#nina stuff

I laid this out over the actual set blueprint to get the room dimensions and floor pattern location accurate. the furniture is eyeballed from screen refs using the rainbow pattern, wall panels, etc to measure by. I'm sure it's not to-the-inch, but it's as precise as I could reasonably be. specifically, my diagram is informed by the El talking to Brenner scene in 4x5 because it's the only time you see the whole room in one continuous shot.

symmetry in the Rainbow Room

two years ago, I had the same idea as Dustin drawing midway points to find the center of that flesh wall, and I drew a couple lines determining the center of the Rainbow Room to be right here:

I did this because the weirdest part of the "Well well" sequence, to me, was the times that El straight up respawns in the RR instead of walking into it. since it seemed to be about the middle of the room both times, I wondered if it was the exact center, if for some reason precision mattered, and I think it is.

(no we aren't shown her feet to make it clear, but we can gauge her location when they show their blocking centered on the double doors and also hers between those bookcases, which happen to be the X and Y axes. if she's centered on both axes, then she's in the dead center:)

I never posted that, but with that trivia in the back of my mind, imagine how apeshit I went when I saw Max spawn in the Rainbow Room and:

she's sitting on that EXACT spot, verifiably this time. so there has to be something important about it.

this is why I won't be shocked if we end up learning that this is the more precise center point of the circle wall. (although it could certainly just be a symbolic thing as well. there's actually symmetry/center stuff going on in that training room too so who knows)

anyways this spot is also just about where two of those floor blood puddles mysteriously appear. I must speculate that this blood belongs to people (or alt timelines of the same person) who keep spawning/despawning right here? possibly El herself? a remnant of prior NINA attempts where she failed to harness a memory in time and got snapped for real?

oh yeah, this is also the spot where El gets Vecna'd... sometimes:

she gets lifted a couple feet in front of the spawn point, and she Marvel-lands there as well, but in between, they set up a whole overhead camera angle (not used anywhere else in the massacre sequence) where the only visual information is her location relative to that spot / the mystery blood. they wanted us to know she was Right There soooo bad.

oh speaking of overhead shots, here's the other time they used it to specify where El is standing on the floorplan. teehee.

I bet you can't guess whether the blood in here has any odd behavior irt symmetry or perhaps mirroring!!!

this is a behemoth topic I'll try to keep concise... there are four main stains I use to orient in this room. they come pairs.

first we've got my bros door splat and wall splat, the ones by the double doors.

then my bros drippy and stompy, who face each other on the bookcases. drippy comes down from the top of one bookcase, and stompy comes up from the bottom of the other. (cause it looks almost like a puddle got stomped in. ik that's not what it is but it's the name that stuck for me)

here's a rare couple of times when they let you see them all at once.

(nvm the Can You Spot 100 Differences? of it all, we're only looking at these 4 specific stains rn lmao)

if we arbitrarily declare the mirror "north", drippy tends to live on the west side of the room, on the edge of the bookcase that's closer to the mirror. stompy tends to live on the east side, and on the edge of the bookcase closer to the double doors. wall splat is west and door splat is east. I consider this standard configuration for these four stains because it's this way across most views in which we're shown the room plainly (ie not as a literal or fuckety reflection)

in other words, it's "normally" like this:

let's catch drippy and stompy misbehaving

at the end of the 4x6 bullying scene, El looks in the mirror and sees her little self in the massacred-up RR. I call this view the Bully RR.

it's impossible for Bully RR to be the natural reflection of Standard RR. those who've read this far are the same handful who already know, but I do need to cover this here for reasons.

I hope it makes sense how I tried to show this by flipping my diagram vertically, but if you were to look in that mirror, here's the way you should see it reflected, complete with how our standard few stains should look.

the camera's representation of Big El's view would be approximately this slice of the room outlined in red.

which isn't what we're seeing. in many regards.

wall splat is where he should be, though. great job buddy!!

drippy is correctly depicted as being on the west side of the room, except... he's on the doors edge, when he should be on the mirror edge. this is a huge deal, considering that's... not a thing mirrors can do.

mirrors only flip images left/right, not top/bottom or close/far. a stain on the edge of that bookcase closer to the mirror will still appear closer to the mirror even in the reflection; likewise further will always appear further. a mirror could not make drippy be where he is. this version of him just straight up exists in a different location.

according to the final shot in the sequence, stompy has flipped in Bully RR as well, and is closer to the mirror instead of farther.

confused? ok forget everything I'm saying about room orientation, let's make this super simple. just look at these two screenshots and tell me: regardless of which is a plain view and which is a mirror image, is stompy in the same place relative to that yellow thing on the bottom shelf? and could a mirror change that?

if you're still a production error truther about the blood, then forget about that for a second and notice how the room itself is also arranged differently.

behind little El in the Bully RR, we're seeing a red-top rainbow bend on the wall in the corner of the room that has the benches and maze.

the maze is where you'd expect it to be for a Standard reflection. but the rainbow is not.

the red bend, according to plain views of the room, generally belongs in the quadrant with the pyramid seat thing. here's a shot from the scene that just happened in the room this is supposedly the reflection of.

so how is the red bend over by the maze in the "mirror"?

even ignoring the rainbow/furniture mismatch - there's simply no natural way for the red bend to be reflecting over here instead of over there:

if my diagram isn't making sense, I'll show you with screenshots. here's one where you really see what El should be seeing in the mirror from that angle. purple bend.

I'll also find you a time we saw the red bend in the mirror. you gotta be angled distinctly the other way.

no matter how you slice it, Bully RR is a wholly different version of the room. idk what else to tell you.

now let's catch the splats misbehaving

here's 4x8 when Brenner walks in and El turns around to face him.

door splat, what are you doing in here? you would have to be on the west side of the room to be reflecting there.

"oh, that must be Bully RR again!" haha no, silly. you buffoon. this reflection contradicts both Standard and Bully, meaning it's a third RR. (I named him Shards RR, and I think there are more still beyond those! but this is about the point where I broke mentally and gave up)

anyways, bottom line is, we sometimes see door/wall splat and drippy/stompy swap places.

it was in the course of turning my photoshop layers on/off that the "reflecting" behavior of all of it really struck me.

but it's very interesting that these stains, which sometimes appear in the wrong locations, appear in perfectly the wrong locations to reflect across the axes of the room.

(dw about what's going on in each one or my old labels or anything, I just mean, see the way they're moving around)

so it's not just these four stains, but also the furniture, and the rainbow itself, that seem to be reflecting - independently?? - across the X and Y axes we talked about earlier. the weirdest part remains drippy and stompy because everything else is conceivably mirror behavior, but not them.

the NINA library is so spotty

Brenner tells El, "Everything that took place in my lab was captured on video tape. Every success and every failure."

but the dates we saw in that closeup are so sparse. it takes only a dozen tapes to span a month of footage leading up to the massacre (a time period you'd think they'd save every second of):

CAM B6 08-10-79 CAM B5 08-12-79 CAM A2 08-20-79 CAM B5 08-25-79 CAM TR1 09-2-79 CAM RR2 09-4-79 CAM C6 09-6-79 CAM RR1 09-6-79 CAM C4 09-7-79 CAM B5 09-7-79 CAM TR2 09-8-79

no idea what a lot of these camera codes denote, but it's not too hard to guess RR means Rainbow Room.

I can tell you off the top of my head that there are four cameras in the Rainbow Room. and one in each corner of the training rooms, at least one apiece in test rooms, bedrooms, hallways. at least one apiece in observation chambers of test rooms - otherwise the One banishment footage wouldn't exist (is that a bit odd now that I think of it?).

and that's not including the tripod cameras with which are recorded close up footage like plinko and the cat.

so, why so few dates and camera angles?

@lilly-flowerr once kindly calculated an estimate about how many VHS tapes would be produced from 100+ cameras' worth of continuous footage for the duration of the HNL program and the result was in the ballpark of several million.

tbf, Brenner never claimed this was all the footage. so I figured, likely, this library actually just houses a pared-down selection of footage relevant to the massacre.

but the problem with that idea is... consider how when we see El get NINA'd with RR footage: she's being shown four views of the room at once. that's already impossible, based on the selection we see available in the library. there aren't even four RR camera views represented on that shelf, let alone all from the same day.

pin that too.

live feeds vs playback

I thought hey, if those camera POVs had dates and everything on them, why isn't that stuff on El's NINA videos? are they hiding that data to facilitate screwing with her?!??

which, yeah. but here's the One banishment footage that Brenner watches alone. no dates on that either:

so I went to look for other times we've seen lab playback to see if there are ever dates.

Hopper checking out the pipe in season 1; Owens reviewing Will's checkup:

that's actually a plot point on the Hopper one because he decided the lab was lying to him about which night that footage was of - if the tapes showed dates onscreen, that wouldn't have been an issue.

so then I thought, ok, if that data doesn't appear on playback, it must only display on monitors showing live feeds, and that stuff doesn't actually get recorded onto it. right?

well here are some live lab feeds: El and the cat; detained Nancy and Jonathan; scientists watching Will's checkup; Owens directing Bob to safety from demodogs. no dates anywhere.

so... if there's no data on live feeds or on playback.... where ARE those dates on the NINA cameras being displayed? there's no internal viewer on those security cameras, like looking through a camcorder viewfinder, so it's not like it's merely "the camera's view" unseen by any actual entity.

so like... who's seeing that? how are we seeing that?

pin that too. I promise we're getting close.

OSD (on screen display)

quick bit of context for those who didn't grow up with VHS.

in VHS days, your video camera (if you had it configured to do so) would put the date onto your home movies. it wasn't a separate layer you could turn on/off after the fact, like DVD subtitles. if that feature was turned on while you were filming, that date was forever fused onto the footage itself. any time you ever played that tape back, you would see that date. there's no way to get rid of it.

osd however - PLAY PAUSE FFW and all that - those labels aren't fused onto the actual footage. they appear momentarily only as you navigate the tape with your VCR. DVD players do the same thing, you're probably familiar.

you can watch the osd labels appear/disappear as Joyce investigates Will's Halloween tape, while the date stays put.

they give us the live camera view of Bob (which has just the date) vs Joyce playing it back on her VCR later (which has the date and also osd). why the timestamps are different is a whoooooole other post.

so now that we're all on the same page about how dates vs. osd works on VCRs,

I'll bring you to the only time I DID find dates on lab playback:

4x6 when Brenner pops this tape in his VCR.

"who's even seeing those ?" Brenner. yeah, that's not my stunning realization. but look what we see up in the top left corner: osd. PLAY.

so here finally is my point: if PLAY appears on the screen as a result of Brenner hitting play on his VCR....

let me direct your attention to the upper left corner of that other footage:

those camera POV shots all say 🔴REC.

those aren't recordings.

they ARE recordING.

Brenner is taping these past events, live, during NINA.

"how do you explain Little El showing up in some of the camera povs? brainwash her all you want, but she would show up big on a tape being recorded in 1986."

indeed! which is why I'm not going so far as to claim Brenner is recording The Actual Past. what I do believe is that he's recording El's memories of the past, in which she is Little El.

"and how are you gonna say Brenner is able to record El's memories right out of her head with a VCR? yes this is fiction, but VHS technology isn't. c'mon."

it's not actually that far fetched! El canonically has a very similar ability - it's been swept under the rug in comparison to the glamor of telekinesis, not used since season 1, but it's well established:

she not only can hear people remotely, but also relay what only she is hearing via radio/intercom to where others can then hear it.

Brenner was filming this test on a tripod camera, which wouldn't have been affected by the cut in power that happened when El started relaying. so he walked away from this moment with a recording of something only El was able to hear.

which is exactly how NINA works. add video technology, and there ya go. if it didn't already exist in 1983, this scene was Brenner discovering the concept.

onward:

Brenner's tapes aren't the tapes El is being shown.

watch this in 4x7: he inserts this tape, hits play, and then we cut to El in NINA, watching all the monitors flash to life with footage of herself in the infirmary for her bullying concussion.

the implication from the editing is that this particular VHS yields that particular footage for El to watch, but that's a false assumption they want us to make.

first, playing one VHS doesn't result in several screens with different footage rolling all at once. one VHS only holds one camera feed. all NINA's monitors can't be fed by one VCR.

second, "Infirmary" would most likely be abbreviated "I" or "IR". the tape he played said CAM TR2, which could stand for either Training Room or Test Room. El experiences 9/8/79 "memories" of both, so I'm not sure which this would be. regardless, it's not Infirmary.

third, as we've covered before, all the lab footage El is shown inside NINA is devoid of dates and cam codes. that's not characteristic of the tape we saw Brenner play in his VCR.

fourth, as we also covered before, not all the camera angles El's seeing are even represented on that shelf of massacre-month tapes.

so Brenner may indeed have captured everything in his lab on video tape, but the VHS library we and El are shown while he says that? pretty sure that's NOT what these tapes are.

it's implied that he's popping tapes into his VCR at the same time El's off in her memories. but if it's not for the purpose of showing them to her.... what is he doing with his?

"but nat, his finger hit play, not record."

well they're not gonna SHOW us him hitting record or we'd guess!

he's hitting play to get the tape queued up to the right spot to record on, which you gotta do with a VHS or else you could overwrite something important that's already on there.

if Brenner is recording whatever El is seeing, wouldn't that help explain:

the varying appearance of El as both big and little within the camera povs. at this moment, El is big because she's aware she's her current self (she's fully conversing with Brenner). this is definitely not really past footage, because it's not like Little El stood up on a chair and yelled into a camera in 1979. after this point though, she accepts what's going on and submits to the "memories" in which she is little, so she's seeing herself as little, so from then on she appears as Little El on the fresh tapes.

the different camera labeling within NINA and its library of tapes - they need to differentiate between old/real/fake/new camera views.

the sparsity of the VHS library - maybe only key moments need to be overwritten

this camera-yelling moment actually is a potential match for one of the tapes on the shelf. it's Sept 4, 1979, and it's in the Rainbow Room. CAM 071 09/04/79 could be the overwriting of CAM RR2 09-4-79. on the other hand, if that were true I'd expect to also see 09-4-79 training room and hallway footage to match those other povs we saw, and I don't, so idk.

the light circle game is the only NINA footage we ever get to see both live camera POV and playback of (although it's not actually the same moment, the dates and cams are different). the numeric camera code on both of these is part of my support for the numeric camera codes representing new footage.

regarding the date and cam code being different on those two bits of nearly identical footage…. what if I... plugged this into Multiplayer NINA theory real quick and said that maybe CAM 126 is fake-old footage that's been more recently rerecorded in someone else's NINA? that maybe that's what's on all of Brenner's tapes before he records El's new stuff onto them?

so here's my current thinking of how NINA works:

decide how you wish El remembered an event and compile cherrypicked real footage and/or staged footage supporting your version of events.

manipulate and gaslight El so that she doubts the veracity of her own memories.

drug her and throw her in a sensory deprivation tank where your selected footage clockwork-oranges her into "fully re-experiencing" your version of events.

presto! the most powerful person in the world now believes your version of events is true because she genuinely remembers it.

by means of El's electronic relay abilities (induced with a buttload of drugs), these false memories that only El is seeing, inside her mind, are displayed for all to see on monitor in NINA's control room.

pop a plain old tape into a plain old VCR and hit record, capturing whatever's on the monitor.

presto! now you have irrefutable original video footage of a past event that never happened.

now you can show that proof to someone else - the government, the media.... or perhaps more importantly another NINA subject, as an ingredient in your tampering with their memories.

so. I can't prove the ol' MindFucker4000 is also a time machine, not in this post, but I do still feel like there's time stuff involved as well. because I can't think of a way right now to claim that recording someone's manipulated memory of the past actually changes that past, meddles with timelines, etc.

in reality, if you're standing at the mirror, the benches-and-drawing-tables side of the RR is on your right - as it appears, correctly, in the red feed and green feed. their footage makes sense coming from the cameras I've circled here (not the events within, I'm just talking about the angles these cameras see)

but the yellow feed has been flipped horizontally:

if we are SEEING the drawing/chess corner of the room in the yellow feed, that means it was filmed by the camera in the other corner - over by the plinko/puzzle table. that is the camera circled in this shot of El playing plinko. except we're seeing the wrong side of the room behind her.

"oh Nat, that's all so normal. I wish this was harder to understand." I GOTCHU

we get another shot where the yellow feed IS oriented correctly! like, in the shot where you see all the NINA screens at once, the yellow is wrong. but in the subsequent shots where El is looking woozy at individual screens, that version of the yellow is correct. that is what this camera should see.

and both are the same footage flipped horizontally.

well. the same footage except one of them is a wider angle where you see a lot more of the plinko board on the right but shh I'm too tired to think about that

anyway maybe this helps explain the moving bodies/blood locations, specifically the cases where I swear the sides of the room keep getting conflated.

the live massacre scene is unreliable because it's poor El's brain's mashup of the doctored / contradictory footage she's being shown. El doesn't know which way the RR really was. she doesn't remember it at all. so all footage is given equal weight, rather than her brain autocorrecting the wrong ones.

the RR is so hard to mentally map because it's a mind-numbingly-almost-symmetrical room, and we're frequently shown it via its mirror reflection, which confuses our perception further. El is canonically just as confused.

(I need to dive deeper on the details of this idea when I get more time. @aemiron-main iirc you're the lead investigator on the changing bodies/blood thing so you'd know better off the top of your head - would you say a room mirroring accounts for many more of the discrepancies? certainly not all)

finally, back to the center feed -

I believe this is correctly oriented (you can see a sliver of the mirror on the extreme left, which tracks with where the plinko game is situated, and Little El(?) is operating it right-handed which is consistent with Big El.)

BUT, don't worry, there's still a weird problem with this footage!

this is a close-up low shot behind El(?) which was not filmed from any of the corner-mounted RR surveillance cameras like the other feeds. it would've had to be filmed from one of those tripod ones.

and they do keep a tripod camera in that area of the RR, but it's visibly not where it would've had to be in order to film this footage which causes El to "remember" One in the plinko scene.

btw, why is this the only footage filmed in portrait mode? if it was landscape, we could have seen One sit next to her. as it is, he wouldn't be visible in it at all. maybe that's why.

so why are they flipping just that one feed?

well, since they showed right and wrong versions of the yellow feed, I suspect they sometimes flip the other feeds too. I just only caught them once. they only seldom give us glimpses of what's going on inside NINA.

is the center feed important because it's unique?

the lab hasn't made sure El is watching that one right-side-up. you can see in the reflection in her eye that she's watching the center screen landscape.

which means the one and only of seven screens El is actually watching right-side-up is this one:

why wasn't NINA designed like this, with all the screens the same way, if you just want the viewer to watch and comprehend all the footage?

because NINA isn't for remembering or comprehending.

having all the screens side by side and right-side-up makes it easy to compare footage and spot discrepancies between them (is that why Brenner is watching multiple screens of the same event?).

the NINA weird screen angles is exactly what stopped me from spotting the mirrored RR problem until right now, and I've been scrutinizing this, and I'm not drugged like El is. with a bunch of screens of boring, redundant-looking footage at random angles, your brain tends to just kinda be like "eh, I don't feel like mentally righting that, I'll take your word for it. seems legit."

what's on the center screen when El banishes One?

they don't want me to know. I wish I did.

every time we see El in NINA, her body breaks the water surface in such a way that prevents us seeing a reflection of the center screen. which apparently tends to display the only unique feed.

is it fair to call this footage-flipping onscreen proof of NINA being not merely a memory-viewing machine but a memory-altering / memory-implantation / machine? so, a brainwashing machine?

which has major implications for the Henry and Victor Creel contradictory memories situation, as long suspected by folks smarter than I.

so the "memories" we experience live with El are actually a meshing of either: A) real events and doctored / fabricated elements B) real events but from 4 different timelines C) por qué no los dos?

not sure whether this "creates" a new timeline in any way besides in El's mind, but even if it were just that, that is valuable enough - to make arguably the strongest superpowered person on the planet remember whatever events you want them to.

but just that doesn't explain the 4 cameras inside NINA, does it?

El using her current mind in past memories

don't forget we have a whole scene of Big El, while immersed in a NINA memory, conversing with current Brenner about the events she's experiencing being a memory and not real.

which means Big El is talking while floating in the tank, or else current Brenner wouldn't know to respond by microphone.

and if she can access her current mind/knowledge and apply that inside of past (real or fake) events.... doesn't that mean she can also use her current powers in past events?

YES. HERE SHE IS DOING IT:

El very very rarely bleeds from both nostrils. two-nostril jobs are very strenuous in relation to her current power level (killing the cat guards and closing the gate are the only other times I remember).

which indicates she's doing something HUGE even in relation to her newly HIGHER THAN EVER power level.

I just find it funny that she also bled from both nostrils in the exact event she was remembering while bleeding from both nostrils.......

also Brenner and Owens see her EEG spiking at that moment, which they've shown us repeatedly throughout the show reflects power use. she's DOING SOMETHING.

so.... Iots I need to chew on.

did the massacre go down wrong and the lab needs to trick El into remembering it differently, and using her current powers inside of the "memory" to somehow actually either change the past, or switch/unswitch timelines, or merge timelines, or something?

is there a timeline where One kicked Little El's ass, or killed her, and the lab needs her to go back and win in that one instead? did little El banish the wrong guy and the lab wants them switched? something like that?