Bruna. 28. Bisexual. Brazil. I've got a film degree.
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When this episode aired there were quite a few remarks about Alana’s weird hospital room.
Of course, this is not how hospital rooms look, but the show is just like that, right?
Mind Palace
Not always. Contrast Will’s hospital bed:
Why does Alana’s hospital room look like it does? Because it’s in her mind palace. We don’t see Alana’s mind palace very often, but it definitely exists.
Nobody thought she was actually drowning in black water, did they?
Usually, when we see Alana’s mind palace, she is the only person in the picture, which consists of her observing herself. What does she see?
We’re All Dead Here
First, the room looks like a mausoleum or viewing room, and the bed resembles a bier. This is the first indication that Alana perceives herself as dead.
In what sense? As in “the wages of sin is death”? No, because - and I’m hardly the first to point this out - the image resembles Mantegna’s Lamentation of Christ. So, Alana sees herself as having led a completely sinless life, suffering death as punishment for the sins of the world that condemned her. We’ll come back to this.
Broken On The Wheel
Furthermore, what is that round spiky thing around her pelvis? It looks like an external fixator, but not like any real-world medical device (that I’ve found). However - as I am also not the first to discover - what it most resembles is a breaking wheel:
This was a medieval torture device that broke the bones of the victim, one of the most famous of whom was St Catherine of Alexandria who was martyred for refusing to renounce her beliefs. Being “broken on the wheel” has been mentioned more than once in the series by now, so definitely not coincidental.
The Outfit That Wasn’t There
And now let’s get around to the outfit - a bandage-like arrangement over the chest and hips, with white panties underneath.
How likely is it that Alana is really wearing these scraps of cloth as she lies on a table with no blankets, in an isolated room that is nonetheless open to visitors? No breach of a patient’s dignity would surprise me in the real world, but this particular setup seems unlikely.
The only pictures I’ve seen of pelvic fracture victims who look like this were taken in emergency settings. Is Alana still in an emergency setting? No, because Chilton asks her “just how many bones did you break?” It is implied that Alana broke most of the bones in her body, and we can at least assume that her pelvis wasn’t the only bone fractured. Yet the pelvis is the only area that is still set, so the others have had time to heal. The bruising is still there, but bruising can stay around for a couple of months (in my personal experience) if it’s bad enough. tl;dr No, nothing about Alana’s treatment seems to justify the way she is dressed.
Really, the bandage-like clothing resembles the loincloths typically seen in images of the Crucifixion, but those are there to protect *our* sensibilities, not Christ’s dignity. In reality, he would have been *completely* naked.
So we can surmise that, in Alana’s “reality” she is completely naked and the bandage-wear is Alana’s editing of her own self-image, which is “really” totally exposed and vulnerable to Chilton’s mockery.
In this case, there is no outfit for me to recreate. It is not like Will’s hospital outfit of pyjama bottoms and bandage, which he was actually wearing in that scene. Instead, it’s an imaginary coverup for the *absence* of an outfit which Alana couldn’t have been wearing in this scene, in any form.
Saints and Sinners
Notice how the mourners are on Christ’s left, and Chilton comes up on Alana’s left, but instead of weeping over her he tells her she is responsible for putting herself in this situation.
Which is unfairly victim-blamey considering that Alana was risking her life to salvage the situation at the time, however much her actions contributed to things getting that bad in the first place; but seen from Chilton’s angle (recall earlier in the episode) it’s no wonder he holds her partly responsible for the harm he suffered in Yakimono.
Which brings us back to that whole “sinless” thing. It makes perfect sense to see Alana as a sinless martyr if you subscribe to the idea that she was deprived of agency throughout, and neither knew nor could have known an inkling of the truth, leading her through no fault of her own led to make a mistake of fact of the kind described here in the example where a dog owner takes home someone else’s Labrador in mistake for her own Labrador.
Agency
As you probably know by now if you have been reading these posts for any length of time, I don’t subscribe to that interpretation and instead believe we’re somewhere in the second example, where a dog owner takes home someone else’s Chihuahua in mistake for her own Labrador. In other words - a less reasonable mistake of fact, and not a negation of Alana’s agency in the matter.
Instant Makeover
Another thing to note about this scene is that Chilton is now an authority figure to her. Alana, in her striving for perfection, continually makes herself up backwards. In her efforts to match herself to an external template, when an authority figure enters the picture and tells her, in words of one syllable, “your attitude is wrong and it makes this picture look wrong” she immediately changes her thoughts and feelings to the correct ones, and without any attachment to her previous view. We saw this with Leonard Braver (”you are smitten with the accused”) and with Kade Prurnell (”reality doesn’t go away”); we didn’t previously see it with Will (”he’s dangerous”) or with Chilton (”those are just empty words”) because they didn’t have enough status in her eyes to be worth listening to.
But now Alana knows Chilton’s got a point, so she immediately remakes herself into something more appropriate. More on that tomorrow.
Often described as the “saddest classical work ever”, Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings has an almost inexorable quality in the slow, steady upward movement of the haunting melody towards the hair-raising climax, before finally settling back to the subdued sorrow of the opening. The piece was famously featured in the film Platoon, and was played at the funerals of Albert Einstein, Princess Grace of Monaco and during the announcements of the deaths of Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy.
