The Mindbending Horror of Area X (Southern Reach Series)

Transcript

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You see a place like the coast. You see it. But it's different, and impossible things live there, and the lighthouse is a glowing green spear, and out at sea you can see ships split in half, and if you walk too far you reach a point where you can't go any farther, and you're trapped while all the impossible things are hunting for you. All the monstrous things you thought were only in your dreams.

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The Area X or Southern Reach series is one of the most disturbing and mind-bending modern sci-fi series. The first book in the series, Annihilation, was adapted into a movie in 2018, but the movie is very different and much less complex compared to the book. There are also three sequels: Authority, Acceptance, and Absolution. Now, I've already done two videos covering the other three books, one of which is over an hour long. You can find those videos linked in the description. This video will focus mainly on piecing together the bits of information and revelations revealed in absoluation, and trying to understand how it relates to what we've read in previous books and how it can all help us understand the nature of Area X and all of the strange and horrific events that occur near and within it. Now, before we dive fully into Absolution, let's talk about the timeline of the Area X series. Book 1, Annihilation, takes place during the 12th expedition, following the biologist and the rest of the team as they cross into Area X. The Biologist is never named. This book is set well after the border has already appeared, obviously. Book 2, Authority, Follows Control. John Rodriguez, the new director brought in to run the Southern Reach under Central's oversight. He is the son of Jackie Severance and the grandson of Jack Severance. The story unfolds at the Southern Reach facility in the aftermath of the 12th Expedition as Control tries to figure out what happened and what the agency is even doing anymore. Control's handler shows up as a disembodied voice, calling in from Central, and by the end it's revealed that the voice is a man named James Lawrie, the only survivor of the first expedition who has been using hypnosis and manipulation to steer Control's investigation and get answers about Area X. And finally, Book 3 Acceptance essentially widens the lens and moves across multiple time periods. It dives into Saul Evans, the lighthouse keeper, and shows how his story connects directly to the crawler and the sermon written along the tower's walls in Book 1. Basically, it reveals how the presence in that book came to be. It also brings up Gloria, who is the same person who is the director and also the psychologist from Book 1, Annihilation. She, of course, had terminal cancer, which is part of the reason why she chose to go on the 12th expedition in the first place. Gloria knew Saul long before, back when she was just a strange local kid orbiting the lighthouse. And finally, it resolves the biologist's story by picking up the aftermath of Annihilation. Following both Ghostbird, the Doppelganger, and the original biologist's fate inside Area X and pushing that arc to its endpoint at the tower and the source of what's happening. Absolution is split mainly into three parts. Events taking place 25 years before Area X appeared, involving 24 biologists doing experiments in the marshes, a place known as Deadtown, near the Forgotten Coast. Then, months before the border appeared, a man named Old Jim sent to investigate the Forgotten Coast and hunt down a figure known as the Rogue, and finally the events taking place after the border appeared, following the first ever expedition. Reading this series feels like going through old case files, endless contradicting files and clips and memos and notes. All out of order. The author of the series is giving us a task. The task is to rebuild the timeline, map out competing interest, Central and its operators like Jack and Jackie, the internal factions like the Phantoms, and of course the Rogue. The aim is to see what these programs were actually studying and what experiment was running, who was directing it, and who or what was being used as the subject. Part 1. The Biologist in Deadtown. In Absolution, we learn about the events of Deadtown through scattered old bits of accounts left by the scientists that were there. In the book, we follow a man named Old Jim as he digs through all of the old files. Twenty-five years before Area X appeared, a rotating team of 24 biologists established a temporary station at Deadtown, an abandoned coastal settlement close to the marsh and tidal flats. In the beginning, the biologists brought four alligators with them. The alligators were released into the local ecosystem without the knowledge of the locals who found out weeks later. They questioned why they would bring alligators to the Forgotten Coast when there were already thousands of alligators in the wild there. The biologists believed that the alligators they would release had been captured in the wild, but in the margin of the files, old Jim reads that three of them had actually been taken from roadside zoos, and the fourth had originated from some prior Central experiment. A fact no doubt related to the creature's later behavior. They tagged the alligators for tracking and observation. Eventually, some in the village would nickname the cohort of alligators the Calvary. The alligator that had originated from Central was initially named by the biologist team Smog, but it was quickly renamed the Tyrant. The apparent goal of the biologists was to field test cutting-edge equipment and to test to see if the reptiles could be introduced into an area of scarcity and be expected to remain there, or would they return to their prior locations via wetlands and interconnected waterways. This is at odds with the fact that the animals were not taken from the wild, which the biologists were not aware of. This implies that Central had a hidden purpose for these experiments. Two weeks after the release of the alligators, the team set up permanently at Deadtown. They arrive via kayaks. The team maintained daily sampling and logged movements of the tagged animals while trying to keep the station functional. They lived in yurts, worked from City Hall and nearby houses, and kept a generator which was sent by Central running. The town had an upright piano. The medic kept it barely playable, and some evenings the group played it near dusk. On one such evening, after the piano had been restored enough to carry a melody, the team heard the same melody answer them from across the flats. The answering sound came from the dark, not from any visible source. At the time, inside the camp, the effect registered as an echo from the landscape, an unnerving imitation of their own sound. The same day, some of the team's radios and tracking gear began to stutter and drop out intermittently. By the middle of August, new troubles would begin. They had abandoned the piano by then. One night they were awakened by a loud noise, the sound of the field generator dying. But what was unsettling was the fact that they could not determine the reason other than it was deliberately broken or meant to fail. The generator eventually works again, but the biologists are unsettled. Five days after the generator began to work again, a surge of animals moved past and around the encampment. Birds and bats crossed together as if a single moving surface. Deer, raccoons, bobcats, coyotes, foxes, and smaller animals ran through in a compressed column that ignored typical predator and prey spacing. The stampede lasted long enough to exhaust the camp's ability to react. After it passed, the generator continued to hum and the camp stood intact, but the place felt emptied. Team leaders tried to file the incident as a known pre-storm phenomenon, but the mood did not reset. This is good use of a trope in science fiction, that animals being more connected to nature and more in tune with their own instincts can sense changes natural or unnatural in their environments. This does a lot to add to the early eeriness of this part of the book, especially considering what happened next. Because then white rabbits appeared in great numbers. They spread across the meadows and the streets, and sometimes into the edges of the marsh. At night they moved in groups that looked coordinated. During the day they ate through waves of fiddler crabs, cracking shell after shell with a grinding sound that became a constant background. Team Leader One noted that they were unnerving because it felt as though they had always been there and belonged there, that it was their own conception of what belonged that was wrong. In her notes, she added the cryptic message, Beware of falling stars. This could refer to the description of the coming of the entity of Area X from the book Acceptance. And it is almost certainly related to the visions in acceptance of shooting stars becoming white rabbits. Team Leader 2 suggested the presence of a foreign entity or a rival group of biologists performing some other experiment. The medic pointed out that they had no record of any other governmental surveys in the area. They were baffled by the appearance of the rabbits and by the creature's behavior. A species acting unlike or in opposition to the normal habits of that species put the biologists at a loss. On a very deep level, it confused them. Nor had they any military training or experience with mass extermination to prevent disease. A rabbit that did not run away was in some ways not a rabbit at all. A belligerent rabbit had, in a sense, already broken contain and escaped the range of their intent. They seemed both afraid and unafraid, could be docile and aggressive and docile again. The same animal, Team Leader 1 wrote. The Mutter, a field specialist, early on reported seeing a rabbit with a strap around its neck that held a small device she described as a camera. She noted that the rabbit's eye looked like a camera lens. Others could not confirm that first sighting, but additional reports followed of rabbits with collars or straps. There were cameras around their necks, but somehow they weren't cameras. Close proximity to these strap devices correlated with interference in handheld gear and tracker readings. The alligator called the tyrant's tracking signal, which had been stable, began to split as if showing two locations. The animals' behavior also changed around the camp's perimeter. The tyrant resurfaced more frequently in the meadowside drainage and took rabbits in sudden eruptions that threw grass and water. This is an important note. The tyrant ate the rabbits. It seemed to be implied that the density of the rabbits near them contributed to the tyrant's behavior. As time goes on, electronics degraded further. The team tried to reorganize procedures and set traps. A sedative meant for seabirds was opened and used in the rabbit yurt, but it didn't sedate the animals, it made them more agitated, chattering and pressing against the wire and wood. The medic advised retreat from the yurt because the combined signals, the murmur of the rabbits, and contact with the devices produced headaches and nausea. At some point, apparently, orders had arrived from Central to clear the metal entirely of the rabbits. The operation used propane flame wands and knives. They moved in a straight line and burned the bodies where they fell. Fur flashed and then collapsed into black crust. The heat softened the plastic of the collar straps and the buckles half fused into the char. Ash drifted into the low swallows and collected around the thistle that wouldn't burn itself. By the time they got done, it was dark. The smell of cooked meat, singed hair, and melted plastic hung over the camp. The equipment was wiped down and stacked by the yurt doors. No final count was logged. No one. Even the mutter made direct comments in their journals about this day. No footage existed, as all comms save a central surveillance camera on Main Street had malfunctioned and gone offline permanently. Another layer of information stripped away. He was left with what the journals told him from this point on. Journals rescued from layers of dirt, green with moss. Journal pages torn and ripped and bloody. Did not move or register the pain as they burnt and died. Did not try to run. Did not care. Did not. Found finally buried in Team Leader 2's journal in the margins of an entry from the early spring when the locals had thought the biologists were burying gold bars. Old Jim's terrible, unthinkable thought, had the rabbits kept on eating, crunching down on dead crabs even after their fur had crisps into ash, even after their hearts had burnt away or exploded from the heat. That night, Team Leader One authorized the dumping of many rabbit cameras into the marsh. Upon reading this particular fact, old Jim is struck by the thought of the cameras mingling with the substrata to be broken down naturally over time, and molecule by molecule become a part of the forgotten coast itself. Even after the unnerving brutality of it all, the calling did not end the phenomenon. At first light, the meadow moved again. Along the edge of the burn, the white rabbits were eating the dead rabbits. Some pulled at the softened tissue where the bodies had not burned through, gnawing at limbs split by heat, skin blistered and peeled back, muscle exposed. Their muzzles were black with ash and wet with blood. Fine grey dust clung to the whiskers and the underside of the jaw. Several of the feeders still wore scorched traps. One had a cracked camera housing hanging at the neck. The sound was a steady, wet tearing that carried across the open ground and braided with the distant clatter of crabs. At the sight, a handful of biologists vomited into the grass around the yurts, into the mud, the weeds. Others seemed almost catatonic. According to the medic, the chewing of gristle, the gentle yet firm way some of the rabbits held the charred heads of their meal, and, wrenching with their teeth, pulled strips of skin and meat from the skulls. How, in several accounts, the charnel house stench released felt like a physical blow. You did not want to be there. You didn't want to be anywhere, ever again. My head will never be right again. I feel the presence of the tyrant in their feasting, as if the rabbits had become the tyrant. But the mudder wrote only, The worm eats its own tail. Will the worm die of it? The biologists are essentially exhausted at this point. Old Jim notes that two of the logs noted that the medic seemed agitated or emotional that day. They note that he yelled at them as though he were whipping a horse in a race, and toward a direction not endorsed by team leaders 1 and 2. This obviously implies contradicting intentions, motivations, and goals. The medic might have a different mission given to him by Central, perhaps from Jack's predecessor, that is different from the mission of the other biologists. At the team leader's insistence, they proceed on a final advance to wipe out the rabbits, even though a similar attempt failed the day before. A few object to this, including the medic, but they are outvoted. As they prepare to move, however, a lone figure appears across the meadow through the rain, covered in a shimmering distortion, as if falling water forms a kind of shield around him. At first, the leaders assume it's a missing biologist who went missing earlier, or a local resident. But when the figure, identified by Old Jim as the rogue, begins yelling at them and charging at high speed, they recognize him as a threat and freeze. The rogue advances while shouting a single word. But instead of obeying, the biologists move forward out of panic and momentum, charging with flamethrowers. As they push through the mud and the rabbits, the rogue's voice becomes physically damaging, described as producing waves of force like fireburst and distortions of distance and perception. Their charge basically collapses into chaos. They fall, trample one another, as the rogue's words overwhelm them with sensory overload, hallucinations, and a sense of deep internal wrongness. Their recollections describe time stretching, bodies slowing, the environment warping around them. The attack leaves them incapacitated, lying in the mud among ancient unearthed cemetery bones, unable to move or think clearly. When the rogue finally disappears back into the storm, the biologists awake in a state of shock, not knowing how much time has passed. They are left not physically wounded, but violated psychically. After they stagger and crawl back to City Hall, they discover that two of them seem to have died from fear alone. Team leaders 1 and 2, the medic and the mutter are all missing. They assume that the tyrant followed the rogue and dragged the missing members away. They also discover that the generator has been destroyed beyond repair and what appears to be deliberate sabotage. It seems to imply that they assume it was the rogue. Now, without leadership, equipment, or psychological stability, the remaining biologists fear the rogue could return at any moment, and this fear dominates the aftermath more than anything else. The weather turned. A hurricane crossed the coast. After days of non-stop storms, the entire landscape around Deadtown was destroyed. Flood waters washed away the shoreline and pulled old rusted cars into the estuary, where they were carried off and dumped randomly across the marsh and through Deadtown itself. The meadow where the biologists had been working disappeared underwater because everything had happened so fast it's unclear whether the bodies of the dead biologists were ever recovered or simply carried away by the flood. The surviving 17 biologists moved through all of this in a shock like state and relocated to the roof of the city. Hull for shelter. They had barely slept in two or three days. Most supplies were ruined, the yurts were flooded, and all communication devices were dead. They could not contact Central and could not send anyone for help because the tyrant still occupied the surrounding land. Their journals confirmed they were exhausted, soaked, hungry, and operating at the edge of collapse. Only three biologists were still recording events, and their entries described increasingly similar, disturbing events. These dreams depicted a transformed, war-scarred version of the meadow, lit by a strange green gold light. The biologists repeatedly dreamed of a massive army of scientists and psychics dressed in archaic armor and using medieval style weapons, marching endlessly toward a gap between two mountains. In both dreams and waking life, the three biologists claimed to see armored figures outside Deadtown. But these figures had no human faces, only lamprey-like mouths. Their journals also mentioned distant, unclear battle sounds. After this period, the surviving entries dissolved into incoherent writing, hallucinations, fragmented thoughts, and references to violence among the group. At some point, the biologist burned their own camp. By the time Central finally arrived, the rain had stopped, Deadtown was emptied, and every member of the expedition was dead from a mix of natural and unnatural causes. The image was warped by water damage and infrared glow. But the rogue's posture suggested deliberate action. Old Jim believed the rogue's main objectives were to steal the rabbit cameras and destroy the generator. He also suspected Central was testing him by comparing his report to their other interpretations. Old Jim also fixated on the Mutter, the biologist whose journal had survived in nearly perfect condition and who wrote in green ink. Her entries were calm, structured, and focused on field observations, even while others were losing their sanity. Unlike the others, she was never found after the disaster. Old Jim believed that she may have used the chaos to escape. The Mutter's journal never mentioned the rogue except for a brief reference related to the generator. Instead, she documented her belief that the rabbits weren't truly rabbits, but mimics acting against their natural behavior. She argued that if an organism behaves outside its essential nature, it may be hiding a predatory purpose and requires new containment strategies. The expedition never had time to adapt to this insight. Central later created a false public explanation, claiming the entire team had died at sea during the hurricane, which was easier to sell since most of the biologists had been selected for having no close personal ties. Internally, Central labeled the situation as an existential threat with unknown origin. Locals in the village bar later claimed the biologists simply left, but their nervous tone suggested they avoided Deadtown afterward. Weeks later, the red protective suit of one of the missing biologists washed up near the estuary before being removed by Central. The Deadtown site had already been sanitized. There were no further traces of the rogue. After reading of all this, Old Jim is left unsure whether the events had been real, exaggerated, misunderstood, or intentionally manipulated by Central. This section of the book sets up everything that happens after. Reading this part of the book, I got the sense that these events are heavily important to what later happens to the Forgotten Shore, even in ways that aren't directly stated. The white rabbits themselves, for instance, where did they come from? I have the answer, I think, but to explain it, we have to get through the rest of the book. Because, as I am coming to realize, in this series, the events of the past are just as important as the events of the future. Part 2. Old Jim. The second part of the book delves into Old Jim's past and his investigation of the Dead Town events and the occurrences on the Forgotten Shore. In the beginning of the story, we learn that Old Jim's adult daughter, Cass, has vanished without explanation. He finds a terse note in his car saying, Don't follow me. Don't try to find me. Don't contact me. Sincerely, Cass. But he still tries to find her. He looks at hospitals, hotels, flight records, but learns nothing. He collapses into despair. He drinks heavily, drifts through cheap motels and bars. He writes dozens of letters to Cass, storing them in a box, but never sends any. He wouldn't know where to send them. One night, Jim collapses drunk near a fire hydrant, and a young woman named Jackie Severance, acting for the mysterious organization called Central, flicks a coin at him and warns he'll kill himself on this path. Jackie, the daughter of Jim's old boss, Jack, warns that Cass's disappearance is tied to something larger. She implies that she could kill Jim on Central's orders if he obstructs matters. Before Jim can react, agents take him into custody. Central holds Jim in a sterile detox facility for seven months. There he gets clean of alcohol, practices piano, and most importantly, goes through the old files about the failed expedition to Deadtown. Noting the logs of the biologist team, significantly the mudder and the medic, and the references to the strange experiments involving the alligators and the ruined generator, Jack eventually reveals Jim's new mission, an operation central codenamed Serum Bliss. Formerly a science expedition and now a hunt for an existential threat known as the Rogue. Jim's cover will be running the local bar on the Forgotten Coast. Jack's team will use a community of amateur psychics called the Seance and Science Brigade as cover. Jackie will run the on-site operation, and Jim, now 61, will wear a beard and work under the alias of Old Jim. On Jack's orders, Jim's top priority is finding and eliminating the rogue. Questions about the Tyrant Alligator or the Deadtown disaster go unanswered. Old Jim does, however, dig into the file and get something concrete about Team Leaders 1 and 2, starting with who they actually are. Team Leader 1's real name is Alexis Aguilar. Team Leader 2's real name is Kim Numi. Central picked them up two days after the hurricane. Out of a motel room north of Bleakensville, they were in terrible shape, underweight, bruised, apparently going through some kind of withdrawal. There are specific things in the report like Aguilar's shoulder dislocation and Numi's blinking left eye. This idea of a constant, meaningless signal, like their bodies were still stuck, reacting to something that they couldn't fully name. And then it gets to the interrogation. Aguilar and Numi admit that they had two rabbit cameras with them. They tried to burn them behind the motel, then brought them back inside, and inexplicably put them on the bed while they basically collapsed on the floor. When Central presses them, were the cameras part of a plot? Were they working with a foreign entity? They insist that there is no foreign entity, that there is no plot, that they don't know what overran their camp. Old Jim notes how messy all of this is. Not just what they say, but what's missing, the gaps, the way even the video from those sessions doesn't lock anything down clearly. Central, of course, still tries to force a motive onto it. The file says that Central wanted to believe that they could have sold the cameras and used the money to disappear, to flee, to turn the whole incident into a selfish escape plan. But it also undercuts that by describing their stories as consistent and simple, and by framing the weird decisions as trauma and panic, and there's no evidence of outreach to any foreign entity or government. Even with that, Central still brands them a security wrist and exiles them away and separates them onto separate islands, completely isolated from the rest of the world, receiving regular supply drops and being subjected to surveillance. Even with this, there is still the question of what happened to the medic and the mudder who also went missing after the rogue attack. With no real choice, Old Jim chooses to accept this mission. Central drops him off on the Forgotten Coast, in a sparsely populated village near a bio waste plant. He is ordered to stay away from Failure Island, which is where the SSB operates. The village has no official government, and the nearest airport is pretty far. The agent who had been sent here before Jim apparently died mysteriously, his bones liquefied at a depth of 400 meters below the ocean. A submersible implosion, apparently. The next morning after Jim arrives at the Forgotten Coast, a woman appears on Jim's porch. She looks and sounds exactly like his lost daughter Cass. She speaks to him casually, calls him Dad, referring to both her names Cass and Eleanor. Jim immediately suspects she is an agent, not his daughter. He quizzes her on personal details. She sticks to her cover name. Jim, furious and grief stricken, dumps the stack of his unsent letters at her feet. The woman reacts as though ashamed. She offers to read them, but Jim refuses. She steadies him as he wavers, then quietly leaves when he rises to his feet, never explaining herself. Jim slams the door. He realizes fully that this cast is an imposter, one installed by Central to manipulate him. Back at his office, Jim pors over a central file labeled the House Cynipede Incident. It tells of a psychic named Helen, who, while cycling on Failure Island, hears a strange underwater voice. She wakes at home feeling something wet under her foot. A voice begs, help me, as she hallucinates, touching sticky feathers and cinipeds on herself. Panicked, she smashes a fire alarm, grabs the axe and literally cuts off her own foot. Two other psychics found nearby later mutilated themselves in related ways. The strangest thing of all, cynipedes were found under Helen's severed foot. Jim suspects this was not supernatural, but some weaponized voice, an earwig, triggering self-harm in psychics. He notes that a phrase might have caused Helen's crash and the madness. In personnel files he learns that the medic, biologist David Shears, now works on Failure Island. He wants to speak with him, but when he does, the medic's answers to his questions disturb him. What do you think happened out there to the other expedition members? You mean beside the mutter, sir? Because I think you mean the mutter got out too, which I never knew that before. The medic said it with no particular malice or interest. No, he ate the meat and potatoes put in front of him every day, and that was enough for him. No strange dreams for him, no rogue running riot across a field of smoldering rabbits. He slept the quiet sleep of the certain, and Jim almost envied him. I'll ask you again, what do you think happened during the storm? Manifestation of the foreign entity, he said in a solemn, almost worshipful tone. And how do you define foreign entity? An entity that is foreign, sir? Can you elaborate? Old Jim asked. And he could not keep a current of sarcasm from his voice. An old force in the world. Old Jim did not like that answer. It sounded too mysterious. It conjured up an ancient army headed toward a gap in the world filled with green light, as if some religion had infiltrated Central. This way he kept encountering a quasi-mystical element, even in how Jack talked about where he got his intel. How would you name it? Old Jim asked, as he noticed how close the medic had drifted towards him. Unnameable, sir. That's what the Seance and Science Brigade is here for. To name it? Yes, sir. To name it. To me, this indicates that whatever eventually creates Area X, sometime after these events, might be triggered by the SSB's attempt to name it. Whatever that actually means. In occult traditions, naming something is essentially an act of recognition, an invitation, a way of giving form to something that was previously formless. If we think of Area X or the force that causes it, then the moment it is named becomes the moment it is allowed to manifest. Naming doesn't just describe it, it anchors it here, pulls it into our world and gives it a foothold. Another key moment in the story occurs when Jim finally confronts a villager by the name of Man Boy Slim. Now it is known that the Mutter often left Deadtown to enter the village. That is in contrast to the medic David Shears, who basically never left Deadtown during the experiments. So the Mudder essentially knew the villagers, and she knew Man Boy Slim. And something significant happened between the two of them involving a man named Drunkboat during the time of the original biologist experiments. Drunkboat had apparently been ripped apart by an alligator. Old Jim notices that Man Boy Slim has a damaged leg, so he starts wondering about the overlaps. So at first, Man Boy Slim tries to play dumb, and Old Jim escalates into threats, shoving him, punches him, and then finally his act breaks. Man Boy Slim admits that it was the rabbit cameras that were the poison in this circumstance. The mudder's real name was Samantha. She watched the rabbit camera footage first, and then Drunkboat watched it, and then he himself watched it. But the footage was not stable. It changed every time. According to the Mudder, Samantha, it showed the coast from above with everybody gone. Man Boy Slim described the sense of a thing under his eye, something inside the skin trying to get out. An army between strange mountains, a strange light. This is definitely somehow connected to the biologist's dream from the first section, towards the end of the mission. Jim suspects that it did not come from them at all. It came through the cameras. It was the cameras that brought the dreams. When Old Jim asks Man Boy Slim what Drunkboat himself saw, he tells him that he saw his own death. Being torn apart by the tyrant in every detail. But ultimately, in the end, that is not what happened. Man Boy tried to destroy the cameras using Bleach, but it reacted and exploded. Drunk Boat was torn apart, and Man Boy was injured. Old Jim insists that Man Boy tell Samantha, the Mutter, to call him. He essentially threatens him if he does not follow through. And Old Jim gets his wish. Back at Old Jim's house, the Mutter calls on the public line. She speaks frantically. She says that the tyrant alligator was unsettled because it ate rabbits fitted with the cameras. She says that the rogue once shucked cameras like oysters and fed shards to the alligator. She swears that the camera footage would drive anyone mad. Her tone turns threatening. She plays a fake gunshot sound in an attempt to fake her own death. Jim realizes that the mutter is terrified and that the footage must have been horrific. In his house, he finds evidence that the mutter's journal has been rifled through and reassembled in his safe. Somebody has been inside of his house. Then, the alligator tracker suddenly shows a signal moving toward his house. He throws the tracker off of his deck into the yard to disable it, realizing he is being watched. At this point, things start to become even stranger for Jim. He sometimes loses time and has strange dreams. One night, Jim walks out onto a bridge. Here, the rogue appears. A naked man with wet hair, barely speaking English. A strange urge makes Jim call out incoherent words towards the figure. The rogue squeals in pain and flees towards the swamp at Jim's words. Jim himself collapses, unconscious. Later he wakes in Cass's actual apartment. Cass says that she shot the man by the bridge, who she believes was the rogue, and retrieved Jim. He had been unconscious for three days. An investigation crew found an alligator harness and a bobber toy from the Deadtown expedition near the bridge. She also tells Old Jim that the old decomp was burned, and from the site, two of the old rabbit cameras had been recovered. They both agree the next step is to visit Deadtown itself. They drive to Deadtown. The intact buildings have been overrun by nature. City Hall is partially standing. Upstairs in what was a tourist center, Jim finds a cluttered room of ruined electronics and debris. The floor is cracked and muddy as if something massive crawled in. The tyrant's huge track is imprinted in the second floor dirt, and Jim spots a dried chunk of animal meat, as if left as bait. Jim concludes that the tyrant alligator has been using Deadtown as its lair. On a nearby wall, he finds graffiti, strange verses, symbols, and scrawled names, including his own real first name, James, and a reference to the piano and Commander Thistle. Jim suddenly begins to hallucinate. He hears a mournful song from the marsh and feels invisible hands. He glimpses the tyrant's huge eyes and senses the creature withdraw. The vision breaks him. He falls to his knees in the muddy room, panic stricken. Cass, terrified, leads him outside and comforts him. He cries uncontrollably by the canal. Days later, Jim reads a new fax. Central's RD team wants to re-interview the exiled biologists from Deadtown for more context. They still won't provide the camera footage. Jim realizes Central is fragmented with secrets. Behind his desk, he notices dozens of burned pages, the lyrics to the piano piece Winter Journey, hidden under safe documents. Uneasy, he touches a strange metal key in his pocket. Immediately, he is engulfed with another vision. He is tied in a chair next to Commander Thistle in the monkey's elbow costume, while Thistle rants in a snake-like voice about God's eye and dumps bodies into vats of chemical fluid. Jim strains but can't move or react. Thistle still thinks that he is subdued. Jim manages to break loose. He fights Thistle and stabs him repeatedly. Thistle escapes into the swamp, weakened. Jim follows and finds Thistle collapsed in the reeds, mumbling about immortality. Jim finishes him off and stumbles away, horrified and injured. Back at Jim's home, Jackie is waiting on Jim's couch. She's been called back to Central to answer for her own failures. She pleads to him for any useful information. Jim gives none. She warns Jim that he might be summoned to, and leaves. Alone, Jim races to the nearby BioWace facility where he fought Thistle. There he finds secret files and documents showing Jack's crimes. Money stolen, enemies murdered, bodies dumped. Central was fractured, with varying interest working against each other, secret organizations hidden within a secret organization. Jack had been using the forgotten shore for several reasons. One was body disposal, with thistle as his hand. Jim had barely escaped. The evidence shows Jack had become unhinged and corrupt. Jim wonders if Cass had suspected this all along. That night he receives a coded call via local switchboard. Cass says only feed the frogs. Jim interprets this as a clue. He breaks into Cass's apartment and discovers a hidden door behind a frog tank. Inside is Cass's secret workspace. The walls are plastered with photos, maps, research notes, and transcripts. Cass has been obsessively tracking the rogue. She has mapped voices, sightings, and suspects. In one corner, Jim finds three items Cass left for him. The first is a file on Central's psychological conditioning. It confirms that the Winter Journey piano suite was used as a trigger phrase on Jim back at the base to program his obedience. It turns out that Thistle had been physically manipulating him this entire time. The piano music Jim had played at the village bar had been used in that conditioning. This explains Jim's lost time. This is almost certainly somehow tied to the weaponized earwig from the Centipede incident. Cass's evidence also reveals that the Tyrant Alligator was similarly conditioned by Central before the original biologist experiment. Cass's handwritten note says that Jim's own investigation into the biologist was also part of his conditioning. Sintril used him and even twisted this mission to control him. Earlier in the story, Cass and Jim had visited a site which contained several strange specimens. This site was called Old Decomp. The second file contains an analysis of Old Decump. Satellite photos show a pattern burned into the potholes, matching the Deadtown map. The residue in the holes is the same strange glowing matter from the rabbit cameras. Cass notes that there was an unexplained fire in the lot days before the rogue appeared and attacked Jim. She suggests something unnatural happened there recently. The last item is a photograph of the alcove in Deadtown. Cass has marked a faint line on the wall hinting at a hidden door behind. She writes that she intends to return. There is no note from Cass beyond that. Jim now realizes the truth. Cass herself has to have been part of some intelligence faction hidden within Central. He wonders if she may be a part of the almost mythic group known as the Phantoms. She was not a clueless exile, she was an agent. Jim steals himself and decides he must go back to Deadtown to open that door that she indicated. But before he gets the chance, Henry Cage, the leader of the SSB, and the medic David Shears, ambush him on his porch. Henry, who is wide-eyed and paranoid, accuses old Jim of stealing his research, and the medic basically says that all of this is on Jack's orders. They force Jim into his car and drive him to Old Decomp. Jim attempts to plead with Henry that the medic will eventually turn on him too, but the medic just beats Jim to silence. At Old Decomp, they demand that Jim reveal where he hid the money he has uncovered. Jim lies and points to the strange potholes burned into the asphalt. As Henry steps into them, the asphalt liquefies and the ground seems to dissolve the moment he does. How the sides of him rippled as they liquefied and fell, splashing and thick in streams and pools of nothing like flesh to feed the holes which throbbed and hummed, green now, come alive in ways that made them seem like two regular tidal pools on a sheet of rock next to the sea. How Henry screamed and screamed, like he was being taken apart at the seams, how he spasmed and tried to pull free, but still he was stuck. Old Jim's veins turned to ice, the pain in his ribs ossified, a century in a moment. The medic, mouth open, couldn't stop watching, the sound coming out of his mouth, indescribable, but like some sort of huffing creature trying to catch its breath. Henry screams and dissolves into the holes, alive. The medic panics, and Jim takes this opportunity to shove him into it. The medic vanishes, still alive at first, then dissolving. Henry reaches for the medic, as if the medic could still pull him free, even though it was too late for that, and how the medic screamed while Henry's liquid arms touched him, as if made of burning lava, and how the medic kept falling into Henry, that never-ending abyss, until old Jim couldn't tell which part was the medic and which part was Henry, and had to look away even as the screams of both begin to die. How Henry and the medic continued to melt in the parking lot and wash away into the murky water of the holes, like something escaping a prison. How the medic oddly became impossible to discern first, and yet Henry still thrashed there for time, like something returning home, all of him, forever, only a gurgle from what was left of Henry's face. And then, even that was gone. Like something crumbling in the tide and swept out to sea. A final sob, a final questing of remains, one last waving hand. And then Henry was gone. Jim escapes, racing away in his car, bloody and traumatized. He drives to Dead Town one last time. The photograph from Cass's files proves the alcove's secret door was real. He rams the locked gate of the town and storms into City Hall. Upstairs he finds the alcove and presses the hidden indentation. A battered door swings open to a small secret room behind the wall. Inside is a nightmarish shrine. Rows of glass jars that match the pattern of the potholes at Old Decamp. Among them are shards of burnt rabbit cameras, and scrolled in something red, perhaps blood, on the walls are notes, and one repeated message. I did not mean to kill them. I feel that the most likely possibility is that the rogue was here, and he wrote these words. A list of names is written at floor level. Saul Evans, the lighthouse keeper who would eventually become the creature known as the crawler in the book Annihilation. Henry, Cass, and old Jim among them, but his real name, James. He has no idea what any of this means, but it feels like somehow someone knew he and Cass were coming. And I think that someone was the rogue. As Jim stands there, the room's temperature drops. He hears a wet splash from a dark corner. The tyrant is somehow here. The huge alligator emerges silently, dragging Jim back deep into the water that has pulled on the floor. Jim thrashes underwater, choking. Suddenly, the tyrant carries him through the wall and through the swamps into a hidden underground lake. Instead of drowning, Jim finds himself on a serene tropical lagoon surrounded by sunflowers. The rogue lies in the water, limp and half dead. The tyrant swims to his side and bends over the rogue. Jim realizes that the two beings are linked. The alligator is somehow merged with or protecting the rogue. Jim begins asking questions in terror, but only images answer. He receives a flood of vision voices. The rogue's memories pour into him. He was once a central created entity, sent from the future to stop a coming disaster. Now he had failed and he was dying. Jim sees scenes of armies marching under glowing green lights and landscapes that have drained of all water and life. He understands horrifyingly, Area X, the coastal phenomena, is growing outward and will eventually flood the world with strange bio-weirdness. The rogue had foreseen this invasion and tried to stop it. Now it is too late. As the rogue and the tyrant merge back, the alligator gently swims Jim to a small island in the lagoon. Jim feels calm, as if given a final message. The tyrant's strange low rumble seems to say, This is just the beginning. Jim wakes up back at the hidden room entrance, watching the tyrant disappear through the tunnel. Night is falling as Jim staggers back to the village. The lighthouse beam on the coast sweeps oddly, cutting through some unseen veil. On his way, he sees Henry and Suzanne driving back toward the lighthouse, both battered but alive. Somehow in Jim's mind, this makes sense, as if he had not just seen Henry die horrifically. At the village bar, Jim returns to cover his duties. He sits at the piano. As he plays the old folk tune, memories of Cass flood him. The real daughter he had lost and the imposter who haunted him. Or perhaps he'd never had a daughter. Perhaps it was all a part of the manipulation by Jack and Central. He feels no more shame or longing. It all washes away. Outside the bar, distant screams are heard. Something is arriving. Jim remains seated at the piano. As he plays on, he feels himself becoming part of something larger. His consciousness meshes with the strange commands and signals he has collected with the tyrant and rogue's purpose. He recognizes that he has been manipulated and chosen, and he surrenders to what comes next without fear or pain. This seems to be the moment that Area X truly begins. Part 3. The First Expedition. The final section of the book follows the very first expedition in Area X after the border appeared. We follow Lori, who we know from the previous books to be the only survivor of the original expedition. Lori is 24 hours away from entering active area X and already unstable. Lori depends on drugs, arrogance, and constant profanity to hold himself together. His mind races non-stop. He hates the required protective suit which fits like a suffocating biological shell. His relationship with Skye, the expedition leader, is inconsistent. He wants her and resents her at the same time. Their closeness triggers anxieties instead of comfort. This part of the book is written in an idiolect that constantly injects crazy language and paranoid thoughts in a way that makes it even more difficult to decipher than the rest of the book, but it lets up after the first couple of chapters as Laurie's drugs wear off. Among the expedition members, rumors circulate about Jackie Severance recently escaping Area X by the skin of her teeth. Whitby, who also appeared in the second book in the series Authority, which is set years after absolution, is also a member of this expedition. In Authority, it mentions that by that point in time, Whitby had been at the agency longer than anyone on staff. Laurie suspects Whitby, an environmental scientist, knows more about Area X than he admits. At Roll Call, Laurie privately ranks who he thinks will die. He assumes leadership in his own mind, even though Sky Winters is the official in command, and her brother, Jamal, is second in command. There are 24 members of the expedition, significantly Karen Hargraves, whose competence made Laurie nervous for some reason. There's also Landry who provided Laurie with drugs, and a psychic named Sophia Scaramudi. Before the expedition, there is much discussion of a rumored off-switch inside of Area X. The fact that they mythologize Area X already is interesting to me. Because why would there be an off switch? They believe this because they need to believe it. It reminds me of Roadside Picnic, which I also did a video on. I think this series is somewhat inspired by it. In Roadside Picnic, there is a legend of a sphere within the zone that can grant any wish. Humans will mythologize and deify and thus grant power to the unknown in the face of uncertainty. For a while, Lori had been meeting with Jack Severance, giving him any intel he asked for. Jack specifically had been asking him to keep an eye on the director and on Whitby, who Jack was watching carefully apparently. He gives Laurie a covert mission involving Old Jim, who Jack said had been compromised by a foreign entity and influenced by pre-area X infiltration. He said Old Jim may still be alive somewhere in Area X. He was to investigate a supposed secret room in Deadtown. Of course, the same room Jim and Cass had discovered in the previous section. Laurie interprets this as proof he is chosen for a more important role. The Southern Reach headquarters was built from a repurposed doll factory that went out of business years ago. When the group suits up, Laurie panics, the suit feels restrictive and humiliating. They move towards the border in trucks like cargo. In the corridor, the entrance into Area X, Laurie loses control. His drugs wear off, he vomits in the suit, and the border expels the group violently. They emerge in chaos. One member, Rogers, disappears entirely. Another, Ehrlichson, dies when his suit fuses to his body. Laurie suddenly believes that the suits are killing them and orders everyone to remove them. Take off your suits! He screamed into their helmet combs so hard some held the sides of their helmet heads with their hands. Take off your suits! Contam! Contamination! The expedition tears out of their suits and stand exposed. Skye, angry and embarrassed, reasserts authority and tells Laurie she hates him. Two people now gone, the expedition reaches the pre-built base camp. Laurie sees it as a flimsy structure that raises more questions about who built it and when. The lighthouse in the distance becomes a point of focus. Laurie himself is almost obsessed with it. The expedition members mostly avoid looking at it. Laurie sees the lighthouse as a penis seeding the entire world, a crass analogy but apt. Somehow, the area X phenomenon is being spread by the lighthouse. Essentially, it is impregnating the world with Area X. Overnight, the suits vanish. The group becomes visibly distressed. Sky tries to minimize it, but Lori thinks the disappearance proves Area X is active and aware. Still, they worry about how they will exit without suit protection. At some point, a member of the expedition, Sheree Binder, dies by a standard alligator attack. Bit by bit, things become more disorienting for everyone. Everyone is tearing at the seams mentally. At some point, their communication devices begin to play real-time audio of them from the day before. Impossible, but happening nonetheless. This implies distortions of time within Area X itself. The devices obviously become a source of anxiety, so the group tries to discard them, but the devices return. As their perceptions of time and everything else continue to degrade, another member of the expedition disappears, this time, Whitby. At some point, they encounter a group of black liquid creatures that shift into distorted copies of dead team members. Shooting them only produces new forms. Many expedition members die. Lori, Skye, Winters, and Scaramudi escape to the beach. Daylight reveals the beach to be covered with human bones. A half-submerged destroyer sits offshore. Skye sees it as a possible source of answers. Lori sees it as a trap. Skye and Winters leave on a boat Lori believes artificially appeared. They never return. Scaramudi disappears without explanation. Laurie is left alone, but he continues to follow Jack's secret mission. Every location he checks is destroyed or abandoned. He grows more paranoid and hallucinates conversations with his dead sisters. But he believes he is being followed. He reaches Deadtown and finds a secret room. Inside is a disorganized mix of occult-style objects and diagrams, a list of the names of the expedition members, including his, circled prominently. This is the same thing that old Jim had seen earlier and not understood. He finds a collapsed skin-like body, marked with a note that says, Do not eat. But the smell of it triggers hunger. It appears to be some kind of molt, as if a human had shed itself. He is compelled to eat the body, and he notices that the face resembles Whitby, though Laurie cannot be sure. The consumed organism affects him immediately. He experiences visions and alternate timelines. He perceives Area X as something orchestrating events across time. His mind becomes overloaded until he expels a cloud of golden dust that seems to carry the visions out of him. Laurie stands on the roof of the ruined city hall, which sits like a fake fort above the marsh. The structure is decayed and empty, with old blood on abandoned chairs and a shattered piano broken on the roof. The lighthouse is visible in the distance, pulsing strange green light across the landscape. Laurie realizes there is no treasure, no answers, and that Area X will behave however it wants, regardless of anything he does. He is disoriented from eating Whitby's molt, and he's exhausted and angry. Winters suddenly appears from the stairwell, talking as if nothing is wrong, and commenting on Laurie's mutations. Laurie decides Winters is not real. He shoves him off the roof and watches the body fall, believing it to have been another construct of Area X. Immediately after, Laurie experiences a severe hallucination, in which the Whitby-like creature overlays its mind onto his. It is not a normal hallucination. He feels as if another mind is being placed directly onto his own, forcing its memories, perception, and logic onto his thoughts. This presence was not Whitby the human, but something that had imitated him. Through a series of nonverbal impressions, Laurie understands that this entity originates in the far future, at a point where Area X already spread far beyond the forgotten coast and has changed most of the Earth's environment and life forms. What he senses is not a single image but layered, simultaneous impressions. Flooded landscapes, altered coastlines, ecosystems rebuilt into unfamiliar forms, and biological structures that do not correspond to any living system he recognizes. Laurie understands also that Area X does not operate strictly within linear time. What he experiences suggests that Area X has the ability to affect both the future and the past, and that its appearance on the Forgotten Coast is only one part of a broader timeline. He perceives that the so called future version of Whitby. Was damaged or disrupted in that future era, and that it has been inserted backward in time into the current Area X as part of the phenomenon's attempt to stabilize its own history. Whitby is the rogue. The entity's presence in his mind conveys that Area X isn't simply expanding outward geographically, but is establishing anchors across different points in time, and that Central's past actions on the coast may have served as an early point of contact that Area X later exploited. In these visions, Laurie senses that the collapse of the outside world is not a possibility, but something that has already occurred in the future timeline from which this entity comes. The impression he receives frame this collapse as inevitable within Area X's perspective. The entity does not express intention, emotion, or strategy the way a human mind would. Instead, Laurie understands that area X pursues outcomes automatically according to patterns or processes that allow it to maintain consistency across time. One of these processes involves preventing any alternate timeline in which area X does not manifest fully. Laurie understands this as a kind of temporal connection. If area X extends itself further in time than the current border event, then its dominance becomes total and unavoidable. All of these impressions destabilize Laurie's sense of self. He temporarily loses his ability to distinguish between his own thoughts and those belonging to the foreign presence. He experiences a flood of information that he cannot fully interpret, including brief glimpses of structures and organisms and environments that seem to belong to a deep future shaped entirely by Area X. In Area X's optimal timeline, it would claim everything. As the last traces of the malt leave his body, appearing as golden dust escaping through his pores, the connection weakens, the entity withdraws, leaving only fragments of what it communicated. Lori is left with the understanding that Area X is not confined to the present moment, and that his own timeline may be a part of a predetermined sequence that Area X is maintaining. When the experience ends, he's physically drained and disoriented, and aware that his own role in the situation may be smaller and more predetermined than he could have ever previously thought. At some point, Laurie finds himself walking toward the lighthouse at night. Its green flare is gone, but inside the structure he sees hundreds of identical corpses, and they are all Henry from the S and SB spilling down the steps toward the beach. He leaves the lighthouse and continues towards the village. Reaching the village, Lori finds that it is destroyed and covered in repeated graffiti reading T-O-T. In the ruined village bar, he searches through old Jim's smashed piano and finds old letters written to someone named Cass. We know, of course, that Cass is Jim's daughter who went missing, or perhaps never existed. Lori just tears up the letters in frustration. Hargraves appears in the doorway. She tells Lori that the other expedition members sent toward the village are all dead, and she recounts old Jim's final moments, explaining that he died alone while being partially transformed by Area X. We don't really know if there was ever a real cast, but Hargraves is the same person as the constructed cast that appears on Jim's doorstep and that helps him with his mission to find the rogue. She was never simply another expedition member, she was a part of the False Daughter program assigned to old Jim long before the mission. Her familiarity with Jim, Jack Severance, and Central's deeper strategies shows that she was embedded at a level that Laurie never grasped. There is a part of this section where Laurie says something like, We'll be kings when we get out of here, and she interjects, also, queens, implying that she too has ambition hidden. As we mentioned earlier, Jim believed that she could have been a phantom, one of the secret organizations hidden within the organization. When she told Laurie that he is not the failsafe and that Jack always works in threes, she is revealing that her presence on the expedition was designed as a stabilizing or terminating force. Someone inserted to intervene when the mission is destabilized. So essentially, in this framework, Laurie was never the trusted operative he believed himself to be, but rather a distraction, a volatile asset or even a controlled variable in a larger plan that Hargraves was meant to oversee. Hargraves, Cass, reveals a scrap of paper taken from Jim's pocket that reads, Kill Laurie. Without further explanation, she shoots Lori in the chest. Kill Lori, it read. Kill Laurie. And I've been asking myself how he could even have known your name. What happened after I left, that he could have known your name, who gave it to him, why was it important? But on some level I've decided it doesn't matter. I don't think it matters why. What do you think, Lori? I think you should take a breath, Hargraves. Cass, I think you should give this another thought. What it means to kill Lori, it says, Hargraves said distant. And you know what? I think I will. And then she shot him. There are a few possibilities. It is either from Central, from a compromised version of Jim receiving distorted impressions, or even from Area X itself using Jim as an unwilling conduit. The fact that Jim could know Laurie's name at all, under the circumstances of his isolation and mental collapse, suggests that the instruction was influenced by the same interference that Laurie later experiences after consuming the Whitby molt. The note signals that Lori's presence was viewed as a liability to one or more overlapping agendas. So, in some way, Cass might have actually been taking the orders of the rogue who had influenced old Jim. Lori is pretty badly wounded and he staggers back into the marsh, and he soon encounters Landry, who is heavily drugged and partly altered by Area X. Landry leads him to a boat-like creature that behaves like an organism rather than a human-made vessel. During the ride, Landry becomes unstable and attacks Lori, and Lori shoots him to survive and jumps from the creature as it tries to consume both of them. Lori reaches the shore alone and begins crawling toward the extraction point. Losing much of the feeling in his body, Lori pushes himself across the wetlands and arrives at the corridor's entrance. There he finds a suit, which appears alive and moves subtly as if composed of many small organisms. The suit speaks to him calmly, encouraging him to put it on, and with no alternatives and nearly unconscious, Lari undresses and lets the suit close around him. He sits with it as the sun sets, believing he is the last surviving member of the first expedition, and that he is about to go home, unaware that Area X has already fully determined his fate. But what's also interesting here is that Hargraves also departs Area X, so it implies that she succeeded leaving the anomaly rather than succumbing to it. She makes it clear that she can quote come home except not through the front door, indicating that she already possesses the means or knowledge to exit through channels not available to the rest of the team. Hargraves leaving creates a direct tension with what we know to be the established canon from the other Area X books, which state unequivocally that Laurie was the only survivor of the first expedition. Hargraves slash Cass's survival indicates two possibilities. Either Central deliberately erased her from the official record, transforming Laurie into the false soul survivor for bureaucratic or political reasons, which is possible, or there are mentions of other timelines. It's said that in every timeline Area X would happen, but it would not succeed to the ultimate extent in every timeline. Another giant clue here is the fact that Whitby is on the first expedition at all. Whitby is in the book Authority, which is after the first expedition. If Laurie had been the only survivor, how could Whitby be in authority? We are definitely dealing with multiple timelines here. All of this could have very well happened over and over and over again, different variants each time. I think that Hargraves' survival and Whitby being there at all are more temporal inconsistencies. All of these events have occurred before and stacked up on each other. That explains the multiple stacked corpses of Henry in the lighthouse encountered by Whitby. That explains the radio signals from earlier broadcast through time. Area X is like a temporal randomizer, and this would indicate that events from here on would be somehow different as well from the events depicted in previous books that take place after the first expedition. On a side note, one thing that's interesting to note about Area X that I've noticed throughout these books is that yes, it can change humans entirely. It can change a lot about us, but there are things that we hold on to till the end. For instance, team leaders 1 and 2 clearly had fallen in love, and that is something that remained even after they escaped, which is why Central isolating them to separate islands is extremely cruel. Another example is old Jim. Some of his last thoughts are of his daughter, Cass. He holds on to the love of his daughter even as Area X begins to alter him irreparably. And of course, Lori loves Skye. He doesn't fully accept this, but it is something that is present throughout his entire section. A lot of these books focus on what happens to humans biologically within Area X, but the psychological aspect is obviously just as important. It really seems that Central itself was responsible for the very first spark that eventually led to Area X, long before the expeditions. Central interfered with something on the Forgotten Coast, and that interference became the initial point of contact that area X later fixated on. Area X is not randomly expanding, it is responding to that first intrusion, treating it as the moment an enemy first appeared. As the medic said, it is an old force in the world. Area X homes in on that origin point across time. In Lori's own future, the Southern Reach will send something through the border, and Area X will redirect that intrusion backward in time toward the Forgotten Coast, effectively trying to create a beachhead not just in the present but also in the past. If Area X successfully colonizes the past, the consequences would be far worse than anything the human characters have seen. What is clear is that when someone crosses the border into Area X, there is no guarantee where they end up. The rabbit, which infected Deadtown 25 years before Area X, had been sent through the border and thus into the past by the Southern Reach. These events are initially presented but not explained in previous books. They send the rabbits and the rabbits vanish. We know from absolution that the rabbits did not vanish, they were simply moved and changed to fit Area X's incomprehensible purpose. This is directly related to something that Whitby says about the corridor or the entrance to Area X. It was also tested with chickens. Central obviously has a long history with animal experimentation before and after Area X, the alligators, the rabbits, and the chickens. The chickens also had cameras around their necks. In one such experiment, the chicken was attached to a harness or a rope and it moved towards an obstacle inside of Area X. When they pulled it back, it was no longer a chicken. It had changed into something else, but the text does not elaborate. The visions that Laurie had were glimpses of that possible future where Area X had fully overwritten the world. The visions that other characters like Jim and Man Boy Slim had were also visions of a humanity attempting to fight against the Area X that was attempting to colonize the world and the future. Laurie's visions showed remnants of alien civilizations and incomprehensible structures that manifested like mirages over the marshes. Not necessarily literal objects, but projections of what Earth might look like if Area X continued unchecked. A world where human civilization has vanished and the environment is shaped entirely by Area X's logic. His mind can barely comprehend these possibilities, so the images appear fragmented, unstable, and symbolic. But the message is clear. Area X will never naturally fade away. And there is no version of events where it turns off. It is permanent. It is inevitable and actively reshaping time itself. And that is why it is terrifying. Whitby was likely involved with the original experiments on the Tyrant Alligator before the original 24 biologists ever arrived on the Forgotten Coast. This is my speculation based on the fact that Whitby was an environmental scientist, and based on the fact that Whitby, aka the Rogue, and the Tyrant seem one and the same the last time Jim sees them. I think the implication is that at some point Whitby went back in time to correct a mistake of his or to right a wrong. Over time, Area X changes and corrupts, makes his mission harder. Who even knows if his original goal is even still the same or even makes logical sense anymore, given how Area X changes everything? Basically, Whitby, aka The Row, who I think might be a version of the Whitby from Authority, might have had an original plan when entering Area X, and might have possessed some mechanism by which to steer himself in the temporal direction that he wished. Along the way, Area X changed him to suit its purpose. Whitby's original intent and Area X's purpose for him are likely at odds, and who knows the turmoil this generates. Whitby or the rogue might have had no interest in stopping Area X, but also no intention of harming anyone, which explains the note, I did not mean to kill them. It might have been that the rogue was trying to ensure that everything happened as it had always happened. Maybe Whitby, aka the Rogue, was trying to preserve the timeline. From its perspective, the version of Area X Lori experienced is potentially the best possible outcome. Meaning every alternative timeline is even more catastrophic. This means that for the entity behind Area X, past, future, it's all fluid. Area X wants the future to unfold in a way that strengthens its position. And if that requires overwhelming the past, it will do so. The rogue may have been simultaneously working for it and fighting against it. Laurie realizes that the casual way Area X seeks to push its influence backwards in time is what terrifies him the most. The horror of this comes from comprehending that there is no timeline in which Area X does not happen. The best case scenario is the future that the original Lauri lived through. And everything else leads to a future where Earth is unrecognizable. Thank you guys so much for watching. Let me know what you guys think about the Area X series. Have you read all of the books in the series? Have you comprehended them? Are there things that you think I might be missing? I'm sure there are because this is a very complex series. Thanks so much, guys. See you later.