This one is pretty self-explanatory. I’m not totally pleased with it, it kinda feels like a clip show. It’s mainly an exposition dump. It does help contextualize a lot of the show up until this point though! So that’s nice at least.
I partially invented the in-universe history of the Charlestown mall, but a lot of the key details are there. It was originally a weapons manufacturer, switched to making computer parts, and eventually was bought and converted to a factory outlet mall which boomed in the 80s and suffered along with hundreds of other malls nationwide, eventually limiting operations to a few minor locations and then closing permanently. The Charlestown Factory Outlet is not to be confused with the Charlestowne Mall in Illinois, another abandoned mall named basically the same thing.
I visited Charlestown USA in 2018. At this point it was totally decrepit, mostly falling apart and flooded. You technically weren’t allowed in, but the area wasn’t very heavily patrolled, and no one seemed to care that much as long as you weren’t causing trouble or destroying it further. The most recently operational part I saw was a little bar called the Backstreets Brewing Company, a nice little place that, according to a cursory Google search, apparently used to be the epicenter of a disproportionate amount of gun violence. There were business cards from that location spilled all over the floor, half-rotted, and I saw isopods and springtails using them as basically a pile of leaf litter. The wooden floorboards were covered in moss, creaky and soaked, with mushrooms sprouting up from in between. Nature was taking the place back.
Eventually this little observation would come full circle. In 2020, the entire complex caught fire, and it burned for two whole days. Either someone lit the place up deliberately or, less likely, some faulty remnant of an electrical system ignited itself. It seems that after a century the place was ready to go. It was demolished in 2022, and nothing is left of it now.
In the Roseworld story, Charlestown never closed or burned. We find out in this episode that it became a mega-mall hosting the Titan Utica. All my Titans have names ending in -a, which isn’t a coincidence. I wanted them to have a naming convention that subtly grouped them all together as powerful beings despite the fact that they’re all just named after normal things like towns and cities. Like how most angels have names ending in -el. Utica, Alvira/Centralia, Canandaigua, Palmyra, Batavia… maybe some others you haven’t heard about yet? Who’s to say! It worked out really well that most of the places I wanted to make host to Titans have names that work with this little naming convention. Utica, as we see in this story and in the way it’s talked about by Centralia in the previous episode (and in the next two), is something like the memory unit of the Titans. Any information they gather is stored inside it. Most of the time, when the narrator’s faction is stealing information from the Titans, they’re hacking it from the enormous memory banks of Utica.
We meet two returning characters in this episode. First is Madison, the teenage daughter from the third episode who survived her family’s abduction by the Animal. She’s an adult now, and is trying to evaluate some kind of mysterious specimen, presumably from her encounter. The second returning character is David Free - do you remember him? He was briefly mentioned in the first episode as an autonomous systems expert who chimed in for the article about the final closing of Roseland. We find out here he’s kind of a know-it-all from a know-it-all family. His famous great-uncle, Maximillian Free, was something of a Carnegie or Hearst for the autab industry. His cousin, Kathy, apparently ended up disgraced in some way, having lost her marbles over what she erroneously thought machines like these could do - according to David, anyway. How that works out for him will become clearer over the next two episodes.