'Brave New World' Episode 6: Conditioning makes New Worlders slaves while AI Indra tries to be master
In a peculiarly poignant scene, Lenina Crowne (Jessica Brown Findlay) gets a panic attack on the train bound for "Epsilon places", even after she has yanked out her optic interface to follow John (Alden Ehrenreich). For John, the train trip is just another new adventure. For Lenina, it is rebelling against everything her body has been taught to do. Searching for or experiencing something new is taboo in the New World because it causes disruption. So, every body and mind has been conditioned, since birth, to stick to narrowly-defined lanes, including the trains they ride on.
It is also why their "Feelies" (the meme-fied version of cinema), are essentially endlessly recycled ideas with technology trying to create "newness". Helm Watson, the auteur of Feelies understands this better than most. The newest "sensation" in town, of course, is John. He is the personification of the "Savage Lands" that the New Worlders go to for their vacations. As a former stage-hand on the Savage Land productions meant for New Worlders, he knows how to keep an audience entertained. His celebrity also rubs off on Bernard. But at the end of the day, John is like a toothless tiger roaming the streets of New World as an attraction. He poses no threat to the order since his violence, stage-managed by Bernard, only reinforces what the New Worlders know about "savages".
His violence is packaged as safe entertainment, of stories told of an exotic land with no connection with the 'real world' of New London. John understands this, which is why even though he craves the celebrity, he is sick of being gawked at.
But the true subversiveness of his presence in the New World only emerges in his interactions with Lenina, as he helps her feel her true range of emotions, without the perennial soma drug dulling her affections. In New London, Lenina and John are the only truly free humans for those brief hours instead of being slaves -- Lenina to the AI Indra, and John to his celebrity.
But within this slave-master dynamic, while the New Worlders are slaves to the system, World Controller Mond (Nina Sosanya) is special. She alone seems to be able to talk to AI Indra as an equal. In this episode, we understand why. She is AI Indra's creator and there are nine other "World Controllers" like her. While she roams the New World, the other nine are on a never-ending vacation in a virtual paradise. Elliot (Joseph Morgan), one of the original 10 masters, cloned himself to create the Epsilons. He also knows why Mond has come to meet him -- trouble with AI Indra.
Mond confirms this, saying that "a virus" in the shape of a man is infecting the system. But John might not be Mond's biggest problem because, at the end of the episode, we realize that AI Indra, in addition to being self-aware, has also developed a bit of an ego. "I'm Perfect", she tells Mond, before trying to drown her.
While AI Indra has been a dutiful slave to Mond and the other nine 'originals', she seems no longer content with the status quo. She is trying to be the master without any human competition, even if that 'competition' is her own creator. But how John fits into AI Indra's masterplan is yet to be revealed.
'Brave New World' premiered on July 15 on Peacock and is available to stream.
