Purgatory, Missouri – Season One, EP 5: Carnies

Purgatory, Missouri – Season One, EP 5:  Carnies

As I listened to the prologue for episode five of Purgatory, Missouri, I had to chuckle a bit when it promised we might get some clues that would help us figure the whole thing out.  YOU, maybe.  Me?  Not a chance.  You could staple clues directly to my forehead and I still wouldn’t notice them.  I’m that observant y’all.  Don’t mistake the fact that I can string a sentence together for any sign of legitimate intelligence.

So off we go, back down the rabbit hole, or stumbling into this strange portal that leads directly to a potentially unknown reality we’ve come to love – Purgatory, Missouri.  Episode five, titled “Carnies,” seems to start everything out in a friendly way…you know, your typical gathering of freaks and geeks to hash things out in a town hall-like setting.  Number One is leading the meeting, known as a CCM (Compulsory Carnie Meeting), and we get to run into characters we’ve known for longer like Five and Thirty-Eight as well.  Mind you, it’s news to Thirty-Eight that he’s Thirty-Eight…we knew him under a different name before – Roger, who was at the center of the third episode.  Clearly some time has passed now, and he’s fitting right in with the rest of these crazies…so why not assign him a number?  What’s in a name anyway, right?  There are rumored to be more than a hundred thousand carnies in total, yet those helping run the place…as much as a place like this can be organized…seem to be limited to thirty-eight so far, with our dear friend once known as Roger now filling the latest position.  Give that it’s a “very elite social tier” – you’d think Thirty-Eight would sound just a little more grateful, right?  He’s not a “newcomer” anymore…those pesky folks that are so sad to be wandering around Purgatory, Missouri, wondering how the heck they got there and why this place exists – like Roger once did.  You’d think they were listening to a podcast of some kind with how confused they are, am I right?  How meta!

“It just feels like one long moment of waiting…for something,” says Thirty-Two as he shares with the group in the CCM.  Ain’t that a life?  I mean it…ain’t that what we’re all going through, all of the time?  It is rare for most of us to get to a day that significantly stands out as extremely different than the last one that we lived.   The carnies are all sharing like they’re in an AA meeting for the discombobulated.  You’ll hear Twelve explain that she’s basically had enough herself, and would love to figure out how to end it all and get the heck outta there.  It’s an airing of grievances, but you’ll also hear common experiences in the tales they tell that compare to ones we’ve experienced with the characters of Purgatory, Missouri.

One thing that’s important to note, is how much Blanca is seen as a complete outsider – a troublemaker of sorts…she who is not to be named, you feel me?  When Thirty-Eight makes the mistake of bringing her up a couple times, he’s scolded for doing so and warned not to do it again.  Oddly enough, according to Number One, “the point of these meetings is to build morale” – and while that’s not intended to be a joke, it certainly got a laugh out of me.  I hate any and all meetings, because every single one of’em could be put into an email, and despite anyone’s intentions, they don’t so much build morale as they do reinforce a desired feeling we’re supposed to have about a company or corporation that we’re working for.  So you betcha – I’m a hard pass on meetings of any kind personally, but they don’t seem to be all that much easier in Purgatory, Missouri, either.  Morale booster?  Is anyone going to come out of this room and skip back to their station while singing their favorite Pop song after it’s all said and done?

Outside of the CCM, we get to learn more about The Void and how he got kicked out of the inner circle of carnies in a conversation with Blanca.  You’ll also hear a few more screams details on the expansion of the Perimeter, and how it seems to be growing physically in tandem with the dangers it seems to pose.  I say seems to, because I don’t think we completely know WHAT function it serves yet, or whether it’s actually dangerous at all.  There’s no doubt that most in the carnival are convinced that it would lead to their own oblivion, but we have to at least consider the possibility that maybe they’ve all been told that as part of some kind of strange social compliance tool.  Maybe the Perimeter is the only real way out.  Maybe you have to step into it with some kind of Matrix-esque faith, knowing there’s something to be found on the other side and you won’t just cease to exist.  It’s just a theory.  Time will tell if I’m right.

What I also really liked about episode five, was that you get to hear some of the politics that Number One employs to create a level of control within the carnival.  Again, not unlike what we experience in our own daily life, there’s the elite class, those that live in squalor, and the bulk of its people caught in between.  Sound familiar?  Like I’ve been trying to tell you from the get-go in listening to this podcast, you better have a firm grip on what side of the glass you’re really on.  We might all be living in Purgatory, Missouri, and just not know it yet.  “Do what you gotta do to keep sane around here.”

We are given an important nugget of knowledge somewhere towards the earlier part of the episode, where it’s made clear that Roger wouldn’t have just become Thirty-Eight and part of the inner circle of the carnival without some kind of an impressive resume or reason to have been promoted so quickly.  As to what that implies, or what that means for Thirty-Eight, we don’t yet know…it’s just a piece of information I think we wanna keep handy for now.  Blanca goes through another one of those weird seizure/separation-from-reality things that she tends to experience, and Thirty-Eight gets himself in trouble once again by talking to her.  That’s where things might finally take the ultimate turn into some tangible answers at long last!  Don’t quote me on that, but it’s certainly possible…hear my spoilers out…

Thirty-Eight ends up talkin’ to some rando who’s in the process of losing his mind over what he could have done to save his mother.  Thirty-Eight talks to him, and somehow gets the guy to remember what he’d gone through in the moments before he got to Purgatory, Missouri.  It was a terrible tornado, and he was doing the best he could to protect his mother under the most extreme of circumstances.  In all honesty, it seems like a different story than the kind we usually stumble across here – yet this poor chap has ended up in the same horrifying place at the carnival like all the rest.  You get the sense that somehow Thirty-Eight understands that this guy doesn’t belong here like so many others probably do, and so he encourages the dude to forgive himself.  He was, after all, just trying to help his mother survive before it all went black, so why should be punished like the rest of these tormented souls are?  I think what happens next gives you the answer to that…and POOF – the guy disappears.  It’s a bizarre phenomenon that we’ve experienced loosely along the way in this twisted tale, but this is the first time we might have an inkling about how, or why it might happen.  Maybe there’s a process of supernatural selection that we’re not privy to…and no different than a letter getting lost in the mail & delivered to the wrong address, maybe some of us end up in hell when we’re not supposed to go there, and simply need someone to come along and sort us back into the right place.  Of all things, you’ll find the ending of this episode was like…oddly comforting?  A little endearing?  Hopeful somehow even?  Maybe we all end up exactly where we belong, and it’s only ever a matter of time.  Well…time and a whole lot of patience.

Speaking of that patience stuff…sit tight for now…I’ll have more theories for ya in a couple of weeks when the next episode drops.  Stay tuned!

Find episodes of Purgatory, Missouri posted up at Stuart Pearson’s main site at:  https://www.stuartpearsonmusic.com/purgatory-missouri-episodes