The Unauthorized Guide to MindShifter

A novella in 8 episodes. Episode 4: The Woman in the Room

The experiment continues!

Last week, I posted the third episode of my novella, The Unauthorized Guide to MindShifter, a thriller about lost TV shows, missing friends, and flyover small towns. The response so far has been small in number, but what readers have told me has been quite positive. It appears I may be fated to a be a cult favorite. I’ll take it!

Episodes are released every Thursday, all leading up to the thrilling SEASON FINALE! The remaining episodes will be available for paid subscribers, all of whom are extremely cool and smell good. Subscribe to follow along!

Also, each Sunday over the serialization window, I’ll be writing a little essayistic something-or-other about TV. Original fiction and trenchant commentary? What don’t you offer your readers, Adam?

Enjoy the episode!

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Previously, on The Unauthorized Guide to MindShifter . . .

Emma followed the clue on Melinda’s YouTube to the fast food restaurant. She expected to find Melinda there, but instead had a disorienting encounter . . .

. . . with The Figure

Episode 4: The Woman in the Room

In a small town like Denmark, Indiana, the pathways were clearly marked. Cars drove the streets, staying in their assigned lanes. People walked on sidewalks, looking both ways when they crossed the street downtown, waving to Ted from the office through the window of his Honda Accord. Even within commercial environments, customers adhered to the desire lines of their predecessors, scoring paths into the tile with their sneakers. Transgress any of the boundaries and one might wind up in some nebulous realm between dimensions.

Stranded in the lot behind the Penguin Point, having pursued The Figure here only to find it had vanished completely, Emma felt she had passed over one of those boundaries. Occupying a portion of physical space no human creature was ever meant to occupy, thereby winking out of existence.

Let her remain here. Let her never return. The world as it existed held no place for her.

The teenage girl appeared from around the corner. The one Melinda had sent here. Could she see Emma standing here? Peer through the veils to see her swaying, dazed, upon the cracked asphalt?

“It’s gone,” said the teenage girl. A statement, not a question. Emma said, “Who are you?” And once she said it, she realized she could not tell whom she was addressing. The girl? The Figure? The world at large?

Dorothy knew how to ask questions. How to get subjects to open up. She should have come here. She would have handled it. Unlike her, who couldn’t even learn from the mistakes she kept making.

The teenage girl approached Emma. As she drew nearer, her own head grew woozy. Two sensations buffeted her simultaneously: a vacuuming-out of her head, and a gripping upon her shoulder. The sensations must have shorted out her own electrical grid, for at the moment she felt them, she knew no more.

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Excerpt from The Unauthorized Guide to MindShifter by Melinda Midge:

The first indication that MindShifter could become something stranger, more distinctive than your standard Saturday afternoon syndication fare came early in the first, and only, season. S1E5, titled "Ring Around the Rosie,” sees Agent Trammer, Doctor Rathbone and young Eliza dispatched to a mid-sized town in West Virginia to investigate the disappearance of a state senator’s daughter. Rathbone appears nervous as they wend their way through the country roads, his usual banter taking on a manic tone. Eliza attempts to use her mindshifting abilities, but encounters a strange plane of blankness in her perception, causing her to faint. Once she awakes, Rathbone asks if she managed to see anything. Yes, she says. A storage facility at the intersection of two county roads. But she has no sense of what she might find there.

Agent Trammer suggests that Eliza remain behind while he investigates. Eliza insists that she must come. Trammer looks to Rathbone for support, but the doctor is preoccupied, saying nothing definitive. Eliza takes advantage of his preoccupation to insist that she come, and Trammer, himself preoccupied with Rathbone’s preoccupation, acquiesces.

At the storage facility, the state senator’s daughter is discovered with remarkably little preamble. This is because the abductor wished only to lure them out to this remote location. A pretext to get the DOI involved. The abductor is, improbably, a teenage boy. Sandy blonde hair, strangely blank blue eyes. Agent Trammer draws his gun, aiming for the boy. A viscerally unpleasant image for MindShifter. The boy does not react. Instead, he glances at Eliza and says, “Hello, Eliza. It’s about time we met.” Eliza says, “Who are you?” Rather than answer, the boy glances at Rathbone. Rathbone says, “Eliza, this is Henry.”

Henry, we learn, is a former patient of Doctor Rathbone at the Department of Ontological Inquiry. He too possesses the ability of quantum cognition, enabling him to mindshift between realities. Following an accident that goes unspecified in this episode, he ran away from Rathbone and has since been living on his own. He kidnapped the state senator’s daughter, he says, to get their attention. He has a message to deliver. To Trammer, to Rathbone, but above all, to Eliza.

“You don’t have to listen to him,” says Henry. “You’ll end up getting hurt if you do. Or worse.” Eliza says, “Did you get hurt?” Henry says, “My mother did. I promised myself I’d never let that happen again. That’s why I’m here—to rescue you from him.” He nods at Rathbone. Eliza steps back, frightened. Trammer places his hand on her shoulder. Henry says, “You’re not ready yet. But you will be.” Then the same blankness overtakes Eliza’s perception. When she awakes, Henry is gone.

“Ring Around the Rosie” feels at once like a sharp left turn away from the show as we know it, and also a fulfillment of its core ideas. It is the black sheep destined to become the king of the jungle. That had almost nothing to do with the show’s creator, Paul Gass, and almost everything to do with the staff writer who wrote the episode, Jane Penny.

There was nothing in Penny’s earlier career that indicated she could write something like “Ring Around the Rosie.” Born in Sacramento, graduated from UC Santa Cruz, Penny made her way into the industry via a friend from school, whose aunt was a producer on Invitation to Love, the daytime soap opera that aired continuously for more than twenty years. Penny started on the show as an assistant, eventually working her way up to writer, producing scripts at the breakneck pace demanded by the soap opera’s punishing five-shows-per-week schedule. Her scripts were, it could be said, professional. She deployed the favored tropes of the genre—the wife in a coma, the evil twin seducing her sister’s lover–with competence and a minimal amount of fuss.

Seeking other opportunities, she applied for a position on MindShifter when Gass was developing the show. Though he has spoken on record regarding Penny only briefly, likely intimidated by her superior talent, he did tell Starlog magazine that he was impressed by the work ethic she developed on Invitation to Love. “That’s the kind of steady hand I need,” he said. But ‘steady hand’ is not the role Penny played in the writers room. Instead, she was a terror.

Though reports from the writers room are few, all of them portray Jane Penny as an arrogant, demanding, yet undeniably brilliant personality. “Jane was . . . well, let me say this: I was scared of her, scared to ask her for help on my scripts. She was so smart, and she could be so mean. But she loved helping other writers improve their scripts. Not to help them—no, to prove she was better than them. And she was,” said David Vance Smythe, another writer on the show, speaking to the Cool Narrative, Bro podcast. Whether because he was a neophyte who didn’t know how to assert authority, or simply because he recognized her value to the show, Gass kept Penny on staff.

Though she was a regular presence in the writers room, Penny completed only two episodes. “Ring Around the Rosie” and S1E18, “Convergence.” That episode continued the saga of Henry, revealing that Dr. Rathbone had engineered the deaths of Henry’s parents in order to obtain full custody of Henry for the purpose of the DOI’s research into quantum cognition. A controversial episode, as it portrayed fan favorite Dr. Rathbone in an uncharacteristically unflattering light. Yet it remains, undeniably, the best episode of the first and only season.

Had it aired, “Zero Hour” likely would have been a similar triumph, as Penny wrote it. Yet the fact that she wrote it almost certainly had something to do with why it was pulled at the last minute. The stated cause was sensitivity in the wake of 9/11, of course, yet Penny herself believed that the episode would have pointed the finger at certain parties that would prefer to remain unidentified. As she told the Mystery Box fanzine in 2004, “The pieces would have been all there, all laid out, if ‘Zero Hour’ aired. They could have figured out what was really going on.”

What was really going on, exactly? Penny wouldn’t say, not even in the pages of a barely-distributed amateur publication. She would never get the chance to, either.