The Unstable Grey Hole

"**The Unstable Grey Hole**" is the second episode in Season 1 of *Solar Opposites*.

## Plot

Yikes! Korvo and Terry use alien technology to make their neighbors like them. Jesse tries to show Yumyulack that humans are basically good.

## Full Story

Korvo finds a letter from the Home Owners' Association on the house's front door, which states several rules that the house and its occupants must abide by. Korvo and Terry resolve to find out whether or not people in the town like them, while Jesse seeks to teach Yumyulack a lesson about not all humans being deserving of being shrunk.

Korvo and Terry break into the town's water supply to place microscopic bugs that can detect a lot about a person who drinks them. There they meet Gordon, an old friend of Terry's who lets them do as they please. Meanwhile, The Pupa leaves the house and journeys far away until it is attacked by black birds. It beats one of them with a stick until it is dead, then wears the bare skull atop its head.

Korvo and Terry find out that no one likes them, and a man named Tyler hates Korvo. Jesse has hidden all of Yumyulack's guns, including his shrinking gun. Korvo and Terry are dismayed, so they help to better various people's lives across town. A man in a wheelchair is given cybernetic legs by Korvo, but the latter walks away before the man learns how to control them. The legs lead the man to nearly be drowned before ultimately causing his death by carrying him in front of a busy road. After the man's death, the legs continue a journey to elsewhere, now carrying the corpse.

Jesse has placed devices on Yumyulack's enemies that control their actions. The two first visit Mr. Dutch, the school gym teacher, who is normally rude. Under Jesse's control, he apologizes for his actions and lets them pass without having to run a mile in the coming week. Korvo and Terry test the feelings of everyone who drank water from the town's water supply, and find out that they are now considered likable and are popular.

Ruth, the president of the Home Owners' Association is spied on by Korvo and Terry, though because they are in plain view, Ruth can see them easily until they drive away in a hurry. Jesse brings Yumyulack to a group of surfers under her control, and they apologize for mocking him. Finally convinced, Yumyulack takes Jesse to the Hell Hitbar. The Pupa stabs the leg of a random man, then takes it to the house and has a lab artificially create another leg using the blood on the knife. The nanobots evolve into an anthropomorphic creature with a distinguishable face and body, wearing a suit given by Gordon. The nanobots have developed a voice, as well. Inside the Hell Hitbar, Yumyulack has Jesse sing a loving song to the crowd, resulting in a bottle being thrown at her, the doors boarded up, and guns pulled out. After they quickly escape into a small closet room, Jesse reveals to Yumyulack that she was controlling everyone throughout the day but she did not know about the neo-Nazis here.

The nanobots are winning over the people slowly but surely, until Korvo, Terry, and the nanobots all share disturbing or embarrassing facts about the people in the audience. Eventually, this causes a large brawl to ensue. Yumyulack asks for his shrink ray, but Jesse says that it is not with her. As they converse, one neo-Nazi opens the door from the inside after breaking through and opens it. Several men drag Jesse and Yumyulack outside in full view of all of the bar patrons. The neo-Nazi who opened the door threatens Yumyulack with a large knife, but to everyone's surprise, he is stabbed through the hand by a spike emerging from Yumyulack's suit, before three more stab both the man and two others through their heads. As the spikes target various, now-fearful, people around the bar, Yumyulack reveals that his suit kills all threats in a dangerous situation, and he has no control over it. The suit begins to shoot out many small, deadly spikes rapidly and takes out several more people before one attempts to hit Yumyulack from the back. The suit forms a mouth that rips off the person's hand before stabbing them in the head. It throws another spike at a biker behind the bar counter, decapitating him and cutting his head in half. Finally, five people carrying weapons form a line to stop Yumyulack, but all are dead in a single moment. Yumyulack tells the corpses around him to perhaps be more tolerant next time as his suit forms a spike ball that gruesomely impales and carries the bodies of the last few survivors in the bar. Jesse apologizes profusely, but the only humans in the room have been reduced to corpses.

At the Home Owners' Association meeting, Korvo fires at attacking people before he and Terry meet the nano bots face-to-face. The Pupa goes to the vending machine outside, now equipped with a full human leg attached to its head, which it uses to kick the vending machine and eat fallen snacks. Inside, Ruth calms everyone down and as a result becomes the top candidate in the audience. Tyler meets and insults Korvo as he is dragged out by a defeated Terry and the nanobots. At the house, the nanobots escape Korvo's grasp and leave. Korvo gives a bold statement to Terry that he will be in defiance of her rules in the future.

Yumyulack dumps a new batch of people, including an innocent passerby wearing a red shirt, into his miniature boxes. A construction worker runs away but triggers a trap. He is incapacitated, allowing for two people who slit his throat and kill him. The other people the red-shirted man came in with are horrified and run away together, but the man is stopped by two women about to kill him. A hooded figure kills one of the women with a toothpick javelin, causing the other to escape. The hooded figure seems to befriend the man as Jesse and Yumyulack discuss recent films.

## Notes/Trivia

* The episode makes a fourth wall reference to Hulu, when they stated that they were back, but if you had the ad-free version (Hulu Plus), it meant nothing.
* Right outside the Hell Hitbar there are two neo-Nazis, a bald one and one with sideburns, who were later shown to have been shrunk down by Yumyulack, uninjured, at the end of the episode. While it is possible that they left the bar before Yumyulack's massacre, the one with sideburns was inside when Yumyulack escaped into the closet, and Yumyulack would have had to go back to the house and get the shrink ray, then go to the bar again. The men should be dead; ergo, it is likely that the character models were merely reused.
* When Terry says "Alexa, turn off the alarm" he is referring to the Amazon Alexa.

## External Links

* "The Unstable Grey Hole" at the US Copyright Database
* "The Unstable Grey Hole" on IMDb
* "The Unstable Grey Hole" script via subslikescript