybe we're all mad here."
oh holy FUCK that's where the baby came from, oh my god. oh my god.
it seems like as much as jérôme hated him, maybe he doesn't want to see him dead?
anker and ramiro trying to figure out how to steer the ship is SO funny, i love them. "may your coffee kick in, before reality does." sir WHAT ?? was that what the books always said, or did it change.
okay so sebastian was definitely in on it. 48 hours until transfer?? "you know how much depends on the success of this experiment." sure but i DON'T. so what does he want people to see? or not see?
"i'm not going to let this happen again" says daniel. how much of this is happening exactly as it did before??
"we got married twelve years ago." SIR WHAT. what a thing to say to a woman who remembers her mother losing her grip on her memories. "wake up," he begs.
A FRACTURE IN THE AIR WHAT A VISUAL. an invisible wall. the limits of the experiment, maybe. and the old henry singleton watching from a screen, in distinctly non-1899 technology.
eyk comes back up in a ship graveyard with a dozen prometheuses ?????
EP 7
i'm back babyyyyy
"i love you. never forget" says daniel to maura. what a thing to say !!! i feel like the writers do great with dialogue that in another context wouldn't really make you think twice but here in this context is soooo meaningful. "i wish this moment would last forever." yeah well you're trapped in a time loop so.
hm interesting foil. maura says reality is what happens in your brain, daniel says reality is on the outside. so who's right? given all the weirdness on the ship, it seems like maura's right—her reality is what's happening to her on the prometheus. maura would get along with with descartes.
what!!!! what kind of modern apartment is this???? okay but her nightgown has those ties on the back, it looks like a hospital gown. what's with the sirens?? wait so daniel walks out of the apartment and sees the creepy hospital landscape. is he seeing that for the first time?
the black fabric (?) under daniel's head in the "wake up" scene almost looks like blood pooling. i thought he was dead at first.
oh now SHE has a device too? "we don't have much time before everyone will die again." oh the room number is 1011, like maura's cabin. also he begs but the expression on her face is one of total distrust. a nice contrast to the previous scene's "i love you"s.
"the awakening" book. is she awake?
does virginia know what's going on? now that her hand is stone? is it spreading?
i'm having thoughts about space and agency. so on one hand right maybe everything's in their heads. one shared hallucination. but maybe it's real and physical. so what does it mean when a character is trapped in a space they don't want to be in, like when daniel is trapped in the hospital and pries a wall panel off to find wires? is the thing keeping him trapped a physical block, or a mental one? what does it mean to pick up a metal bar thing and use it to open the wall?
?? okay that's sebastian, right? messing with a touch screen ???? if sebastian knows, is in on the "same side" as daniel or not? oh shit shutdown in 42 minutes.
god i LOVE a portal opening up in thin air. where's daniel now? whose memory is this? ahhhhhh he's being watched!! oo love the fade in from screen to scene
"we both know damn well that i'm not carrying god's child" says tove. so yes—she's kind of associated to a mary mother of christ archetype, but inverted (?)
wait wait okay if iben isn't hearing god's voice, whose voice is she hearing? what if it's the experimenter/henry singleton's voice?
oh how anker must love her. he knows they're both going to die, but he says he'll stay with her until the end. "yes, let us pray."
so first memory daniel shows up in is kind of a dusty hilltop with a well, with ramiro's rosary in the dirt. now he's by a cabin with blood on the snow, and olek's postcard. which other memories have we seen so far? maura in the hospital, eyk's forest house pre-fire, lucien in the desert (or is that jérôme's memory?), tove in the fields, daniel's bedroom in the loft (also with maura), ling yi and yuk je on the boat. who are we missing? i think ángel, clémence, virigina, krester. and of course somehow they're all connected.
clémence immediately goes to embrace lucien, not jérôme. does she like him or not? ángel embraces ramiro. i'm not so sure they can pass this off as a brotherly greeting lol
ling yi tells olek "i'll go wherever you go."
1013. daniel's cabin? with a photo of maura. THE LITTLE BOY IS THEIR SON??? or at very least she and daniel knew him.
graveyard. a little light grave desecration. is this back to maura's hospital landscape? i thought it looked the same.
the children's room with the boy!! he speaks!! okay yes definitely their child. maura has the code lost in her memory. are they in this mess because maura isn't waking up like she should? also i gotta say 10/10 casting, the boy does look like daniel's child.
more triangle message codes. it's still not morse code. but then again some of these strings of triangles are five long, which wouldn't be a standard letter. also the phrase "shutdown" is clearly written in english, so why not these triangle messages too?
also. if daniel and mural were a couple outside of the prometheus, are any of the other couples also together outside? olek & ling yi? is ángel with krester or ramiro?
okay daniel you're being very cryptic here. is elliot dead on the outside? is that why she wanted to forget? but he exists here?
sleeping beauty, wake her with a kiss
is maura the only one sleeping/dreaming? what about the other characters? are only daniel/maura/elliot real? but no—we've seen some of their memories.
why does henry care where the boy is? why is he doing this? to torture his own daughter?? also. is every time the simulation resets this much of a panicky mess?? so what is the point of the simulation? to see what they'll do in extremis?
NOOOO OLEK !!!!! nooo lucien !! no ángel !!! everybody just dying !!!! somebody better reset this fucking simulation immediately so i can get my boys back !!
AND franz sacrificing himself for tove ?? oh god oh god fruitless sacrifice for NOTHING i'm gonna cry
oh there you are, eyk. so this is the archive. heaven or purgatory or hell. survivor count: eyk, tove, ramiro, ling yi, maura, jérôme, clémence, virginia, maybe daniel. wonder if this is better or worse than usual.
AND THERE'S ONLY ONE MORE EPISODE ????
EP 8
okay here we go i'm ready to get my heart broken
okay so. elliot likes iridescent beetles. but also he's interacting with maura as his mother while they're both in 1899 clothing? when did this happen? did this happen? also also, why wouldn't elliot speak when he first appeared?
oh okay so that was elliot's dream/memory.
"they came on this trip because they made the choice to forget their past." i feel like i've been operating under the assumption that it isn't "really" 1899. but of course all these dream memory scenes have been set as if they occurred in 1899. so—are they totally false memories? recreations of something that happened in a more modern era? or how long have they all been stuck in the time loop? i don't think years and years, because the loop is only 8 days. although that would be horrific if they'd gone through it all thousands of times
what is maura looking at? "she's the only person who can get us out of here." is henry stuck too?
quick pause- i think i count maybe like 80-90 boats in the archive. presumably more beyond the horizon. yikes.
is it just me or do eyk and maura have some romantic tension
poor ramiro, no one can speak his language.
it feels like henry is trying to turn elliot against maura. why? why does he care?
something so inherently wrong/creepy when characters wonder through a memory landscape that isn't theirs
"trust me" says henry to elliot as if he was not being the most cryptically creepy man ever
it's elliot's prison ??????
did they build the simulation to hold elliot alive in stasis??? okay maybe. but then what went wrong? because maura doesn't remember elliot—what's the point if they aren't together in the simulation?
god henry's being so fucking condescending. "it was a mighty big thought for a girl her age" dude shut up.
what is daniel doing?? is he trying to give them escape routes?
who was in the well?? is lucien stuck in ling yi's memory?? "he's spreading the virus" WHAT VIRUS
"what kind of father could do this" the father of a mother who would trap her dying son in a simulation i suppose
white syringe for remembering black for forgetting
if henry created it, if maura did—either way the focus of the simulation is the maura/daniel/elliot trio. so why bring everyone else into it?
oh hey maura's eyes actually opened from being shut that time. that's new and different. oh wait okay is the grave by the mental hospital supposed to be elliot's grave? it does lead down into elliot's room
"you have to leave now" as in only maura??? she has to leave daniel behind?? daniel says he'll be there but i feel like he's lying
waking up in the room with everyone hooked up to machines—again i'm bad with faces—is everyone here someone in the dream? some of them look different
i'm sorry are they in a SPACESHIP
oh my GOD THEY ARE
"may your coffee kick in before reality does" same thing the navigation books said on the ship!!
what the fuck !!! netflix how DARE you cancel this !!!!!