He makes him not only confess his feelings but interrogate why he’s having them why can’t he choose, as he implored the Epsilons to do, whether to live like this? The answer, of course, is because he’s so hung up on Lenina. At first, he takes his newfound impulse out on Gary, but then he directs it to John personally, implying that he had sex with Lenina, knowing that John’s issues with Lenina’s promiscuity are in large part what’s sending him crackers.Īnd CJack60 doesn’t help because he turns John’s own ideology and words back on him. Bernard doesn’t help since he’s now in touch with his own emotions enough to realize that he’s jealous of John and that he’d quite enjoy taking some revenge on him. Now he knows the unfettered access to everyone’s consciousness that the optic gives him, it’s only a matter of time until he reconnects. He rejects the interface, ripping it out.īut the damage is done.
He’s overwhelmed not just by the complexity of his own feelings but by the breadth of everyone else’s. As it turns out, it isn’t simply a case of switching John’s emotions off so that he can be comfortably numb a person has to feel something, after all, and John’s problem in Brave New World episode 8 is that he can’t decide – or perhaps even identify – what it is he feels. John having Helm plug him into Indra turned out to be a mistake, which anyone could have seen coming, really, though perhaps not in quite this way. He spends most of his time marching around in a black trench coat pulling moody faces, being indecisive about whether he wants to engage with his emotions or not, and then ultimately getting super weird with Lenina in what I think is the only sex scene of the season that has actually meant something – although what it meant doesn’t exactly bode well.
“Monogamy and Futility, Part 2” gets unusually, uncomfortably dark, a change that is reflected, rather comically, in John’s outfit and attitude. Check out all our recaps in the episode archive.