The Sound Board

Adore this show beyond words. Every episode I wrestle with huge philosophical issues from a perspective I've never considered before. I'm immersed into every second. Everything rings true though character and grounded in a wildly fantastical world whose rules are invented from the ground up, and quite unlike anything I've seen before.

My overall feeling at the end of Ep9 is that although the show is about many, many things, it feels at this point that most pertinently it is a show about cults. The series - even right from ep 1 - is about lovebombing Carol. She seems a hopeless case, an angry volatile misanthrope grieving her wife that they killed. How could they possibly get her onside?

Abandonment. Give her enforced apparently blissful solitude, and add time. It won't take all that long.

Indeed it doesn't. They get her to a point of maximum vulnerability and milk it for all its worth. Carol feels loved. She even realises at one point that her partner is really her chaperone - "exactly" Zosia confirms. They're not even hiding it - they can't. And STILL Carol is in. She tells herself she can live with that because the alternative is so much worse. She "feels" amazing. And it must do - she is being globally love-bombed.

The feeling that you - squirty, failing, hopeless little you - are actually the centre of someone else's world is such a heady part about being mutually in love. It feels unbelievable, you pinch yourself - can it even be true? Yes! It is true! Oh my God. It is overwhelming. Well never mind that, Carol is the centre of 7 billion others' world. Everything is designed to make her happy. Limitless, boundless. Zosia herself is designed to make her happy, the person plucked from 7 billion as the most likely to be able to woo, seduce her and then fulfil her every conceivable wish. And these others totally believe in it too. Completely. It's all for one purpose.

The cable cars quietly stop the moment Carol and Zosia have departed.

This is cults, pure and simple, only on the largest scale possible. Cults are masters at exploiting vulnerability (often not a negative vulnerability at all, eg compassion). They make you feel like you are the centre of their world. And slowly they become the centre of YOUR world. In fact, not just the centre, your periphery too - they are your ENTIRE world. You cannot leave because if you do you lose everything. You are shunned, rejected, utterly alone. Everything you believed in, the reason you got up in the morning, the purpose that you put your heart and soul into, shattered.

Having an entire city move away to avoid you is the perfect metaphor for what that would feel like. And they do it to her TWICE.

There were times when I thought Carol wouldn't have gone so far down the rabbit hole, but by the end I realised it was inevitable she would.

So. Delightfully... now what?

Vince Gilligan holds the rights to Raven, the biography of Jim Jones. He knows how this stuff works.