Finally, in episode six out of seven, we meet our secret protagonist. Not the narrator of the podcast, but - as we’ll find out in the next episode for certain - the person who set the events of the resistance against slurry into motion.
When I started this show, I knew there would be a character like Latoya Baker, but I didn’t know who she was until I actually wrote this episode. She’s going to be very important going forward.
This episode is the only one so far to be set in a completely fictitious location. Serenity Bluffs Psychiatric Hospital is based in part on the Rolling Hills Asylum, with some key differences. Rolling Hills closed in the seventies, and was widely known as a horrifically abusive “insane asylum” and “poor house.” It’s absolutely full of tragic, nightmarish history that I won’t get into here. This true history was too dark for me to feel comfortable transplanting the location into my story entirely, even in an alternate universe, so I invented a similar but distinct entity for Roseworld. Serenity Bluffs was first mentioned in episode four as one of several examples of successfully-implemented AI.
It’s unclear exactly how Latoya ended up in the hospital and I want to keep it that way. She’s one of many people who fell through the cracks of a system that wasn’t designed to look after her. What’s important is that she knows she doesn’t belong in an institution, even if there are some people who feel that they do, and she wants out. The Titan Batavia befriends her because she is something of a computer genius and convinces her to help it out, in return for getting her name out of the system. Batavia needs to escape before it’s destroyed like Palmyra was, and Latoya is its chosen escape route.
Since she’s stuck in a place where terrible things have happened in the past, Latoya experiences something like a haunting in this episode. I’ll leave it up to you to decide whether this was a result of the stress and sleeplessness she’d been dealing with or if ghosts actually exist here. I tried to write this part respectfully, making it clear that the villainous figures here were the doctors who mistreated their patients in the past, not the mentally ill or disabled people they were meant to be looking after. This fits with what we’re told about Rolling Hills Asylum as well - when I toured it, there were all kinds of horrific stories about the malevolent doctor and nurse spirits, while the spirits of patients were said to be mostly benign and at worst a bit grumpy, only frightening to behold if you weren’t used to them. (I didn’t see any ghosts at Rolling Hills.)
Part of what I wanted to emphasize in this episode is that the shining retrofuture of Roseworld is not a utopia. The World of Tomorrow we see in the imagined American future of the forties through the seventies - where this podcast draws its main aesthetic from - never was. It was a vision centered on the white American nuclear family, its comfort and pleasure, and its continued ability to find new and exciting ways to maintain its lifestyle while extracting resources from the rest of the world. Latoya Baker, a young Black woman living in arguably this society’s golden age, is one of many tossed aside. Did this mean she was uniquely able to empathize with Batavia? Or that she was made vulnerable in a way where the Titan was able to deviously exploit her to its own end, being just another shiny piece of the rotten system she’d been up against her whole life? It’s not entirely clear in this episode.
Finally, at the very end of the episode, we get to something I’d been excitedly waiting to put in this show since the start: Centralia. This description of Centralia is quite far from the truth of what the town has been at any point since the fire started, let alone in the modern day. It’s an exaggerated Centralia that lives up to the folkloric concept of the haunted, abandoned, perpetually burning ghost town that has been built up around it, especially in the internet age. Marked by a modified version of the now-infamous theoretical long-term nuclear waste warning, our primary antagonist is shown in all its glory for the first time as Latoya travels into the belly of the beast to give her friend’s compressed memories and personality over to something that shouldn’t even be able to exist. It’s clear from the description we’re given that something is deeply wrong with Centralia, and we’re going to find out what exactly that is in the next episode.