Both Clanton in 2032 and London in 2099 have more than their fair share of horrors to go round...
Please note, all spoilers are unmarked.
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"Pilot"
- Corbell Pickett's introduction. After Conner 'persuades' the three sketchy drug dealers to sell Flynne her mother's medicine, they troop back inside Jimmy's... To find him sitting in their booth, puffing on one of his trademark cigars. He addresses them in a warm and fatherly manner while they are clearly terrified out of their wits — they are then proven correct when he slams the lead dealer's head into his own glass, leaving his face a bloody mess, to 'teach him a lesson' for not selling enough drugs and allowing his authority to be undermined.
- The fact he does this in a such a public place shows exactly what sort of town Clanton is.
- The Koids are very, very sinister. We're first introduced to them when two walk out of the floor in front of Peripheral Burton as he enters the Buckingham Palace party (Thanks to the Assemblers). They look a bit like shop-window dummies, talk in an eerie synchronised manner, and apparently consist of a bunch of glowing wires with a hollow 'skin' layer stretched over the top, which is revealed when their blank 'faces' split apart.
- This is especially pronounced with Mariel's driver, the first Koid seen in combat — the way it instantly, and silently, starts whaling on Peripheral!Burton after he knocks out its master is also pretty creepy.
- The eyeball scene. Dear Lord, everything about the eyeball scene. It's the page image for a reason. Well, several reasons:
- Imagine this from Flynne's perspective, if you will. The first session into London was essentially a Tuxedo and Martini espionage adventure. The second time she puts the headset on, she's Strapped to an Operating Table and forced to endure torture. That's one hell of a Mood Whiplash.
- Aelita's line "I started the connection, so only I can end it.". This surely means that some deranged sicko in 2099, given the right resources, can use 'polts' as torture victims, sending them back once they've been tortured to insanity and leaving minimal evidence, and no witnesses, to show that they've done anything wrong.
- When the surgeons remove Peripheral!Burton's eye, there's no Gory Discretion Shot. It comes out, attached nerves and all, in plain view. Squick.
- Once the eyeball has been taken out, Aelita immediately puts the peripheral under. She purposefully forced Flynne to endure the pain of the operation, and try and detach herself from it, as she might have to experience more later. Does that mean the strange device which 'scanned' Flynne in the RI's basement caused even more pain than having your eye torn out?
- Most of the fight sequence with Daniel. He ends up suffering from Villain Decay, but manages to be immensely threatening in his introduction:
- Flynne, as Peripheral!Burton, squares up to him menacingly — he flips him over and ties him up as if he's some annoying kid, not a skilled, heavily-built fighter.
- He then unveils the 'sonic punch' weapon. While initially it might be mistaken for a run-of-the-mill Sonic Stunner, he quickly assures Aelita that it's not the case — its concussive force causes painful internal injuries, and demonstrates this by blasting her liver, causing her to cry out in agony.
- Flynne manages to get Peripheral!Burton to escape his bonds, by pulling the skin off his wrist, revealing the peripheral's robotic endoskeleton underneath. This must have been excruciatingly painful.
- Flynne then tackles Daniel before he can execute Aelita, allowing her erstwhile 'puppet master' to escape, but leading to the peripheral's "death" when Daniel blasts it in the head.
- After this happens, Flynne stumbles out of the chair, throws up, and tells Burton bluntly "Never again." She then lies in her bed for hours on end. The poor woman's just been through straight-up torture.
"Empathy Bonus"
- The mercenary goons get one heck of a Mook Horror Show — they thought all they were up against were a bunch of drunken, unsuspecting rednecks, and end up getting ambushed by cybernetically-enhanced Super Soldiers who hack their drone and wipe out most of the squad (which outnumbered them three to one, by the way) with no casualties.
- It's becoming apparent that the headset is doing something unpleasant to Flynne's nervous system, with her beginning to periodically lose control of her right hand. Yet, she keeps donning the headset, regardless.
- When Burton goes to visit Conner, the latter tells him that, when he first saw the Mooks he helped take out earlier, he just assumed that someone had pissed off Pickett. Exactly how common are assassinations in Clanton County?
"Haptic Drift"
- It was already apparent that Corbell Pickett isn't a nice man, but the Cold Open for this episode demonstrates that he's even worse than that. In a flashback to 2015, when he was primarily a car salesman, he sells three heavily-armoured SUVs to a biker gang on a hot day. Or at least, that's what the bikers thought he was doing. In fact, he'd sabotaged the cars so that the bikers get trapped inside and die wretched deaths from sunstroke, allowing him to establish control over Clanton's drugs trade. He had guaranteed the vehicles for the rest of their lives, after all.
- Just to hammer the point home, he then lines a road with their crucified bodies.
- Oh, and he made sure his nephew Jasper was Forced to Watch all of this. Why? Because the kid needed to learn that from time to time, you should be cruel "for the sheer animal joy of it". Yikes.
- But this episode also serves as a proper introduction to Dr. Cherise Nuland, the boss of the Research Insitute, who makes Pickett look like a back-alley thug by comparison.
- She decides to demonstrate to Daniel exactly what will happen if he lets her down again. In doing so, she shows that she has control over London's Assemblers. What this means in practice is that she's a Reality Warper — she disassembles a section of a bridge directly in front of him, then walks over the gap. Exactly what the limits of her powers are is a question which doesn't bear much thought.
- Her brutal execution of Grace, a scientist and Aeilta's friend, who was unfortunate enough to tell Aelita about the RI's Time Travel work. She invites her for a nice cup of tea in her apiary, and calmly informs her that her tea was laced with pheromones that will cause her bees to think she's a hornet. You can guess the rest.
- The scene of a young Wilf (then Wolf) and Aelita being "adopted". Their would-be-mother examines Aelita's mouth, as though she's purchasing livestock, or slaves.
- That same woman, Mrs. West, keeps a Koid programmed to look like Aelita, except without any of her "troublesome tendencies". Brr...
"Jackpot"
- Whatever the headset's done to Flynne, it's steadily getting worse — after getting agitated at Burton, she collapses into a seizure, with echoes of the injuries she's suffered in her peripherals appearing on her body. But what's perhaps more terrifying is the fact her Small Town Boredom is so severe she sees her visits to London — torture and all — as Worth It, and wants to go back for more.
- Wilf goes to tell Lev that his family are all dead in the stub — brutally murdered. Lev, who up until now has seemed Affably Evil at worst, smiles and explains that he arranged their murders — because he found their existence philosophically disturbing. Oh, and he wants access to a stub as a location for things like unsupervised drug testing.
- We finally get an explanation of the titular Jackpot — the reason why the future seems so devoid of human beings — in the form of a kind of 3D animation. There really are a lot fewer human beings in the world, and the reasons are every bit as bad as you might expect.
- In 2039, continent-spanning blackouts were inflicted on various countries by hackers, lasting months and only becoming more common. This is only seven years off in the present timeline.
- Two years later, The Blood Plague spread, attacking the viscera in the body, filling it with blood until the abdomen burst.
- The ecosystem collapsed and mass famine followed. Over four decades, 8 billion people were reduced to less than 1 billion.
- Finally, a terrorist attack detonated a nuclear missile, right in Flynne's hometown.
- Hence, "Jackpot", because it wasn't one thing. It was everything, one after the other.
"What About Bob?"
- After receiving some medical tests, Dee Dee informs Flynne and Burton that she's suffering from some sort of bacterial infection, which may be the cause of her seizures... But this raises the pressing question of how the hell the bacteria got there? Since the Time Travel is limited to data, did the signals from the headset somehow induce the microorganism to develop? If so, how much else can it do that Flynne doesn't know about?
- The eponymous character also deserves a mention. A sociopathic ex-IRA hitman who Koid!Daniel decides to sic on Flynne and Burton after his living self's past failures, he's downright terrifying during the bowling alley scene:
- The scene is relatively peaceful for a while, as Bob sits at the bar with Frank, who was planning on going after his daughter. Then Frank's three young sons square up to Bob with the aim of removing him from the premises, and perhaps something beyond that. When one puts their hand on his shoulder, Bob remarks "I loved you like a brother, Frank". He then strikes his would-be-assailant in the throat, whips out a pistol, and guns down all his enemies in less than ten seconds, before casually dispatching the bartender, who had been foolish enough to go for a shotgun.
- What's perhaps even more frightening than the lightning speed with which he conducts the quintuple murder is the fact he looks rather weary afterwards. Just what exactly would be a challenge for this guy?
- His mean streak is displayed in full shortly after. As he walks back to his car, it turns out one of Frank's sons was Not Quite Dead, and takes a few shots at him while bleeding profusely. Bob almost resignedly ducks under the car, and bends underneath to blast the man with the "sonic punch" gun he'd been given by Daniel. The blast really seems to do a number on him, as he's left paralysed, with blood trickling from his mouth. Bob chastises him for not just pretending to be dead, but says he'll let him live if he can move out of the way. The unfortunate man can do nothing but scream as Bob gets in the car and accelerates towards his prone body...
- And as Bob is transported to jail in Tommy's police cruiser, the vehicle is rammed by one of the invisible SUVs. The last thing Tommy sees before he blacks out are a pair of ornate cowboy boots... Yup, Corbell Pickett has got his hands on the assassin. That can't be good.
"The Doodad"
- The Koids are as sinister as ever — we get a nice long shot of one forming from the inside out, its glowing skeleton of wires slowly expanding, and furthermore, the Met Police models look relatively human, but this is restricted to the small amount of skin revealed by a balaclava, and the rest of their faces are blank.
- Lowbeer reveals that the stub timeline not only diverges at least a decade back, but that it's actually accelerating toward the Jackpot even faster than her timeline did, implicitly intentionally driven by R.I. as part of their research. Considering the already short window before the first event, Flynne's timeline is, to put it simply, about to crash.
- Bob opens up a deep gash on his arm so he can pretend to be a patient in order to take Ella hostage at the medical centre, leading to a spectacularly brutal fight with Reece which averts Instant Death Stab hard — the poor guy is shanked roughly a couple of dozen times before going down, and even then Bob has to choke him to death.
- A double-whammy when Cherise reveals exactly why she's so concerned about the data Flynne has 'stolen' — it relates to the R.I.'s behavioural modification implants they tested out using the Haptic Recon tech. This is bad enough, but by now we know that the Neoprims want the same data in order to Restart the World, leading to a logical conclusion.
- Tommy's snap decision to Pay Evil unto Evil by shooting Jackman and blasting Pickett with the sonic punch can come as somewhat of a shock. Even if Pickett survived the hit — and it's fairly likely he did — he'll probably wish otherwise when he wakes up, given that the weapon works by causing internal injury.
- The following episode reveals he survived, but only barely. Against squishy human organs, the sonic punch is as good as lethal, putting Pickett into a coma he isn't expected to wake from.
