Case 02.01,
the case of "Portrait of Daria Gray"
or
"The artist becomes the canvas."
Daria's story is pretty straightforward. What we know about Daria: she's a struggling left-handed artist who used to wear a lot of hand-me-down clothes from her sister, and she doesn't like the way she looks. At some point she decides to get a bit of a makeover and, among more mundane things, she starts shopping for a new tattoo. She finds a deal too good to be true (it is) offered by one 'Ink5oul'.
Ink5oul is sketchy as hell, and definitely has something supernatural going on. The tattoo they gives Daria (with no input from her, WTF! - paintbrush, floral patterns and glittering symbols) hurts much more than it should, but also heals almost instantly.
Looking at the tattoo (which is 'perfect') fills Daria with sudden desire to paint an autoportrait (which comes out 'perfect'). And once that is done, looking at it again makes her realize she can adjust herself (and make herself perfect).
So she takes her painting tools, most notably a pallet knife, right to her own face (and soon pretty much every other body part) and gives herself an impromptu plastic surgery. Which goes on uninterrupted for several days (???!?!!?!) until her room-mate Sarah comes home. Poor Sarah walks in on Daria while she has a knife stuck in her jaw, understandably freaks out and punches Daria, at which point half of Daria's face collapses under her hand like putty.
Having no idea that her room-mate has been touched by the spooky, Sarah comes up with the only rational explanation she can think of, which is that Daria poured some acid on her own face (which is very comic-book logic, but maybe Sarah paid more attention to Batman than chemistry and biology class as a teen).
So now Daria has severely disfigured face, and also is officially considered suicidal and a danger to herself and must go to therapy. (Honestly, she needs therapy).
There are two things, aside from the obvious, that grabbed my attention here:
The voice.
Narration in the first case was that of a pretty normal email - a little bit rambly, a little bit disjointed, referencing things that the recipient would know about that we can only infer. The second case had a perfectly average forum thread.
This case... also starts out with pretty realistic voice - right until the moment Daria stats talking about the tattoo. Then suddenly this story gets ridiculously verbose. The way she describes the studio, the tattooing process, the tattoo itself, the painting process and finally the 'adjustments' - the details, the wording - there's no way a regular person talks that way. Not in real time, not about a traumatic event that they very much don't want to talk about at all.
So where is this coming from? I think it's the ink. Until proven otherwise, I'm going to assume that Ink5soul's tattoo somehow infused Daria with power to 'express herself' perfectly in whatever medium she's using - be it words, paint, or her own flesh.
Invasion of privacy issues all over the place.
First Daria's tattooing session is streamed for who knows how many Ink5oul's fans without her say-so, and then her be-damned therapy session gets intercepted by some weird basement government branch. Daria glosses over the former and doesn't know about the latter, but they are there. And there was that private email in case of 'Not-Arthur' too. I wonder how present this theme will be in rest of the show.
One thing I can bet on: if one of the cases doesn't deal with a conspiracy theorist yelling about government spying on them, I'm gonna eat my hat. (And the poor paranoid guy will be 100% right, just not in the way they think).
"Daria? What's wrong?!" Eric's eyes widened as he found his wife curled up next to the Christmas tree. "It's your birthday! Hey baby, don't cry!"
Daria looked up at her husband as he kneeled beside her, tears brimming in her eyes.
"Do you still love me, even though I'm old and wrinkly?" she whispered. Eric shook his head, his face full of silent amusement.
"You, Daria James-Gray, are ridiculous. For starters, you are not old. You are 38, you have no wrinkles and you know that I will always love you, no matter how many wrinkles you get in the future, or how many greys you get in your hair. I can't imagine life without you, and frankly I wouldn't want to even think about it. I love you my baby, forever and always."
Daria curled up in her husbands lap, her tears slowing as she inhaled the soothing smell of his neck.
