The I-Land – Season 1 Episode 3 Recap & Review

The Future

Episode 3 of The I-Land sees Chase awaken to a Doctor standing over her. Panicking, she mentions the island but is met with a blank expression before she blacks out, awakening again to find Dr. Conrad standing over her. He tells her the paralysis she’s experiencing is really just a magnetic field to help keep the prison population under wraps. After freeing her from her restraints, he rushes out the room where he leaves her stuck in the room.

Guards arrive with guns soon after and tell her to follow them. They head outside where the exterior looks distinctly familiar to the abandoned building Cooper and her found last episode. Is it the same place?

Brought before Warden Wells, he tells her about the new experiments they’ve been doing. She asks why she’s imprisoned but he turns the questions around to the island itself. It turns out she wasn’t really there and the island was all just a simulation. Leaving her to stew over his words, she fights off two guards effortlessly before knocking one of them in the chair she awoke in. Charging through the corridors, she fights past numerous guards, dodging bullets as she goes, before eventually being knocked out and thrown into a holding cell underground.

After being given some time to cool off, she’s taken to a room full of high-ranking officials, along with the Warden and a man called the Professor, and told more about the island. It’s a battle of nature VS nurture and the whole concept is around whether you can you change a person’s moral compass and innate desires. As she sits, listening to them talk, the group discuss whether they should allow her back into the simulation.

The Warden hears enough and takes Chase outside and discusses matters with her alone. She asks him about Brody and he tells her that when you do something bad on the island, it pays you back, which may explain why Brody was stabbed on the beach. However, it wasn’t the game that got to him, it was one of the islanders opening up a new mystery for her to try and solve. Whatever happened, the Brody inside and outside the game is now gone. The Warden tells her he’ll be keeping his eye on her if she goes back inside, especially given how peculiar she’s been reacting to the game.

The board come to an agreement and decide she should be put back in the simulation. As the guards grab her and take her away, the Warden takes her outside and antagonizes her again, this time with a noose around her neck. Despite a valiant effort to fight them off, Chase is eventually electrocuted with tasers and knocked out.

Bloodied and bruised, after a cryptic talk with a rogue psychiatrist who talks to her about the island, she manages to escape capture. She hurries across to another area of the facility where she finds a control centre full of scientists and guards. The nine other islanders are floating in tanks while dressed in a strange cocoon-like suit. It’s here the Warden finds her again, sneering and informing her that none of them have a chance in the game if he has anything to say about it. As he tells the guards to “light her up”, the game begins again.

With a decent episode of exposition, The I-Land takes a well-earned break from the tropic sunshine to explain exactly what’s going on. While The Warden plays off as a typical caricature antagonist here, the much-needed answers add an extra dimension to the show and actually open up a really interesting narrative from here. As questions around morality come into play, The I-Land leaves things wide open for the second half as Chase is sucked back into the simulation again.