Endtown by Aaron Neathery for January 29, 2016

Holly has sooooo much guilt. No wonder she’s losing it in the here and now she’s living in.

Well, Obviously there were others who could have spoken up beforehand, but chose not to.

Their car has mutt legs.

They’re not talking to anybody else in the car, either.

Well, wrong again. At least I’m consistent. ;-)

Ah ha… i hate being right sometimes.

You know, the houses here with the fake sky overhead, and the street lighting… that’s not that different from the Endtown colony area that Holly lived in.

Holly seems selfishly pragmatic here. The wonderfully scary thing is that I have no trouble understanding her rationale. I might even see myself saying something similar. I can also see why this haunts her. Every time she looks in the mirror or sees another mutant, Holly sees a consequence of her decision to remain silent. She might feel partly to blame for the whole fiasco.

Might just be the outfit, but I can’t help but think that Lyn is voiced by Humphrey Bogart. ;)

And, huh, very interesting. So, the mutagen in the air was created as pest control? So, I guess we went from DDT to something even more destructive. I guess when they ban dynamite, you break out the atomics…

Lyn: “Holly, don’t you have a conscience?”

I agree with JanBic, they had been living in a lower socio economic community. WIth bedbugs. She is rationalizing their silence, not saying the mutagen kills the bedbugs.

I would appear the Topsiders are not developing new technology, but using old technology in different ways: flying car/ flying mutt. I have to wonder what they were doing that they so easily started wiping and plasticizing mutant brains to run the mutts. (Brrrrrr)

So how did Holly get from this “it’s all about me” person to the helping character we all know and love?

Anyone else notice the suicide doors?

Idealistic vs pragmatic. Always trying to find a balance. I think Holly is more concerned with raising her child than being selfish.

The car’s mutt legs makes me wonder if this society hadn’t already been taking shortcuts with smart devices and using human brains as processors. Tech like that doesn’t develop in less than six years, so the Topsider infrastructure had to be in place some time before the End, including plasticized brains. “My Mother the Car” could be a documentary here.

I’m guessing Apex created the mutagen as a measure for population control. Of course you can’t just up and tell your citizenry to kill each other to cull the herds, but you can get them to rally behind exterminating monsters and mutants.

But it backfired (as these schemes often do). Considering the Topsiders’ access to pre war technology (and then some), perhaps they were the first on Apex’s payroll?

I don’t think its as simple as Holly being “all about me” in the past. Part of it was that she was worried about raising her child in squalor part of it was that the whole monster thing seemed so above her ability to respond. I think she just hoped it was a one time thing and it would never happen again. Now that mutations are becoming common, she may be wondering if she did the right thing but isn’t strong enough to ask that question. She may be saying the things she does to try and convince herself that she’s right.

Given the resemblance of high-rise suburbia to the hole-in-the-ground Endtown, I wonder if Endtown was originally a debtor’s community where the undesirables lived buried deep underground with substandard facilities, and restricted access to keep them there. An oubliette. And maybe the debtors were used as test subjects for the Top 1% (before they were Topsiders).

Holly might be nice and caring person in past, but having a baby usually change some priorities, especially toward survival of the baby. This might be case of mother instincts turning ugly.

Holly does not want to raise her baby around bed bugs. How ironic that she did not notice the cockroach in the car…

Now the full extent of the Topsider industrial complex is known. Where they are probably at in the vision is the same place the drones come from. This place too may be underground and continues to operate.So this is post monster, early virus spread time in the Endtown saga. I imagine their silence is bought only till they can be properly taken care of. It now looks to me they are being held…..just in case their “exposure” to the monster leads to contamination. Like Sparkplug lost his family…..Holly may soon be losing hers……when the monsters appear.

I’m pretty sure Holly and Lynn always lived in this particular house. But they had accumulated a huge load of debt and were faced with having to move to Kashmere Acres, where there undoubtedly have been bedbugs. Therefore, the job with Apex allowed them to pay off their debts and stay in their nice house.

Ahh, that explains a lot. Survivor’s guilt… and the wish for a better life at the expense of willful ignorance that tips it to the dark side.

Since I believe that my previous comment was deleted, I’m a little bit afraid to try it again, but here goes…

What happens if a pregnant mother is asleep, but the unborn baby is awake, when the mutagen affects them both?

Really, REALLY, dark stuff….

A question that may have already been asked and discussed: Where is Holly?

Yes, we see a pre-mutant Holly in a flying car, but is this Holly? The first appearance of the Dittos had them haunting the man who’d made himself immune to mutation, but lost his wife and daughter. The Dittos replayed that moment again and again.

Is this what’s happen here? Holly goes in first; Wally & company follow, and find it’s the last Christmas before the war. Is this the key moment for Holly?

If so, is the Holly Wally and everyone sees the real Holly in Ditto guise, or is the real Holly in tears watching this replay? If it’s the former, could Holly think she can change history, or maybe create a Ditto world where she didn’t lose her husband and baby? If so, how this Holly acts could be different than how she acted the first time. The change we see could be an effort to avoid the bad event.

If it’s a replay, though . . .

Both raises the question of whether dittos feed off human emotion or something. In that case they are parasites that need humans, and this colony needed “fresh meat.” But why would Wally’s dittos clear out and not join in the fun?

Someone else besides Holly at the heart of this? Someone who’d subverted the dittos to relive this very same moment? Someone else from Hillside? Maybe even Holly’s Lyn?

Probable answer, the Dittos were originally intended as a cure for the mutagen. Their programming was incomplete however, so “Remake everything as it was” had a really wide (and sometimes literal) interpretation. It can stretch from the moment, to years prior. The fact the food was real shows they could also have some capacity to reproduce basic forms of matter.

Perhaps the Dittos themselves are attempting to find the cause to their existence, since they’re basically inhabiting an almost completely lifeless world, isolated from the Topsiders by their suits, the mutants of the colonies by their airlocks (ever notice they’re more receptive to those who are equally receptive to them?).

Ah well, but then I always entertained the idea of cybernetic counselors to guide AIs through the ridiculousness and lack of logic of their creators.

It’s like being handed a 1000 piece Salvador Dali jigsaw puzzle that keeps melting before you can fit all the pieces.

I’m guessing that the trip through the breakfast table only had one destination and that Holly is here, hidden by dittos. Given that Wally and company know nothing about Holly’s past, only her mind could tell the dittos about her past. I’m guessing she is watching it along with everyone else.That said, guessing Aaron’s plot twists can be a dicey enterprise.