'The Institute' Episode 1 Recap: Is Michelle Dead Or Alive?

Episode 1 of The Institute opens with a 14-year-old Luke acing an exam meant for kids much older than him. Back home, while playing basketball with his friend, he rips his limited-edition jersey (this is an important detail and relevant for character-building, I suppose). And then he proceeds to go to the local pizza place to talk to his parents about going to MIT because that’s where he should be if he wants to enhance his knowledge about the world. As he begins to explain about accessing an “abyss” full of information, he topples over the pizza pan, supposedly via telekinesis. This is just grade-A storytelling, by the way. The need for seamlessly transitioning from one scene to another is just so old school. Complaining about janky exposition is so boring. Now is the time to truly not care whether or not the flow of an episode is right as long as viewers get a lot of vague details. Anyway, a girl at this pizza place, Michelle, takes note of this incident with the pan, and she is later revealed to be a member of the titular organization, which has sent her to abduct Luke. The kidnapping goes successfully, as Michelle and her team covertly enter Luke’s house and knock him out so that he is unable to create a scene. What happens next? Let’s find out.

Spoiler Alert

It doesn’t take too long for Luke to figure out that he has been kidnapped, as he wakes up in a facility where his room has been made to look like his personal bedroom. After exiting this facsimile of a part of his home, he finds himself in a dull grey corridor full of posters with words on them that contradict the overall mood of the place. There he comes across Kalisha, who commences a bit of a yap-athon through which we come to know that the place they are in is essentially a prison where kids are being experimented upon by an organization—that’s supposedly headed by Sigsby, Stackhouse, and Hendricks—because of their telepathic or telekinetic abilities. As if that’s not annoying enough, she starts kissing Luke for no reason whatsoever. Given how it’s non-consensual, this might well count as sexual harassment. Or does she do it because she has read Luke’s mind and knows that he wants to kiss her? Do one’s thoughts count as explicit consent? Don’t people have to express their emotions verbally to make sure that what they are thinking about is what they actually want? Yeah, this is a can of worms that The Institute has unnecessarily opened, and I’m sure they won’t be able to deal with it in a logical fashion. Anyway, Stackhouse puts a lid on Kalisha’s weird behavior and takes Luke to meet Sigsby. By the way, the conversation between Luke and Sigsby isn’t all that eye-opening either. Words like “for the country,” “cutting-edge science,” “fronthalf,” and “backhalf”  are thrown around to give some vague hints about what’s going on, what the graduation process of this place is, and how it’s going to save the world. And it’s really tough to sit through these scenes because of the bad dialogue writing and the awkward performances (whatever Joe Freeman is doing is really irritating). 

The only part worth remembering is the fact that Luke will have no recollection of his work at this facility once it’s over and he is sent back home, kind of like the movie Paycheck. Well, on that note, Luke is sent to Tony to get tagged (the marker or tracker is in the form of an irremovable earring), and then he is allowed to mingle with all the other kids in the facility, as the people in charge believe that it’s easier for new entrants to accept their situation once they see there are others in the same boat as them. During the concluding moment of the episode, Luke reunites with Kalisha, who begins smooching him again. Is this some book-accurate stuff that’s going on? If something is weird in the books, that doesn’t mean it has to be adapted word for word. It’s an adaptation, and Stephen King is not a god; you can remove the odd stuff or at least try to make it make sense. And this whole interaction is such a turn-off that the introduction to the rest of the kids in the Institute—George, Iris, and Nick—doesn’t seem to hit the right note. Everyone talks like they’re reading off a teleprompter, and all the teleprompter has is exposition. I guess things are going to improve eventually, as the kids begin scripting their escape plan from the facility, but I’m not really hopeful.

We are introduced to Tim, who volunteers to cancel his flight to New York for $600 cash and a full refund on his ticket, since it is overbooked. He calls up whoever is waiting for him there (I think the name I hear is Kate or Kit; it’s difficult to figure out without subtitles) and apologizes for this sudden change in decision. And then he proceeds to hitch a ride to Maine, but not for free though. He helps the driver deliver books to various places as payment, something that’s greatly appreciated by all parties concerned. Since he intends to stay in Dennison River Bend, Maine, for a while, he needs a job. He notices an application for the post of a night knocker, which is essentially a patrolman who does the rounds of the town at night to make sure there aren’t any antisocial activities happening. They don’t get a weapon or anything like that. I guess they just roam around and inform the real police if their services are needed. Tim’s interview for this job is taken by Chief John, who doesn’t take too long to get straight to the point: during Tim’s stint at the Boston PD, he received awards and commendations from 2011 to 2020, and he stopped a shooter from attacking a mall. That makes him grossly overqualified to be a night knocker. Hence, what’s the catch? 

Well, from the looks of it, that last confrontation was traumatic enough for him to resort to alcohol, and now he is trying to get away from all that by taking on a job that’s relatively less traumatic. Apparently, that’s enough for John to accept his candidature; he asks Tim to show up for duty in the next few hours, and Tim is more than happy to do so. Officer Wendy gives Tim a basic rundown of what his duty entails and all the places he has to check out during his patrol before returning to the station. While doing so, she exhibits some hostility for reasons that aren’t clear to me yet. But if I have to guess, I’ll say that the show is laying the groundwork for a budding romance between Wendy and Tim (book readers, feel free to correct me if I am wrong). As for Tim’s first night on the job, I don’t really have words to describe it. I mean, he encounters a homeless woman, Annie, who says teeth fillings are used to surveil people and then goes on to talk about stuff from Tim’s past, which understandably spooks the man out. The following day, we see Tim having a chat with Norbert, the owner or manager of the hotel he is staying at for the time being. As Norbert starts talking about snowflakes and whatnot, Tim notices Annie again and decides to go help her instead of listening to Norbert’s nonsense. 

Even though Michelle has clocked out for the day, she is cornered in the elevator by Stackhouse because he wants to talk to her about her next assignment and how she can improve her kidnapping abilities. Through their conversation, it’s insinuated that Michelle had to kill Luke’s parents for reasons that aren’t exactly clear (there’s a lot of that going on in the show). I don’t know why they were armed to the teeth when they had some kind of magic spray that knocked people out immediately. They could’ve used that same substance to flood the ventilation system, worn masks while infiltrating the house, and then done the kidnapping. It looked like they had the expertise and the gear to pull off such a stealth mission, but they didn’t, because how else could the show have highlighted Luke’s amazing ability to remember a face—Michelle’s face, to be specific—while losing consciousness, right? Going back to the plot, Stackhouse finally allows Michelle to leave, and on her way out, she gets a text from Kate, who I’ll come back to in a bit. The titular facility is apparently in the middle of a forest somewhere near Dennison River Bend, because Michelle is able to get to the town by car in a matter of minutes. There’s only one road leading in and out of the Institute, and the cover that’s being used to prevent normies from trying to get in there is that it’s a laboratory for testing highly dangerous diseases. If it works, it works. 

Michelle meets up with Kate at the local bar. We learn that Kate is a journalist and she is in a situationship with Michelle. Kate is inquisitive about the nature of Michelle’s job, and the latter tries her best to be mysterious about it. However, after having sex, I guess Michelle becomes malleable enough to start exposing the reality of what her work entails. That’s when Kate reveals that she is actually an employee of the assassin who has been employed by Stackhouse to make sure that Michelle doesn’t give out any trade secrets. Now, before all this went down, Kate and Michelle crossed paths with Tim, but they neither acknowledged nor recognized each other. Assuming that Tim was talking to a person named Kate at the beginning of the episode, is it alright to speculate that Tim isn’t just some drifter who is new to Dennison River Bend, and is on some covert mission? I guess we’ll learn more about it later on. By the way, in case there is any confusion about Michelle’s status, yes, she is very dead. She got shot in the head. She’s not coming back. If the Institute makes clones, the character might make a return. Otherwise, this is it for her. By the way, unrelated to all of this, we get a scene of Sigsby cooking and partaking in some kind of self-flagellation ritual. I think it’s supposed to show that despite running such an elaborate facility, none of these guys are that well-off. As long as they are in that building, they display authority and poise. As soon as they are out of there, they are essentially nobodies and extremely expendable, and I’m sure that that’ll somehow factor into the larger narrative that’s unfolding.