Find Your Tribe

Hey look, it’s a 2k fic from Yachter Otter’s POV! :D

Why didn’t Eleanor write more than “Eleanor, find Chidi,” on the paper? This was probably the most debated moment of the whole season, I would say. We thought about it. We probably talked about it for a total of about 10 hours, and in chunks — when we first wrote it, we were coming up with it, and when we shot it. We actually shot a couple other versions of things that she wrote that were very similar, but slightly different versions. We also talked about it a million times when we were in editing, because we had the ability, with visual effects, to change it to whatever we wanted. In these days, the writing process never ends; you can just keep writing things forever. Here’s the theory, I will lay out the whole theory for you: There were a couple circumstantial things, and then there’s the actual specifics of the message itself. The circumstantial things are that she has almost no time, right? Michael, at any moment, is going to walk in here, and if he even sees her holding a pen, she’s doomed. It won’t work. So she has to do it very, very quickly under tremendous pressure where the stakes of that moment are literally, “Are you going to be tortured for infinity or not?” She has basically no information of what her life is going to be once she’s rebooted, except for the fact that Michael has said that he is going to split them up and keep them apart from each other. She might be in a completely different environment, she might be on a different planet, she might be anywhere, with anyone, under any circumstances. The only thing that makes sense is to try to get her back to the position that she is in here, and the best way to do that would be to say, “I need to find one of these four people.” We thought about her saying, “There are four of you,” or trying to write their names quickly, but the truth is that if she found Tahani first, and she said, “I’m not supposed to be here,” there’s every possibility in the world that Tahani would just turn her in, because Tahani is not what Chidi is, which is a person of extreme ethical and moral exactitude. And Jason is a disaster, so if she found Jason first, the two of them would just mingle around together being disasters, and probably eventually get caught. She also couldn’t write anything that might lead her to go to Michael, because if she wrote something vague, like, “You’re really in hell,” and she showed it to Michael, like, “What does this mean? I’m scared,” anything that would lead her to go to him that doesn’t specifically say, “Avoid that guy,” might end in her being found again. We had the line earlier in the episode where she says, “I was dropped into a cave and you were my flashlight.” So it was like, “Oh right, that’s in her head,” so the first breadcrumb on the path that leads her back to figuring it all out is Chidi. If she can find Chidi, she can confess who she is to him, he will keep her secret because he did the first time. He also is the only person of the four of them who can actually help her get better, and learn about how to be a good person. And by saying “Find Chidi” specifically, the implication is don’t trust anyone but Chidi, so wherever you are, basically it’s a warning to her, from her, that says, “Don’t talk to anyone, don’t do anything until you find this guy.”

Me when I found out James Comey got fired: