Sophia

SPOILERS — Jade (David Alpay) and Tabitha (Catalina Sandino Moreno) find the childrens’ bones but are trapped in the catacombs under the town. The night creatures are unable to tolerate direct sunlight, so someone (?) causes darkness falls in the middle of the day possibly to give the creatures a better chance of catching up to Jade and Tabitha. A sunless afternoon ensues and the night creatures attack those who uprooted the bottle tree forcing them to drive back to town. Patty (Trina Corkum) panics, grabs Boyd’s gun and tries to shoot herself, but only manages to shatter one of the car windows.

Jade and Tabitha are trapped in a chamber with a barred opening. One of the “ghoulish children” was seen imprisoned behind those bars in episode 210.

Jade is a software engineer who arrived on the same day that Tabitha and her family got there. In Season One, it was his car that ran the Matthews’ vehicle off the road. In Season Three, it was Jade who figured out what the notes attached to the bottle tree mean. In Season Four, it was Jade who found the magic mushrooms that propelled his psychedelic vision quest that allowed him to see three other versions of himself (avatars?) all of whom had died in the town at different times in the past. If the town is a Virtual Reality for which Jade wrote the program and it developed glitches, he might have decided to enter it to identify the problems. But when inside the virtual environment, he has no conscious memory of why he’s there. Such a shared virtual reality experience could explain how people manage to enter the place from widely separated locations, and, like Jade, have no conscious knowledge of why they are there

Henry (Robert Joy) finds a tin can in Victor’s room with several bullets in it. Believing that the “dream” is providing him with the means to eliminate what anchors him to his current reality, as those in his “hospital reality” said it would (see “The Calm Before” (episode 409), Henry goes to the Sheriff’s station and finds a gun in an unlocked drawer and takes it back to Colony House. He threatens Victor (Scott McCord) with it, but when Ethan (Simon Webster) enters and distracts Henry, Victor disarms him.

Tabitha picks up one of the children’s skulls and says “It’s her”. She remembers the child who spoke to her in episode 310, and one gets a feeling that child might have been her daughter.

If Tabitha is another version of Henry’s wife Miranda, then it is possible that the entire Kavanaugh family is another version of the Matthews family. That would make Julie another version of the deceased Eloise, and Henry a different expression of Jim (or vice-versa). That would make Ethan an alternative Victor, and since both are alive, either Ethan or Victor is likely to die soon to preserve the symmetry of the situation. This might be the reason someone or something is trying to persuade Henry to kill Victor. (Sara tried but failed to kill Ethan in Season One.)

The Man in Yellow can only take the form of people who have died in the town, so why has he taken the form of Sophia? It is clearly painful for him to shapeshift. Wouldn’t it be less painful to shift into a form more similar to his own?

The fourth season ends with The Boy in White and Sophia meeting near a hollow tree (into which Sophia dumps all the talismans she has collected from the town).

SOPHIA: “Wow, look at you, all grown up.”
BOY IN WHITE: “They have the bones.”
SOPHIA: “But the Bottle Tree is gone.”
BOY IN WHITE: “You’re gonna lose this time.”
SOPHIA: “I’ve always admired your optimism. I guess we’ll see.”

The Boy in White and Sophia

They sound like brother and sister, and their short conversation reveals a lot. One can infer that The Boy in White and Sophia haven’t seen each other for a while. and that they have competed before, and when they did, Sophia almost always won. The digging up of the bones somehow worked against Sophia, and the effect of the uprooting of the bottle tree was unfavourable to the Boy in White. Despite all this, The Boy remains optimistic, as though he has an ace up his sleeve. One wonders: what if The Man in Yellow, The Boy in White, and the late Sophia are (or were) a family like the Kavanaughs and the Matthews. If so, who might Sophia’s mother be? Donna would fit that role well, and might connect with Ethan’s favourite fiction, “The Flight of the Cromenockle”, especially if the author’s name, Kay Dillon, is a nom de plume.

Deaths and Rumours of Deaths

Acosta and Kristi after the fall of the bottle tree

At the clinic, Fatima (Pegah Bhafoori) sees through the Smiley Creature’w 3eyes again and knows he is approaching. Mari (Kaelen Ohm) tries to protect Fatima and is fatally wounded. When Kristi (Chloe Van Landschoot) returns to the clinic, Mari dies in her arms. Her death seems random and uncalled for, but if Hypothesis One holds, death might be the prescribed method of exiting the program.

At the diner, Sophia (Julia Doyle) offers Elgin (Nathan D Simmons) a deal, but he’s smart enough to reject it. He tries praying, but Sophia kills him anyway, It is not certain exactly how. Then she says: “Now I light a match and watch it burn.” With the help of Clara (Katerina Bakolias), she collects all the talismans from the town.

When Jade and Tabitha do not return, Julie (Hannah Cheramy) wants to know if her mother is dead, and when Donna (Elizabeth Saunders) begins to explain the situation to her, poltergeist-like activity (objects thrown across the room and cabinet doors banging, all impelled by some invisible force). When this happened the first time, in “The Arrival” (episode 401), Julie was reassuring Ethan that his father was not dead. (Jim’s body was not found until “Fray” (episode 402).

Donna

Boyd (Harold Perrineau), Ellis (Corteon Moore), and Fatima, go into the tunnels to rescue the missing people and bring out the bones. When they find Jade and Tabitha, Fatima reveals that she has be become a night creature, and stays behind to delay the other night creatures and give Ellis and Boyd time to escape.