It is available for free on PLEX here, though I have not yet had time to watch it. I will watch it, but I don’t buy the premise. It feels like some cover story. Well formulated, it touches themes of the Gate student’s secret superiority (being psychic), and then there is that “paranormal spice” which makes the story, and the world, feel more interesting. And of course it explains the weirdness of the GATE program. But I don’t buy it. It feels manipulative.
I think the reality is the conspiracy wanted to put its people in leadership roles. But its sales pitch is always, “You could never do any of this yourself, but we can place you there. Just then you will be totally dependent on us.” From the genital deformities of Weinstein and Epstein, who were turned by the machine into Cassanovas, to the intellectual shortcomings of Biden or Swalwell, or any other politician portrayed as intelligent.
The conspiracy cannot approach the natural gazelles, as the natural gazelles want to run free and see how high they can jump themselves. They don’t see that they need the conspiracy, so they will never be bound by it. So the conspiracy always needs to recruit the sub-optimal’s – the sloths, and the sales pitch will always be, it can put the sloths in the positions normally inhabited by gazelles. The problem is, then it needs to suppress all the gazelles.
I think GATE was always just intelligence gathering on its natural enemies, the gazelles. And because the conspiracy’s enemies were gifted, it needed to do that intelligence gathering as early as possible, before they became smart enough to realize there was a competition afoot. It needed access to them as children. That was what the tests were. Those were baseline physical parameters – field of view, peripheral vision, hearing capability in each ear by sensitivity and tone, neural reaction times, visual acuity, even psychic ability. Probably it measured suggestibility and malleability, and morality, and aggression, and stubbornness, and other metrics through observation.
That however leads to the conspiracy, and it school intelligence operations, and the routine sabotage of the lives of the gifted it engaged in. And that leads to the broader American Stasi, doing the same things in the adult community. So what we get it this – a story where a small group chasing their tail, examining something which probably does not exist, happened to cross paths with us for a while because we might have been special and psychic in a world which was magical and paranormal. I think the story is much colder and more evil.
