Teddy, our amateur beekeeper and full-time conspiracy theorist, feels cheated by a system that was never designed for him to win. Working a minimally-compensated job packing boxes at Big Pharma institute Auxolith, he plots against his distant CEO, the high-octane Michelle Fuller, angry over a potent mixture of avenging his mother’s medical malpractice, job disillusionment, and most importantly, the unshakeable belief that Michelle is actually an alien from the Andromedan System, here to coordinate the demolition of planet Earth. Jesse, and his highly suggestible friend Don, hatch a plan to abduct and torture Michelle, in the hopes of dissuading her from carrying out this task.
Michelle, finding herself tied down to a makeshift torture-chamber in Teddy’s basement, tries a variety of psychological tricks to escape her captors; most upsettingly, telling Teddy that the anti-freeze in her car is actually the cure for his mother’s condition, to which end the weirdly gullible (for a conspiracy theorist, come on) Teddy rushes off to go and, essentially, murder his mother. Freeing herself of her shackles, she doesn’t try to leave but instead rifles through Teddy’s records of previous hostages. When he returns, she angrily confronts him, and eventually concedes that she is a member of the Andromedan species; though it’s unclear at this point whether she really is, or is still playing with Teddy’s mind in the hopes of escape.
Back in her office, with Teddy wearing a bomb vest for collateral, Michelle types a 58-digit code into her calculator, which she claims will teleport them up to the spaceship, but really just seems like a desperate ploy for time. Gracefully, she lets Jesse step into the teleport (read, wardrobe) first, and beams him up by pressing enter on the calculator (read, Teddy’s vest goes off and blood, mixed with bits of what used to be the body of Teddy, spatters all over the walls of her minimalist office). An injured Michelle frees herself from the hospital-bound ambulance and waddles back to her office, where she gets in the wardrobe and tries to beam herself up, just like Teddy.
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But it works, and we see Michelle in her real form; as Empress of the Andromedan High Council. Teddy was right, unequivocally right, I mean he even got the contours of the spaceship exactly right. Impressive from the conspiracy theorist. This was the point at which everyone in the cinema leaned back and put their hands on their head, not in shock but because the neat, pretty narrative they’d been building of the movie in their heads just shattered, Teddy-esque, into a million pieces.
It felt pretty clear up until that point; classic Marxian disillusioned worker Teddy’s life sucks packing up the same part into boxes all day every day. No projection, no seeing himself in his work, results in anger at the world around him, and especially at those in power of the very enterprise keeping him captive. All Teddy’s mannerisms once he has Michelle under control - his very corporate manner of speaking, his ill-fitting suit, his hierarchical relationship with Don - point to his desire to feel in control of the system, to sit atop the chain, to own the boss and be the boss. The moments of anger that we see are not when he feels out of control of the situation, but of the dialogue; when Michelle attempts to guide him, influence him, give him feedback. Above all, Teddy just wants to play the part of the dictatorial CEO.
So the unfulfilled Teddy projects his anger onto the world, and, in a desperate attempt to feel important, past the world and into outer space, so he can be the representative for our planet; him and Don are alone capable of preventing the World from Major Disaster at the hands of Aliens. And we’re supposed to sit there, comfortably in our place in a system where, given our being in a cinema with £7 popcorn on our laps and midweek hours to spare, we’re certainly not one of life’s losers, and think: what a madman. He’s crazy, and yeah, sure, the film says something clever about how CEO’s and rich people are just like aliens to normal people, except swing and a miss Yorgos because this guy isn’t normal, he’s a crazy 4chan conspiracy theorist, and anyway, the metaphor is a bit on the nose. But then, Teddy turns out to be right, and it’s really a big F-you to the entire audience.
Because now what are you supposed to think? The loser psycho conspiracy theorist was right, he outsmarted you all, and suddenly you’re watching a sci-fi movie.
My attempt to make sense of this shift is to propose that it really doesn’t matter in the slightest that Michelle actually is an alien; in what sense wasn’t she an alien to Teddy before? He’s completely convinced in his belief that she is extraterrestrial, and even if she isn’t, their lifestyles are so utterly incoherent to each other that she might as well be. No, I don’t believe it matters one bit - except in the satisfying vindication for Teddy - that Michelle actually is an alien. What Yorgos is showing you isn’t that the conspiracy theorists sometimes turn out to be right, but the uncompromising lunacy of their methods.
The dangers of letting conviction, not truth, drive you to action, and really severe action at that. So what that this time, he turned out to be right? What about the hundreds of times he wasn’t? What if they all had such disastrous consequences as; his best friend killing himself, his murdering his mother, his suicide, and finally, the eradication of the human species. That happened this time, the time he was right?
So what did we gain? What did we win? The point; okay, the conspiracy theorists might be right this time, and they might be right about the COVID vaccines, or the 5G poles, or Big Pharma. Or, (more likely) they’re breathtakingly far off. But that’s not important, what’s important is that we mustn’t kill ourselves trying to get there. Can’t let the lofty ideas guide us out of existence. The ends don’t justify the means.
That’s what Michelle admired about the bees. Their resilience, their ability to do their jobs and not get carried away. They don’t drive themselves mad and ruin a good thing, because of self-imposed premonitions about some hidden truth. That’s why they survive.