1899

“The Key”, Season 1 Episode 8

Requested By

Dan200 on Discord

What do I know about this series going into it?

Never heard of it. The blurb going in mentions a ship, a Daniel, and a Maura.

Recap

The wilderness, with rushes rustling in the wind. A kid with a British accent calls out to his mother and shows her a beetle he has captured and named Alfred. He wants to put Alfred in a small box, but in a heavily metaphorical conversation she tells him that he has to let it free.

Gosh, I wonder what she’s actually talking about.

But as he hugs her, she vanishes, and he is in a desolate wasteland holding only her clothes. He cries out - and wakes up. This was a nightmare; he’s at home, in an enormous bedroom with Victorian-era décor. Also in the room is Obviously Evil Old Guy, watching people on modern TV monitors – one of which shows the kid’s mother. “Your mother has fooled you,” says OEOG, “and she’s the only person who can get us out of here.” He offers to show the kid “the truth”.

Well, so far this is impressively opaque.

Opening credits, with ships and pyramids and statues shattering. One statue is recognizably the kid.

We fade back in on a flotilla of ships. “Eyk” climbs onto one of them from the water and embraces the kid’s mother, Maura. Eyk demands that Maura stop lying about who “he” is, and she admits that “he” is her husband. More confessions follow: her son was found “on the Prometheus”; her father owns the ship company and somehow gave them amnesia; and wherever they are, they’re in a (computer?) simulation. Nobody else believes her, but she points out that none of them remember how they boarded the ships in this flotilla.

Yes it is. You’re the main character.

She also admits that her husband is working for her father, who I suspect is OEOG. And everyone has a mysterious envelope in their pocket that they don’t remember putting there.

Elsewhere, a man is trying to do something with some kind of machine. With magic bubble buttons.

OEOG has taken the boy into a desolate wasteland overlooking a pyramid. He has a handheld device that controls reality, so they must be in a computer simulation too (but not the same one as the flotilla). He uses the device to take them to the wilderness from the kid’s dream.

For example, my actual name is Count Olaf.

Back on the flotilla, everyone demands answers from Maura, but she only remembers one thing: waking up on a ship called the Kerberos, and finding a key in her envelope, which was sent to her by her brother. She doesn’t remember anything before that.¹ There’s some kind of black spikes that are spreading and taking over the ship, and some of the group wants to flee using a lifeboat.

Maura objects: it’s all a simulation, there’s nowhere to go! But they all think she’s crazy and leave. Only one guy sticks with Maura. He and she run into a room and start pulling up the floorboards, whre they find impenetrable metal panels. “You think your father is here, in your memory?” the man asks. So I don’t understand – is this a computer simulation, or are they inside Maura’s subconscious?

They break through walls and floors to go from setting to setting, some of which are obviously not on board a ship, until they find scattered photographs – modern photographs – depicting Maura and her family. She doesn’t remember them at allnot even being married. Her father created “this”. They tear down another wall, under the logic that they need to get from one place to another inside her brain. I have no idea what’s going on.

Meanwhile, Magic Bubble Button Man activates the machine and is connecting bits of it to each other. Whatever he does turns out the lights back on the ship, replacing them with red emergency lighting and a siren. The spikes begin to spread more rapidly, and the group that was headed for the lifeboat is quickly trapped and separated from one another.

OEOG has taken the kid into a room with some kind of torture chair. He reveals that the simulation was built to trap the kid, not his mother, then injects the kid with something.

The kid wakes up inside one of his own memories. His parents are there (Maura and Magic Bubble Button Man). Over MBBM’s objections, she injects him with something that will make him “forget”, which is “the only way they can be together”. Maura had trapped the kid in this simulated world, because he was dying and it was the only way to keep him alive and them together. And the key in her envelope is the only way to exit the simulation.

So did something go wrong with the simulation, trapping them all there? Did OEOG tamper with it? Is the real world also in (I assume) 1899, or the modern day, or somewhere in between? Is the simulation technological or an induced mental state? If the latter, how is Maura inside the same simulated reality as the kid?

Back on the ship, MBBM makes all the doors disappear so that the group can’t flee from the spikes. Is he the bad guy? Maybe not – after letting them freak out for a bit, he eventually opens portals into various outdoor settings on dry land that can’t possibly be connected to the ship they were on moments earlier.

You and me both, lady.

OEOG and the kid return to the monitor room, where a subordinate reports that MBBM has hacked into the mainframe and is “changing the architecture of the simulation”, trying to wake everyone up without having to resort to use of the key. If he succeeds, OEOG and his subordinate will be trapped forever.

MBBM continues his manipulations of the now-separated group, making “Ramiro” hear his dead friend “Angel” calling out to him from inside a well and “Clemence” hear “Lucien” calling out to her from inside a box. But it’s “Olek” who comes out of the box, made out of some kind of oil. Using new portals, MBBM reunites the group on the ship they started from, this time with no spikes.

I don’t know what this accomplished, but OEOG (watching over monitors) tells the kid that it proves his father is choosing Maura over the kid.

Meanwhile, Maura and her friend have entered a building where her father “did something” to her. But they are cornered by OEOG’s subordinate, who demands the key.

I can’t help but feel personally attacked here.

He too has a reality-manipulation device, so she hands it over. Still, he presses a button that kills her friend Eyk, just to be a jerk.² The subordinate then takes Maura to OEOG, who as I guessed is her father; the kid’s name is revealed to be Elliot.

OEOG teleports them to the room with the torture chair and straps Maura into it. You are the Creator, he reveals, which the soundtrack treats as a major reveal, even though we already knew this. He injects her with something to make her forget everything again.

Meanwhile the group have reached the engine room, but it is coming apart into lava.

“I can accept magic spikes, disappearing doors, and portals that open in thin air and take you from the middle of the ocean to dry land and back. But this is where I draw the line!”

OEOG, Elliot, and the subordinate teleport back to OEOG’s study without Maura. He inserts the key into a handheld pyramid and turns it, but nothing happens. Something MBBM did “changed the code”! A computer voice announces that the simulation has been corrupted and is being deleted. The ships, the ocean, everything vanishes.

Maura wakes up. She is lying on her back in a hospital gown in the middle of nowhere, and is wearing a wedding ring. A beacon of light shines on a cross on a hill.

She climbs down a ladder into a bunker and sees the picture of her, MBBM, and Elliot. MBBM arrives. “It worked!” he says, and embraces her – though she seems not to remember him.

MBBM reports that they escaped the simulation, but they’re not in the real world yet. This is the first simulation that he and Maura created. He had reprogrammed the computer: he changing the code for the syringe, so that it didn’t make Maura forget, but rather brought her here; he deleted the code behind OEOG’s pyramid and pasted it into this other pyramid that he’s got here; he deleted the code behind the key and pasted it into Maura’s wedding ring.

There’s a further reveal: MBBM says neither Maura nor her father trapped everyone in the simulation, but rather Maura’s brother, who’s been brought up a few times in the episode but didn’t seem important enough for me to mention.³

MBBM tells Maura that she has to wake up and stop him before he figures out they escaped. She puts her wedding ring in the pyramid and wakes up.

Good thing she hasn’t gained weight in the simulation. I haven’t been able to remove my wedding ring for years.

She’s standing in a circular room, with a futuristic apparatus around her head that clearly controls the computer simulation. Removing the apparatus, she looks around and sees various characters from the series, all attached to similar apparatuses that line the walls of the room. She still has her wedding ring on her hand. And she looks out the window to discover they’re on a massive rotating spaceship.

She approaches a computer terminal, which brings up a readout: Project Prometheus. Passengers: 1423. Crew: 550. Date: Oct. 19, 2099. Then a message from Ciaran: “Hello, sister. Welcome to reality.”

DUN DUN DUN!

Unresolved questions

• Is Maura actually in reality this time?

• What is the purpose of the trip through space? Are they colonizing a new planet or is this a standard commercial flight, like one would take today to Europe? (Calling it “Project Prometheus” makes it sound like the former.) Is Maura passenger or crew?

• What is the simulation’s purpose? Are passengers kept in stasis permanently for the flight, or is this a rec room in which people pass an afternoon? If it’s permanent, they don’t appear to be in stasis, so how do they eat, drink, and go to the bathroom?

• Why was the 1899 setting chosen? Why did the people who entered the simulation have to have their memories wiped? Were they all in the same simulation, or did the computer simply populate the simulation with faces that Maura knew?⁴ Assuming it really was a shared hallucination, how much of the characters’ personalities is drawn from reality, and how much was altered by memory-erasure and memory-changing shenanigans? What happened to the characters who were in the simulation when it was deleted - were they merely transferred to new simulations, or did they get brain damage?

• Maura didn’t even speak after she woke up, so we know nothing about her in reality. Has her memory been restored? The mental hospital and the desolate wastelands didn’t look like they belonged to the same world as the spaceship. Are those really Maura’s memories or just part of the fiction? Did MBBM and Maura really invent the simulation technology, and was its purpose really to upload Elliot’s mind into a computer before he died? (I don’t think I saw OEOG or Elliot among the people in the room at the end. Do they really exist?) The director made sure to show us that Maura still had a wedding ring when she woke up, but is MBBM really her husband? Was he really responsible for waking her up or is that just the excuse the simulation invented for continuity purposes?

• How much do OEOG and MBBM remember about reality? Do they know they’re space travelers? If so, why was OEOG so desperate to escape the simulation, if the ship’s not at its destination yet? Did something go wrong and he regained enough memory to know the world isn’t real, but not enough to know it’s okay to stay there for another few months as originally intended?

• What were the envelopes about? Did everyone have a key in their envelope at first, which is how they were supposed to exit the simulation if they wanted? Did something then go wrong, like OEOG stealing the keys or Ciaran making them disappear?

• Is Ciaran evil? Is he tormenting the people in the simulation and/or keeping them trapped there, or is he just the random crewman in charge of running it? Or is he just a random other passenger on the ship who asked the computer to ping him when his sister came back from the holodeck? How much does he know about what happened inside the simulation? Is there anything sinister happening at all, or did everyone in the simulation suddenly freak out for no reason?

Ratings

I have a standard disclaimer that I always put at the start of the Ratings section. It emphasizes that I am analyzing the finale in isolation, and that nothing that I say applies to the earlier episodes of the series.⁵

But this time I have to write a custom disclaimer. It is abundantly clear that the series was canceled at the worst possible moment: just after we were told almost everything was a dream, but just before we could be told which parts of the dream were real.

The showrunners had just shattered a vase, and were about to pick up only the biggest pieces and glue them together to form something new. But they were prevented from doing so - which unfortunately means I’m reviewing a shattered vase.

Therefore, far more than usual, I want to emphasize that the criticism here does not apply to the rest of the show. I am treating the ending as though it were intended, when it was clearly not.

Story: 3/10. The story wasn’t very well-developed. There was an extended detour in which MBBM worked to separate all the members of the group and then bring them back together, seemingly just to pad the runtime. And we spent a lot of time retreading the same water: it’s a simulation, it’s not real, Maura created the prison.

But the biggest problem is the ending. It does too good a job of erasing all that came before, leaving viewers with nothing to lean on. Is there any point to discussing the events in flotilla-world? For all we know none of it - Elliot’s illness, OEOG’s imprisonment, MBBM’s “first simulation”, and so on - was real. Maybe they were all invented by the computer and the spaceship reality bears no resemblance to it whatsoever.

I once dreamt that I teamed up with an axe-wielding Charles Krauthammer to defeat a time-travelling serial killer. And while I, Charles Krauthammer, and serial killers are all things that exist, the only one of us who acted like its real self was the axe.

So even if we assume that the spaceship is the real reality, we only know two facts that it shared with the simulation: That the main character has a brother named Ciaran, and that she wears a wedding ring. We know nothing about her son or her father, if they are the people the simulation claimed they are or if they even exist. We know nothing about her personality or her life story. We don’t even know if her name is really Maura! And while we saw some other characters’ faces, we know even less about them.

One could create the same cliffhanger in the finale of literally any other television show:

Just as Greg Davies was about to hand the trophy to the winner, he accidentally pressed the big red button in its base, and woke up on a spaceship.

Okay, it’s not as bad as that. In this case, “it’s a simulation” was a heavy part of the plot, so it didn’t come out of nowhere. But can we believe anything we saw before the final scene?

Writing: 6/10. Generally above-average writing for television, which made for an enjoyable episode overall. I’m concerned as to how cliched and evil OEOG’s behavior was. But I can’t criticize that too much; maybe he was intended all along to be a cartoon villain made up by a computer simulation.

Production: 9/10. Good set design in general. Very high quality special effects, if slightly overdone (though again, maybe the overdoing is part of the point). Good acting, especially from the child who played Elliot. His behavior in the injection scene was so realistic that I started to grow concerned for the actor’s welfare.

Characterization: 2/10. The episode’s focus on resolving the mystery to the exclusion of all else left little room for character. Aside from OEOG, whose behavior was stereotyped and over-the-top, I know nothing about the personality of any other character, in or out of the simulation.

Accessibility: 4/10. I’m surprised myself at how high I’m rating this, given how confused I was throughout the episode. After all, this is supposed to be the part where I list major characters whose names I don’t know (OEOG, MBBM), plot points I didn’t understand (the aforementioned detour engineered by MBBM) and so on.

But imagine if you watched only the last scene of The Wizard of Oz, where (spoiler alert) Dorothy wakes up. You’d know almost as much about Kansas as someone who watched the entire film, and can accurately describe its setting as a perfectly normal farm in the late 1930s, in which a girl one day had a weird dream.

1899’s flotilla-world has about equal claim to being real as the Land of Oz. So it doesn’t matter how much of the former I failed to understand; all I need to understand is the spaceship reality. And I have as much information about that as any fan of the show.

It would’ve been hilarious to give this a 10/10 as a result, and I was tempted to do so. But I did spend the vast majority of the episode utterly lost, so I can’t.

Closure: 1/10. Not only does the finale not offer closure, I’d wager that it leaves you with more questions than you had at any other point in the series.

Do I want to watch the series now?

Yes and no. The episode was good enough to recommend the series from the beginning. And I’m very curious as to the setup: What have the episodes been about until now? How early was the “it’s a simulation” solution hinted to, and when did it become obvious?

The trouble is, I’m hesitant to take it up if nothing prior to the last scene was real.

Now, this objection would seem to apply to any work that has an All Just A Dream-style ending. Am I saying that all such works are pointless?

I am, but only if the work has no purpose beyond the mystery.

Consider Life on Mars, a British series about a cop in 2006 who gets hit by a car and wakes up in 1973. Has he travelled back in time, is he in the afterlife, is this a coma-induced hallucination?

That mystery is the central plot of the series, but not its purpose. Life on Mars is a police procedural; the mystery just provides extra spice. You watched the show to see Sam Tyler solve the crime of the week while trying to cope with his unfamiliar surroundings and dual existence. If the end had revealed it was all just a dream (and I’m not saying it did - you’ll have to watch it), that wouldn’t make the series irrelevant.

1899’s finale is firmly in the puzzlebox genre; it’s there to resolve the central mystery and do nothing else. But saying “it was all just a dream” doesn’t explain a mystery; it shoves it aside. Was the rest of 1899 also solely a puzzlebox show, in which case the finale unravels the entire purpose of watching it? Or is there more to recommend it?

Not having watched the rest, I can’t answer this question myself. I guess you, the reader, will have to tell me.

1. How does she remember that she even has a father and brother?

2. If the device can do things to people, why even ask for the key? Just press a button to make her give it to you. Or press a button to teleport the key into your hand.

3. This reveal makes a lot of sense; it wasn’t likely that Maura or her father were responsible, because both of them were trapped too, and Maura couldn’t even remember anything.

4. I know we see many scenes without Maura in them, but that doesn’t necessarily prove that the people in those scenes have an independent existence. Most computer games track at least some of the actions that NPCs take while off-screen.

5. The standard disclaimer reads as follows:
These ratings evaluate the finale-of-the-week from an angle that its writers never intended: how well it works as an individual episode watched in isolation. The analysis accompanying each rating is written from that point of view as well.

The ratings do not necessarily apply to the episode if it is watched in the proper context. And it should go without saying that none of them apply to the series as a whole, which I have not watched.