With HR dead, our priority was denouement: resolving what needed resolving, handing out the happy endings to everyone we felt called for one. But still, Shanna’s story would’ve been incomplete without a moment like this.

Any version of Shanna is someone who seeks structure in a disordered world. In Fans, she had superscience and the supernatural shoved into her face by page 5 of the first story and freaked out about it early. She eventually forced herself to cope, first to support her ailing mother, then to fight for justice. You could argue that the pursuit of justice is a higher, more rewarding form of structure-seeking than chanting to yourself that extranormal things can’t really exist.

This version of her has had most of those basic experiences, but in a different order. She could handle it, barely, when she stumbled into HR’s “discount Matrix” and his body started radiating purple light. She’d been hardened from life on the run and shooting JJ…and she knew that keeping her head together was her only chance to survive.

And she still went mostly catatonic after things reached a certain level of weird. She recovered enough to deal with the bodies and Carol in the aftermath…

But now it’s all catching up with her. Gravity was arbitrary in there. The ceiling was starting to mutate. The physical laws of the Earth can never be fully trusted again. She’s overdue for a freakout. Xan’s calming presence and the fact that there is still work to do are helping her manage this one, so it’s not as bad as if she just started screaming on the street until her voice cracked. But part of her mind wants to do just that, and she’s got to compromise with it a bit, or it’s just going to drive her all the way over the edge.

FB: Some nights, it feels like they look back.