LIMETOWN — “Sylvia if your listening, they know. It’s time.”

The Premise

10 years ago, 327 people disappeared from Limetown, Tennessee and were never heard from again. Investigative reporter Lia Haddock sets out to find out what happened and why.

What we know:

In what is presumably the “Season 1 Finale” (more on that later), we begin to get some answers. Here’s what we know:

All of the residents of Limetown were employees of a single company, run by a man named R.B. Villard. They were developing a technology that essentially amounted to telepathy. Mind-to-mind communication between two people without having to speak or write.

Eventually, about half the residents of Limetown were given an implant — or “the tech” as it’s called — surgically placed behind their ear that gave them these telepathic powers. The other half weren’t. They were the “control group.” The decision as to who got the tech and who didn’t came from the highest levels — presumably Villard — and appeared arbitrary. Eventually, those without the tech rioted and mutinied. They destroyed Limetown and burned Oscar Totem, the head scientist who was developing the tech, at the stake.

It was revealed in this episode that as all of this was happening, a woman named Leonore Dougal, who was hired as the “city manager” in charge of logistics, was secretly working as a corporate spy. She was a mole who worked for a powerful organization that wanted the telepathy tech for itself. This secret company didn’t have a formal name and we don’t know much about them, except they are very powerful and resourceful. Their organization went by a series of ever changing alphanumeric digits like GDK-4. Leonore herself referred to them as “the Bad Guys” as will I.

Leonore takes Lia to the basement of an Italian restaurant she owns. Based on Lia’s statements later in the episode, it sounded like the restaurant was on Bleecker Street, which would place them in New York City.

Leonore explains that the initial plan was for the Bad Guys to steal the tech, “extract” Dr. Oscar Totem as well as Emil Haddock, another central figure who is known as “the asset” and who is Lia Haddock’s uncle. The plan was to then kill everyone else in Limetown. But after half the residents got the chip implants, the plan evolved. Now the new plan was for Leonore to capture all the residents who had the tech and kill the residents who didn’t.

As best I can tell, the Bad Guys were NOT responsible for the riot and mutiny that happened in Limetown. That evolved on its own as those without the tech were increasingly dissatisfied. But they did have a small army of private security personnel ready to siege Limetown when things went south. Sometime near the end, Oscar Totem discovered Leonore was a mole. Together they called in the Bad Guys to rescue them as riots burned the town. But for Oscar it was too late. He was already burned at the stake by the time the Bad Guys went in. Emil Haddock, on the other hand, survived the riots and presumably were captured by the Bad Guys.

Meanwhile, Leonore continued to execute Plan B. She managed to get all the residents with the tech to hide temporarily in caves that were next to Limetown. From there, these individuals were transported to different cities all over the world. As for the other residents — those without the tech — all but one were killed. Their bodies were gruesomely liquefied and presumably drained into a nearby river.

Leonore evidently let a seven year old girl named Sylvia survive and escape Limetown, despite not having the tech. At one point in the episode, Leonore shouts out to the live broadcast, “Sylvia if your listening, they know. It’s time.” It’s not clear what this means. However, in episode 2 it was revealed that Sylvia was the daughter of another woman named Winona who had also managed to escape Limetown. In episode 2 it was said that Winona was allowed to leave Limetown, though the details of how and why are unclear.

The survivors — the residents of Limetown who had the tech and allowed to live— were shuttled off to new, secret Limetowns all over the world, where presumably for the past ten years the Bad Guys continued to develop and improve the tech.

Finally, as noted earlier, key to the telepathy technology is a man named Emil Haddock, Lia’s uncle. Leonore calls Emil “the asset.” We don’t know much about him. Lia evidently knows (or remembers) little about him. But the Bad Guys believe he is a critical asset. Emil tried to escape from the Bad Guys clutches in the past. At least once before he succeeded, before he was caught. Now, Emil has once again escaped, and the Bad Guys are using Lia as leverage to try to lure him back.

Once Leonore explains all of this to Lia and to the listeners — all while an egg timer is counting down 12 minutes in a masterful stroke of radio theater — she takes a pill that she says will cause her to fall asleep and die within minutes. She encourages Lia to take a pill as well, although she says “Emil wouldn’t approve.” Lia discovers she is trapped and that the Bad Guys are coming for her. Leonore dies just as Lia is captured by the Bad Guys. Leonore’s last words are, “Oh, you can feel him can’t you?” Presumably, what she means is Lia has the same innate telepathic traits Emil has. So it’s possible she may be an asset to the Bad Guys as well.

The episode ends with Lia asking her producer Mark and the audience for help. She yells “don’t let them win!” Her transmission cuts off just as she says she is sorry for losing.

A day later, a short statement was released by Gina Purri, senior vice president of American Public Radio. Purri acknowledges APR made a mistake sending Lia in alone, she says an internal investigation is underway, and they are working with the FBI to try to find Lia.

Things that don’t make sense

1. Why is Leonore still helping the Bad Guys?

A central mystery is what is motivating Leonore at this point. Why does she come out of hiding now, 10 years later? Why does she reveal what she knows to Lia? And most importantly, why does she continue helping the Bad Guys?

Leonore states very clearly at one point in the episode that she is NO LONGER working for the Bad Guys. I think her exact words were, “I no longer work for them.”

We know that the Bad Guys are trying to kidnap Lia to use her as bait for Emil. It also seems very clear from this episode that Leonore is acting as an accomplice to lure Lia into the trap. She brings Lia into the basement of the restaurant she owns. She asks Lia repeatedly whether she REALLY wants to know the truth? “Is the truth really worth it?” Importantly, once they enter the basement of the Italian restaurant, THE DOOR TO THE BASEMENT IS LOCKED. We know this because later Lia tries to escape but she can’t. It’s not clear whether it was Leonore or someone else who locked the basement door, but either way, Leonore very clearly knows that Lia is effectively trapped in that basement and there is no way out.

There is also the important detail of the egg timer. Leonore sets the egg timer for exactly 12 minutes. She seems to knows that in exactly 12 minutes they will be found by the Bad Guys. And in fact, the Limetown producers did a great job with production, because exactly 12 minutes later in real time, the egg timer goes off.

The question is, how does Leonore know that they have exactly 12 minutes before discovery? One possibility is that the Bad Guys have been waiting for Lia all along. Perhaps they were hiding upstairs on the main floor waiting for the signal to go in. Personally, I don’t think this is the case. I think if the Bad Guys were in the area, they wouldn’t wait the 12 minutes to get Lia. They would just get her right away. They also wouldn’t stand idly by while Leonore disclosed all their secrets. It sounds like Leonore understood that once the Bad Guys realized she was betraying their secrets, they would not only capture Lia AND Leonore, they would torture Leonore for what she disclosed. That’s why Leonore took the suicide pill.

The other important detail is the phonograph. When Lia and Leonore first walk into the basement, they hear old music playing from a phonograph, and Leonore jokes that she’s not a fan of the music player. But notice what Leonore does. Just BEFORE she starts the 12 minute egg timer countdown, she STOPS playing the music on the phonograph. Why?

My theory is that somehow this music from the phonograph interfered with the signals of the telepathy tech. As a result, as long as the phonograph was playing, they were effectively hidden from the Bad Guys. This would seem to be in line with the way Max Finlayson tried to keep the Bad Guys away in episode 4 — namely by blasting music from speakers affixed to his house. It didn’t work for Max but maybe it worked for Leonore?

But then the question becomes why did Leonore stop the music? She could have just let the phonograph kept on playing if that kept their location a secret. Why did she lock the basement door, knowing that Lia couldn’t escape?

Is Leonore helping the Bad Guys or not? It certainly SEEMS like she is helping them. But if she IS helping them, then why kill herself? It doesn’t seem to make any sense.

My guess is that Leonore decided she finally wanted to come clean about what happened in Limetown, and what her role was. Near the end she says, “I pulled the parachute because my truth was important.” I think she wanted to tell the truth — pull her parachute — because her guilt over her actions were haunting her. Despite the clinical language she uses to describe the 162 people she killed, despite the cost-benefit analysis that she uses to rationalize her decision, I think she is racked with despair over her actions. Hence her desire to live it up one last time with the whirlwind travel, the parachuting over Bora Bora, before finally coming clean as to what she had done.

I think Leonore was also perfectly aware of the consequences of coming out with the truth. Hence why she took the suicide pill.

As for why she decided to help the Bad Guys by locking the basement door and stopping the phonograph, the only reason I can think of is she made some sort of deal with the Bad Guys that she would help them get Lia in exchange for something involving Sylvia. She obviously cares about Sylvia’s well being. (“Sylvia, if you’re listening, they know.”) Maybe she promised to help them get Lia in exchange for their promise not to harm Sylvia? I don’t know. Otherwise, her actions don’t seem to make much sense at all.

Alternatively, maybe Leonore faked her own death. Maybe the pill she took wasn’t a suicide pill at all but some elaborate ploy to try to win Lia’s trust? Again, I don’t buy this theory. My sense is that Leonore is really dead. But this remains an open question.

2. Why didn’t Lia just tell her producer where she was?

While Lia promised she would meet Leonore alone, she didn’t promise she wouldn’t tell anyone where she was. Why didn’t she tell her producer Max Greene — as well as everyone else who was listening to the live broadcast — the exact location of the intersection she was standing on? Why didn’t she say, as she was walking, “I’m about to enter a restaurant on Bleecker Street.” It seems unrealistic that she would intentionally withhold her location and only at the very last minute reveal her location as a last ditch effort for safety. It also seems highly improbable that APR and Gina Purri would let Lia be interviewed with absolutely no backup. Again, even if Lia promised to enter the interview alone, they could have had, at the very least, private security guards somewhere near the perimeter.

Lastly, it seems HIGHLY unrealistic that Lia would be entering this interview without any actual law enforcement involved. At this point in the season we are to believe that most of America is paying attention to Lia’s investigation in real time. Given all of the violence and danger that’s already transpired in episodes 1–5, there is every reason to believe that the police or FBI or other government entity is ALREADY closely involved in this story. If Lia really was meeting with Leonore at an Italian restaurant in Manhattan, some sort of law enforcement agency should have been closeby, whether APR wanted them there or not. I think this is a particular plot point that was engineered for the sake of the story — because the goal was to have Lia kidnapped by the Bad Guys. But it doesn’t seem particularly plausible the way it went down.

Questions

There are still many, many unanswered questions that are left for season two. Among them are:

First and foremost, what is Lia Haddock’s role in Limetown? It seems pretty clear that she is much more closely aligned to the events of Limetown than we or even she understands. Does she have the same mind-meld capability of her uncle Emil? (It almost sounds like The Force from Star Wars. You either have Jedi powers or you don’t.) What did Leonore mean when she said, “Oh, you can feel him can’t you?” Is she going to use those powers at some point in the story? Or is it possible that there are truths about Lia’s identity that she is aware of but has kept hidden from the audience all this time?

Who is Emil Haddock and what is his true relationship with Limetown and with Lia? Why is he such an important “asset”? Also, why does he call Lia “the apple of his eye” even though Lia only says she knows him as a “distant relative”? Is it possible Emil is really Lia’s father? (Another possible Star Wars theme.)

Speaking of Emil and Lia, there’s more to their relationship that Lia is hiding. At one point, Lia is asking Leonore about Emil but she cuts herself short and says, “Did he … no I’d rather not talk about that.” This is AFTER Leonore reveals Emil is still alive, so it can’t be that Lia was asking whether Emil died. Up until know we were led to believe that Lia knew almost nothing about Emil. Is there something Lia is hiding? What did she want to ask Leonore about Emil?

Who are the Bad Guys? What are they exactly? How powerful are they? At this point, they sound like some sort of all-powerful criminal enterprise, not unlike SPECTRE from the Bond movies.

Who is Sylvia? Is she Winona’s daughter? What did Leonore mean when she told her “they know” and “it’s time”?

Speaking of Winona, why was she allowed to leave Limetown, as revealed in episode 2?

What is the current status of the tech? What is the status of all the residents who were transported away from Limetown? How many other Limetowns are there out there?

What exactly is the nature of this telepathy tech? Can more than two people use the tech to have a meeting of the minds? Is this the kind of technology that will eventually lead to all the minds meeting together? Like some sort of collective hive? Or is it strictly limited to one-to-one communication? Can this tech be “turned on or off” at will? Is the sender capable of blocking certain messages from being sent? Is the listener able to NOT hear certain thoughts? How far away can you be and still feel someone’s presence or hear their thoughts? There is a lot about this tech that we still don’t know.

What happened to Lia at the end of the episode? Do the Bad Guys have her? Will she be rescued?

What will happen to American Public Radio and the producers? Will Gina or Mark be fired?

Leonore tells Lia she has sent audio clips, notes, and other files to her producer Mark. She says those materials should arrive within a day. Will we in the audience ever hear those clips or otherwise have access to the contents of that material? If so, what will they reveal?

There is a lengthy reference to Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle in this episode. The messenger who fetches Lia reads a lengthy excerpt from the novel. (“No damn cat and no damn cradle.”) Cat’s Cradle contains themes about free will and man’s relation to technology. It’s deals with nuclear weapons and the idea of mutual assured destruction, as well as a group of beleagured inhabitants of a fictional island who create an artificial religion. What are the producers of this podcast trying to tell us?

Finally, Lia says from the very first episode that this was to be a seven-part podcast on the question, “What happened to the people of Limetown?” I don’t know how she knew it was to be exactly seven episodes. As of today, the Limetown website still states it will be a 7 part series. But of course we know Lia’s investigation ended prematurely with her kidnapping and capture at the end of episode 6, which was also labeled the “Season 1 Finale.” So was episode 6 really the season finale and we were thus fooled all along? Or will there be a seventh episode somewhere down the line before the start of season 2? Only time will tell.

Either way, all in all, I very much enjoyed season 1 of Limetown. I thought the producers did a fantastic job and created a compelling storyline. And I can’t wait for the start of season 2!