"I don't excuse the actions of this character--" well I do. I kiss them about it directly on the mouth. I think they should have done worse things. I think that would have been funny.
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I think I just figured out a big part of how NINA works. here's how Brenner is "altering" past events.
something just hit me about this footage that's been staring me in the face this whole time.
before I come to my Big Point, let me establish a few things:
the camera codes don't match
s4 keeps giving us camera POV footage that's labeled per camera. we see codes like CAM 071, CAM 039 and CAM 114.
what's weird about that? nothing, except... here are what the tape labels in the NINA library look like:
alphanumeric codes like CAM B2, CAM A5, CAM TR2. not a single one with just the three-digit numerical codes.
k, put a pin in that.
the NINA library is so spotty
Brenner tells El, "Everything that took place in my lab was captured on video tape. Every success and every failure."
but the dates we saw in that closeup are so sparse. it takes only a dozen tapes to span a month of footage leading up to the massacre (a time period you'd think they'd save every second of):
no idea what a lot of these camera codes denote, but it's not too hard to guess RR means Rainbow Room.
I can tell you off the top of my head that there are four cameras in the Rainbow Room. and one in each corner of the training rooms, at least one apiece in test rooms, bedrooms, hallways. at least one apiece in observation chambers of test rooms - otherwise the One banishment footage wouldn't exist (is that a bit odd now that I think of it?).
and that's not including the tripod cameras with which are recorded close up footage like plinko and the cat.
so, why so few dates and camera angles?
@lilly-flowerr once kindly calculated an estimate about how many VHS tapes would be produced from 100+ cameras' worth of continuous footage for the duration of the HNL program and the result was in the ballpark of several million.
tbf, Brenner never claimed this was all the footage. so I figured, likely, this library actually just houses a pared-down selection of footage relevant to the massacre.
but the problem with that idea is... consider how when we see El get NINA'd with RR footage: she's being shown four views of the room at once. that's already impossible, based on the selection we see available in the library. there aren't even four RR camera views represented on that shelf, let alone all from the same day.
pin that too.
live feeds vs playback
I thought hey, if those camera POVs had dates and everything on them, why isn't that stuff on El's NINA videos? are they hiding that data to facilitate screwing with her?!??
which, yeah. but here's the One banishment footage that Brenner watches alone. no dates on that either:
so I went to look for other times we've seen lab playback to see if there are ever dates.
Hopper checking out the pipe in season 1; Owens reviewing Will's checkup:
that's actually a plot point on the Hopper one because he decided the lab was lying to him about which night that footage was of - if the tapes showed dates onscreen, that wouldn't have been an issue.
so then I thought, ok, if that data doesn't appear on playback, it must only display on monitors showing live feeds, and that stuff doesn't actually get recorded onto it. right?
well here are some live lab feeds: El and the cat; detained Nancy and Jonathan; scientists watching Will's checkup; Owens directing Bob to safety from demodogs. no dates anywhere.
so... if there's no data on live feeds or on playback.... where ARE those dates on the NINA cameras being displayed? there's no internal viewer on those security cameras, like looking through a camcorder viewfinder, so it's not like it's merely "the camera's view" unseen by any actual entity.
so like... who's seeing that? how are we seeing that?
pin that too. I promise we're getting close.
OSD (on screen display)
quick bit of context for those who didn't grow up with VHS.
in VHS days, your video camera (if you had it configured to do so) would put the date onto your home movies. it wasn't a separate layer you could turn on/off after the fact, like DVD subtitles. if that feature was turned on while you were filming, that date was forever fused onto the footage itself. any time you ever played that tape back, you would see that date. there's no way to get rid of it.
osd however - PLAY PAUSE FFW and all that - those labels aren't fused onto the actual footage. they appear momentarily only as you navigate the tape with your VCR. DVD players do the same thing, you're probably familiar.
you can watch the osd labels appear/disappear as Joyce investigates Will's Halloween tape, while the date stays put.
they give us the live camera view of Bob (which has just the date) vs Joyce playing it back on her VCR later (which has the date and also osd). why the timestamps are different is a whoooooole other post.
so now that we're all on the same page about how dates vs. osd works on VCRs,
I'll bring you to the only time I DID find dates on lab playback:
4x6 when Brenner pops this tape in his VCR.
"who's even seeing those ?" Brenner. yeah, that's not my stunning realization. but look what we see up in the top left corner: osd. PLAY.
so here finally is my point: if PLAY appears on the screen as a result of Brenner hitting play on his VCR....
let me direct your attention to the upper left corner of that other footage:
those camera POV shots all say 🔴REC.
those aren't recordings.
they ARE recordING.
Brenner is taping these past events, live, during NINA.
"how do you explain Little El showing up in some of the camera povs? brainwash her all you want, but she would show up big on a tape being recorded in 1986."
indeed! which is why I'm not going so far as to claim Brenner is recording The Actual Past. what I do believe is that he's recording El's memories of the past, in which she is Little El.
"and how are you gonna say Brenner is able to record El's memories right out of her head with a VCR? yes this is fiction, but VHS technology isn't. c'mon."
it's not actually that far fetched! El canonically has a very similar ability - it's been swept under the rug in comparison to the glamor of telekinesis, not used since season 1, but it's well established:
she not only can hear people remotely, but also relay what only she is hearing via radio/intercom to where others can then hear it.
Brenner was filming this test on a tripod camera, which wouldn't have been affected by the cut in power that happened when El started relaying. so he walked away from this moment with a recording of something only El was able to hear.
which is exactly how NINA works. add video technology, and there ya go. if it didn't already exist in 1983, this scene was Brenner discovering the concept.
onward:
Brenner's tapes aren't the tapes El is being shown.
watch this in 4x7: he inserts this tape, hits play, and then we cut to El in NINA, watching all the monitors flash to life with footage of herself in the infirmary for her bullying concussion.
the implication from the editing is that this particular VHS yields that particular footage for El to watch, but that's a false assumption they want us to make.
first, playing one VHS doesn't result in several screens with different footage rolling all at once. one VHS only holds one camera feed. all NINA's monitors can't be fed by one VCR.
second, "Infirmary" would most likely be abbreviated "I" or "IR". the tape he played said CAM TR2, which could stand for either Training Room or Test Room. El experiences 9/8/79 "memories" of both, so I'm not sure which this would be. regardless, it's not Infirmary.
third, as we've covered before, all the lab footage El is shown inside NINA is devoid of dates and cam codes. that's not characteristic of the tape we saw Brenner play in his VCR.
fourth, as we also covered before, not all the camera angles El's seeing are even represented on that shelf of massacre-month tapes.
so Brenner may indeed have captured everything in his lab on video tape, but the VHS library we and El are shown while he says that? pretty sure that's NOT what these tapes are.
it's implied that he's popping tapes into his VCR at the same time El's off in her memories. but if it's not for the purpose of showing them to her.... what is he doing with his?
"but nat, his finger hit play, not record."
well they're not gonna SHOW us him hitting record or we'd guess!
he's hitting play to get the tape queued up to the right spot to record on, which you gotta do with a VHS or else you could overwrite something important that's already on there.
if Brenner is recording whatever El is seeing, wouldn't that help explain:
the varying appearance of El as both big and little within the camera povs. at this moment, El is big because she's aware she's her current self (she's fully conversing with Brenner). this is definitely not really past footage, because it's not like Little El stood up on a chair and yelled into a camera in 1979. after this point though, she accepts what's going on and submits to the "memories" in which she is little, so she's seeing herself as little, so from then on she appears as Little El on the fresh tapes.
the different camera labeling within NINA and its library of tapes - they need to differentiate between old/real/fake/new camera views.
the sparsity of the VHS library - maybe only key moments need to be overwritten
this camera-yelling moment actually is a potential match for one of the tapes on the shelf. it's Sept 4, 1979, and it's in the Rainbow Room. CAM 071 09/04/79 could be the overwriting of CAM RR2 09-4-79. on the other hand, if that were true I'd expect to also see 09-4-79 training room and hallway footage to match those other povs we saw, and I don't, so idk.
the light circle game is the only NINA footage we ever get to see both live camera POV and playback of (although it's not actually the same moment, the dates and cams are different). the numeric camera code on both of these is part of my support for the numeric camera codes representing new footage.
regarding the date and cam code being different on those two bits of nearly identical footage…. what if I... plugged this into Multiplayer NINA theory real quick and said that maybe CAM 126 is fake-old footage that's been more recently rerecorded in someone else's NINA? that maybe that's what's on all of Brenner's tapes before he records El's new stuff onto them?
so here's my current thinking of how NINA works:
decide how you wish El remembered an event and compile cherrypicked real footage and/or staged footage supporting your version of events.
manipulate and gaslight El so that she doubts the veracity of her own memories.
drug her and throw her in a sensory deprivation tank where your selected footage clockwork-oranges her into "fully re-experiencing" your version of events.
presto! the most powerful person in the world now believes your version of events is true because she genuinely remembers it.
by means of El's electronic relay abilities (induced with a buttload of drugs), these false memories that only El is seeing, inside her mind, are displayed for all to see on monitor in NINA's control room.
pop a plain old tape into a plain old VCR and hit record, capturing whatever's on the monitor.
presto! now you have irrefutable original video footage of a past event that never happened.
now you can show that proof to someone else - the government, the media.... or perhaps more importantly another NINA subject, as an ingredient in your tampering with their memories.
so. I can't prove the ol' MindFucker4000 is also a time machine, not in this post, but I do still feel like there's time stuff involved as well. because I can't think of a way right now to claim that recording someone's manipulated memory of the past actually changes that past, meddles with timelines, etc.
can you? I don't have all the nuts and bolts ironed out, but I welcome your thoughts while mine gel!
one of my favorite (/s) experiences in fandom is when you're all having a good time theorizing and then like one (1) person says smth along the lines of "it's not that deep" when you're only halfway deep into explaining your analyses and you just go. oh. this is not a safe space suddenly. this space is Not autistic enough right now.
what do you mean people are screenshotting this to put over their blorbos. i literally made this post 8 hours ago. it hasn’t even had time to bake yet cmon guys
“No, but really. If I was a girl,” Mike presses on, looking up at Will with red-rimmed eyes through dark lashes. Leaning in. Somehow, fully unaware that this line of questioning has Will's heart climbing up to his throat. “Would you want to kiss me?”
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