In the third episode of The Institute, Luke was severely tortured by Hendricks because he wanted to determine if the kid had telepathic powers as well as telekinetic powers; the results were inconclusive. When Hendricks submitted a watered-down version of the reports of said torturous tests to Sigsby, she acted on her hunch that Hendricks and Stackhouse were planning to betray the facility and checked out the footage from the CCTV cameras. She saw them conspiring and reported about their activities to her boss, credited as the Man on the Phone, but he disregarded those allegations because, without proof, Sigsby’s words were just idle gossip. As for the kids in the facility, Kalisha was sent to the back-half, which prompted Luke, Nicky, George, and Avery to focus harder on their escape plan. While all this was going on inside the facility, Tim and Annie’s conversation revealed the real intention of the Institute: they were using telepaths to remotely manipulate minds, probably for political reasons. When Tim casually mentioned this to Kate, because she was pretending to be a journalist, she went ahead and killed Annie, since she had accidentally uncovered the main motive of the facility. How were these plot threads explored in the fourth episode of The Institute? Let’s find out.
Spoiler Alert
New Candidates
Episode 4 of The Institute opens with Luke and Avery discussing why they can’t reach out to Kalisha via telepathy. That’s interrupted by the entry of a pair of twins, Gerda and Greta, who have been newly inducted (more like abducted) into the facility. While the kids interact with each other, Sigsby, Stackhouse, and Hendricks talk about the last twins that were brought in before these two and how, in theory, twins are known to amplify each other’s powers. Yes, this is a very obvious nod to the most famous twins in the history of horror, the Grady sisters from The Shining. I don’t think these two IPs are connected, but King has a habit of making everything interconnected, so maybe it is. If you have read the books, please, let me know if the “shining” and the telepathic and telekinetic abilities that the kids are showing here are one and the same. Going back to the plot, while Avery, Luke, Nicky, and George are trying to acclimatize Gerda and Greta to their new environment, another new kid, Harry, barges in and starts acting very rudely. Nicky tries his best to calm him down and assure him that they are all in the same boat, but Harry is hellbent on being aggressive to everyone he sets his eyes on. Stackhouse wants to intervene, but Sigsby wants things to play out uninterrupted to see how these kids react to stress. When Harry tries to strike, George uses a tactic that I haven’t seen before to trip him: he puts his food tray in between Harry’s legs. I don’t know if this is a practical method, so if you want to try it against someone who is bullying you, please do so at your own risk.
Surprisingly enough, after having his face shoved into the ground, Harry calms down a little. At the same time, the drugs that were administered to him to kidnap him also kick in and force him to puke, which inadvertently helps to bring down Harry’s temper a few more notches. However, before the kids can give him the lowdown on what’s going on, Stackhouse takes Harry away to meet Sigsby. As Harry begins to freak out again, Luke uses some kind of a football analogy to get him to comply. When Stackhouse is out of earshot, Avery and Nicky realize that Luke’s telepathic powers have started to blossom. Luke is trying to hide them so that he isn’t sent to the back-half like Kalisha and Iris were. I guess his efforts to obscure his telepathic powers would’ve been successful if the whole operation at the facility was happening somewhat ethically (the whole thing is unethical, but at least there are some checks and balances being maintained by Sigsby), but since Stackhouse and Hendricks have ulterior motives of their own, Luke’s ability to not let them know that he can do telepathy is truly put to the test.
The back-half
As soon as Sigsby leaves the grounds, Hendricks runs an unauthorized experiment on Luke, which brings him to the brink of insanity. While recuperating in his room, Avery shows up to tell Luke that he has finally honed his powers well enough to locate Kalisha in the back-half. They hold hands, and Avery projects their consciousnesses into the back-half, and they are able to talk to Kalisha. Yes, we do see Kalisha moving around the drawing room there and responding to Luke and Avery’s questions, but I don’t think she is talking out loud; she is using her telepathic powers to communicate with Luke and Avery’s projections. If you think otherwise, please let me know in the comments. Anyway, Luke, Avery, and Kalisha talk about how she is doing, what she is eating, what she is smoking, what kind of tests she is being put through (there are none apparently), and what she is being made to watch. Yeah, she talks about watching a movie shot from a first-person perspective where the protagonist does “doctor stuff” like taking care of patients and whatnot.
I couldn’t exactly make out what that’s about. Maybe the kids are being trained to manipulate the minds of medical professionals. Instead of exploring that further, Kalisha chooses to get Iris’ attention, who is still alive, but she is far too broken to function normally. I think she momentarily sees Luke and Avery’s projections, but then something happens and she is unable to see them anymore. I guess this proves that strong telepaths are able to see projections that are meant for someone else, thereby allowing them to disrupt telepathic communication. Avery points out the obvious: Iris is not alright. He also figures out that the constant humming noise that the back-half kids are being subjected to is coming from the recovery room. I don’t think it’s meant to help the kids recover; it’s actually meant to keep the telepaths from communicating with anyone on the outside. Luke tries to force Avery to look at what’s in the recovery room, but Avery freaks out, and the telepathic connection between them and Kalisha falls apart.
Tim and Wendy Team Up
At the Dennison River Bend police department, Tim tries to convince John, Wendy, and Drew that Annie didn’t die of an overdose. Since they know more about Annie’s shenanigans, while Tim has known Annie for just a few days, they are not interested in his theories that she was probably killed. Tim requests that John ask for a toxicology report, but John says that the process will take a long time and it is expensive, and Annie is not worth all that effort. Realizing that Tim is clearly stressed after being in a shootout and then coming across a dead body, John advises that he take a night off, but Tim refuses that proposal and walks out of the station to cool himself down. Wendy goes after him to apologize that she can’t officially help him solve Annie’s murder, but I think that gives him a hint that she is willing to do some under the table stuff to get to the bottom of this incident. Tim thanks Wendy and then goes over to Annie’s tent to sift through her stuff before it’s thrown into the incinerator or something. He finds a hand-drawn map of the geography around the Red Steps, a newspaper clipping of the death of the teens that drowned at the Red Steps, the bottle of vodka that supposedly killed Annie, and a beer can. He supposedly puts them in his bag and heads over to Wendy’s house to do some research. He puts the vodka bottle and the beer can on her table and shows that they don’t have any lipstick marks. Annie used to wear lipstick, which means that she never sipped on it, and it was forced down her throat. Wendy doesn’t understand why someone would look to kill Annie.
So, Tim reveals that, right before dying, Annie told him about the plane crash before it even took place. Of course, Wendy finds that to be preposterous. Therefore, Tim shifts their conversation to the topic of the drowning incident and talks about wanting to know more about the victims. Wendy didn’t know them personally. Hence, she pulls out her school yearbook, because it has all the info Tim needs to find all the people who were associated with the kids who died. Tim doesn’t have a vehicle of his own, which is why he hopes to borrow Wendy’s car so that he can visit all the people in that yearbook. Wendy has warmed up to Tim a lot, so she says that she’s okay with that plan, and later on, we see Tim going on a solo mission and coming across a property with a “no trespassing” board on it. At this point, it’s pretty evident that these two are going to end up together. Additionally, I’m willing to bet that there’ll be a betrayal of sorts. I know that most are expecting Tim to turn out to be a bad guy, because no man can be this nice. However, I feel that Wendy is going to betray Tim because she is secretly working for the Institute. Book readers, feel free to let me know if I am on the right track. I have learned that the showrunners have already deviated from the books. But if this is a subplot that’s being accurately adapted, feel free to spoil it for me.
Sigsby Is On The Back Foot
Sigsby finds out about Hendricks’ unauthorized experiments, which makes me question the whole point of conducting an unauthorized experiment. The whole place is fitted with CCTV cameras. What’s the point of hiding? Or maybe the whole point of doing all this right under Sigsby’s nose and then coming up with extraordinary results is to show how far they have to actually go to get good results. As long as they follow all the arbitrary rules put in place for the Institute, they’ll have to wait a lot. If they keep pushing endlessly, they’ll reach their goal quickly. I guess we’ll know more about this later. Sigsby goes to interrupt Avery, George, Luke, and Nicky’s conversation about their escape plan, or the idea of making an escape plan, because they aren’t even close to figuring out what they need to do to get out of the facility. Sigsby wants to talk to Luke alone because, well, he was the one who was subjected to the unauthorized experiment by Hendricks. So, while everyone goes indoors, Luke and Sigsby hang back at the porch to have a chat, in the rain, about Hendricks. In doing so, Sigsby exposes the fact that she doesn’t trust Hendricks and Stackhouse and that Hendricks and Stackhouse are betraying Sigsby. Luke was looking for a weak spot to strike all this while, and finally, he has one. Sigsby tries to cover up her mistake by saying that Luke will never win, but even that shows that she is afraid that now, there’s a sliver of a chance that these kids will escape, and she and her colleagues will be tried legally for everything they’ve done in this facility.
While heading back to his room, Luke comes across Tony, who is carrying an incredibly sick Harry. Luke wants to know what happened to him, but Tony obviously doesn’t reveal the truth of the matter, dumps Harry in his room, and leaves. Since Harry had puked on the floor, Tony called in Maureen to clean up the corridor. She tries to sympathize with the kids’ plight, but Luke shuts her down by saying that he knows that she is putting on an act. Maureen proves that she actually cares about them by taking Luke over to the ice machine (because it masks their voices and it is at a blind spot, thereby preventing the authorities from snooping on them) and having an honest chat about the power that the people running the Institute wield. Luke is unwilling to believe that, despite being a janitor, Maureen can’t do anything. Maureen knows her limits, and regardless of what Luke feels she can do, she is apparently not in the position to become a whistleblower. She just wants to get paid and look after her family.
Luke Can See the Future
Luke retires to his room and has a vision of Harry accidentally killing one of the twins. He tries to prevent it by calling the guards, but they don’t act swiftly enough to stop Harry from striking Greta. Instead of letting the kids recover from that trauma by themselves, the following day, Sigsby meets up with Luke, Avery, Nicky, and George in the cafeteria to “explain” what led to that incident, and she boils it down to a side effect of the experiments that were conducted on Harry. The only useful thing that she says is that Harry, Greta, and Gerda are alright now. Then she immediately goes back to underscoring the importance of the “work” that they are doing and emphasizing that they’re not going to stop the experiments just because one kid freaked out and almost killed another kid. After Sigsby leaves, Luke and Avery go to the ice machine to talk about the premonition that he had before the incident with Harry and the twins. But before they can discuss the fact that Luke’s powers are so advanced he can see the future, Tony shows up and drags Luke away for his next experiment.
This one basically involves Hendricks and Tony constantly suffocating Luke in a vacuum chamber until he reveals his telepathic powers. Luke endures the process without telling them the truth about his powers, because he knows that Tony and Hendricks can’t kill him. Hendricks eventually gives up and tells Tony to take Luke back to his room. At the end of The Institute episode 4, Hendricks meets up with Sigsby in the storeroom with the intention of having sex, only to find out that Sigsby wants to talk to him about all the off-the-books experiments that he has been doing on Luke. Hendricks briefly denies the allegation, but then he blurts out that he is running a side hustle with Stackhouse in order to turn Luke into a “precog,” or PC. So, this proves that the Institute and every facility like the Institute aren’t just looking to commit crimes by manipulating the minds of their enemies or by committing a crime without leaving a trace (because telekinesis and telepathy don’t leave any fingerprints or footprints); they are also looking for candidates who can anticipate their enemies’ moves. If they are one step ahead of “the enemy,” the people in charge of these facilities can manipulate governments, politicians, and the powers that control every aspect of this world based on what they are planning to do. That’s kind of like Minority Report.
Anyway, going back to the conversation, Sigsby orders Hendricks to not tell Stackhouse anything about the conversation they just had, and she also tells him to move Luke to the back-half. Hendricks advises against it, because according to his stats, Luke isn’t exhibiting telepathic powers, and “the hum” can prove detrimental to the mind of a person with only telekinetic powers. Sigsby sees through Luke’s ruse; hence, she says that he is faking his lack of telepathic powers so that he can stay in the front-half. However, Hendricks refuses to take such a big risk just because Sigsby thinks Luke is lying. Therefore, they go back to square one: Hendricks will continue to collaborate with Stackhouse so that he doesn’t suspect that Hendricks has leaked info about their side hustle to Sigsby, while Sigsby sees if she can find an efficient way to bring out Luke’s telepathic powers. Maureen takes Luke back to his room so that he can rest up, and that’s when Avery catches a glimpse of what’s on her mind. I can’t say for sure what it was, but I guess she is the one who takes telepaths who turn into “precogs” into the recovery room. The opening credits did show a room full of beds filled with kids who were attached to some kind of a VR headset. So, it’s possible that these “precogs” are forced to see stuff that’s happening in real time and then predict what’s going to happen based on that footage. I suppose that “assumption” is then passed on to the telepaths, and they are tasked with manipulating a target. That’s just pure speculation. I’m sure we’ll know more about it in the next few episodes.
