Wil Williams Writes

Let’s Go Back to ars PARADOXICA is a relisten and recap series for season one of ars PARADOXICA released every week. You can see the full series here.

“34: Path”

An embed to RadioPublic’s direct link for the episode, which you can also find here.

Transcript
Written by: Daniel Manning, Mischa Stanton, Eli Barraza, and Tau Zaman

So, what happens in this episode?

After leaving ODAR, Dr. Grissom is on the road. She wants to get her story out to the press, taking it across the country so newspapers can investigate ODAR and get the word out. Unsurprisingly, her story does not take, given it sounds absolutely buckwild and is impossible to fact check. Dr. Grissom’s next try is to write the story herself with a typewriter, but she soon finds it’s more time-consuming and isolating than expected.

When Dr. Esther Roberts sets her up with a substitute teaching job at the University of Chicago, she jumps at the chance to at least do something. She finds out that she’s filling in for none other than Enrico Fermi. She sends him her book and he actually reads it, but tells her that nobody is going to believe her, even if he does. When she finds out he’s not coming back for the next academic year, she continues working, weaving her story into her lesson plans. This also doesn’t work well; she’s too impatient for how gradual the plan is, and all of her students just think she’s insane.

After an especially ruthless class, Dr. Grissom is visited by a familiar face made less familiar through the years: Jack Wyatt, or, as he’s going by now, Scott Palmdale. The two go out for food and catch each other up, sort of. Palmdale has twins now, his children taking the original names of him and his wife, once-was Penny. The two have been moving from city to city under new pseudonyms. Meanwhile, Dr. Grissom tells him just how much he’s missed–which is, essentially, everything. The crux of the conversation, though, is that Palmdale doesn’t understand why she’s holing up at this university, talking to undergrads who don’t care. She says she doesn’t know.

The episode is cut by Petra leaving a coded voicemail for someone. Her code all has to do with baseball, something she definitely doesn’t care about–but she’s asking after the status of a hot dog cart.

A year later, Dr. Grissom has been fired, and she can’t understand why she made any of the choices she has. They all seem erratic and unlike her. She decides to take some time to really listen to herself–and find Maggie Elbourne.

Next, Dr. Grissom visits Lou Gaines, who has been teaching at Alabama State. He says he missed it, and ODAR had nothing left to offer him when David Marian died. Dr. Grissom isn’t just here to catch up, though; she’s also here for a favor. She wants to know where Maggie Elbourne is, because she’s realized she has Butterfly Syndrome again. That’s why her decisions are erratic: for her brain, everything is happening out of order, so she can’t think through what her decisions should be. Very reluctantly, Gaines tells her where Elbourne’s been, but tells her she has to stop looking if she’s even a little suspicious she’s being followed.

On May 28th, 1955, Dr. Grissom shows up at Maggie Elbourne’s cabin–followed shortly thereafter by Dr. Nikhil Sharma. The two are thrilled to reunite, but Elbourne is less thrilled. Dr. Grissom explains that she’s left ODAR and that Dr. Sharma is a friend, and Elbourne lets them in. She already knows they’re looking for a cure for Butterfly Syndrome, and she does have one–left on her door just before June Barlowe showed up to help cure a dying Ben Quigley–but she can’t synthesize a compound necessary for its success: cortichronopine. There’s no way to synthesize it without advanced tech–so Dr. Grissom hatches an extremely dangerous plan.

The plan is to have Mateo Morales come back from the future with some of the cortichronopine, and then have Elbourne make the cure in five minutes to cure Morales before he dies. It’s a wild plan, but they have no other choice–and when they’ve practiced enough to have it down, it works. Dr. Sharma is reunited with Morales, and the cure for Butterfly Syndrome is successful.

Later, after Morales has woken up, Elbourne says she may or may not take the cure herself. Dr. Grissom has taken it–and Dr. Sharma gives her antibiotics so she won’t die from infection and undo all their hard work. Dr. Sharma and Morales plan on going somewhere, but the conversation is cut off by a phone call . . . for Dr. Sharma. He cautiously takes the call, and when Morales points out that the only people Dr. Sharma cares about are in the room, Dr. Grissom understands that it must be Petra. Dr. Sharma confirms this, saying she stills wants him to be part of her plan, but he turns her down.

Dr. Grissom tells Dr. Sharma and Morales that she wants them to keep playing all of her recordings. Her story has to get out there somewhere. But they realize that this means that because of how time works, they have to be far away from each other.

Dr. Sharma: It means that for the success of both of our missions, we should try to complete them in a fashion that won’t negate each other. And since we’re only trying to find an Outpost, well . . . They have Outposts in some pretty remote places.

Morales: It means that, for the sake of both of us, this should be the last contact we can ever have with you, Dr. Grissom. I’m sorry.

Dr. Grissom: Well, then I guess this is . . . You know what? We’ve said goodbye enough already. This time I just want to say: Good luck.

Dr. Sharma: Good luck, Sally. You might need it.

Elbourne kicks them all out of her house, because she is frankly done with being mixed up in their horseshit.

Dr. Grissom talks to Dr. Roberts, who is building Quantum Dynamics & Mechanics, a new laboratory. Dr. Roberts says she and Chambers are making things work–but fairly quickly, the conversation moves to revolve around Petra. Both of them are worried about her, and Dr. Roberts points out that there have been sightings of her around the world at the same time, meaning there are duplicate Petras again–that’s who she’d been leaving voicemails for throughout the episode. Dr. Roberts wants Dr. Grissom to help her stop Petra here in the new lab, but Dr. Grissom turns her down, saying she’s instead going to do “the one thing [Dr. Roberts] can’t.”

Petra Prime leaves one last voicemail for the other Petras, saying she’s impressed by how much they’ve accomplished. They have everything they need for the plan. There’s the sound of a Timepiece, and then Dr. Grissom’s first narration from back in episode 1.

Key facts and characters

• Cortichronopine: The medical compound necessary for the successful cure of Butterfly Syndrome.
• Scott Palmdale: The new pseudonym for Jack Wyatt.
• Quantum Dynamics & Mehcanics: Dr. Esther Roberts’s new lab.

How does it hold up?

A solid episode, “34: Path” is cemented best by the performance of Lauren Shippen as Maggie Elbourne. Shippen’s effortlessness in conveying Butterfly Syndrome, weaving easily between the mixed-up tenses, is dizzying and delightful. She carries each line so naturally.

Butterfly Syndrome

Timeline 1

• Starting time: Dr. Grissom is from a modern-day alternate timeline (see ODAR & You! for more on that) that she is pulled out of on August 14th, 20XX.
  • 20XX is sometime after 2014, a year that has not been redacted; 2014 is when Dr. Grissom received her PhD from MIT. If she started working at the SSC directly after graduating, 20XX would be 2016.
  • XXXX: Dr. Nikhil Sharma goes back in time with two conflict missions: kill Dr. Grissom or bring her back to the current year.
• Jump back: On August 14th, 20XX, Dr. Grissom lands back in October 29th, 1943.
  • On October 29th, 1943, Dr. Grissom is brought to her new home of Polvo, New Mexico.
  • On January 17th, 1944, the blackout hits, but Dr. Grissom does not move forward with the test on the Timepiece.
  • On Wednesday, July 16th, 1945, Dr. Grissom, Anthony Partridge, Helen Partridge, and Chet Whickman witness The Trinity Test.
  • On September on an unnamed date, Quentin Barlowe is killed by a bullet in a time loop:
    • Loop A1: Quentin Barlowe is shot by Chet Whickman from Timeline 3.
    • Loop A2: Dr. Grissom is shot by June Barlowe, which is then sent back in time to kill Quentin Barlowe, also closing the loop.
  • Quentin Barlowe’s funeral occurs on September 16th, 1945.
  • Dr. Grissom invents the TAP on September 20th, 1945.
  • The ODAR Christmas party, and subsequent mass firing, is on December 21st, 1945.
    • Loop B1: When the Polvo power grid overloads, Dr. Grissom A uses the timepiece to help save Polvo.
    • Loop B2: Dr. Grissom B goes to RAINBOW A and pulls the lever to regulate the power. RAINBOW B explodes.
    • Loop B3: Dr. Grissom C chokes out Lambert and saves RAINBOW A, saving the town in conjunction with Dr. Grissom B or Maraczek.
  • December 24th, 1945: Dr. Grissom A wakes up. Dr. Grissom B and C have been killed by Cornish and Donovan.
  • February 1946: Dr. Grissom, Roberts, Wyatt, Anthony Partridge, and Helen Partridge are moved to Point of Exile, Colorado, by Donovan and Whickman.
  • March 1st, 1946: Dr. Grissom concludes that forward time travel using the timepiece is impossible.
  • August 2nd, 1946: Dr. Grissom accidentally gets stuck in the CAGE for an hour and a half.
  • August 18th, 1946: Helen Partridge’s jazz performance.
  • September 9th, 1946: Roberts and Whickman stay in the CAGE for just over 22 hours.
  • December 23rd, 1946: Helen Partridge leaves Point of Exile.
  • December 24th, 1946: Partridge discovers Donovan’s tapes.
  • October 27th, 1949: Dr. Grissom establishes the answering machine in The Blackroom, and Esther Roberts reunites with Bridget Dreyfuss. Dr. Nikhil Sharma is brought back from XXXX.
  • November 2nd, 1949: Dr. Grissom and Dr. Sharma break into the ODAR HQ.
    • Loop A: Dr. Nikhil Sharma is killed by Chet Whickman.
    • Loop B: Petra revives Dr. Nikhil Sharma.
  • November 1950: Hank Cornish starts working with Andrew Thurston to cover with tracks with the KTNK.
  • February 27th, 1953: Dr. Roberts is put in house arrest.
  • March 3rd, 1953: Dr. Roberts’s trial.
  • May 28th, 1955: Mateo Morales is brought back from the future. The cure for Butterfly Syndrome is completed.
  • May 19th, 1985: Petra, Carmen, the other children, and Van arrive after travelling back in time.
    • Loop 1: Liam travels back in time ten minutes to see himself.
    • Loop 2: Liam A meets Liam B from 10 minutes in the future, giving him severe Butterfly Syndrome.
  • December 13th, 1990: Petra, Carmen, the other children, and Van travel back in time to May 19th, 1985.
  • 20XX: Director LeMartine travels back in time to take over for Dr. Roberts as Director of ODAR.

Timeline 2

• Starting time: Dr. Grissom is from a modern-day alternate timeline (see ODAR & You! for more on that) that she is pulled out of on August 14th, 20XX.
  • 20XX is sometime after 2014, a year that has not been redacted; 2014 is when Dr. Grissom received her PhD from MIT. If she started working at the SSC directly after graduating, 20XX would be 2016.
• Jump back: On August 14th, 20XX, Dr. Grissom lands back in October 29th, 1943.
  • On October 29th, 1943, Dr. Grissom is brought to her new home of Polvo, New Mexico.
  • On January 17th, 1944, the blackout hits, but Dr. Grissom moves forward with the test on the Timepiece, which then sends an electromagnetic pulse backwards in time into Timeline 1.

Timeline 3

• Starting time: Dr. Grissom is from a modern-day alternate timeline (see ODAR & You! for more on that) that she is pulled out of on August 14th, 20XX.
  • 20XX is sometime after 2014, a year that has not been redacted; 2014 is when Dr. Grissom received her PhD from MIT. If she started working at the SSC directly after graduating, 20XX would be 2016.
• Jump back: On August 14th, 20XX, Dr. Grissom lands back in October 29th, 1943.
  • On October 29th, 1943, Dr. Grissom is brought to her new home of Polvo, New Mexico.
  • On January 17th, 1944, the blackout hits, and Dr. Grissom does not go forward with the test on the Timepiece.
• On September on an unnamed date, Quentin Barlowe is killed by Chet Whickman after Whickman finds out that Barlowe’s records are fake. The bullet is sent through a rift in time to Timeline 1.

Fragment Timelines

Throughout the series, there are fragmented timelines that the audience is never given the full details of. Instead of trying to factor these into the main timelines, they’ll be given their own sections.

Bill Donovan’s Tapes

In the first season, Partridge finds the tapes that Donovan has been sending to himself from the future using his own Timepiece to make sure he gets his way. Only certain tapes were played in the episode, “10: Consequence, Act I.”

• Tape 1: Recorded August 1st, 1945; sent back to July 10th, 1945. Donovan tells himself to let Partridge take the others to Las Vegas. He tells his past self that J. Edgar Hoover is gay.
• Tape 2: Recorded July 17th 1945; sent back to July 10th, 1945. Donovan tells his past self that the intel on J. Edgar Hoover wasn’t sufficient.
• Tape 5: Recorded July 26th, 1945; sent back to July 18th, 1945. Donovan tells his past self that Winston Churchill lost the United Kingdom general election and that they should call in a favor.
• Tape 7: Recorded August 10th, 1945; sent back to August 4th, 1945. Donovan tells his past self that Truman still will not fund their work until he sees good evidence that it’s going towards something.
• Tape 12: Recorded September 12th, 1945; no date listed for when it was sent back. Donovan says that he found the tape of Chet Whickman from Timeline 1, Loop A1, shooting Quentin Barlowe.
• Tape 16: Recorded December 3rd, 1945; sent back to November 28th, 1945. Donovan tells his past self that Hank Cornish has arrived in town.
• Tape 19: Recorded December 12th, 1945; sent back to December 11th, 1945. Donovan tells his past self how to avoid being hit by a car.
• Tape 20: Recorded December 12th, 1945; sent back to December 11th, 1945. Donovan tries again to tell his past self how to avoid being hit by a car.
• Tape 21: Recorded December 12th, 1945; sent back to December 11th, 1945. Donovan tells his past self to not go outside.
• Tape 26: No dates given. Donovan tells his past self to tell “her” how much she means to him.
• Tapes 29-33: Recorded December 21st, 1945; sent back to December 20th, 1945. Donovan tells his past self how to trigger the explosion in Polvo, make sure Dr. Grissom uses the Timepiece to create duplicates of herself, and then use those duplicates as physical proof that the timepiece is working to get their funding.
• Donovan’s final tape: Recorded December 10th/15th/18th, 1946: Donovan tells his past self that his illness is getting worse, but he receives the tapes.

Elbourne’s experiments

• Experiment 1: Food is sent to a mouse back through the Timepiece.
  • Loop 1: The mouse, Kronos, pushes a button, and receives his food an hour later. Food is brought back to Loop 2 through the Timepiece.
  • Loop 2: Kronos receives his food as soon as he pushes the button. The food is received from an hour into the future via the Timepiece.
• Experiment 2: A mouse is sent back through the Timepiece many times to complete a maze.
  • Loops 1-6: The mouse, Hermes, attempts to complete the maze with quickly declining proficiency.
  • Loop 7: Hermes is dead at the start of the maze.
• Experiment 3: Three mice are sent back to their past selves. Pushing a button, the future mice will receive food but shock their past selves.
  • Loop 1: The mice–Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos–are raised to adulthood. They are trained to receive food by pushing a button.
  • Loop 2: The adult mice are sent back through the Timepiece to adjoining cages to their past selves.
    • Future Clotho pushes the button, indifferent to the pain of Past Clotho.
    • Future Lachesis refuses to push the button, starving herself.
    • Future Atropos attempts to kill Past Atropos by abusing the button, regardless of receiving food.
• Experiment 4: A mouse will be sent to raise itself in the past with its mother.
  • Loop 1: A mother mouse raises a child mouse in isolation.
  • Loop 2: The child mouse, now an adult, is sent back through the Timepiece to raise itself with the mother. The adult mouse attempts to kill its past self.

The Recruitment of Gaines and Marian

In a version of the current timeline, both Gaines and Marian are recruited into ODAR. Sometime after October 28th, 1943, Marian is given the order to stop Gaines from joining ODAR.

• Loop 1: Both Gaines and Marian are recruited by ODAR.
• Loop 2: The current timeline, Marian destroys Gaines’s offer letter to work for ODAR.

The Multiple Petras

In order to execute the jailbreak plan for Maraczeck and Lambert, an infinite number of Petras traveled to the past, to other Petras’ timelines, to help them learn from their mistakes.

• Petra 1: Taught by all the iterations before herself, Petra’s mission fails, so she uses the Timepiece to travel to the timeline of Petra 2.
• Petra 2: Taught by Petra 1, she attempts the jailbreak plan and fails. Petra 1 dies, and Petra 2 travels to the timeline of Petra 3.
• Petra 3: Taught by Petra 2, she attempts the jailbreak plan. Petra 3 is the Timeline 1 Petra, and she is currently still joined by Petra 2.

The Death of Cornish

In Timeline 1, Hank Cornish almost escapes after being revealed as ODAR’s mole. Partridge, from the Blackroom, rips him out of time and lands him in another timeline, where his corpse washes ashore and is found by that timeline’s Chet Whickman.

ODAR & You!

• Dr. Grissom briefly mentions National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. NaNoWriMo is an annual challenge to write 50,000 words in one month.
• Jack Wyatt says that he wasn’t aware of the board game Scrabble during one of his prior pseudonyms. Scrabble has an interesting history, but it wasn’t popularized until 1952, when the president of Macy’s played the game on vacation and then demanded it be sold in his stores.
• Linguistics time!
  • Maggie Elbourne says, “Bob’s your uncle,” an English idiom that at least goes back to 1924, but might have roots all the way back in the 1700s.
  • Dr. Roberts uses “sly” to mean “gay,” which was definitely done–but I’m having trouble finding sources. I’d love any to be shared in the comments!
• The mystery of the numbers station at the end of each episode is. If you’ve been decoding them–or, like me, just reading them on the Wiki–you can see that they become clearer and clearer messages for characters in the story, sent back through time by Morales and Dr. Sharma.
  • The weather in MEMPHIS today is: banjoes

Next week, I’ll be recapping episode “35: Tangent.” For all of the ars PARADOXICA recaps, start with this post, or see all of the posts in the series here.

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