In episode 2 of The Institute, Annie shared her crackpot theory with Tim that the town of Dennison River Bend had been taken over by some kind of skinwalkers who were pretending to be humans. Tim learned from Wendy that Annie had been acting that way ever since a kid called Officer Zoe accidentally drowned at the Red Steps, in what Annie alleged was a murder. Unrelated to all this, Tim saved the life of the owner of a local convenience store, with some help from Officer Drew, and that helped establish his good-guy persona in front of his colleagues and the rest of the town. At the titular facility, after Iris’ departure to the back-half, Luke, Kalisha, Nicky, and George started working on a plan to escape. Eventually, they came to the conclusion that the only way they could get out of there without getting killed was with the help of a really powerful telepath. And their prayers were immediately answered with the admission of the new kid, Avery. In the meantime, a betrayal began brewing amongst the staff as Stackhouse and Hendrick decided to poach the kids being brought there to people with deep pockets and get rich. Sigsby got a hint of this mutiny, thereby setting the stage for some workplace drama. How were these plot threads furthered in the third episode of The Institute? Let’s find out.
Spoiler Alert
Luke Is Tortured
Episode 3 opens with Tony taking Luke to Hendricks for yet another round of experimentation. This one involves staring at a white screen, after being injected with Hendricks’ personal concoction of brain stimulators, until Luke can see dots of color appear before his eyes. This procedure takes quite the toll on Luke (but Hendricks gets some solid readings, so I guess it’s worth it), and it’s only exacerbated by the physical abuse that he is subjected to by Tony. At the end of the ordeal, Luke is forced to look at blank cards and guess what’s on the back of them, which is something that he fails to do.
I think he was supposed to read Hendricks’ mind as he was looking at the image on the back of the card and give the correct answer. But Luke can’t do telepathy; he can do telekinesis. So, was he supposed to get a feel of what was drawn on the back of the card and “guess” it correctly? Well, whatever the case may be, when Luke exits Hendricks’ chamber, he can barely walk and is dropped back in his bedroom by Tony (Stephen King’s latest comments make these scenes feel very awkward). After cleaning himself up, Luke heads over to the dining area to talk to Kalisha and Nicky about Avery, how powerful he actually is, and how easily he can read everyone’s minds.
Sigsby Rats On Stackhouse And Hendricks
Maureen reports to Sigsby and Stackhouse about what the kids are up to. She tells them that they should keep an eye on Luke because he is hyper-focused on the security system. Sigsby tells Maureen to be wary of Avery because he is more powerful than all the other kids. Stackhouse isn’t interested in any of this because his kidnapping teams have been failing recently—Sigsby passes a remark about this—and because he isn’t invested in the betterment of the facility, given he’s started his very own side hustle of poaching kids. Sigsby already had doubts about Stackhouse’s intentions after she saw him and Hendricks talking outside her house, but when Hendricks starts watering down the results of his experiments, she realizes that something is definitely up.
She checks the CCTV footage from the day Stackhouse first approached Hendricks regarding his plan to betray the facility and notices him muting the audio on the camera. That’s when she becomes at least 60 percent sure that Stackhouse and Hendricks are going to cause some kind of trouble. By the way, I assumed that when Stackhouse muted the CCTV, he did it in a very sly way. However, when you look at the footage, you can clearly see him pushing a button on a remote and a mute logo showing up on the monitor that the footage is being fed into. Is Stackhouse an idiot? Did he just assume that no one would notice? Or did he want Sigsby to notice and raise an alarm so that he could paint her as an alarmist and get her kicked out? I don’t know, but, yeah, the mute logo giving away Stackhouse’s covert activities seems dumb at this point. Sigsby doesn’t waste a second and informs her boss that Stackhouse’s intentions seem suspicious. The boss-man shuts her down by saying that these allegations won’t hold water unless she has any credible proof. So, I guess, Sigsby is about to snoop on Stackhouse and Hendricks until she has something to show to the higher-ups.
Kalisha Goes To The Back-half
Kalisha reveals that she is about to graduate to the back-half pretty soon, and Luke sees the positive side of it, i.e., Kalisha is one step closer to going home. That conversation is derailed by Avery as he starts sensing something. Soon enough, everyone in the room starts to hear a humming sound, and far away from the facility, Annie hears it too. Kalisha theorizes that it often comes from the back-half, but she hasn’t been able to figure out the source. Later on, while doing their rounds of the facility, Avery tells Luke that Maureen, who we all thought to be the kids’ greatest ally, is hiding a lot of secrets. As per Avery, even though Maureen hates this place as much as the kids do, she can’t be trusted because she leaks info to Sigsby. The following day, Nicky, Luke, and Avery are seen working on their escape plan again, which is when Avery shows off his powers by looking through the eyes of the guard dog. His number one observation from that is that there’s another playground in the vicinity. What does that mean? Well, Avery isn’t sure, but he has a bad feeling about it. I think it might be a cemetery where all the dead kids are buried. Before Avery can pry into it further, Kalisha shows up after her grueling session of experiments and basically says that her time in the front-half is over and she is about to be taken to the back-half. And, well, her prediction comes to pass, as Sigsby arrives that evening for Kalisha’s graduation ceremony.
While everyone is distracted, Luke secretly approaches Maureen and plants the idea of defecting against the Institute. When he returns to the table, Kalisha asks everyone to hold hands, and, I think, they begin channeling their superpowers into the atmosphere all at once. Sigsby notices that and tells Tony and the guards to separate them as soon as possible to avoid any kind of catastrophe. This leads to a bit of a scuffle, but it’s stopped pretty soon as Kalisha and Luke manage to convince Nicky that this isn’t their time to attack. They must wait for the opportune moment and strike when their chances of winning are at their maximum. Kalisha is then taken to the back-half, which is telepathically tracked by Avery, who is in turn being monitored by Sigsby. When Kalisha enters a room, the contents of which remain a mystery, Avery loses track of her, and that causes him to panic. That means that the back-half room is impervious to outside telepathic entry, but it’s capable of emitting telepathic signals. That said, since Avery has kind of shown his hand, I think Sigsby will try to keep him in check so that he doesn’t expose the Institute’s real plans. Or maybe she is going to use Avery to learn about Stackhouse and Hendricks’ side-hustle plans. I suppose we’ll know more about that in the next episode.
Tim Gets Defensive
Tim reports to the station and is immediately cornered by Wendy regarding his heroics at the convenience store because he refuses to take credit for what he did to save the life of a gunshot victim. So, Wendy straight-up assumes that Tim is some kind of fugitive who doesn’t want the limelight and just wants to remain anonymous to avoid any unwanted attention. Tim defends his stance by stating that his past experiences compel him to not get involved in any trouble voluntarily.
Saving that convenience store owner wasn’t optional, but getting rewarded for it is a choice, and he just thinks that Drew needs the pat on the back more than he does. Now, Tim was doing fine until this point, but then he starts telling Wendy to cut Drew some slack because he is doing his best and cut him some slack as well because he is a “nice guy.” Wendy immediately clocks that and points out that nice guys don’t need to say they are nice, which is absolutely true. To be honest, even I was buying Tim’s ruse that he is a do-gooder, but this bit has got me thinking that maybe his character has some villainous undercurrent to it. We’ll see.
Annie Is Dead
Tim goes out for his nightly rounds and comes across Annie playing hopscotch because it keeps “them” (I’m guessing she is talking about the alleged skinwalkers, but she might also be talking about the people in the facility) out of one’s mind. Then she mentions something about using telepathy to give a pilot the wrong numbers, but before Tim can learn more about that, Annie tells him to stay away from the Institute, and then they go their separate ways. Later on, when Tim makes a pit stop at the bar, he is approached by Kate, who clearly tries to woo him for reasons that aren’t clear yet. I guess she is trying to recruit him into the kidnapping department of the facility, because I’m pretty sure that she hasn’t got the hots for him. However, her flirtations are sidelined by the news of a plane crash, which is something that gets Tim’s attention. Now, I don’t know if Tim puts two and two together, but it’s apparent that the Institute is using the telepathic and/or the telekinetic kids to commit acts of terror from afar. That loud hum that they all heard was one or more of the back-half kids being forced to send the wrong coordinates or directions to the pilot of the plane, which caused it to crash. Why that plane specifically? Because a senator was on it. Since Kate is pretending to be a journalist, Tim asks her if she knows anything about what the Institute really does, whilst citing Annie’s theories about mind control and whatnot. Kate gives a non-answer and then departs.
That said, the agenda of the facility is obvious now: they are killing off people in power, at the behest of other people in power, with the use of telepathy and telekinesis. The man on the phone has politician friends, and I guess whoever pays him the most to do a hit job to shift the tide of the country, he does it via mutant kids. Isn’t that convenient? At the end of The Institute episode 3, while returning to the station, Tim pays Annie a visit and sees that she has supposedly committed suicide by downing a bunch of pills with a bottle of alcohol. But it’s pretty obvious that this is Kate’s doing. Earlier, Annie had revealed that it’s been years since she had had a drink. So, it’s not like she suddenly felt suicidal and started drinking again. Kate heard from Tim what Annie has been saying about the Institute’s true goals, and she decided to silence her by staging this suicide. Hopefully Tim will see through this ruse and arrest Kate before she takes yet another life. He’ll definitely have a hard time convincing Wendy, Ashworth, or Drew to look into the activities of a “journalist,” but given how much he liked Annie, I think he’ll stop at nothing until he ensures that justice has been served. Anyway, those are just my thoughts on the ending of The Institute episode 3. What did you think about it? Let me know in the comments section below.
