Line #101 Headscratchers/Sense8


1	New entries on the bottom.
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3	[[foldercontrol]]
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5	[[folder:7+ Languages]]
6	* When asked, Nomi states that she knows "7" languages, plus "some shitty French" from highschool. That makes sense if we're only thinking about the first languages of each of the cluster: English, German, Hindi, Swahili, Spanish, Korean, and Icelandic. But on top of that, Sun can speak Mandarin (Season 1, Episode 1), and Riley can speak Dutch (Christmas Special) and ''fluent'' French (Series Finale)... So how come those languages aren't included in Nomi's count?
7	** Because they can only speak the first languages. In the Christmas special, Will specifically can't understand Riley when she speaks to someone in Dutch. The cluster shares a lot, but not literally everything.
8	*** In the finale, Will shows his ability to tap into Riley's French language knowledge. They share everything, but with more or less difficulty, and as time goes on it becomes easier.
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12	[[folder:Eye contact]]
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14	* They say Whispers' ability works by making eye contact with sensates, after which he can visit the sensate that made eye contact with him. This begs two questions: one, would closing your eyes or wearing shades help in any way to prevent this, or is it only unconsciousness that protects you? Two: if it does, why didn't Will, who knew Whispers will be there, bother to take shades with him to Iceland?
15	** He was telling Riley to open her eyes, so it seems that keeping your eyes closed is enough (though he had her hooked up to some electrodes that would force her to obey him). Not clear if sunglasses would work. On the other hand, it was stated outright more than once that Will was charging in half-cocked with no real plan, relying on Nomi (and to a lesser extent his other clustermates) to figure things out behind the scenes as he moved. So they probably just didn't think of it.
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17	[[/folder]]
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19	[[folder:Sara's cluster]]
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21	* For Sara Patrell to Visit Will, she must have been a fully awoken sensate with a cluster all exactly the same age as her. So the options are that, after cutting her skull open, Whispers then did the same to seven other children across the world (or may have killed some of them already before finding Sara) or that seven other children across the world all had to experience one of their cluster dying (an experience grown sensate Yrsa describes as a pain she thought would kill her and which no child would be equipped to deal with even if it wasn't the result of NightmareFuel brain surgery murder).
22	** Or... It's never explicitly stated that all sensate clusters come in 8. The only confirmed "rule" of being a sensate cluster is sharing a birthday. At the time she was killed, Will and Sara could very well be the same age. It's also never fully explained how a sensate gets activated, but it is explained that Whispers and Jonas can visit sensates outside their cluster after making eye contact with them. Perhaps eye contact with active sensates is exactly how new sensates are activated; Angel makes eye contact with each of them in the pilot. This would also mean that Riley has been an active sensate for most of her life, having met Yrsa as a child. After having been activated by Whispers, Sara would be able to visit Will, assuming she had met him... Except, we are never given any indication that they've ever physically met, so the only way she could visit him is if they were clustermates... My God, what if one of their own was murdered as a child?
23	** The very fact the Sensates share the same birthdate and hence age means that the other child members of Sara's cluster have to cope with a gargantuan trauma their minds are not well-developed for.
24	** It's clear in the first episode that the entire cluster is born/awakened at the exact same time, so if Will was able to visit with Sara and Riley was able to visit with Yrsa before being born, it's clear that Sara didn't necessarily have to be a fully awoken sensate with a cluster. What IS clear is that she and Will locked eyes and immediately formed that outside-of-cluster sensate connection, which is how she was able to visit him even when she was unconscious and why he still saw her memories after she died.
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26	[[/folder]]
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28	[[folder:Oral sex as a religious experience?]]
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30	* Is Lito's talk of his first oral sexual encounter as a religious experience more of a commentary on religious condemnation of sexuality vs. something that makes sense storywise. It seems like a way to take a swipe at religion by someone who's been excluded from it? It seems like what he's saying is that since the sexual act is considered something that makes him not worthy of the Church, that's his substitute.
31	** While I can't comment on the intent of the writers, most likely no. Powerful religious experiences can have elements of awe, mystery, reverence and ecstasy. This is what Lito is comparing his first time to: a powerful, transcendent experience. There's also a subtext there of "rightness". Just as the act of Communion is a ritual meant to bring one closer to God and thereby to one's own best spiritual self, Lito was saying that receiving oral sex from Hernando made him more right with his true self, i.e., being a gay man. Believe it or not, there are plenty of gay people in the world who don't hate the religions they were raised in, even if those religions don't accept them unconditionally.
32	** Based on other scenes in the show, it’s likely a reflection on the perceived capacity for sacredness to be found in intimacy, human connection, and sensuality to the writers. Sun says something similar about how much more she learns about her body and the body of an opponent she defeated in competition from sex than if she fought him a hundred times. It’s part of a speech she gives Kala about the wonders of sex. There are also the scenes in the series where sexual intimacy shared by the cluster is treated as them connecting on a spiritual level. Lito’s comments aren’t a swipe at religion but commentary on how sensuality, vulnerability, self-awareness, and standing in your truth are components of spirituality.
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34	[[/folder]]
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36	[[folder:Nomi's legal status?]]
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38	* I can understand how if Nomi was a minor, her mother would be able to force her to undergo the 'treatment' in the hospital. But, she isn't. Surely she'd be able to leave the hospital whenever she wanted to? I'm in the UK, so I don't know the US side of these issues, but it's not as if she's committed any offenses at that time to warrant her being locked up. There's later scenes I don't understand either, like when she's running from Amanita's mother's place, and the police pull guns on her. Why? Again, she's not committed any crime, certainly nothing to justify having a gun pointed at her. I can understand her being on the run if she had committed an offense, but she hadn't (and I don't remember Whisper's or his friends mentioning setting her up for anything like that).
39	** The doctor convinced Nomi's mother that Nomi had mental problems, an explanation which she accepted gladly. From there, it's just a hop and a skip to declaring Nomi mentally unfit and give her mother legal control over her again, and then tell the police that [[InsaneEqualsViolent she's dangerous]]. Keep in mind that we don't know how far the conspiracy spreads; at the very least, the doctor should not be allowed to practice medicine after killing several patients and putting at least one more in a coma (and even if his license isn't revoked, he shouldn't be allowed to continue performing ''that exact same procedure''). If the conspiracy has a judge in their pocket, they can accelerate a lot of the legal issues that would keep this sort of thing bogged down in the real world.
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41	[[/folder]]
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43	[[folder:Lito's pictures and Nomi's hacking]]
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45	* The pictures were digital information on Joaquin's computer and Daniela's phone. Why couldn't Nomi protect Lito by hacking in and deleting them?
46	** Hollywood hacking aside, it's pretty easy for Joaquin to make sure he protected his computer. All he'd need to do would be to disconnect the internet connections of Daniela's phone and his own machine, then burn a few copies to disc and distribute them to different places. He doesn't give the impression of being stupid, and with celebrities having their phones leaked, he'd probably security conscious enough to have some protection in place. Why Daniela couldn't demand he returned the phone, or just say it was stolen and have it remotely locked is another issue, but Lito being outed drives the plot forward. Hopefully the later episodes might reference this, maybe by Nomi returning the favour and leaking some of Joaquin's details to the press.
47	*** Daniela didn't realize he had her phone until he sent a picture to Lito. By that point, having the phone locked (or getting him to return it) wouldn't have done much good - Joaquin would almost certainly have saved copies by then.
48	** The other answer is that by the time Nomi learned of the photos, they were already on the internet. Once there it would have been impossible to keep them from spreading. The Sensate were still new at calling each other on purpose so it is unlikely that Lito contacted Nomi about them until he saw that they had been leaked.
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50	[[/folder]]
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52	[[folder:What's going on in that fight?]]
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54	* At the end of the Christmas Special, Wolfgang gets into a fight with multiple men and the others come to help him. It's been established that they're only there mentally and can't interact physically unless they take over Wolfgang's body. But there's clearly a scene where Wolfgang gets tackled/grabbed by a guy, but Sun is seen fighting another guy behind Wolfgang, and then they swing back to Will helping Wolfgang with the guy who grabbed him originally. So Sun was fighting an entirely separate person than the one Wolfgang was touching? How is that possible?
55	** The show has done similar things to this before, like the first time Capheus visited Riley. He picked up her tea and tasted it, all while Riley remained seated. But when the visit ended, it was Riley standing up holding the tea. Even though the scene played out as as though Capheus was physically in the room, it's clearly established that the filmmakers were playing with a '''''trope unique to this show''''' related to a visiting sensate's ''presence''. The most prolific usage of this trope is: the more physically present a character is, the more "in sync" the present characters are. And in this instance, we know that the only character physically in the location where the fight takes place is Wolfgang, but what ''looks'' like multiple sensates fighting independently is actually just multiple sensates ''piloting'' Wolfgang's body in the same moment. Sun and Will didn't magically appear in Berlin to help Wolfgang fight; but Sun, Will and Wolfgang did become a sort of [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestalt_psychology gestalt entity]] that drew on the fighting prowesses of all three of them, instead of one at a time. The filmmakers decided to convey that in the scene by having them all fighting on screen at once.
56	*** In this last fight scene, Wolfgang was dealing with one opponent and Sun was dealing with an entirely different opponent, both on screen at the same time, and with an after-scene that shows Wolfgang still physically in contact with his initial opponent, meaning that there's no way Sun could have taken control of his body to take out the second guy and then gotten Wolfgang back in that hold - this has never happened before. In previous fight scenes, it's made explicitly clear who is taking control of the body and performing which actions, and the sensates who aren't physically controlling the body hover and wait for an opening. If it's a decision by the creators to use this fight scene as a visual metaphor, it's strange that they decided to do this now after an entire season and a special episode of taking deliberate care to spell out what sensates can and can't do and how such scenes will be portrayed.
57	*** WordOfGod confirms they can't "project" their bodies and that it was an editing mistake.
58	[[/folder]]
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60	[[folder:Sun's Prison Escape]]
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62	* During the second season, Sun escapes from prison after an attempt on her life. She is very nearly lynched, and only saved by the timely intervention of her cellmate, who kills one of the fake guards and releases her from the noose. But how did her cellmate get out? Didn't the fake guards lock the cell?
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64	** Given that we've seen both Soo-jin and Min-jung (the cellmate that rescued Sun) coming to visit Sun during solitary confinement by bribing a guard, the most probable explanation is that the guard helped once more during that situation (either she was able to call for him just in time, or he knew about the fake guards' actions and stepped in quickly after.) How the cellmates were able to bribe him for so many times is another mystery.
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66	* As a corollary to this, the cellmate wasn't wearing her prison garb when the fake guards abducted Sun, but clearly took the time to put it on after Sun was taken, before she left to rescue her. Why bother?
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68	** To both notes above, the woman who rescued Sun was doing maintenance in the hallway of the prison, she wasn't in the cell at the time that Sun was taken out. They pass her in the hallway as they're walking to where they are going to kill Sun.
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70	*** No, she was in the cell, along with Su-jin, Sun and the other cellmate. The camera even cuts to a close-up of her, ''after'' the fake guards lock the door. The person doing maintenance was someone else entirely.
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72	[[/folder]]
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74	[[folder:Sensates and siblings]]
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76	* Various characters state that sensates are a separate species from homo-sapiens. However, both Kala and Nomi have siblings but don't have abilities (assuming of course that they don't just have said abilities dormant and are waiting to be born) , and the founder of BPO, Ruth El-Saadawi, is said to have had a twin sister who was a sensate. Not being a biologist so don't know how different species start to break off, are they really different species?
77	** Simply put: No, sensates are not a different species.
78	** Humans are another branch of humans more like, and there's no evidence that says that the various siblings don't have a chance to be activated later. Potential, if a sensate has to be activated, or "birthed," than a lot more potential sensates could exist/have existed that were never activated.
79	** From someone who ''is'' a biologist: The definitions of species vary, but at the very least, you tend to need a separate population with which there is little interbreeding before speciation occurs. Therefore, it's ridiculous to claim that the Sensates, who were born out of a normal human population in different places in the world, qualify as a different species. Nothing more than a bad case of ArtisticLicenseBiology at work. Movies sure do like mangling the definition of "species" for various purposes; the ComicBook/XMen franchise is guilty of the same thing.
80	** This could also be Jonas’s FantasticRacism talking. Racists of all stripes seem to genuinely believe that people with features they don’t like are fundamentally other (and generally lower). Whatever semi-scientific understanding Angelica may have developed comes to us through Jonas’s severe Us vs. Them lens. I don’t think anyone both knowledgeable and benign refers to them as biologically definably separate species.
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82	[[/folder]]
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84	[[folder:Sun's prison situation]]
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86	* Seems to be a major plothole to me, but in the second season, Sun is attacked twice by outsiders when in prison (discounting the fellow inmate), sent by her brother to assassinate her. I can't think that the prison system is so corrupt that no-one would flag up the point that she's obviously a target. This is even worse in the second attack, when it's people from an outside prison, flagged as I remember by the detective. Wouldn't she have been moved to a more secure location after the first attack? I'd have thought that even if the guards just claim she attacked the fake lawyers unprovoked, they couldn't discount the guns, tasers etc.
87	** There was a year between attacks. Measures could have been taken to keep her from being attacked again after the first attack. Especially when Sun's brother was shown to have political connections. It possible the second attack was done by men posing as guards in that prison specifically because all other attempts to get to Sun failed because of the new protects placed upon her due to the first attack.
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90	[[folder:What happened in the end of season 2?]]
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92	* That's a lot of timeskipping and glossing over scenes after [[spoiler: Wolfgang is captured by BPO]]. How did Will arrange a meeting with Whispers personally without tipping him off that he's there in person? How did they find Jonas? How did they infiltrate BPO to intercept Whispers being moved without raising flags? So many questions.
93	** Blockers. At least, that's as much explanation as the show gives. Just before the plan is executed, someone says "I have a plan. But we're gonna need blockers."
94	** It seems to be a plan that were already forming after they retrieved important classified files and [=IDs=] from the house the Whispers escaped from, before being distracted by Will's father's death.
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96	[[/folder]]
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98	[[folder:Blockers in Kala's bag]]
99	* How did Kala manage to bring in so many Blockers into the UK? Wouldn't it be suspicious that she was carrying a large quantity of unmarked pills into the country?
100	** I don't know what laws govern the UK but given that Kala is a researcher for a major pharmaceutical company and that blockers likely aren't a regulated substance, it was probably easy. She probably just passed them off as an experimental drug for a clinical trial.
101	*** Even then, in her capacity as a pharmaceutical researcher, she would have to provide documents from her company and airport security would likely be obligated to double check that with her office. It's not as simple as you might think.
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103	[[/folder]]
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105	[[folder:Riley's language ability]]
106	* It's been shown that two sensates can communicate with each other without using the same language, as in the scenes between Kala and Wolfgang and between Sun and Capheus. Why, then, didn't Riley understand Capheus's Swahili when they two first met in person?
107	** The scene with Caph and Riley was episode 4. The scene with Caph and Sun was episode 5. It stands to reason that some of their connections hadn't developed far enough to subconsciously recognise they understand each others languages. Also in episode 4, Will spoke Korean, and didn't even realise. By the time Sun and Capheus meet, their sub-conscious language comprehension has probably developed enough to not be an issue. It's also possible, that if Capheus didn't know English, he and Riley wouldn't have been able to communicate.
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109	[[/folder]]
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111	[[folder:Talking/Visiting Between Sensates vs. What Normal People Are Seeing]]
112	* In previous scenes, we've seen when sensates are visiting each other and talking/doing actions between themselves, they are actually performing these actions by themselves and people around act accordingly. Good examples of this are when Will gets caught kissing thin air by his colleague, Nomi talks to herself with her hacker friend around and Amanita having to explain she just talks to herself sometimes, Whispers having to repeat what Will is saying to someone else in his cluster and Will can hear him repeat it, Wolfgang and Kala play in the snow and Wolfgang is just rolling around by himself, etc. But when Lila is first introduced and her and Wolfgang are practically having sex on the dinner table, there are no outward signs of this visitation at all and it plays out like it's all in their heads. They talk to each other with no one else hearing them and when it cuts to them at the "normal" dinner, they're not panting or moaning or anything. So to what degree are the things sensates do in their visitations visible to normies on the outside?
113	** Both Wolfgang and Lila are physically present at the location in that scene. They are also "visiting" each other from across the table. It stands to reason that what is actually going on is: any time Lila speaks, it's in [=WGs=] head, and WG speaks in Lila's head, but it was shot differently for stylistic or production-simplifying reasons. As for not having any obvious signs that they're getting off; WG already had a surprise encounter with Lila earlier where she lap-danced him, and he was pretty obviously surprised. By the time they were eating, he was ready for it.
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Context Headscratchers / Sense8