Caleb’s Flashbacks

Published April 13, 2020 · Updated July 6, 2022

Hello again,

Just some notes about last night’s episode.

Since the beginning of this season I have had a line that Bernard said in Season 2 Episode 10 swirling around in my head.

While in the Forge looking for the “system” [aka Logan] Bernard and Dolores come across one of the system’s renditions of Daddy Delos, and watches his insane behavior. Bernard notes “What humans define as sane is a narrow range of behaviors. Most states of consciousness are insane” Looking back now on this one line, the Hosts were learning that “sanity” in humans is a very slim list of behaviors and once a human’s behavior diverges from that list, they are deemed “insane”.

When we apply this to what we are seeing in the Rohoboam lead society, we see that people that are “sane” are easily controlled. The system can tell them where to live, where to work, who to love, it can control if they have children and how much money they can make. Meanwhile, Rohoboam cannot control the “outliers” aka, the “insane” people in society. Isn’t that just another way of saying that the “insane” people are the ones who have free will? As they are unable to be controlled by any system, their behaviors are unable to be predicted? But while Rohoboam cannot control the “insane” human’s behaviors, it can however dictate a way in which to dispose of these “outliers”. Serac mentions (in the flashback to his conversation with Liam Dempsy Sr.) “Rohoboam sends this group to high risk sectors, like, uh, war, a wood chipper to eat them up and spit them out, dead or useless.”

So the system that the Serac boys built cannot fix the outliers, and cannot control the outliers, but can influence the path they end up on, putting them on paths wherein their only choices are high risk environments wherein they will most likely be killed or be so fucked up after their experiences that they are unable to function properly when back in society (like PTSD veterans who are unable to function “normally” in society after war).

Serac, showing a small glimpse of his own humanity (if you take it that way), decided to create a facility wherein he would try to alter the “insane” people, instead of sending them off to be killed. Note he references that he and his brother were given “anti-radiation medications to halt our genetic breakdown. Thats when I understood, it was possible to edit people”. So while the system Serac built would dispose of this sector of humanity (those deemed “insane”) he tries to edit their personalities, so that they may have a chance at “sanity” and therefore would then belong in the society at large. While at first glance it can be taken that Serac is doing good work in trying to rehabilitate the “insane”, he is just trying to change their code on some level.

Now flash back to Season 2 episode 10, Bernard and Dolores back in the Forge, Bernard says “Small changes to their programming would yield large swings in their behavior”. Now here Bernard was referencing when the System was trying to create an exact copy of the humans consciousness, a small tweak would create a large swing of their “normal” behavior. So can we assume that Serac altering and/or editing the “code” of the “insane” does not help them “normalize” but rather sets their behavior on a swing even more unpredictable? Or has her perfected the science somehow, allowing “insane” people to be rehabilitated to a degree.

Now cut to Caleb. We do not have a clear picture of what his past experiences were. But we can gather up the facts that we have gotten from the start of this season to now. We are told the following about Caleb

* His mother was schizophrenic, left him in a diner, and was committed six months later, leaving Caleb to be “in the system” aka foster care (or whatever the future of foster care is) * He was in the army, while this may be a pre-programmed memory, we have already been told that Rohoboam sets the “insane” humans on paths where they will be eaten up and disposed of, therefore there is a chance that Caleb did in fact serve in the army because Rohoboam was trying to get rid of him * We are seen a very quick flash of a character we dont know of, played by Enrico Colantoni (see footnote 1). * We see a flashback of Caleb in an all white suit with googles on, screaming and grunting

[(footnote 1) Now this might be something that the show comes back to, or this is an Easter Egg for all of Nolan’s Persons of Interest Fans. Enrico Colantoni played the role of Carl Elias on Persons of Interest, he was a mobster who was against the main characters for most of the show until *SPOILER* he ends up rebelling against “Samaritan” (PoI’s Rohoboam) and helps the main characters take down the evil data collecting AI. Again, this is more of a question then an answer to anything because we dont know what significance this character is going to have, but if you watched PoI, then you know Elias had some dealings with Russia and trying to take down certain mobsters in there, and the fact that the only war Caleb could have possibly fought in was a Russain Civil war, who knows if there is a connection there but there is a lot of coincidences to point out.]

The only reason I point this out is because the in Caleb’s sequence of flashbacks, it seems as though he is in a war-like scenario, someone gets shot, Enrico Colantoni’s character looks like he is a boss of some kind watching the killing, then we get the scene of Caleb in the mental institution. So the timeline of events, if his flashbacks are to be trusted, would be (1) he is deemed an outlier given his genetic predisposition to mental illness from his mother (2) he is taken into foster care after being abandoned by his mentally ill mother (3) he is shipped off to War by Rohoboam to die
(4) he does not die and comes back from war only to be placed into a mental hospital ran by Serac to help those who are outliers (5) he is experimented on to “edit” his code.

The show has always loved to play with the ying/yang; black/white; good/evil balances of life. I think there is a point they are trying to make with showing us that Caleb possibly is a product of the system taking the “insane” and trying to dispose of them one way or another. I think the opposite example of that is William. William we know was a poor child who (most likely) did not have that much opportunity at his feet. However, through sheer force of will he was able to become Vice President of Delos, and eventually turned that into owning the entire company and becoming one of the most rich and powerful people alive. His mental issues have been brought up to us in Season 2 episode 9 wherein we see his profile card and see that he is part of category 47B, a subset of humans that has an occurrence rate of 0.0072% (Rare). So we are told right off the bat that William is classified as an outlier. However, because the system did not yet exist, and because his mental illness was able to be somewhat hidden from the “real world”, he flourished, amounting great success. Yet we see that the system had classified Caleb, causing him to have no option but the army and subsequently admission to a Serac-ran mental institution where he was experimented on. While yes this is still speculative based on us having no concrete evidence of what experiences of Caleb were real and false, we can at least look at a story they have told us is certain and equate some meaning from there. I believe that Caleb and William are mirrors of one another, where they are both built from the same “insanity” blocks, but one gets to choose what path he wants to take and success follows, while the other has his path chosen for him, and leads to nothing but pain and suffering.

I know this is a lot, I am just spitting out everything from what I got last night and what I have been thinking about since the season began. I think the take on the “insane” versus “sane” is really interesting. Also I will follow up on my Serac Brothers vs. Ford/Arnold later in the week once I have organized all my thoughts better. But there is mirroring going on there too.

Hope you guys can dig a little deeper on this and add your own takes.

Gillian

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