Dispatches From Elsewhere balances between puzzles and character, with just a touch of whimsy
TV Reviews Recap
It’s an episode called “Everyone,” which means Dispatches From Elsewhere aims to bring together the gang, despite the fractures it has sustained recently. And this installment might be one of the best yet.
The show’s concept of every episode essentially just focusing on one character (even though at its core, this is a true ensemble drama) has meant the first five episodes devoted notable time to individual character origin stories on top of the ongoing narrative. This week, though, freed of that dramatic burden, “Everyone” is perhaps the show at its peak when it comes to nailing down the balance between character stories and puzzle-solving, all operating in a nebulous grey area between reality and fantasy. It wasn’t a dramatic step up in quality in comparison to past episodes, but it still stands out as the show at its absolute platonic ideal.
Things begin with another team meeting at the diner, with everyone still interested in working together even though their goals are still technically pretty different, with Peter wanting to find Clara, Janice wanting to rejoin the game and Fredwynn still focused on uncovering the conspiracy behind it.
The compromise they land on splits up the initial pairings, because Janice is still mad at Fredwynn after the events of the last episode—she and Simone head out to hopefully track down the real Clara, by following the trail of her artwork. Meanwhile, Peter agrees to work with Fredwynn on getting closer to understanding the forces in play behind the game, even though, as he acknowledges later, Fredwynn is the worst teammate.
All of this is happening under the cloud of the news that “Clara’s truth will be revealed tonight,” meaning that it’s likely the very last night of the game — putting a ticking clock on their exploration, and also serving as a reminder that by choosing to play the game outside of the established parameters, the gang will be missing out on the planned final experience. (This only seems to really bother Janice, but her FOMO is understandable.)
Together, Peter and Fredwynn make for a dysfunctional pairing, largely because Fredwynn has no respect for Peter (to be fair, he doesn’t really seem to respect anyone else as his equal) and Peter is hesitant to stand up for himself. But after they discover that the previous sites they have visited were shut down, and break into a closed museum in search of other clues, it’s Peter who identifies the meaning behind a symbol he and Fredwynn keep seeing: It’s the logo for a major company known as Bender Elmore, which owns the Not!Spotify music service Peter worked for until just very recently.
This means Peter is their best bet for sneaking back into the Manamana offices to figure out what’s happening, though Fredwynn provides a valuable assist (posing as a life coach) in sneaking them in. There, the previous music cues utilized by the game, including Isaac Hayes and Peaches and Herb, prove essential to not just tracking down the playlist created by whoever is running this game, but then tracking down said person’s IP address, leading to a new location.
Meanwhile, Simone and Janice head together to the Fishtown bar which initially led Simone and Peter to the headquarters of the Elsewhere Society — today, though, it leads them to a trip into Janice’s past, as Janice not only used to frequent the bar, but is familiar with one of the regulars. After a round of tequila shots, her old pal Boris is able to direct them towards one of Clara’s old murals, which they figure out looks incomplete because the bulk of it was clearly painted from a different perspective, from inside an apartment across the street.
That apartment is now occupied by someone easily stereotyped as a “crazy cat lady,” but Janice is able to smoothly talk them inside, not just revealing the hidden portion of the dragon mural, but enabling them to dig up the records containing Clara’s last name: Torres. Armed with that information, Simone and Janice hit up the local library, spinning through the microfiche newspaper records (a truly old-school touch) to find a story about Clara disappearing years ago.
However, in the article about her disappearance, there was mention of her having been hospitalized for mental illness, and without even looking it up Janice is sure she knows what facility this means. This is an episode that really celebrates Janice as a character, both her past as a hardcore feminist during the fight for the ERA, her troubled time (likely related to postpartum depression) that led to a short stay at Hawkton and then today, where as Simone observes, Janice is uncovering her true inner badass.
Janice and Simone arrive at the original location for Hawkton only a few minutes before Peter and Fredwynn do—because the penthouse apartment of the building where the mental facility used to be matches with the IP address.
Fredwynn has already hacked his way into the building’s elevator controls, so it’s trivial for the gang to get upstairs and investigate, discovering a split-screen monitor featuring both Octavio Coleman and Commander 14—two Richard Grants for the price of one, delivering the same message: “Bad news, everyone. They have Clara. We need your help right now.”
So both sides are playing the same angle. Does that mean they’re playing the same game? The abrupt end to the episode means that we won’t learn the answer yet for a while. Still, it was a well-calibrated installment; the sort of episode that might not stand out in your memory if you were binge-viewing, but did important, valuable and enjoyable work in service to the season.
Stray Observations
- If you’re a hopeless romantic, then you know there’s rarely anything as fun as rooting for two characters to kiss, and this is the second episode in a row where Simone and Peter have seemed just on the edge of… something… and then nothing happens. This is a pattern that will hopefully change by next week.
- Just saying, Simone telling Peter that he looks “rugged”? C’mon JUST KISS ALREADY.
- Though, Fredwynn’s advice to Peter about Simone feels important: “If she gives you her heart, don’t take a magic marker and write all over it.” These people are all delicate in so many ways; it would hurt if any of them broke.
- Wonderful to see Tara Lynne Barr return as Young Janice, as well as Grace Rex as Berthe Morisot, the well-known impressionist painter haunting Simone. These touches definitely push the show towards the more surrealist angle it’s aiming for.
- Who was the threatening voice at the phone booth, telling Peter and Fredwynn to “return to the game, as instructed?” It didn’t sound familiar to me, but that may just mean it didn’t sound like Richard E. Grant.
- Putting sugar on a hard-boiled egg seems like one of those things that sounds disgusting, but… maybe it could be good? I don’t know personally, and I am not going to waste one of my 10 remaining eggs on this experiment, but if you can speak to this one way or the other, please share in the comments!
24 Comments
“You sound ridiculous. This is about an international conspiracy designed to control our behavior.” Oh Fredwynn, don’t ever change!Am I the only one who thought the fancy condo they broke into at the end of the episode looked awfully similar to Fredwynn’s? Or maybe all upscale condos just look the same; perhaps that’s the true conspiracy.
Potential nod to the original game: Peter notices the “cool phone” is gone. In the first part of The Jejune Institute there was a specific payphone in Chinatown you had to find with a pagoda-ish theme to it. The phone was removed shortly after the game’s launch. From that point on participants had to bring their own mobile phones.
It’s a stretch but I wonder if someone getting hurt is a nod to the fact that at least one player in the original game claimed to have gotten hurt in a quest to get information. Based on the preview for next week, I wonder if we’re going to get a version of what was maybe my favorite event of the original game, the “Chapel of the Chimes,” which in the original game was where the truth of Eva was revealed. The breaking in to people’s houses is also supposedly from the original, though I believe that was part of the story and not something actual game players did, though I don’t know that for sure. Not related to the game, but I got Back To The Future II Cafe 80s vibes from that weird automated split screen of Octavio and Commander 14 at the end of the episode.
I swear, if Lodge 49 had to die so this show could live…
… I bet Fredwynn is a member of the Fraternal Order of The Lynx.
…then it was a fair trade. “Lodge 49″ was great, but I absolutely love every little thing about this show.Still, why can’t we have both? They would have been great back to back. And it isn’t like there aren’t 75 generic police procedurals. Two surreal, heartfelt, weird, shows shouldn’t be too much to ask.
I tweeted this very thing and got a reply from someone “in the know” who said that this show was basically done when Lodge 49 was canceled and initially the idea was that DFE would air in March and April and then Lodge 49 would come back in the fall. So it kind of breaks my heart a bit to know that we were close to having both shows. I was also told that DFE is meant to be a “one and done” series, but still, I think both shows would kind of complement each other since they are both kind of optimistic and a bit whimsical. But I don’t think Lodge 49 was killed to make way for this. My heart still holds out a little hope that maybe one day they’ll give us a third season of Lodge to wrap the story up.
I hadn’t watched Dispatches yet due to some external life things, but I’m actually going to given what you said. And definitely, Lodge’s ending was on the precipice of so much. It’s really a shame AMC never found the audience for it, I think it would definitely have room on Hulu.
This show has rapidly become one of my top “look forward to” shows of the week. In all the insanity there were some really great laugh lines this week. Segal and his writers room is really bring an A game to this material.
Segal giving Andre the fake orange but saying he wasn’t angry anymore was definitely one of the best jokes of the season so far
That was a good one. Personal favorite was referring to the cat lady as “Martin Scorsese’s Mom.”
“Peter, that was impressive. Just wanted to let you know, just in case you bleed out before we get there.”
I was really eager to watch this series; the write-ups were SO promising! Then I saw the streaming service this appears on; I considered the math for my month’s budget – Hah!! This shit is expensive AF: The previews sounded especially entertaining so, yeah Liz, I hope this program has some originality; we need exciting narratives that feature inspired solutions to seemingly hopeless problems (science and inspiration = a-save-the-world marriage [maybe sexy??]) Whatever……Maybe it will go to Netflix (remember when that shit was $5.99-$7.99 a month?).
just as Anita implied I’m dazzled that any body able to get paid $6636 in 4 weeks on the computer. hop over to this site ➤➤➤➤➤➤ http://www.newbox3.ℂℴm
How does this review manage to completely ignore Fredwynn’s trip back to his mind palace and seeing the creepy clown kid who was spying on Janice in her home?!?! This is an element that seems important yet completely unconnected to the greater story at this point. WTF is this clown kid?!!?
I know, right! I think that was what Clara was trying to get Fredwynn to see in his memory. (SPOILERS FOR FUTURE EPISODE TITLES!) The final episode is titled “The Boy,” so clearly whoever/whatever that is will be important. I have a theory about that and where I think the show might be ultimately going.
Fun fact: the model city inside the Please Touch Museum (featured in this episode) is not accessible to the public, wasn’t installed by the museum, isn’t maintained by the museum, and is in horrible disrepair.
KISS! KISS! KISS! KISS!! C’mon you guys!!
The rugged line was a perfectly absurd touch.
Did anyone else notice the prominent QR codes on the “Now Leasing” ads at the entrance to Hawkton while Janice and Simone were standing out front? It’s not a web address but just a snippet of text that says: MEMORY TO MEDIA – 1-215-709-2298. It’s a real phone number in Pennsylvania, although when I called it all I got was a “this line is either not in service or you must first dial 1 and the ten-digit number” error that I am not sure is a real phone company error message.That and Fredwynn dropping some scrap of paper as the Uber showed up were the biggest mysteries for me tonight.
My biggest mystery was THE MILK GUY. Namely, is he drinking whole, skim, or chocolate???
I think it was whole AND chocolate.
So, is Fredwynn:1. Narcissistic? 2. Obsessive Compuslive?3. Rageaholic?4. Perfectionist? 5. On the spectrum?6. A little bit of everything?
Definitely 1 and 2. I think 1 and 2 can cause one to appear to be 3, 4, and 5, so I’m not sure about those. But in lay person parlance, I’d say the term is “a pain in the ass.”
Do you remember that article about SHOWBLOCKERS? Characters who make a series come to a screeching halt, or make you nearly or fully turn the channel and never come back? Remember that red-headed girl in the first season of Jessica Jones? For me that is getting to be Fredwynn. He is aggressive nails on a chalkboard while the chalkboard is hitting you in the head. I am not sure I can hang with it that much longer, he is weapons-grade annoying. I am a little whimsied out, and the idea that “this is all real” is just too silly, but I can take the rest of the show, Fredwynn being an incredible jackass every minute he is on screen is too much.