#hotelpod analysis

[braintapes]

The Hotel Podcast Season 3 Analysis: Part III - The Owner

Hey. It's been a while. I was going to open this with a cheeky joke, some kind of 'bet you thought I forgot about this thing haha!' type line. But I think I wanna just get straight into it..

When I write these analysis posts, whether it's for The Hotel or anything else, it's a personal thing. I write about the stories and art that I love in an attempt to understand and make meaning of them for me. And I share them largely because if I don't, those thoughts plus all the time and effort it took to organize them into words and sentences would be forgotten and left to rot fifteen minutes after exiting the word doc.

When I started this whole S3 series of posts, I wasn't expecting any response. I expected the people who followed me to glance at it, scroll past it, and life would carry on. It's easier that way, to write and share without watching eyes. Watching eyes means potential to fail, somehow. Potential to get it all horribly wrong in front of other people. That's the main reason why this took so long to come back to.

Other lesser reasons include inconveniences like my enter key breaking completely. That left the prospect of ANY long-form writing headache-inducing (though I've since adjusted to my workarounds). I kept forgetting and remembering this entire project. Etc etc, I won't drag this out.

I am finally, FINALLY ready to sit down to write this all out again. I love season 3 of The Hotel. It means a lot to me in a very personal way because it was the season that made the entire series click for me. So if I get everything wrong, or some things wrong, or fail or come up short, well. That's fine. I can fail other people, but I can't fail myself on this one.

In Part I of this series, we covered the Manager's arc stretching from 3.1 - 3.4. Part II covered the Lobby Boy from 3.5 to 3.7. Now the only Staff left is the Owner.

The Owner is a character I struggle to connect with, I have to be honest. I enjoy him greatly as a character and Graham's performance elevates and gives the Owner such a unique and entertaining presence. But as a person, the Owner reminds me of the people in my life I've been scared of, the kind of people I want to run away from very quickly. It can be hard for me to get past that bubble of anxiety that comes up briefly when I think of him.

Having mulled it over, though, I realized there are things I share with the Owner that I can relate to and understand about him. The perfectionism that stalled this project for 7 months is a voice that says, "It won't be up to standard, it needs to be better, it needs to be right." It plays constantly on loop. Why? If it's good enough it will matter, if it's perfect as can be it will carry significance. The significance, the voice insists, justifies the work's existence.

The Owner's plight through much of The Hotel is, similarly, to justify his own existence. It's a constant tension core to his character which expresses itself by largely by being projected onto everyone else (the way he hounds the lobby boy, attempts to nitpick the manager in s1). At the end of the day, though, all of that bluster is only to prop himself up and assure himself that he is, in fact, definitely doing something that matters, that his place is real and valid. That he's not insignificant.

In this season, the Owner is technically introduced in the very beginning, right alongside the Manager. His echoing yells can be heard as the Manager treks through the dark forest towards the mountain to the place where the Hotel will be. The Owner is already dying, though. He wasn't really there alongside her. We hear his shouts sporadically across the season, but we don't get much more of him until 3.8 A V O I D. Since I've been doing this analysis on an episode-by-episode basis, that's where I want to start.

We open, nearing the metaphorical mountaintop, with the Lobby Boy's death on the third floor. The Owner is thrilled. We get one of my favorite exchanges in the whole series as per the episode transcript:

LOBBY BOY (CONT'D): I panic. I'm scared! I'm so scared! Why did my Manager let this happen to me? Why is the Hotel doing this to me? What's that moving against the light??...What will it do to me?....What CAN it do to me? The worst it can do is kill me. Again. And Again. Forever. WHY CAN'T I DIE? (echo) [power that be noises] LOBBY BOY (CONT'D): No no no no no no no no no no please please no no please no no please please please no no no please Wet, ripping thuds and rending flesh tears. The Lobby Boy's music stops. WINGS FLAP. The Owner's music begins. THE OWNER: Thank you. Dispatching that creature has been long over due. [Angry powers that be noises]

Between the Lobby Boy's dialogue, the Hotel Herself coming in with the BEST comedic timing to give an answer in the form of very squelchy pulpy painful death, the Owner being a hater completely unprompted, and the Hotel Herself immediately turning and getting on the Owner for that it's all. Just... Excellent. Very funny sequence I love it dearly.

But...Wait, what was that?

Dispatching that creature has been long over due.

Hmm. Of course, he could just be referring only to the Lobby Boy's run around the guest floor with his whole burning and dying and burning and dying thing. He clarifies as much in his next lines as he backpedals in the face of the Hotel's implied scolding. Then we get this:

The Manager and I are more than capable of running The Hotel and checking in guests. Once we begin checking them in. Once we...I can't...have we been open long? I remember...distantly I remember so much but...Have we had any guests?

Season 3 is both the beginning and the end. Memory is murky here, liminal and prone to bleeding through yet quickly dissipates to haze. He has prior knowledge of both the Lobby and the Manager here, that's what he bases his judgments of them from – the same judgments he's made of them before (per his S1 episodes, for one example). Yet while there's certain things he knows he knows, the memories attached to that knowledge are muddled. Without them, he is new. A fresh baby bird hatchling The Owner. He isn't even aware that the Manager died a little while ago.

The Hotel gives him the recap on what's happened to the Manager and what's been going on, to the Owner's befuddlement. Her voice turns from the gurgling noises into words the audience can make sense of. I don't have anything to say about this from an in-universe perspective, I assume this is just to make the conversation more interesting to listen to and bring the Hotel Herself into the picture more fully?

In any case, the Owner is already very picky about how things should be. Even if he did remember everything, this would still be a highly unusual situation – no guests, just the Staff. Dying like the guests. This is so far beyond the Owner's (currently vague) understanding of routine that he struggles to get his bearings.

As she talks to him, it feels like the Hotel is playing with him like a toy. You could say that's what she's doing to everyone, Staff and guests and all, but in this specific conversation it feels especially like she's teasing him, prodding and poking lightly enough because she enjoys it. Good for her!

Do you remember how to die? The gibbering creature approaches. I'LL REMIND YOU. The front desk bell TOLLS and the Owner screams.

The vocal effects here make the Hotel sound intimidating and scary, imposing and powerful. And she is! But this feels playful to me.

And it feels natural, logical, in that strange logic of death the Hotel operates in. We've seen the point hammered home every episode so far: Everything in the Hotel dies. Including the Staff. Death is the inevitable. The anticipation of it, the attempt to defy it, marked the Manager's story. The fear of it and attempt to run away from it equally defined the Lobby Boy's story. Anticipation, knowing that the end is coming. Fear, of what that means, the need to avoid pain, avoid facing that awful certainty. Now, here at the Owner's arc, we arrive at understanding. Making sense of it all.

He starts confused, faced with deaths he cannot wrap his head around. It's...I hesitate to say personal, but it is much more personal than the way he conceptualizes the guest's deaths. The Manager's death shocks him. The Lobby Boy's hundred, thousand, billion deaths on the second floor baffle. Why did she die once, and him many times? Why did She kill the Manager? Are they not open for business? What does the Hotel intend, what does she want? What is the meaning of this? The purpose?

Questions abound. When anticipation and fear have been bashed and battered to bloody chunks, another way to deal with death is to try and understand it. It can be easier to cope and make peace with, I think, by trying to make it fit it into an overall grand scheme of existence. That is what the Owner's arc this season embodies, to me.

...But his domain is – and has always been – a void. Endless nothingness with the only sliver of somethingness being pointless paperwork and reservation cards. And anyway, we're on the third floor. We're near the top of the mountain. There's nowhere left to go but up, further into the darkness. There is only death ahead. And behind. And all around.

The Owner dies.

He's back in his office again for 3.9 Under Old Management.

This version of the Owner is absolutely one from S1. He envisions the third floor as a labyrinthine office full of office things like papers, filing cabinets, so on and so forth. He has the same mindset as he did then, his view of his role as like an actual job in an actual workplace setting, with standard workplace tedium and hierarchy. After being ended, he finds himself at the beginning again – his beginning within the Hotel.

Before I can get into the meat of the episode, I have something of a side tangent I want to discuss starting with this line:

Something flickers. In the dark of my mind, somewhere in the back, a thought. A memory. I hold my breath and close my eyes, trying not to scare it away. Yes. Yes I remember. I exhale loudly, blowing the thought away.

The memory begins to seep into him slowly, like a viscous liquid. The memory belongs to the self, the Owner of the previous episode. Upon the interruption/entrance of the Gibbering Creature, though, he slips back into the self of S1 Owner, shouting:

You can't...IF THAT'S YOU, LOBBY BOY, YOU HAD BETTER GET BACK TO YOUR POST!

I want to use this to get into something that's been cooking in my brain for a long time now, my theory/conceptualization of Self within The Hotel. My personal framework for understanding what the heck is going on with these characters and why their identities and memory can be so strange and ephemeral.

My fundamental premise is this: The Lobby Boy, the Manager, and the Owner are archetypes. Ideals, concepts. They are prescriptive roles which define the core of their identity, but each individual Manager or Lobby Boy that we see episode-to-episode is a distinct instance of that role. The Manager of one episode is not the same Manager of the next episode. They do not exist in the same space or time as one another nor are they acutely aware of each other. But they both do exist. Have existed. Are existing. Time and space are all kinds of warbly in The Hotel, that's just Her nature. It's how the Hotel is and experiences, and so that extends to the Staff [putting a pin in this sentence also. I will get into Self as related to The Hotel Herself specifically in the next post].

Due to the ever-constant, ever-changing paradoxical nature of time within the Hotel, distinct instances of Self can cross – memories and knowledge can leak into each other. Some Managers remember more than others due to this. There are infinitely many instances of the Staff which brush past each other and leak memory, self, knowledge etc. into themselves. I also think that the more time goes on, the more those selves accumulate and feed each other, the more a stable self-identity forms. Habits, preferences, feelings and so on occur frequently enough that that informs the next instance of the Manager.

This is what I think happened going from seasons 4 → 5. That's where we start to see more work done with linear plotlines and character development for everybody, so I use my framework to make in-universe sense of an out-of-universe writing direction.

Consider layers of time, space, and self happening here. A circle with a line through it, maybe. Everything is cyclical within the Hotel, but within that cycle is a linearity, a progression. The cycle isn't just the end and the beginning, it's the ingredients in-between the bread. What happens in the linearity feeds back into the circle, which feeds back into the line, and so on. When weird self and memory stuff happens in the series, this is how I make sense of it. It is fully self-contradictory and fleeting and weird and that's how it Is.

Idk. Personally I experience time in a really weird and very unreal-feeling way that's a lot like what I just described above, so I could just be projecting onto this. I'm considering making an entirely separate post just trying to explain this in a way that doesn't make me feel like I'm saying nonsense. So let me get back to my post, then.

This episode is so god damn JUICY. We've got a lot going on with the light/fire/darkness stuff, we've got the Owner being the most Owner he could possibly be and getting MAULED for it, the Owner - Lobby Boy parallels, we've got a Manager cameo, I love everything happening with the Hotel Herself specifically, this one really is just a home run all the way around.

As soon as the Owner lays eyes on the Gibbering Creature, he tries to book it.

Gibbering. Heavy foot falls and gibbering. You had better...get back... Gibbering echoes off of nothing. No no no no NO. WINGS FLAP and FLAP to no effect. NO! The gibbering and stomping continues to chase him. I have to run. Something is coming for me. I only know how to fear one thing, and this isn't her. But still I run.

For all his disdain and looking down upon the Lobby Boy, the Owner sure does seem to share that same 'run away' instinct, huh?

I run because the dim flickering candle in the back of my mind is getting brighter. More candles join in. Each flame a memory. Like a candle, you can regard it only for so long before the bright light burns the memory of the fire into your eyes, and I don't want this burned into my eyes. I can see her laying dead on the lobby floor. I can see the blood framing her open eyes. I can see the shape of her skull, and I remember.

Back to the light and fire imagery! Here, the fire is explicitly said to represent memories. In this case, the memory of the Owner's self that witnessing her dead in the lobby...We assume that he's referring to the Manager here, and I do think that he is. But @zombified-queer makes a good case in this post (With included follow-up insights from Veronica yay ! ) that he's also referring to Madam Hotel in season 4, specifically when the Owner kills her as Judy Blashy. Excellent post, I've since incorporated that into my own interpretation.

I personally choose to believe he's referring to both of them here. He doesn't want those memories of either the Manager or the Hotel-as-Judy horrifically dead. He wants to retreat literally, physically, but also into a self unburdened by that memory, hence why he starts out as S1 Owner here. He runs and the office setting slips away into the void.

The Owner then says:

I let one of the candles in my mind blow out. Like a birthday wish that will never come true.

What I think is happening here is that he's sacrificing one of his old memories, letting go of it to focus in on the ones he wants, needs desperately to remember in order to avoid the traumatic one. He allows the office setting, his old role, all of that to fade away to irrelevancy. He hones in on the memory of her (clearly intended to be the Manager but again the case could be made for Madam Hotel/HH/they're all interconnected with each other!!!) as he knows her because her death is too much for him to handle. It terrifies him deeply.

Whether this is the start or end point, this shakes up what the Owner knows. They shouldn't die or be dead! They're the Hotel Staff! They carry out the Hotel's will, they aren't like the guests, this is all wrong! Seeing the Manager, dead, killed by the Gibbering Creature (the Hotel Herself by proxy) for perhaps the first or last time means something has gone terribly, horribly, awfully wrong.

He begs and pleads this to the Hotel Herself as she plays with him even more. The Owner just doesn't get it yet, he doesn't understand. He thinks himself and the Staff above anything else in the Hotel, just as the Manager did. He flails and protests, insists:

Who will kill them?! If not us?!

To which he's answered by

Distant gibbering. I make so many pretty things. Listen to them gibber.

I just love this. I love her energy here. She doesn't need him strictly. The things the Staff do could be done by any number of killers created from her will. I truly feel this conversation is for her. She'd said to him earlier that he might only be doing and thinking what she wants him to do and think and I believe that's largely true in this case.

The Owner is exactly the way she wants him right now. He flails, begs, pleads, struggles. He understands nothing yet and that makes him fun to toy with. Meanwhile, the Manager taunts the Owner. I want to include this whole sequence because I love it so so much, please appreciate it with me:

THE HOTEL: TIIIIME to blow out another candle. THE MANAGER (distantly): I didn't run. THE HOTEL: Time to make a wish. THE OWNER: And you died. THE HOTEL: It's almost my birthday. (it's almost my birthday) THE MANAGER (DISTANT): So did you. THE OWNER: Not yet! I'm not some simple Lobby Boy or Manager! I own this, all of this belongs to ME! YOU ARE BENEATH ME, YOU ARE WEAK, YOU DIED BECAUSE YOU LACK THE WILL TO LIVE. TO RUN! I AM- The gibbering creature stomps over howls as it bludgeons the Owner. The Hotel theme plays over credits as the Owner continues to get torn apart by the howling creature. The Hotel blows out a candle.

The Owner so badly doesn't want to die, it's kind of adorable looking back on this. Essentially cornered, taunted, with no other options, he turns to the most familiar tool in his arsenal: shouting loudly about how above everyone he is. I've tried to think of something insightful to say about this but I honestly think this all speaks for itself.

This is where I want to wrap up this post. It's a little abrupt, I know we've still got 3.10, but I'd like to cover that next time as I segue into talking about The Hotel Herself. (And I need to stop and eat some dinner!)

I will see ya'll next time, and I PROMISE you that won't be anywhere near as long of a wait as this one was. I'm excited to finish this out. :-)

[braintapes]

The Hotel Podcast Season 3 Analysis: Part 4 - The Hotel Herself

Today, we'll start to wrap up anything left to cover for the Owner's arc, then dig some more into the Hotel Herself, her character, and her relation to the Staff.

I have little in the way of fancy preamble this time, except for that I'll consider this my big treatise on the character of the Hotel Herself and I will be discussing more than just her presence in Season 3. I really can't talk about her without getting into...everywhen and where else.

This is also the longest post in the series, at 8 full pages long. Not that much longer than the other posts, I guess, but it feels long to me. Take breaks if ya gotta. Here's some links to Part I - The Manager, Part II - The Lobby Boy, and Part III - The Owner.

It is a joy for me to write this up and to share it with you. If you read even a little bit, I'm grateful. If you read all of it, I'll be over the moon. So I thank you very kindly for your time :-)

Let's get into it with 3.10 In Which We Burn. This episode is about both of them, all of them really. This is where we start to get into that whole, 'interconnectedness of the self within the Hotel' thing I put a pin in before. Strap in for the ride.

The Owner begins again in the void. There is nothingness all around him, yet he wanders forward to somewhere, something he can't quite perceive yet with only a vague idea of what he's going to do:

I would know if I was going the wrong way. Returning from somewhere to somewhere. I don't know where I'm going, but I know how to get there. I think there's someone there already. I think I'm going to kill them. No, that's not quite right. That's not it. But it's all I can think of as I walk thru endless endless nothing. "I'm going somewhere. Someone is there. Someone to kill." Over and over I repeat the words, trying to make them make sense. Trying to find the parts that stick out in sharp directions. Like a mountain crag that needs weathered down by time to dust.

...There's that mountain again. This is a version of the Owner reforming after his last death, one that strikes me as prototypal, almost. He exists in the void for what's implied to be a long time and seemingly has no memory yet of the previous episodes events? He has no memory of...anything. Just him and the endless darkness.

I think that the Hotel is forming him slowly here. Experiencing through him. The Owner doesn't fully exist yet, he's still baking in the metaphorical oven. Without any memory or experience besides the void, she seeps through into him as he fumbles for something.

"I'm going somewhere. Someone is there. Someone to kill."

Consider the creature versions of the Staff ala season 2 or 5, how they seem to have foggy memories that slip away until they settle into being whatever monster of the week they're going to be. This feels the same way to me. Compare the above line with the following from early on in 2.3 Mr Heavy Bones:

Something in me, not me, something separate, needs to kill them.

I also want to point out not just the similarity of those two lines, but how said lines could easily refer to the Hotel herself. Hear me out - If I wanted to describe how the Hotel operates in as succinct a way as possible, it'd be something like the above! Someone is there, somewhere. Someone to kill, someone needs to be killed...

He approaches, or perhaps the lobby approaches him as it comes into view. He's disoriented, the ceiling and the floors mixed up and everything is going by too fast, he's completely disconnected from the sense of time and space of the Hotel's shape. In a flash, he remembers and is immediately reset again. The Hotel instructs:

Watch it again. And pay attention this time.

On it boss!

The music has changed to The Hotel Herself's theme, Cosmic Heartbeat, and continues to play as the Owner goes through another run. The perspective is slowly starting to shift - although we're still seeing through the Owner's narrative eyes, understanding is on the horizon. The Owner goes again and looks at the Manager.

THE OWNER: She's already been killed. Is that what was sticking out? Is that what I needed to weather? I don't think so. I don't believe it, but I do as I'm told. Dying isn't easier the second time. THE HOTEL: (Yyyyyyyyou've) You've died much more than that. You've died again, and again, and again and again. Here comes another one, don't miss it or we'll have to start over.

She's responding not just to his words, but to his own internal narration. The line between them gets a tiny bit blurred, line by line ;)

So, then, if it's not the Manager he needs to see, maybe the Manager's murderer? He takes note of the gibbering creature, starts to remember more but the Hotel grows a bit frustrated with him. The Owner's not quite picking up on everything yet.

So we go back again for another round and the Owner grows more harried. With each death he sounds more and more ragged and I have to give huge props to Graham Rowat. Like I said last post, his performance as the Owner is always wonderful but this episode in particular has always stuck out to me as a high point. The Owner sounds so desperate here, so battered. He's lost and in pain and so afraid of dying yet still trying so hard...

He goes through again, makes it past the Manager and the gibbering creature and sees the Lobby Boy cowering in the corner. He's so overcome with disgust at the Lobby Boy he loses sight of what he's supposed to be understanding and the Hotel kills him again. He's getting lost in the details, not paying attention to the bigger picture. He needs to see beyond himself.

THE HOTEL: We have nothing but time here. (here here h e r e) Time (time time time) and pain(pain), if you want it. I already understand (everything)everything(everythgibber) WINGS FLAP THE OWNER: PLEASE! No more! THE HOTEL: But you don't understand yet. (don't don't don't understand yet ) Until you have an understanding you will receive only pain and time. AGAIN!

There's a bit of implication that this goes on for longer than just the exchanges we get in the episode. Now can see that the screams of his that echoed throughout the season, such as at the very very beginning and on the second floor, were the result of him witnessing these events again and again from his own jumbled perspective. I picture the Owner in my mind's eye falling, hurtling upside down through the Hotel, flying through time and space at Her direction.

I also want to talk a bit about the Hotel's part in these exchanges, and on her broader relationship with the Owner. To my understanding, official word on season 3 is that it's the Hotel experiencing her own origin like a memory, but because time, self, etc. aren't separate concepts for Her, it's experienced in this weird distorted kinda way. But nevertheless, she is here, experiencing all of this alongside the Staff and alongside the audience. She's watching and reliving these events and the Owner seems to be a sort of...Dante, almost? Sort of. He's there to watch with her.

What is the Owner's role through most of the series? His very title the Owner is superfluous because he very obviously doesn't own anything. He has no authority whatsoever, only the costume of it. He holds the threat of replacement over the heads of the Manager and Lobby Boy, but he can't actually do anything to them. The only time he tries to do something during season 4, he gets his ass handed to him just as much as he beats the Lobby Boy. He has no real authority over the guests – he certainly scares them, but he doesn't build the rooms or check them in.

What is he tasked with doing, then? He is to observe the proceedings of the Hotel, observe the guests and the Staff, and file reports to the Hotel. Again, he has no meaningful authority. His reports are meaningless in terms of running the Hotel. She can and does do whatever she wants regardless of what he has to say or think about the matter. So what purpose does he serve to her? This is what drives the Owner fucking bonkers in a 'constant accumulating dosage of radiation over time' type of way. It's the main reason he has such a hangup about not being insignificant, it fuels his hatred (read: JEALOUSY) of the Lobby Boy, it's why he makes it his business to shout at everybody else for not doing their jobs right, it's why he breaks down in season 4, I could go on.

For her, his reports may not have a purpose vis-a-vis hotel operations, but that's not the point. He's her confidant, her right hand. To him, that's an ideal he must constantly strive to live up to and fulfill. To her, she enjoys the company. Someone to watch it all with her. The Owner is so different from her in temperament that in his unique position, I think he gives her fresh perspective, a way of seeing things from different angles. I'd offer this excerpt from 4.8 AJ, Taylor, and Wayne:

I know he wants to understand though, the Owner, for me. He's such a sweetie. Always thinking of me. He wants to do a good job on his "reports". I like his reports, I like hearing about his day, and hearing about the staff, and how they like it, and how he likes it, and if I can do anything to make it better for everyone. I can, of course. Heh, I can do anything.

In 4.11 The Owner - V she tells him:

Now wait just a damn minute. I know you don't like my Lobby Boy, but you have got to get it together. The floor staff are absolutely necessary to running the day to day, but you and I are supposed to support them, drive them forward to new fantastic heights!

The Owner responds, then the Hotel responds:

They were! They are! But it's you and me, kid. I really thought you and I were gonna be able to work together more closely on this. And it's supposed to be fun! You may be like them, one of them but when you come here you're on my level. I elevate you to singular significance, even if it is just to chat.

I know those are long excerpts, but I feel they're necessary here. The Manager and the Lobby Boy have each other. They improve each other and work well together. I strongly feel that their interactions fuel their character growths. The Hotel sees the Owner as the Lobby Boy to her Manager. It's the two of them, working together! He's beneath her, of course, everyone is, that's just how it goes. But they're a team!

The Owner very much doesn't see it this way. He conceptualizes himself entirely from his place in the hierarchy, his title as The Owner. He is above the other Staff and exists to further Her will. He's so god damned worried about running everything that he cannot see past this through to what the Hotel actually wants - his company. The Owner ties himself up in knots partly due to his internally and externally imposed isolation from the Staff. I wouldn't say it made the Owner the way he is, he did just kinda come out of the box like that, but it absolutely exacerbates his issues in a feedback loop. It drives the Hotel mad because she can't understand this. For all she says she understands everything, she struggles to get why the Owner gets so wound up. Something something divorce core or what have you.

...That, um. Got away from me a little bit.

Anyway.

Aaaall of that is to say, if the Owner isn't there to actively affect things, then he must be there to watch. That's been his role, to me, from all of his season 1 episodes to now. His role here, in season 3 specifically, is to watch and learn. And She watches through him, watches him watch, and he is the vehicle through which she makes meaning of Herself all over again through new eyes. Ties it all together.

[More could be said on this about this being the Owner's on-boarding - the exact word he uses to describe this later on in 4.11. But if I start up again I don't know where I'll stop so I need to move on for now.]

The Owner's arc is pretty much done here anyhow. He goes around again and eventually he starts to understand. Starts to! He sees himself in the Manager's place, dead on the floor. He sees himself as the Lobby Boy, cowering in the corner. He sees himself as the gibbering creature.

You're so close to understanding.

THE OWNER: No. No! As the lobby passes I see my own reflection at my feet. The Hotel begins pulsing rhythmically. THE MANAGER (echoing): I see her standing here in the void, fear carved into her face. THE LOBBY BOY (echoing): I see him, and the fear turns into awful understanding. THE OWNER (echoing): Killer and killed. Predator and predated. Ashes to ashes.

The Owner becomes them all one by one, and they, in death, become each other. Cycle through being each other, it seems. Here is the moment of understanding. They are all one in the same. None of them are separate from or above death. They are not separate from the Hotel – they are the Hotel, split into distinct parts which are separate yes, but inextricable from Her. A long silence passes before:

THE HOTEL: The mountain has been weathered. Do you see? MANAGER/LOBBY BOY/OWNER: Yes. THE HOTEL: My will. My purpose. You kill for me. MANAGER/LOBBY BOY/OWNER: Yes. THE HOTEL: You die for me. MANAGER/LOBBY BOY/OWNER: Yes. THE HOTEL: Darkness is the universes natural state. MANAGER/LOBBY BOY/OWNER: We are the light, one and separate, existing briefly, extinguished and anguished. THE HOTEL: Now, at the end, our work can begin. Front desk bell DINGS.

AaaaaAAAAA!!!!! AAAAAH!!! THIS. THIS IS MY TOP FAVORITE SEQUENCE IN THE PODCAST EVER. This is what got me. I already liked the series since I'd made it up to this point, but this is what made it feel special to me. The timewarp end-beginning stuff, the interconnected self, the cosmic nature and presence of the Hotel Herself, all of it resonated somewhere deep in me. This contextualizes the entire thing for me in one line I think about Frequently:

Darkness is the universe's natural state.

That is why I honed in so hard on the light/dark fire/death imagery. The implication that darkness, void, nothingness, death - that all of that is a resting point. The light is an aberration, something new and anomalous which exists for a time before resetting back to default.

The way I picture the Hotel is as a cosmic entity of, well. Cosmic proportions. Too vast to comprehend on a meaningful level. She's not the representation of death in general, she's simply a part of the universe that embodies some of the void. The space between.

After all, a hotel is a place between where you started and where you want to go, isn't it? You go there, you stay there, you leave there. A candle is lit, it burns, it dies. Leaving only cold, empty darkness behind.

It's the inherent contradiction that makes the Hotel Herself in my mind. She exists as an entity, yet is as a void. Symbolically representative of death, yet she contains life and light within her in the form of the guests and the Staff. From her void, she Becomes in infinite fractalling, spiralling shapes. Hotels and lobbies and rooms and doors. Something from an underlying nothing.

Note, I don't mean the terms 'empty' 'void' and 'nothing' as derogatory. She is not hollow (though she does contain hollows). In terms of symbolism, 'nothing' is as much Something as 'something' is. It's like...In art, you have negative space. It's defined by being the absence of something. The interplay of negative and positive space creates the artwork. That's what I'm getting at with the light/dark stuff here.

Another food for thought: How about 'light' in terms of seeing, or perception? Not only does the Hotel take on infinitely many forms in shape, but she also influences and manipulates how she is perceived. The guests, Staff, and New Crew all perceive the Hotel differently - I made a post about this subject a while ago that you can read, even! [That post is outdated now re: the New Crew stuff at the end, but I thought it worth including anyway.]

Incidentally, I think the Hotel does have trouble seeing back at the Staff. She knows them inside and out, don't get me wrong, and she can twist them any way she chooses. But they have gotten out of her grasp before. Her tensions with the Manager and the Owner in season 4 come to mind, she has trouble seeing things from their perspective and vice versa. The Hotel is above them, and that is its own position with its own perspective. The limitless is, ironically, limited.

Now let's talk about the Mountain.

The mountain has been weathered. Do you see?

It's the most predominant recurring motif of the season alongside the fire. I consider it complementary and even entwined with the fire. Firstly, on its own, I consider it to represent structure. The mountain is at once something to be scaled and something to be weathered. In both (contradictory) cases, it is playing within space. The painting process, as opposed to the proverbial color palette.

It directly represents the structure of the Hotel as, like, a hotel - the Staff's roles each represent a floor. The Manager is the lobby, the entryway, the ground/first floor. This is why she has to be the one to search for the place the Hotel will be in the forest, why she has to introduce the season and the series (she opens season 1, too!) while the Lobby Boy is already just kinda...there when his turn comes up.

Second floor is the guest floor, a horizontally infinite maze of hotel rooms, hallways and doors. This is the midpoint, the journey from life to death. Of course, the deaths don't have to happen here, but many do. This floor is a role of its own. It exists dedicated to this purpose. Then, there's the third floor. A dark office that is at once a void yet also filled with paperwork, desks, computers, so on. As I write this, I realize I said all this in the last post so I won't drag this out.

Point is, as we ascend, we zoom out more. The lobby is only ever the lobby. It's a personal, one-on-one entryway. The second floor is broader – there are many rooms for many guests. Only one may check in on a given night, but since time works differently here, all the guests are already there and already dying and already dead etc etc. The third office overlooks the floors beneath it, overseeing not just the guests but the Staff, too. What's above the third floor? Darkness.

These correspond directly to the Staff's roles and we've had PLENTY going on across this season that makes those connections as well. The Manager in 3.2 Hammering Bones experiencing the building of the Hotel first-person style or the Lobby Boy's whole thing kind of tying him to the burning rooms, for example.

[Stray thought: If I wanted to get real artsy with it I could talk about the hierarchy here not just a physical building structure and corporate structure, but also as structure of the human body - Starting from the ground, standing firm as the Manager does, going up to the hands which build, to eyes that watch, to the brain that is. well. everything. But thaaaaaat's leaning a bit too into my own personal projections as I see barely any canon basis for this so. Take or leave at your discretion. I just adore symbolic trios.]

Form and light. Mass and shape. The Hotel as a tiered yet deeply interconnected structure containing fire and light that exists in service of snuffing out the fires that enter her. Do you see my vision here?

Weathering the mountain is grinding down 'something' into 'nothing.'

When the Staff have all been weathered, they are Her again.

There's a little bit more to the ending of this episode, echoes of the old Managers, Lobby Boys, Owners, ending with:

THE HOTEL: …We hope you enjoyed your stay with us. Your Hotel for the night. We hope you'll enjoy all your nights with us. THE MANAGER/LOBBY BOY/OWNER/HOTEL: WELCOME! The Hotel theme plays over credits.

This is a lovely ending to the season and I like it very much. I apologize that I don't have much to say about it beyond that, I just got so lost in the symbolism sauce back there.

I still have more to talk about, actually, while I'm still here. Before I spoil and rot in this text post. It's been 7 long pages now but there's still work to be done before the skin sloughs off my bones. Because in all my talking about the Hotel as she exists, her how and her form and all that, I never really talked about the Hotel Herself, did I?

Maybe I did a little, here and there, but that's just not enough for me. The Hotel Herself is such a character and while she's always been here in this season, yes, we don't get a lot of her directly. And there are still questions that might arise from the whole 'the Hotel is also the Staff and they are all each other' thing that need answering.

Namely, why would she do this in the first place?

[Well, aside from the whole 'well there wouldn't be a story at all otherwise' thing]

The Hotel exists as. ah. the Hotel. Like I said earlier, she chooses that form for Herself, that's who and what she is! A hotel is that positive space 'something' and it has a structure, a prescription just like the archetypes of the Owner, the Manager, and the Lobby Boy do. She has many variations, from a cabin to a rental home, to a dingy roadside motel to the fanciest most elaborate 5 star resort, but these are all her own kind of instancing as defined in my previous post. The only difference is that she, at the highest level, exists simultaneously as all of these instances at once and thus has an eternal awareness of Herself that the Staff do not.

I draw a distinction between the Hotel Herself and Madam Hotel because of this. To me they are NOT interchangeable. Madam Hotel is a specific instance, a specific form that is her, but not all of her. Not fully. She seems more...cloudy, I suppose, as Madam Hotel. Everything is all new to her. Existing in a human body is new to her, seeing things from this perspective is new to her, and she lacks the cosmic clarity of the Hotel Herself in her vast endless entirety.

Still, she retains the same personality. And I really, really want to talk about the Hotel's personality. She's so fun!

She is endlessly curious, always excited for novelty. She likes watching the lights inside her twinkle and interact just as much as she likes putting them out. ALL of it is wonderful fun to her. There's an infectious enthusiasm about her in her season 4 narrations, where we see her fully in her element as Herself. Some excerpts:

[Stretching noise] MMMMMMMM-MM! Sometimes you just have to stretch out and take up some space, am I right? And we have THREE guests tonight! THREE! They aren't getting a room though, so I thought it would be okay to to relax a little, let it all hang out. Well, let some of it hang out, anyway. Really explore the notion of unwinding. My lobby is still rooted firmly, I mean we do have to meet the guests halfway you know. But tonight I just let myself unspool up and up and up and up up up up [giggles] ohhh it's really almost just like doodling. Filling in the fiddly-bits with scrabbly brick and twisted metal and I'm even experimenting with the windows tonight. Kind of greasy and yellow, I don't know, stained with nicotine or some other poison. Just one of those little subtle touches that's more for me than the guests. They don't notice almost anything. Sillies. They just see me as a normal old building, red carpet under an awning.

[4.8 AJ, Taylor, and Wayne]

I lay down, lounging on the side of a very green and bushy highway by an airport. I'm the kinda place people go when they don't have anywhere else to go. Or don't want anyone to know where they went. I fill my dull yellow paint with cracks, for character. The staff barely even have uniforms here, and they look pretty rough themselves. Gotta look the part, right? I put the Lobby Boy's Supply Closet around back this time. The lobby is pretty small, but the fresh air will do him good.

[4.11 The Owner - V]

Look at how much FUN she's having being herself!!!!!! I love her so much!!!! Each instance is an experiment and exploration in self-creation. Okay, hang on, let me have one more. I know the bonus episodes aren't canon, but The Garden has stuck in my interpretation of the Hotel Herself since it aired, let me have this.

My hands shoved knuckle deep into the cool, dark soil of the universe. I flex my digits and churn it into a place something could grow. I plant seeds there and nurture them best I can with water and food and little lights. There are things that live down there that suck up mud and chew on slime and help it all flourish. It's an entire ecosystem. Carefully balanced and tended too. I don't know anything about plants or gardening so I have to make up the rules as I'm figuring them out.

I won't rehash the whole episode but the whole thing really gets across that she is at once the garden and the gardener, every single part. The metaphor of the garden, of growing plants and flowers and hoping for the best, figuring it out as you go, feels SO in-line with what we see of her in the main episodes.

Back to my point, the Staff are integral parts of the Hotel. How could you have a Hotel without Staff to run it? They are instruments whose tones and timbres affect the sound of the night's composition.

They are her, but they are also themselves, too. The reason they can individuate is to allow for new variations, new shapes and forms, a new angle to look from or new idea to explore. I realize this paragraph runs the risk of getting meta very very quickly but I don't know how else to explain my thoughts here. In-universe, the Hotel Herself made these constructs, but if they were all the same, they'd be only darkness!

It at once excites and frustrates her when their tensions come to a head. She tries to bond with the Manager and the two ABSOLUTELY DO NOT see eye to...eye...The Owner goes completely off the rails in his breakdown. Even the Lobby Boy sides with the Manager and is starting to show signs now of getting a backbone.

The Hotel takes on her own roles, then, in responding to them. Becomes at once the workplace and the workplace CEO who is so obscenely rich they are effectively disconnected from reality and consequently the people working at the company. She is the matriarch of the family, for all of the good and bad that entails in her dynamic with the Manager. [This is why I kinda took the punishment angle in the first post of this analysis series. I don't view it that way anymore, not fully, but I feel this is an important part of their relationship as it currently stands.]

Through it all, even then, the constant push and pull is part of the fun! The contradictions, the interplay of something and nothing...I feel like I'm starting to repeat myself. On the one hand, I feel like I have so, so much more to say that I didn't even scratch the surface of yet. On the other...I feel like I've said the same things three times over.

Fitting, sure. But I'll have to end this post at some point. I'm getting tired. My vision is blurring. And on the metaphorical side, something something turning into a pile of rotten flesh on the floor something something.

One last, laaaast thing for now: I've gone over the cycle, the endless loop, the endlessness, all that good stuff. But the Hotel Herself also has linearity of her own. She goes from an it, from the Powers That Be, distant and impossible to understand, to the Hotel Herself, present and full of verve and energy and personality. She revisits her origin, but from a perspective of herself in time in which she already understands everything.

She's always been here, and all that. I just find that really poignant and I wanted to get into it more but couldn't find alllll the words I wanted.

I'd love to keep writing more stuff like this, it's been an absolute blast for me. Reading the transcripts, listening to the episodes, getting my little snippets in the word doc and writing about them...I hope you've enjoyed reading my work just as much. Like I said at the top, it means a lot even if you just, like, skimmed through. Thank you so much for your time and have a good one :-)

[braintapes]

The Hotel Podcast Season 3 Analysis: Part II - The Lobby Boy

(Time to blow out another candle.)

Welcome back! Part I was allll about the Manager's arc, covering episodes 3.1 - 3.4. We saw the Manager as she was repeatedly killed by a pale, gibbering creature, we watched the darkness consume her and the lobby, and we also witnessed the Hotel being built, in a way.

The Manager's been killed again by the gibbering creature. Now we see from the Lobby Boy's perspective. Well, we will see.

As I said in my previous post, S3 is simultaneously the old crew's origin, end, and a place/time/series of events they intermittently return to. This means that we're seeing the staff in a very specific, raw state of being. A different a lens to understand them through.

(Time to make a wish.)

This season functions as a collection of character studies showing us how the old crew responds to inevitability. The certainty of death. There is no release for these three, as there may be for the guests. There is only dying to wake up to die again.

The Manager's arc emphasized the certainty. The Lobby Boy's arc will showcase the cycle.

As always though, this is only my own personal read on the text/audio. Analyzing the art and stories I like in this way is a creative fun outlet for me, and my hope is that this can prompt more discussion for other people too. I love getting to see other people's perspectives and bring up stuff I hadn't considered!

Enough preamble though, let's get right to it. (Do get comfy though, because this is nearly 7 full word pages long)

(It's almost my birthday.)

To properly set the stage for the Lobby Boy's arc, I need to talk some more about the Manager first. Who is the Manager? What drives her?

I'm going to go by Season 2 here. I believe S2 is another, though different, look at these characters. There, we see them as raw as raw can get. They're a mixture of ingredients sitting in the pan waiting to be put into the oven. Whereas in S3 they are freshly baked and piping hot. And also still being baked. And speaking of food metaphors…

The idea of hunger and satiation continually shows up in the Manager's stories. Burger Baby is, uh, fairly obvious and speaks for itself, I think. Mrs Bones is interesting because again we see her thirst as this primal need inside the Manager, a desperate instinctual urge that drives her forward. This also happens in 5.1 Merp and Burble, where she. Well. She merps and she burbles.

In these altered states of consciousness, she has an animal-like nature. She is concerned only with satiating herself. But even when she gets what she's looking for, it's never enough. She can never truly be content.

This shows up in 3.2, when the laborers' deaths satiate the Manager. They even build her/the lobby as they perish one by one. But of course, of course, the fullness doesn't last. This is one of my absolute favorite aspects of the Manager's character. It makes her so distinct from the other two.

The Manager's response to the inevitability presented to her is to allow it in. She neither fights it, kicking and screaming, as the Owner would, nor does she run from it, as the Lobby Boy will. She accepts her circumstances and adapts to them. She takes to everything the easiest of the three.

So, she dies. So...she dies. So what? She's dead now, and will remain so for the rest of the season. What's done is done, until the Hotel wills it otherwise. They serve at the pleasure of the Hotel Herself, after all.

(Do you remember how to die? I'll remind you.)

The most distinct difference between the Lobby Boy and the Manager is that the latter seems to relish in her job. Not in the way the Owner does, as a title to preen and puff up over. She gets nothing out of lording her position over the other two. She does what she does because it's in her nature to do so, and it's a form of sustenance. Her job is her life is her nature. Literally hashtag ultimate girlboss, y'know?

The Lobby Boy, on the other hand, does NOT relish his duty. He is deeply intimate with death and dying and the horrors that lurk inside the Hotel in a way that the other two simply are not. He constructs nearly every awful thing in the Hotel and personally delivers the guests to those things.

As the gibbering creature continues to beat (and then starts to consume) the very dead Manager in 3.4, the Lobby Boy notes the "pulsing and bruised" walls of the Hotel. Something is deeply wrong here and he can feel it. The way he's seeing everything is not how he normally would. He says:

"It's not supposed to look like that, I think. Not to me. Maybe to the guests, but to me it only looks like...I knew underneath and behind and through everything was something awful and vast watching, but I could still look at the facade and know my place here."

The Lobby Boy has, off the top of my head, seen the Hotel in this way two other times. Well, one of this times was in a bonus episode and so doesn't really count, but it's one of my favorite bonus episodes so I'm going to talk about it a bit anyway. Feel free to skip that part.

First, in 4.12 X - X, during the big fight between the Owner and the Lobby Boy, the two go sailing and flying through the Hotel. They crash through lobbies and halls and rooms. The Lobby Boy SEES everything in the Hotel. He sees everything he has built and everything he hasn't yet. He sees the guests dying. He sees himself, burning. And he hates it. He decides to look away, to try to not remember.

In fact, the Lobby Boy's active avoidance of witnessing his own work is THE big reason the Owner hates the Lobby Boy and picks that fight with him in the first place.

In the bonus episode The Hotel, the Lobby Boy has a dream in which he is entirely alone. He examines the lobby before using his cool powers to rise up through the Hotel in such a way that he can see it all. He keeps going, pushing aside and shaping and conducting the Hotel's form until it reaches a crescendo of swirling color and shape and fervor...Then, of course, he remembers that he's not alone, not really. He's never alone in the Hotel.

Like I said, that lies in murky non-canon-ish waters so feel free to ignore it. I personally consider it an interesting supplemental to the other two examples. The point is, the Lobby Boy isn't an idiot. He's very well aware of what the Hotel is. What he is and what he does.

3.4 ends with this:

"In the Hotel there is only death. Only ever death. But still I run to the second floor, where the deaths don't matter so much. The floor with the guest rooms."

He sees the darkness consuming the lobby, the Manager, everything in the Hotel lobby. He knows what's happening. Still, he decides to run. He chooses to look away. To not think about it, if he can.

He runs to what he knows best: the guest rooms. The familiar forms the Hotel is supposed to take. The facade he can try to lose himself in, knowing all the while that it's a lie and he will face the horrible truth that envelopes and underpins it.

(Here comes another one, don't miss it or we'll have to start over.)

Now, it's time for 3.5 The Lobby Boy Dies.

“I step off the elevator and hold the door for the guest, but the elevator is empty.”

The Lobby Boy is alone as he walks down the endless hallways. The lights wink at him as he passes by. We'll see the Hotel Herself flicker her lights at the Lobby Boy other times, like in 4.10 Audrey Burns. It's one of her cheeky and fun ways of communicating with him! The Hotel is absolutely playing with him like a toy in this arc. I mean, that's true of every arc but this one especially feels so delightfully cheeky.

He refuses to look back behind him. He's seen the guests look back and it's never saved any of them. Then he spots a different kind of light – a candle by an empty guest room.

“I...the candle wants me to stare into the flame. It wants me to go inside the room. The door matches the key ring in my hand... Why-”

But the Lobby Boy knows what's happening here. He drops his keys and continues walking. He avoids looking at anything but straight ahead of him, down the hall. With each room, door, candle he avoids, another one shows up until every room is an empty guest room with a candle. For him.

He wants to refuse. He doesn't want to go in. Tells himself he won't, he CAN'T. But the Hotel pulsates in the background and he starts to imagine what it would be like if the walls caught fire...the fire spreading...Chasing him...He runs!

But why? Why avoid the flames and the burning and the smoke when he knows he can't, won't escape them? When he knows he'll end up dying anyway?

There's a few ways to look at this. One is that it's part of his nature – he doesn't want to face death, not necessarily in a human way but because it - like basically everything else - makes him squeamish and uncomfortable. If he runs, he doesn't have to face it. If he runs, he can pretend:

"The doors seem to turn towards me as I pass now. Stretching, almost reaching out. Presenting to me, showing me the sweetest lie: Safety. Safety from what is behind me. Safety from the end ahead."

“The flames behind, the fire ahead, I will pretend not to know what is beyond the door and know relief for a sickening, hopeful, instant.”

[Bolding mine]

The Lobby Boy is aligning himself with the guests here. He is a guest in this episode: he has a room he will go and die inside of. He knows the guests aren't saved by their pretending, but he does it anyway because the tiny glimmer of light inside the Lobby Boy is hope. Is wanting. In this case, it's wanting the comforting lie that he'll be okay, somehow.

Another part is that this is technically new to him, new and frightening. His nature is fearfulness, so of course he runs. He's still a fresh-out-of-the-oven Lobby Boy at this point! All of this that's happening doesn't gel with whatever knowledge was baked into him from the Hotel. He hasn't had a chance to acclimate yet!

He enters his room and sees, just before the door closes, himself stepping off the elevator in the hall. He stands in the dark for a long time until the candle appears again.

“I stare into the flame and I can hear the Hotel around me.”

He's transfixed until the candle falls over and the whole room goes up in flames, burning him to death. He doesn't accept it, he screams and tries to run and tries to open the door he knows will not open again. He dies just like one of the guests.

(You were there too.)

Since the previous Lobby Boy is dead, the Lobby Boy who we just saw step out of the elevator is our narrator for 3.6 The Lobby Boy Tries Not To Die.

“I step off the elevator and hold the door for the guest, but...there is no guest. I'm alone.”

Last episode, we saw the part of the Lobby Boy that identifies with the guests, the part of him that's just as trapped as they are. But there's plenty more layers and sides to the LB we've yet to peel.

The Lobby Boy lies to himself and attempts to convince himself that the guest he saw at the end of the hall definitely did not have his face. It for sure wasn't him. Totally. He slips back into his role, what he knows he should be doing. But everything's wrong, still. He continues down the hall and passes rooms full of smoke and burning and screaming.

Occasionally, his voice reverberates. Notably, it happens when the ceiling is full of soot. He says:

“I don't want to fall up into that void. I don't know if I'll hit the ceiling, or just fall forever. (forever, forever.)”

[Formatting taken directly from transcript]

In my last post, I talked about how the darkness – the Hotel – is inextricable from the Manager/the staff. The idea returns here with...Well, with the smoke and soot, obviously, but ALSO with these vocal effects. It's one of the Lobby Boy's things, sometimes if he's particularly worked up he'll get effects like this in his narration.

As it's applied here, it feels like something directly tying him to the Hotel. A part of him that is like it. These reverberations come back at the end of the season both with the Hotel Herself's narration and the staff's response to her. They are not separate entities, but a strange splintering and amalgamation of each other.

The Hotel's pulsing starts up in the background. The Lobby Boy continues walking but his steps become wet and squishy as the floors become coated in, um. Melted Lobby Boy soup leaking out from the room doors. It pools and congeals into a gory sticky mess that clings to him, hinders his running. The desk bell dings and something is chasing the Lobby Boy and screaming at him and his immediate instinct is to run away.

The slurry of himself enmeshed in the floor shows that the part of the Hotel that is the Lobby Boy is this second floor. The same way the Manager is the lobby and we saw her being built, the Lobby Boy is every endless hall, room, door, ceiling, floors. He is both the facade and the horrible truth at the end of it.

What he runs from is himself, literally, in this episode, but also from...himself. You know what I mean?

“I run faster. I want the soot black ceiling to take me. I want to sink into the cold bleeding carpet. I want grey walls and nothing else.”

(mood man I hate being yelled at too.)

They're both screaming now, his pursuer and himself. Just...screaming. I LOVE the distorted layered yells here. Something visceral and miserable about the sounds perfectly encapsulate the Lobby Boy, I feel.

He runs and every door turns into an elevator. He ends up, of course, back at that door. That room, with the smoke and the fire and the other burning Lobby Boy already inside of it. He looks back and sees himself clearly this time. He's terrified. He'd rather burn to death than be caught by himself. He closes the door “a little faster” before the other him can get inside.

And so the Lobby Boy Fails To Not Die.

(Did you see him? Was it too fast for you?)

We are roughly two Lobby Boys down as we head into 3.7 The Rooms Are Filled.

“I step off the elevator and hold the door for the guest. The guest steps out and into the hallway.”

So now there's two of them in the elevator. One must be the guest, if one of them is the Lobby Boy. But then...? They walk together and the other lets our viewpoint LB into the room.

Once again, this opening sequence involves the Lobby Boy following his standard routine. Bring the guest to the room. Ask if they need anything. Our narrator gives a quick rundown of the room but then the fire starts consuming everything again. Instead of running away from each other, the two Boys struggle pathetically over each other to get out. One of them escapes, the other remains trapped in the room.

He heads back to the elevator and goes to another floor.

“There are so many buttons twinkling dully at me. I like to stare at them on the way.”

Bringing up this quote just to say I'm putting a pin in it for later in this post. Bear with me, there WILL be a payoff to this. I just wanted to make special note of this line in particular.

The elevator doors open and the cycle continues, repeats. One Lobby Boy brings the other Lobby Boy to his room and he dies there as the Lobby Boy goes back to the elevator to do it again. Again. Again. Every time the Lobby Boy dies, a light in the elevator goes out. Slowly, they burn to darkness every hall in the Hotel.

He's not running the same way he was during the last few episodes. He's settling in. Getting acclimated. The way he gets through this is by not thinking about it. If he doesn't think, he can hold out the sliver of hope within him that he won't be the one to die. But he'll still die.

He sounds so utterly exhausted as he relives both the walk from the elevator to the room and the burning to death inside the room. So strained, bordering on anger almost.

“Why do I look so afraid, if I'm not the one who has to burn? But I am the one who has to burn. And the one who has to close the door. I'm the only one here.”

Okay to be honest you could just ignore every single thing I've written here and just look at these lines because this is the crux of it all.

The sound gets...weirder from here. The elevator door dings wrongly. The Lobby Boy doesn't hold the door open for the guest. We hear the Owner's scream for the first time in a while, though this comes immediately after the line saying, “The rooms are filled with my screams.”

Hmmmm...

But I can't talk about that yet. I need to talk about this:

“The halls are filled with smoke and mess. I don't know why The Manager only had to die once and I have to die so much. So much. Too much.”

[Bolding mine]

Does this line sound familiar? He sounds envious here, almost...resentful, in a way that reminds me very specifically of 2.2 Cracker Man:

“Why do they get to be in the house? Why do they get to be young and happy and beautiful? Why does it hurt to watch them live? I don’t know why but it does. Every smile stings.”

The Manager's S2 episodes showed us her primal instinct as one of her core traits. The Lobby Boy's S2 episodes show us his envy and rage. He's portrayed as a stalking figure in both Cracker Man and Frozen Figures, something that watches from the outside before going in for the kill. Yeah, technically the Owner and Manager do this too, but it feels personal for the Lobby Boy.

Why do THEY (the guests) get to live? Why do THEY get to pretend, to have the luxury of not knowing what's going to happen to them? Why did the Manager only have to die ONCE instead of being stuck in this endless cycle? (She didn't, she died at least like 4 times, but I suppose he doesn't know that). Why is he stuck here and they're not? WHY CAN'T HE D--

“There are so many buttons twinkling dully at me. I like to stare at them on the way.”

That envy and his feelings towards the guests are also why I think the Lobby Boy likes staring at twinkling lights. I mean, there doesn't have to be anything deeper to it. I do think it is just...a thing he likes and that's that. But if there WERE deeper meaning to it, I would say part of him wants what the guests have. He wouldn't know what, exactly, he wants. But he knows they're different. They have something else. Maybe something nicer. Maybe. He admires the shimmering light until it turns into a desperate flame that eventually burns to soot and ash.

His envy collapses and gives way to the rage tucked deep inside him in Cracker Man. Here in 3.7, he taps into that and chases down the other Lobby Boy. Once again, he becomes the pursuing monster. He is the rooms he built. He is the guests he brought to them. He is the horror that will kill them inside the rooms. The screaming effects layer beautifully again.

“Every room is getting filled. Endlessly. We put ourselves here because we did. Never a thought to why or where. He runs so I'm running. He burns so I'm burning. If I could catch him, if I could touch him, could we burn together?”

I have nothing to add to this, I just want to sit and appreciate these lines for a minute.

The chase continues. This Lobby Boy can see into the elevators lining the hallways. Behind the both of them, “the void spills out” and chases them. No matter what direction they go, he'll always end up back in that darkness. Whether he's inside the burning room or out in the hall. He still, still, holds onto that tiny sliver of false hope that maybe, just maybe, he can catch him this time.

But the Lobby Boy sees him and closes the door a little faster. And the Lobby Boy is brought to a void by a trillion lights.

(The guests were never meant to come this far.)

There's...a lot more I'd love to say. I could go on and on in endless circles about this arc. It would be fitting, but this is already so long and I still have the Owner and the Hotel Herself to talk about!

So for now, let's see what happens to the Lobby Boy in the cleverly titled 3.8 A V O I D.

The Lobby Boy doesn't actually...do much here, since this episode is meant to start us on the Owner's arc. LB sits in the void, afraid. As familiar gibbering/Powers That Be noises follow after him, he panics.

“The worst it can do is kill me. Again. And Again. Forever. WHY CAN'T I DIE?”

[Formatting taken direct from transcript]

One last time, there's the crux of the Lobby Boy's despair. Why is he trapped like this when he's so, SO afraid? Why? Why why? The hopeless wailing and thrashing shared by the guests in their last moments.

We proceed listen to the Lobby Boy having the worst time he's probably ever had when he whimpers and begs “No no no no please no.”

His question is answered by as he's brutally killed by the gibbering creature the Hotel.

(He seems to be dead now though.)

And then the Owner chimes in with the fucking funniest possible line, “Thank you. Dispatching that creature has been long overdue.”

Thanks king. So glad to see you on your hater streak <3

Anyway, that wraps things up for the Lobby Boy's arc. I've never seen a more literal version of the “Man Vs. Self” style of conflict as this, as he grapples and struggles and fights with himself across time.

We get to see the fearful core of his being on full display along with the reasons why he'd be so afraid compared to the other two. Neither the Manager or the Owner are as down in the dirt with the guests, so to speak, as the Lobby Boy is. He embodies the most important aspect of it, the rooms and the killing.

It seems the only way he can get himself to function in that endless cycle is by avoidance, turning himself away from it all. The Owner just doesn't get it. Even though they have so much in common...

Well, that'll be for next time to delve into. See you then friends. Thanks again for reading! :-)

[braintapes]

The Hotel Podcast Season 3 Analysis: Part I - The Manager

@zombified-queer @subsequentibis @thehotelpod <3 <3 <3 hearts for yall. Thank you for encouraging my madness :-)

This is gonna be long and windy due to the nature of Season 3 and because I have a lot to say about it. As in like, I wrote this post and then when I was done, realized I'd HAVE to break this up into multiple posts because I have so damn much to say. Bear with me.

I'm going to approach this from a purely in-universe, Watsonian perspective as much as I can since I find that more fun. And of course, this is all just my own personal interpretation of the text/audio. Would be very happy to see anyone's additional thoughts or alternate takes!!!!

With that...

I believe S3 takes place simultaneously before the show begins, sometime after season 1 specifically, and also is occurring periodically as time progresses. This is not the usual manifestation of the Hotel, but more of a dreamscape, the blurry subconscious of the Hotel entity. It is the place, time, and series of events that the Hotel and, specifically, the Hotel Staff (old crew) spring from and it is where and when they will inevitably, always return to.

After all, no one escapes the Hotel. No one leaves. Certainly not the guests, and certainly not the Staff. You can't just have a Hotel without the Staff to run it.

But I think I'm getting ahead of myself. Was that yelling I heard just now…?

Season 3 is made of distinct segments - the Manager's perspective, the Lobby Boy's perspective, and finally the Owner's and the Hotel Herself's perspective at the end. So I'm going to tackle this in 4 distinct segments breaking down each arc before I tie it all back together at the end. At least, that's the plan, anyway. Let's do this.

(Do ya see it?)

Part I - The Manager

We begin the very first episode of season 3, Forest Fire Night Beast, with these lines from the Manager:

"I arrive, finally, at the place it will be. A jagged mountain, almost invisible against the night storm."

Right off the bat, this episode establishes all of the elements of importance that will show up throughout the season and wrap around to its finale. The mountain specifically will be important near the end, so let's stick a pin in that one for now.

Even though we get the Manager's narration, her music isn't present in the beginning of the episode. Instead, we get howling wind (more subdued, NOT the Owner's) and the sounds of the Manager's ragged breaths. Already the tone is eerie and unnerving. The listener can feel the Manager's discomfort and unease alongside her as she pushes through the dark, frozen forest. Occasionally, in the background, we hear a yell whoosh by.

The Manager is looking for something, though it's impossible for her to see anything. Something is pursuing her, a different something. She pushes onward, her steps more hurried and her breathing quickened and raspy until she finds it - the place she's supposed to be at. Her theme begins in the background as if it's a landmark. As if it isn't something attached to the Manager, but something the Manager attaches herself to.

And she does attach herself immediately, as soon as she's able. She seeks safety from the gibbering creature and finds solace in her role as Manager. She comforts herself with the certainty of the Hotel:

"The walls are thin, and brittle, and safe. In here, I am the pursuer. In here, endless will die, but never, ever me. From this one room, this one root, a new system will grow and change and consume. They will come to me and let themselves be swallowed like glass takes the night."

Then, she adds:

"But this night, when I should be alone to begin my work, I have to keep the fire lit in my little shack."

[Bolding is mine]

Here we see the light/dark dichotomy come up again. Recall 2.7 Return. I could gesture to basically the entire script for that episode, The Hotel Herself goes on the whole time about extinguishing the fire/lights/living beings that ended up inside her. Near the end, after sighing dramatically for a few minutes about the ennui and boredom of no longer getting satisfaction from killing, she says:

"Something is still roaming the rooms inside me. Painting with bright colors and vivid shapes. Something is taking those lights and turning them in godly tapestries.

Three lights of my own making couldn’t be put out. I turn my self inward and investigate the hollows of the worlds that live in me. What I find gives me for the first time, an exciting pang of surprise."

[Bolding/italics NOT mine]

I'll expand on this specific quote more in the Hotel's part. For right now, what's important is that the old crew staff are 'lights,' but not the same lights The Hotel has extinguished before. The way I see it personally, they're a composite, made from the leftover bits of thought and knowledge that float around the cosmic Hotel stew, if that makes any sense. They're more people than the Hotel is, but they're not really people at all.

From the Manager's dialogue, we can see what she doesn't understand at this point in time: Her role as Manager does not save or exempt her from death/darkness.

I'll get to where I consider s2 in the hotel time soup uhhh at some point in a later part. it's a whole thing. But for RIGHT NOW, if we're coming off of season 1, the Manager has never died before. And again, in the early seasons specifically, the staff feel like...almost people. Not human, but not not human.

The Manager has spent the first part of this episode pushing herself forward to escape the dark that has "frozen and obsidian limbs [that] threaten to shred [her] coat with tugging fingers." She shows her persistent, steadfast nature and incredible grit. But no matter how stubborn she is, no matter how perfectly she does her job...She's still part of the darkness. She facilitates it, invites it as she invites the guests in, but doesn't consider it a part of her. She clings to her role as Manager out of fear of death.

She holds down the fort, or in this case the tiny shack that is, I guess, her office. She tends the fire, though it gets smaller. The space that the Manager is inhabiting is…forming. Becoming itself, for lack of better wording. The lobby has started forming at this point. If she can just hold out long enough, then....But the gibbering creature, which "belongs here but [is not] supposed to be here," is there too. The dwindling fire doesn't keep it away.

The Manager attempts to grip with white, bleeding knuckles the safety of her position. She reasserts herself, reasserts the inevitability of escape at the Hotel in a futile attempt to glare down the gibbering creature. For her failure to understand, it bludgeons her to death.

(Until you have an understanding, you will receive only pain and time.)

The Manager wakes up to the sound of hammering in episode 2, Hammering Bones. It's no longer nighttime now. She observes the Hotel taking form as it's being built by laborers:

"For a long time I walk and trees bleed and weep and die and sweaty men who's faces I can't see hammer endlessly."

When she looks at them, her head tingles, presumably the lingering phantom pain of being clubbed to death earlier. She says she can feel them in her bones, quote, "hammering me together out of something cold and empty, while something cold and empty watches them."

She narrates as if she is the trees that are being cut down, clubbed with hammers and built into place. Her descriptions of the bleeding and dying trees here read to me as a dream within a dream, some subconscious part of herself grappling to force the sequence of events into a sensible shape.

That part of her, I think, is the human part. The fire, the light, that grants her the warm facade of the front desk manager allows her to draw in the guests. That part of her, then, would naturally fear being extinguished.

She remembers the gibbering creature, but does not run from it this time as it nears. It attacks her, hits again and again and the trees fall as she breaks apart. As she lies in the snow, bleeding and fracturing to death, she imagines the laborers now as "hurried, frightened men" who frantically try to build the lobby as fast as they can. But the Manager, who is entwined with - who IS - the lobby, now, imagines killing them. She imagines breaking them the way she was broken.

I take this as revenge fantasy for sure. She notes that as the workers die, she doesn't need them to hammer in order to build her (the lobby) up anymore. Their deaths sustain and build her.

Though she is satiated by this for a bit, the Manager once again remembers the 'nightmare,' the gibbering creature. Some of it comes back to her but she grows panicked trying and failing to remember what happened "in-between" her dying and waking up again this episode.

3.2 shows us the Manager's mindset and imagination. She entwines herself with the trees and the lobby. For a brief while in this dream-within-a-dream, she is as the Hotel is. A place. A lobby. But as she remembers, her fear creeps back in, overpowering her. She's not quite there yet. For her failure to understand, she is killed again by the gibbering creature.

(We haven't opened for business again yet.)

I don't have as much to say about 3.3 She Is Not Alone. We see the Manager in her element, here much more comfortable in the lobby. She wonders about the guests briefly as she examines and makes her way around the lobby. Though it is a fully formed lobby, it seems to be full of shadows that grow and shift around the place. The gibbering creature is still here too, of course.

Of it, she says:

"Something…something in my mind, not just my Hotel. I can almost remember and I rub my tingling face with a sharkskin-rough hand. What was it? Something inside me, something seeing me, something I could never escape."

[Bolding mine]

The shadows continue to engulf the lobby, slowly and steadily. She starts to remember that something happened, but decides she doesn't want to remember as the lobby dims further and further. The elevator dings, the doors open and close but nothing is there. The yelling in the distance is back, then flies by. The gibbering creature closes in.

But this time when the darkness approaches the Manager, she does not run from it. It surrounds her and she already knows she has nowhere to go, so she doesn't try. She lets it swallow her up and says:

"The cold I expected to feel wasn't there. The sharp, icy shadows only looked like they would cut; instead it folded me up in the dark warmth of the heart of the world and all that was left was me and-"

Then, the Lobby Boy shows up, signifying that the Manager's arc is near its end. We can see from this episode that she's coming to accept the darkness. Though it still unnerves and bothers her somewhat, she regards it, acknowledges it, and lets it wash over her and consume her (gay asf). Consequently, for her almost understanding, the gibbering creature does not kill her this time.

(I make so many pretty things...Listen to them gibber.)

Going into episode 4, the Manager seems to be back to her usual self - at her front desk, waiting and ready for the guest. By this point, she understands.

(Sidenote here: Part of why I feel this season is something that keeps happening is because this understanding doesn't completely stick to the Hotel's satisfaction. My read on the Hotel's dynamic with the old crew is that they keep being too annoyingly human and it's getting in the way of all the fun killing and like, really harshing her vibes, so she keeps putting them in these nightmare worlds as a sort of time-out punishment room. But they just keep coming back!)

Anyway, the Manager behaves as she would in, say, any given season 1 or early season 4 episode. She takes note of her lobby and her Lobby Boy. She sees the gibbering creature and recognizes it fully as a guest, a welcome and normal and expected part of the Hotel. She doesn't fear it, doesn't run from it. She only continues to do what's expected of her. She is the Manager. So, she manages.

As she does so, the Lobby Boy recoils and refuses to go along with this out of his own fear. For this, she's killed again by the gibbering creature. I think that one was just for funsies. (and also, for the lobby boy as we transition into his arc).

The gibbering creature is an element that will come up later towards the end with the Owner, but for now I want to talk about how it relates to the Manager specifically. To me, it represents her fear and the inevitability of death. She runs from the grabbing hands of the darkness, the shadows symbolizing death. She attempts to keep it at bay, imagines her attempts to fight it and get revenge on it. But no matter what she does, it always kills her....Almost.

The only time it doesn't is when she turns away from the memory of her death(s). She observes the darkness take over her lobby. And she simply accepts it. Remains as part of it. She lets it come as another inevitability of the Hotel. She understands now that death will come and take her again and again. But again, she is the Manager. She manages, and this is no different. She's stubborn, but adaptable like that.

Also, I didn't know where else to put this, but gah I LOVE how the Manager's arc starts with her outside the Hotel. With each death, she slowly moves more and more into it, even though she's also been in the lobby the entire time. She considers herself outside the Hotel's purview (that being, of course, death). Yet, each episode, she takes a step closer to understanding. By 3.4, she begins and ends in the lobby, fully integrated with the Hotel.

See, what I love most about S3 its tightness and cohesion. In the Manager's arc alone, we have thematic elements relevant to the Manager specifically, but also to the rest of the staff. They are individuals, but they're also like. cosmically attached at their cores to the Hotel. The writing, voice acting, and sound design all work together here to portray that.

Is it as linear and direct as, say, the Madam Hotel arc in season 4? No, but it doesn't need to be. As a story it does what it sets out to do and does it well. But I'll probably say that again in my next posts.

(We have nothing but time here. Time and pain, if you want it.)

As for the Lobby Boy....Join me next time, I will edit this portion with links to the next parts once I have them all posted. And thank you for reading if you got through all this!!! <3

[braintapes]

anyone want my hotelpod season 3 appreciation/analysis post

[braintapes]

AH. I FORGOT TO FINISH MY HOTELPOD S3 ANALYSIS. AHH...SORRY. I WILL UH. WILL GET BACK TO THAT. SOON.

[braintapes]

Each of the three new staff have made it a significant point in their narration to explain how they “see the Hotel differently” than the guests do. Differently than even the staff do, which brings on a whole host of very interesting implications.

I want to bring up the idea of contrasting ‘light’ and ‘dark,’ since that comes up a lot in relation to the Hotel herself. She is, herself, darkness. The natural state of the universe. Not quite nothingness, but the specific, cold, absence of life. The Hotel, from lobby to elevators to stairs and hallways to rooms, is death. Those inside the Hotel are lights, stars glimmering in Her vast darkness.

(On an unrelated note, it’s my personal view that when the Staff describe Madam Hotel as having eyes like starlight, it’s them catching glimpses of her full form. Condensed infinity of hotel.)

We know from the finale of Season 2 that the Hotel herself tried to “put out” those “three lights of [her] own making” and couldn’t do so without nearly unraveling herself. She also refers to the guests as lights, both in that episode and later on when we get narration from her, such as in 4.8:

Now aside from me losing my mind now at how much you could parallel the three guests of that episode to the first three staff and not realizing this before...

We also know that the early staff don’t see the Hotel the same way the guests do. Often, they’ll comment on the guests seeing or reacting to things that aren’t within the staff’s perception. Things that can cause them to react and behave as if they were in a regular hotel up until the very end. The staff are aware that both their own, and the guests, perception can be shaped and warped by the Hotel’s whims. But still, the Hotel appears as a hotel to the first three staff.

The new gang has a decidedly different perspective. The Bellhop sees the Hotel as a massive amalgamation of meat and guts ( :-] ). The Concierge paints a picture of the Hotel’s structure as this....paper mache formality, as something that hides the true cosmic colors and shapes that underpin every part of the place. And the Auditor in the new ep introducing her refers constantly to darkness. The darkness from which they all come from, and which they will all return to.

The new staff are perceiving the Hotel as....herself, essentially.

That’s curious, because this set of staff is, at least as I understand it currently, fresh outta the oven. Created by Her as the result of the lead up and events of the Curtain arc.

This new set starts out with this...reverence towards the Hotel. This admiration and awe and wonder of Her. I wonder if this is because of their perception, or if it’s because they’re new. 

There’s clear character development with our first set of staff, mostly because...Well, obviously. There’s no avoiding that. Admittedly, while I adore S1 very much, I don’t know how ‘canon’ their early characterization actually is since it seems to be around S2 that the series settles into itself.

But purely in-universe, I wonder if the reason the Hotel is bringing on these fresh employees now is because she’s noticed that the first three staff are becoming more human. More...like the guests. They first perceived themselves as part of a company structure (at least, the Owner did.) after all. Much less cosmic wonder, more powers that be in the sense of your vague, far away corporate overlord, y’know? And they grew to care for each other, to form bonds with one another despite starting out as infinite copies of a basic idea. Somehow, they found a way to persist. To become and individuate, not unlike the guests.

Buuuut, welllllll....What does that say, when the staff are just like the guests? How professional is that? We’ve got an operation to run here! And all this in-fighting and protectiveness and blah blah blah is getting. in. the. WAY! (Never mind that Madam Hotel was getting, in the way of them)

So, what to do? Can’t, er...fire them. Or rather, extinguish them. They may be more like the guests now, but they’re also her in a way. So integral that ridding herself of them would be unspooling herself. Her brute force punishments of S2 and the Curtain arc have only strengthened the old three’s resolve. The whole of S3 was both, I believe the staff’s origin and also end? and also another attempt from the Hotel Herself to get them to understand her. to understand their world. That worked....temporarily.

Maybe they need some encouragement! Some positive role models! Some good influences to rub off on them and get eeeeverybody on the right track again! And this time, let’s fix some of the old model’s problems while we’re at it. These three will get to see, from the start, what and how and why she is.

The only question remains, how will these new staff members change over time? What will happen if she loses control of them in the long run, too?

[braintapes]

Getting emotional thinking about how the Manager and the Lobby Boy at least, at least, have each other, but the Owner doesn’t have anyone or anything but himself. Sure, he reports to the Hotel Herself, but she’s literally on a different plane of existence from him and it really puts a dent in having any sort of working relationship.

He’s just so...alone! Alone, with himself and his anxieties looping in on themselves day in and day out, no wonder he fractures apart so easily and so intensely! Of course he would shatter and break the way he does in 4.12. He’s stuck with this horror, this eternal horror in this endless routine and he can do nothing about it, speak to no one about it, but it just keeps happening-

The Owner’s feelings about the Lobby Boy are so fascinating to me because really, it’s pure jealousy.

The Lobby Boy has everything the Owner wants. Is everything the Owner thinks he should be. The Lobby Boy has power, the power to twist and shape and construct. He has the Manager, always always has the Manager right there (regardless of the actual dynamic of their relationship, by god they at least have a one). Yet somehow the Lobby Boy is on the lowest rung of the ladder, so to speak. So afraid and cringing away, so unwilling to (in the Owner’s view) be proud and claim fully what is his. Then there’s the Owner, who is supposed to be, well, the Owner, ending up as the most trapped of any of them. Since he doesn’t have what the Lobby Boy has, the Owner doesn’t understand why the LB is the way he is.

And like, the Owner’s rage is this self-fulfilling prophecy. He wants to connect with the others, I think, but he can’t because of his own magnified insecurities and feelings of needing to fulfill his duty, which wouldn’t be so bad for him if he had connection, which he can’t because because because...Y’know?

I mean, The Hotel tells him that the two of them are a team the way the Manager and Lobby Boy are, but...Like, the Owner’s reports are literally just for Her amusement, they don’t actually make a difference to her one way or the other. The Hotel is really compelling to me as a character too, because of the inherent obliviousness that comes with being a literal cosmic being and having like. employees. She doesn’t, physically cannot, understand any of the Staff on a meaningful level, can’t understand why she has trouble getting through to the Owner...

Idk. Everyone and everything in the Hotel is broken and miserable in their own ways but I’m having lots of thoughts tonight about the Owner in particular tonight...I really like his character as being full of rage, which specifically stems from anxiety and isolation.

[braintapes]

oughhhh....read the transcript for new hotel ep (cant Listen to it yet but i gotta know what happens) and not only is this my favorite episode aesthetic wise but like. every time i think i cant love madam hotel enough another episode proves actually. i can love her SO MUCH MORE....

like. it’s clear she’s thinking about a lot of stuff at the moment, things she probably never had to think about before. I think her taking on a ‘human’ body for the first time back in X.X definitely sparked a revelation in the Hotel.

She’s so used to being BIG and VAST and EVERYTHING that being small and finite and gushy and humanly fragile (as much as she can be anyway, being herself) was a totally new and fascinating experience. It was a treat and a newfound delight for her, otherwise she wouldn’t be as giddy and playful and curious about herself as she was in 4.13 - Judy Blashy.

It’s interesting to me that she’s still hanging on to that body. Hasn’t changed it, hasn’t taken on another guest’s appearance or done seemingly anything at all with her form past its original state. Considering how much the Hotel LOVES change, loves experimenting with her own appearance and form as the Hotel (building), this is extremely curious. Creativity and exploration is important to her, so much so that even the staff uniforms change every time. And yet...This form is unchanging. 

I wonder if there’s not a little bit of omnipotent immortal’s ennui going on here, after getting a new perspective? The Hotel wants and wants and wants and cannot be told ‘no’ to. So used to being boundless, so constantly and eternally powerful, and yet...No matter how much she gets her way, something’s still wrong. She’s unhappy and clearly aware that there’s contradiction and friction there, but I wonder if at this point she knows why, exactly. How aware of herself is Madam Hotel? And is what she’s wanting, whatever void she’s trying to fill, something she is capable of having? hrmmm head full many thoughts...

There’s some side commentary to be made here about the Hotel’s actions this season in relation to being an artist - wanting to go big and bombastic and COOL AND FUN, ignoring the structures that actually make a piece work. I think I rambled once on a priv twitter about the Lobby Boy in X-X and how his part in that episode felt like a bit of commentary on what it’s like to be a horror artist. Madam Hotel’s arc feels like it can be taken as a sort of continuation of that, in a way. idk. maybe i’ll share that essay if anyone ever wants to see it, for now i just wanna go on about this episode and about Madam Hotel a bit.

conclusion: i love her dearly and i am on the edge of my seat to see where this arc goes

[manxmoss]

I just want to share my fav bits of this because your analysis is SO GOOD. I can’t elaborate further because I don’t want anyone to take my word as hints or foreshadowing but I just wanted to screenshot these…

(I very very much want to share my own thoughts but they’ve been contaminated and it would be a security breach so pretend I said something so wise to contribute)

The Hotel Podcast Season 3 Analysis: Part 4 - The Hotel Herself

Today, we'll start to wrap up anything left to cover for the Owner's arc, then dig some more into the Hotel Herself, her character, and her relation to the Staff.

I have little in the way of fancy preamble this time, except for that I'll consider this my big treatise on the character of the Hotel Herself and I will be discussing more than just her presence in Season 3. I really can't talk about her without getting into...everywhen and where else.

This is also the longest post in the series, at 8 full pages long. Not that much longer than the other posts, I guess, but it feels long to me. Take breaks if ya gotta. Here's some links to Part I - The Manager, Part II - The Lobby Boy, and Part III - The Owner.

It is a joy for me to write this up and to share it with you. If you read even a little bit, I'm grateful. If you read all of it, I'll be over the moon. So I thank you very kindly for your time :-)

Let's get into it with 3.10 In Which We Burn. This episode is about both of them, all of them really. This is where we start to get into that whole, 'interconnectedness of the self within the Hotel' thing I put a pin in before. Strap in for the ride.

The Owner begins again in the void. There is nothingness all around him, yet he wanders forward to somewhere, something he can't quite perceive yet with only a vague idea of what he's going to do:

I would know if I was going the wrong way. Returning from somewhere to somewhere. I don't know where I'm going, but I know how to get there. I think there's someone there already. I think I'm going to kill them. No, that's not quite right. That's not it. But it's all I can think of as I walk thru endless endless nothing. "I'm going somewhere. Someone is there. Someone to kill." Over and over I repeat the words, trying to make them make sense. Trying to find the parts that stick out in sharp directions. Like a mountain crag that needs weathered down by time to dust.

...There's that mountain again. This is a version of the Owner reforming after his last death, one that strikes me as prototypal, almost. He exists in the void for what's implied to be a long time and seemingly has no memory yet of the previous episodes events? He has no memory of...anything. Just him and the endless darkness.

I think that the Hotel is forming him slowly here. Experiencing through him. The Owner doesn't fully exist yet, he's still baking in the metaphorical oven. Without any memory or experience besides the void, she seeps through into him as he fumbles for something.

"I'm going somewhere. Someone is there. Someone to kill."

Consider the creature versions of the Staff ala season 2 or 5, how they seem to have foggy memories that slip away until they settle into being whatever monster of the week they're going to be. This feels the same way to me. Compare the above line with the following from early on in 2.3 Mr Heavy Bones:

Something in me, not me, something separate, needs to kill them.

I also want to point out not just the similarity of those two lines, but how said lines could easily refer to the Hotel herself. Hear me out - If I wanted to describe how the Hotel operates in as succinct a way as possible, it'd be something like the above! Someone is there, somewhere. Someone to kill, someone needs to be killed...

He approaches, or perhaps the lobby approaches him as it comes into view. He's disoriented, the ceiling and the floors mixed up and everything is going by too fast, he's completely disconnected from the sense of time and space of the Hotel's shape. In a flash, he remembers and is immediately reset again. The Hotel instructs:

Watch it again. And pay attention this time.

On it boss!

The music has changed to The Hotel Herself's theme, Cosmic Heartbeat, and continues to play as the Owner goes through another run. The perspective is slowly starting to shift - although we're still seeing through the Owner's narrative eyes, understanding is on the horizon. The Owner goes again and looks at the Manager.

THE OWNER: She's already been killed. Is that what was sticking out? Is that what I needed to weather? I don't think so. I don't believe it, but I do as I'm told. Dying isn't easier the second time. THE HOTEL: (Yyyyyyyyou've) You've died much more than that. You've died again, and again, and again and again. Here comes another one, don't miss it or we'll have to start over.

She's responding not just to his words, but to his own internal narration. The line between them gets a tiny bit blurred, line by line ;)

So, then, if it's not the Manager he needs to see, maybe the Manager's murderer? He takes note of the gibbering creature, starts to remember more but the Hotel grows a bit frustrated with him. The Owner's not quite picking up on everything yet.

So we go back again for another round and the Owner grows more harried. With each death he sounds more and more ragged and I have to give huge props to Graham Rowat. Like I said last post, his performance as the Owner is always wonderful but this episode in particular has always stuck out to me as a high point. The Owner sounds so desperate here, so battered. He's lost and in pain and so afraid of dying yet still trying so hard...

He goes through again, makes it past the Manager and the gibbering creature and sees the Lobby Boy cowering in the corner. He's so overcome with disgust at the Lobby Boy he loses sight of what he's supposed to be understanding and the Hotel kills him again. He's getting lost in the details, not paying attention to the bigger picture. He needs to see beyond himself.

THE HOTEL: We have nothing but time here. (here here h e r e) Time (time time time) and pain(pain), if you want it. I already understand (everything)everything(everythgibber) WINGS FLAP THE OWNER: PLEASE! No more! THE HOTEL: But you don't understand yet. (don't don't don't understand yet ) Until you have an understanding you will receive only pain and time. AGAIN!

There's a bit of implication that this goes on for longer than just the exchanges we get in the episode. Now can see that the screams of his that echoed throughout the season, such as at the very very beginning and on the second floor, were the result of him witnessing these events again and again from his own jumbled perspective. I picture the Owner in my mind's eye falling, hurtling upside down through the Hotel, flying through time and space at Her direction.

I also want to talk a bit about the Hotel's part in these exchanges, and on her broader relationship with the Owner. To my understanding, official word on season 3 is that it's the Hotel experiencing her own origin like a memory, but because time, self, etc. aren't separate concepts for Her, it's experienced in this weird distorted kinda way. But nevertheless, she is here, experiencing all of this alongside the Staff and alongside the audience. She's watching and reliving these events and the Owner seems to be a sort of...Dante, almost? Sort of. He's there to watch with her.

What is the Owner's role through most of the series? His very title the Owner is superfluous because he very obviously doesn't own anything. He has no authority whatsoever, only the costume of it. He holds the threat of replacement over the heads of the Manager and Lobby Boy, but he can't actually do anything to them. The only time he tries to do something during season 4, he gets his ass handed to him just as much as he beats the Lobby Boy. He has no real authority over the guests – he certainly scares them, but he doesn't build the rooms or check them in.

What is he tasked with doing, then? He is to observe the proceedings of the Hotel, observe the guests and the Staff, and file reports to the Hotel. Again, he has no meaningful authority. His reports are meaningless in terms of running the Hotel. She can and does do whatever she wants regardless of what he has to say or think about the matter. So what purpose does he serve to her? This is what drives the Owner fucking bonkers in a 'constant accumulating dosage of radiation over time' type of way. It's the main reason he has such a hangup about not being insignificant, it fuels his hatred (read: JEALOUSY) of the Lobby Boy, it's why he makes it his business to shout at everybody else for not doing their jobs right, it's why he breaks down in season 4, I could go on.

For her, his reports may not have a purpose vis-a-vis hotel operations, but that's not the point. He's her confidant, her right hand. To him, that's an ideal he must constantly strive to live up to and fulfill. To her, she enjoys the company. Someone to watch it all with her. The Owner is so different from her in temperament that in his unique position, I think he gives her fresh perspective, a way of seeing things from different angles. I'd offer this excerpt from 4.8 AJ, Taylor, and Wayne:

I know he wants to understand though, the Owner, for me. He's such a sweetie. Always thinking of me. He wants to do a good job on his "reports". I like his reports, I like hearing about his day, and hearing about the staff, and how they like it, and how he likes it, and if I can do anything to make it better for everyone. I can, of course. Heh, I can do anything.

In 4.11 The Owner - V she tells him:

Now wait just a damn minute. I know you don't like my Lobby Boy, but you have got to get it together. The floor staff are absolutely necessary to running the day to day, but you and I are supposed to support them, drive them forward to new fantastic heights!

The Owner responds, then the Hotel responds:

They were! They are! But it's you and me, kid. I really thought you and I were gonna be able to work together more closely on this. And it's supposed to be fun! You may be like them, one of them but when you come here you're on my level. I elevate you to singular significance, even if it is just to chat.

I know those are long excerpts, but I feel they're necessary here. The Manager and the Lobby Boy have each other. They improve each other and work well together. I strongly feel that their interactions fuel their character growths. The Hotel sees the Owner as the Lobby Boy to her Manager. It's the two of them, working together! He's beneath her, of course, everyone is, that's just how it goes. But they're a team!

The Owner very much doesn't see it this way. He conceptualizes himself entirely from his place in the hierarchy, his title as The Owner. He is above the other Staff and exists to further Her will. He's so god damned worried about running everything that he cannot see past this through to what the Hotel actually wants - his company. The Owner ties himself up in knots partly due to his internally and externally imposed isolation from the Staff. I wouldn't say it made the Owner the way he is, he did just kinda come out of the box like that, but it absolutely exacerbates his issues in a feedback loop. It drives the Hotel mad because she can't understand this. For all she says she understands everything, she struggles to get why the Owner gets so wound up. Something something divorce core or what have you.

...That, um. Got away from me a little bit.

Anyway.

Aaaall of that is to say, if the Owner isn't there to actively affect things, then he must be there to watch. That's been his role, to me, from all of his season 1 episodes to now. His role here, in season 3 specifically, is to watch and learn. And She watches through him, watches him watch, and he is the vehicle through which she makes meaning of Herself all over again through new eyes. Ties it all together.

[More could be said on this about this being the Owner's on-boarding - the exact word he uses to describe this later on in 4.11. But if I start up again I don't know where I'll stop so I need to move on for now.]

The Owner's arc is pretty much done here anyhow. He goes around again and eventually he starts to understand. Starts to! He sees himself in the Manager's place, dead on the floor. He sees himself as the Lobby Boy, cowering in the corner. He sees himself as the gibbering creature.

You're so close to understanding.

THE OWNER: No. No! As the lobby passes I see my own reflection at my feet. The Hotel begins pulsing rhythmically. THE MANAGER (echoing): I see her standing here in the void, fear carved into her face. THE LOBBY BOY (echoing): I see him, and the fear turns into awful understanding. THE OWNER (echoing): Killer and killed. Predator and predated. Ashes to ashes.

The Owner becomes them all one by one, and they, in death, become each other. Cycle through being each other, it seems. Here is the moment of understanding. They are all one in the same. None of them are separate from or above death. They are not separate from the Hotel – they are the Hotel, split into distinct parts which are separate yes, but inextricable from Her. A long silence passes before:

THE HOTEL: The mountain has been weathered. Do you see? MANAGER/LOBBY BOY/OWNER: Yes. THE HOTEL: My will. My purpose. You kill for me. MANAGER/LOBBY BOY/OWNER: Yes. THE HOTEL: You die for me. MANAGER/LOBBY BOY/OWNER: Yes. THE HOTEL: Darkness is the universes natural state. MANAGER/LOBBY BOY/OWNER: We are the light, one and separate, existing briefly, extinguished and anguished. THE HOTEL: Now, at the end, our work can begin. Front desk bell DINGS.

AaaaaAAAAA!!!!! AAAAAH!!! THIS. THIS IS MY TOP FAVORITE SEQUENCE IN THE PODCAST EVER. This is what got me. I already liked the series since I'd made it up to this point, but this is what made it feel special to me. The timewarp end-beginning stuff, the interconnected self, the cosmic nature and presence of the Hotel Herself, all of it resonated somewhere deep in me. This contextualizes the entire thing for me in one line I think about Frequently:

Darkness is the universe's natural state.

That is why I honed in so hard on the light/dark fire/death imagery. The implication that darkness, void, nothingness, death - that all of that is a resting point. The light is an aberration, something new and anomalous which exists for a time before resetting back to default.

The way I picture the Hotel is as a cosmic entity of, well. Cosmic proportions. Too vast to comprehend on a meaningful level. She's not the representation of death in general, she's simply a part of the universe that embodies some of the void. The space between.

After all, a hotel is a place between where you started and where you want to go, isn't it? You go there, you stay there, you leave there. A candle is lit, it burns, it dies. Leaving only cold, empty darkness behind.

It's the inherent contradiction that makes the Hotel Herself in my mind. She exists as an entity, yet is as a void. Symbolically representative of death, yet she contains life and light within her in the form of the guests and the Staff. From her void, she Becomes in infinite fractalling, spiralling shapes. Hotels and lobbies and rooms and doors. Something from an underlying nothing.

Note, I don't mean the terms 'empty' 'void' and 'nothing' as derogatory. She is not hollow (though she does contain hollows). In terms of symbolism, 'nothing' is as much Something as 'something' is. It's like...In art, you have negative space. It's defined by being the absence of something. The interplay of negative and positive space creates the artwork. That's what I'm getting at with the light/dark stuff here.

Another food for thought: How about 'light' in terms of seeing, or perception? Not only does the Hotel take on infinitely many forms in shape, but she also influences and manipulates how she is perceived. The guests, Staff, and New Crew all perceive the Hotel differently - I made a post about this subject a while ago that you can read, even! [That post is outdated now re: the New Crew stuff at the end, but I thought it worth including anyway.]

Incidentally, I think the Hotel does have trouble seeing back at the Staff. She knows them inside and out, don't get me wrong, and she can twist them any way she chooses. But they have gotten out of her grasp before. Her tensions with the Manager and the Owner in season 4 come to mind, she has trouble seeing things from their perspective and vice versa. The Hotel is above them, and that is its own position with its own perspective. The limitless is, ironically, limited.

Now let's talk about the Mountain.

The mountain has been weathered. Do you see?

It's the most predominant recurring motif of the season alongside the fire. I consider it complementary and even entwined with the fire. Firstly, on its own, I consider it to represent structure. The mountain is at once something to be scaled and something to be weathered. In both (contradictory) cases, it is playing within space. The painting process, as opposed to the proverbial color palette.

It directly represents the structure of the Hotel as, like, a hotel - the Staff's roles each represent a floor. The Manager is the lobby, the entryway, the ground/first floor. This is why she has to be the one to search for the place the Hotel will be in the forest, why she has to introduce the season and the series (she opens season 1, too!) while the Lobby Boy is already just kinda...there when his turn comes up.

Second floor is the guest floor, a horizontally infinite maze of hotel rooms, hallways and doors. This is the midpoint, the journey from life to death. Of course, the deaths don't have to happen here, but many do. This floor is a role of its own. It exists dedicated to this purpose. Then, there's the third floor. A dark office that is at once a void yet also filled with paperwork, desks, computers, so on. As I write this, I realize I said all this in the last post so I won't drag this out.

Point is, as we ascend, we zoom out more. The lobby is only ever the lobby. It's a personal, one-on-one entryway. The second floor is broader – there are many rooms for many guests. Only one may check in on a given night, but since time works differently here, all the guests are already there and already dying and already dead etc etc. The third office overlooks the floors beneath it, overseeing not just the guests but the Staff, too. What's above the third floor? Darkness.

These correspond directly to the Staff's roles and we've had PLENTY going on across this season that makes those connections as well. The Manager in 3.2 Hammering Bones experiencing the building of the Hotel first-person style or the Lobby Boy's whole thing kind of tying him to the burning rooms, for example.

[Stray thought: If I wanted to get real artsy with it I could talk about the hierarchy here not just a physical building structure and corporate structure, but also as structure of the human body - Starting from the ground, standing firm as the Manager does, going up to the hands which build, to eyes that watch, to the brain that is. well. everything. But thaaaaaat's leaning a bit too into my own personal projections as I see barely any canon basis for this so. Take or leave at your discretion. I just adore symbolic trios.]

Form and light. Mass and shape. The Hotel as a tiered yet deeply interconnected structure containing fire and light that exists in service of snuffing out the fires that enter her. Do you see my vision here?

Weathering the mountain is grinding down 'something' into 'nothing.'

When the Staff have all been weathered, they are Her again.

There's a little bit more to the ending of this episode, echoes of the old Managers, Lobby Boys, Owners, ending with:

THE HOTEL: …We hope you enjoyed your stay with us. Your Hotel for the night. We hope you'll enjoy all your nights with us. THE MANAGER/LOBBY BOY/OWNER/HOTEL: WELCOME! The Hotel theme plays over credits.

This is a lovely ending to the season and I like it very much. I apologize that I don't have much to say about it beyond that, I just got so lost in the symbolism sauce back there.

I still have more to talk about, actually, while I'm still here. Before I spoil and rot in this text post. It's been 7 long pages now but there's still work to be done before the skin sloughs off my bones. Because in all my talking about the Hotel as she exists, her how and her form and all that, I never really talked about the Hotel Herself, did I?

Maybe I did a little, here and there, but that's just not enough for me. The Hotel Herself is such a character and while she's always been here in this season, yes, we don't get a lot of her directly. And there are still questions that might arise from the whole 'the Hotel is also the Staff and they are all each other' thing that need answering.

Namely, why would she do this in the first place?

[Well, aside from the whole 'well there wouldn't be a story at all otherwise' thing]

The Hotel exists as. ah. the Hotel. Like I said earlier, she chooses that form for Herself, that's who and what she is! A hotel is that positive space 'something' and it has a structure, a prescription just like the archetypes of the Owner, the Manager, and the Lobby Boy do. She has many variations, from a cabin to a rental home, to a dingy roadside motel to the fanciest most elaborate 5 star resort, but these are all her own kind of instancing as defined in my previous post. The only difference is that she, at the highest level, exists simultaneously as all of these instances at once and thus has an eternal awareness of Herself that the Staff do not.

I draw a distinction between the Hotel Herself and Madam Hotel because of this. To me they are NOT interchangeable. Madam Hotel is a specific instance, a specific form that is her, but not all of her. Not fully. She seems more...cloudy, I suppose, as Madam Hotel. Everything is all new to her. Existing in a human body is new to her, seeing things from this perspective is new to her, and she lacks the cosmic clarity of the Hotel Herself in her vast endless entirety.

Still, she retains the same personality. And I really, really want to talk about the Hotel's personality. She's so fun!

She is endlessly curious, always excited for novelty. She likes watching the lights inside her twinkle and interact just as much as she likes putting them out. ALL of it is wonderful fun to her. There's an infectious enthusiasm about her in her season 4 narrations, where we see her fully in her element as Herself. Some excerpts:

[Stretching noise] MMMMMMMM-MM! Sometimes you just have to stretch out and take up some space, am I right? And we have THREE guests tonight! THREE! They aren't getting a room though, so I thought it would be okay to to relax a little, let it all hang out. Well, let some of it hang out, anyway. Really explore the notion of unwinding. My lobby is still rooted firmly, I mean we do have to meet the guests halfway you know. But tonight I just let myself unspool up and up and up and up up up up [giggles] ohhh it's really almost just like doodling. Filling in the fiddly-bits with scrabbly brick and twisted metal and I'm even experimenting with the windows tonight. Kind of greasy and yellow, I don't know, stained with nicotine or some other poison. Just one of those little subtle touches that's more for me than the guests. They don't notice almost anything. Sillies. They just see me as a normal old building, red carpet under an awning.

[4.8 AJ, Taylor, and Wayne]

I lay down, lounging on the side of a very green and bushy highway by an airport. I'm the kinda place people go when they don't have anywhere else to go. Or don't want anyone to know where they went. I fill my dull yellow paint with cracks, for character. The staff barely even have uniforms here, and they look pretty rough themselves. Gotta look the part, right? I put the Lobby Boy's Supply Closet around back this time. The lobby is pretty small, but the fresh air will do him good.

[4.11 The Owner - V]

Look at how much FUN she's having being herself!!!!!! I love her so much!!!! Each instance is an experiment and exploration in self-creation. Okay, hang on, let me have one more. I know the bonus episodes aren't canon, but The Garden has stuck in my interpretation of the Hotel Herself since it aired, let me have this.

My hands shoved knuckle deep into the cool, dark soil of the universe. I flex my digits and churn it into a place something could grow. I plant seeds there and nurture them best I can with water and food and little lights. There are things that live down there that suck up mud and chew on slime and help it all flourish. It's an entire ecosystem. Carefully balanced and tended too. I don't know anything about plants or gardening so I have to make up the rules as I'm figuring them out.

I won't rehash the whole episode but the whole thing really gets across that she is at once the garden and the gardener, every single part. The metaphor of the garden, of growing plants and flowers and hoping for the best, figuring it out as you go, feels SO in-line with what we see of her in the main episodes.

Back to my point, the Staff are integral parts of the Hotel. How could you have a Hotel without Staff to run it? They are instruments whose tones and timbres affect the sound of the night's composition.

They are her, but they are also themselves, too. The reason they can individuate is to allow for new variations, new shapes and forms, a new angle to look from or new idea to explore. I realize this paragraph runs the risk of getting meta very very quickly but I don't know how else to explain my thoughts here. In-universe, the Hotel Herself made these constructs, but if they were all the same, they'd be only darkness!

It at once excites and frustrates her when their tensions come to a head. She tries to bond with the Manager and the two ABSOLUTELY DO NOT see eye to...eye...The Owner goes completely off the rails in his breakdown. Even the Lobby Boy sides with the Manager and is starting to show signs now of getting a backbone.

The Hotel takes on her own roles, then, in responding to them. Becomes at once the workplace and the workplace CEO who is so obscenely rich they are effectively disconnected from reality and consequently the people working at the company. She is the matriarch of the family, for all of the good and bad that entails in her dynamic with the Manager. [This is why I kinda took the punishment angle in the first post of this analysis series. I don't view it that way anymore, not fully, but I feel this is an important part of their relationship as it currently stands.]

Through it all, even then, the constant push and pull is part of the fun! The contradictions, the interplay of something and nothing...I feel like I'm starting to repeat myself. On the one hand, I feel like I have so, so much more to say that I didn't even scratch the surface of yet. On the other...I feel like I've said the same things three times over.

Fitting, sure. But I'll have to end this post at some point. I'm getting tired. My vision is blurring. And on the metaphorical side, something something turning into a pile of rotten flesh on the floor something something.

One last, laaaast thing for now: I've gone over the cycle, the endless loop, the endlessness, all that good stuff. But the Hotel Herself also has linearity of her own. She goes from an it, from the Powers That Be, distant and impossible to understand, to the Hotel Herself, present and full of verve and energy and personality. She revisits her origin, but from a perspective of herself in time in which she already understands everything.

She's always been here, and all that. I just find that really poignant and I wanted to get into it more but couldn't find alllll the words I wanted.

I'd love to keep writing more stuff like this, it's been an absolute blast for me. Reading the transcripts, listening to the episodes, getting my little snippets in the word doc and writing about them...I hope you've enjoyed reading my work just as much. Like I said at the top, it means a lot even if you just, like, skimmed through. Thank you so much for your time and have a good one :-)