TV Show:
Amelia is the one who is talking in the intros, not Jake.
So far we haven't seen Jake talk a single time, and have no real evidence that he is even capable or would feel the need to give these monologues. In the Season 1 finale,
we hear Amelia talk, and her voice sounds an awful lot like the opening narration. Considering that they're both young children, it can't really be told whether or not the voice is male or female.
Jake isn't mute
His opening and closing monologues clearly demonstrate a high level of intelligence and he speaks in them. I posit that he actually is capable of speaking, but doesn't do so because he hasn't come up with any way to verbally communicate what he sees. (Or perhaps is simply aware that if he were to tell people "I can predict the future", they would think he was insane. Given his obssession with the numbers and patterns, it's likely that he doesn't consider anything else worth communicating about, so he simply doesn't talk.
- This is made more likely in the season 1 finale: Video is discovered of Amelia, the young girl Teller was working with before. It appears at first that she can't speak, until she does; at which point Teller asks her why she hasn't spoken before, to which she replies "Unneccesary. An evolutionary speed-bump."
The Japanese girls will eventually become part of a much larger Story Arc.
They've appeared in three consecutive episodes so far. No way is that a coincidence.
- It's possible that they, along with other throw-away lines, references, and events through the show will figure into some grand season finale.
- Jossed for the Season 1 finale. It may still come true later though.
Teller is crazy
In school, Teller was really into math and sci-fi. Rather than become a writer or a mathematician, he slowly descended into obsessive madness. The series is his hallucination.
- Probably Jossed, considering he's now dead.
The numbers are the will of a superhuman entity
Amelia was its first victim, and now Teller's bit the bucket too. Its influence on a mortal manifests itself as brain damage - hence why Teller's enlightenment was treated as an aneurysm, and Jake has an Ambiguous Disorder in-universe.
We've already seen a good number of the "36" other than Jake
The few characters shown who can see numbers like Jake are:
Jake himself, the Invisible Prince, and Amelia (also possibly Teller but he's dead), so we can probably assume all of them are "36."
Avram also states that the "36 righteous ones" are those who make small changes to alleviate the suffering of the universe. But oddly enough, his explanation in Music of the Spheres doesn't talk about Jake's mutism or numbers, so people who are "36" might not necessarily need to have mutism or see numbers the way Jake does, but simply be characters who do good to everyone around them.
The "36" may also include certain recurring characters who have done good to others around them:
- The two Japanese girls who keep making videos which are then seen by other people and affect them.
- Randall. He follows his own sequence of numbers, independent of the Amelia sequence, which has lead him to different places where he helps others (and a few times colliding with Martin/Jake).
- Avram, maybe. We've only seen him help Martin, Clea, and his cousin, but Jake wasn't afraid to touch him, so that has to count for something.
- Lucy, but she might just be an extension of Amelia from the Amelia sequence, like Martin is to Jake.
Single-episode characters who do things to help others (without significantly having been caused by Martin or Jake's actions) might be revealed later to be "36" people, since they have capacity to do good on their own accord. These include:
- Kayla Graham (Pilot)
- Grace (Safety in Numbers)
- Natalie, maybe (Noosphere Rising)
- The taxi radio guy, maybe (Zone of Exclusion)
- The soccer ball kid (Gyre Part 1)
- The traveling musician (Gyre Part 2).
And don't forget the people Guillermo's been killing starting in Season 2 - the composer-turned-baker in Brussels, the architect in Barcelona, Claudia the astronomer in Santiago four years earlier. And Jake's one of the many people on Guillermo's death list.
Touch is Pi: The Series
The "36" start talking when they turn 13.
As long as we know, Jake's the youngest of the "36" and he has being alive for 12 years. Amelia is 14 but the videos (I think) are from a year ago. Also older "36" talk normally and had joined into society quite well.
In season 2's premiere, Jake declares that his mutism is about to end soon, so my guess is he'll start talking as soon as his 13 years of life come.
The death at the end of "Reunions" was faked.
There's most likely a reason why it was staged as an offscreen
Disney Death. It's not unreasonable to suggest that
Lucy is being held in a secret AsterCorps facility somewhere (which may or may not be the Teller Institute.)
The
Mental World Amelia and Jake can access is a representation of the Garden of Eden.
So far, only the 36 (well two of them) righteous ones can access it. By there nature of being righteous, the 36 are possibly pure enough that they would not be barred from it.
Aster Corp wants to use the power of the 36 to rule the world
The reason the events of
Revolution occurred was that at least one of the 36 got killed off.
According to the concept of
Tzadikim Nistarim, there are 36 righteous souls who keep the world from being destroyed by God just by existing. So when one of them got killed off, God came up with a particularly cruel punishment for the Earth by shutting down the power worldwide. Now that group of individuals is struggling to stay alive, as well as get the number back up to 36 in the hopes that God will reverse the punishment.
He's in-tuned with the universe, and has an empathic link to every human. Being touched sharpens the link for the person making the contact, but in doing so
every detail of the individual comes screaming at Jake. You would freak out too.
