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justjenah · 11 months ago

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Latvia Mike: A Disconnected OverMike Hiding in Plain Sight

Of all the Mikes Walters (species) Latvia Mike is the one that seems to be most often taken at face value. He’s the responsible one, the one who likes to go into things with a clear plan. He prefers to abide by protocol if at all possible but will throw protocol aside if you give him a good enough reason

He’s the one true Mike, the only iteration that is allowed to use the name “Mike”, everyone else has to find something new. Michael makes this explicit when he tells MW that “‘Mike’ is taken” in episode 91 .

More often than not, Latvia Mike has to do very little to earn his iterations' trust. His motivations are almost never questioned. This is likely in part because in addition to being older and more experienced than the "Mikey Generation," he has historically acted as a calming influence and a rational counterbalance to Michael's more inflammatory and reckless impulses. He is unafraid to challenge Michael or other "Michael Generation" iterations.

Not only that, Latvia Mike has often done his best to protect Mikey. For example he advises Mikey to lock his door after the Alaska Mikey incident and despite threatening to do otherwise, he ultimately tried to cover for Mikey when he was sneaking around with the calculator to investigate Edman's cure when he was supposed to be focused on helping the Texas posse break Base out of the Dome. And it's not just physically protection that Mike has offered but emotional protection as well. Mike offered to kill Innocent Hutner for Mikey, recognizing how difficult it might be for him.

It's not just Mikey that benefit from Latvia Mike's instinct to protect either. Mike has gone out of his way to protect Michael and MW as well. The man spent 43 days attempting to break Michael out of the compound. And while it backfired horribly, Mike protected whom he thought was the Dome iteration of Michael and insisted that the Michael who escaped to Texas keep his word and consolidate. While that iteration turned out not to be the Dome iteration but Lieutenant, it was a still a protective action. When they brought back an injured OverMike, it was Mike who most vehemently opposed killing the iteration and hatched the plan to train him and consolidate him instead of allowing Michael to kill the runaway OverMikes.

It seems likely that this habit of caretaking has afforded Latvia Mike a image of trustworthiness. And while he's not without his missteps, that image has been well earned—or at the very least well cultivated—among the Council of Mikes.

And yet I am fairly certain that Mike is not what he seems to be. Namely, I think there is significant evidence that Latvia Mike is not connected to Mikey. In fact I am not sure he’s connected to any of the Mike Walters iterations we’ve met so far. I’d argue that as it stands, in order to find a Mike Walters iteration that Latvia Mike is connected to you would need to travel back to before the first iteration of Mike Walters (species) was made.

Looking at all the evidence (and there is a surprising amount of it) I’d argue that Latvia Mike is actually a disconnected OverMike whose time period of origin is five years in the future from Mikey.

This theory goes way back to not long after we first meet Latvia Mike. The evidence begins with episode 50, the second episode in which Latvia Mike appears.

In Episode 50: Propagation & Consolidation Latvia Mike gives us our first ever mention of OverMike in the show:

“One goal at a time, right. Wouldn’t want to Propagate,” [Mike] said. “I remember the time. It gets better, eventually. It’s not always going to be you taking Edgar and Anne’s word on what you should do. But it’s exciting, right? Everything is shiny and new and you’ve got that new Calculator to play with. Do you have an O.V.E.R. Mike yet?”

“I don’t know what that means,” I replied.

“Ah, I won’t propagate that information, then,” he said.

On its own, this isn’t much in the way of evidence. The first time I listened to this episode I remember thinking it was strange but assumed it was merely an easter egg of things to come.

It isn’t until the next episode, 51, Corrections, Corrections , that I questioned Latvia Mike’s iterative origins. In that episode Latvia Mike and Michael show up at the house in Rugby North Dakota to rescue Mikey who has just had the ever loving shit beat out of him. Michael shows up and the two have the following exchange:

Michael: So uh, I assume your instructions didn’t say to kill him or to let him die?

Mike: No, but I can’t imagine that it matters too much. I don’t think he’s connected to us. Did yours?

Latvia Mike assuming that Mikey isn’t connected to him or Michael is such a WILD assumption based on what we know up until this point. Mikey himself assumes that one day he will “become” them. Michael even famously tells Mikey in episode 44 “You turn into me, remember that.” (it’s even the name of the episode!). I’ll talk a little bit later why I think they are incorrect about Mikey “becoming” Michael, but suffice to say at least up until this point Latvia Mike is the only iteration of the three of them to explicitly declare any sort of disconnectivity. In 51 Mike states quite plainly that he’s fairly confident that at this point, Mikey dying shouldn’t really affect him.

Exactly when in the timeline Latvia Mike becomes disconnected is a little unclear to me (more on that later) and I question his assertion that Mikey dying at this specific point in time wouldn’t affect Latvia Mike. That said, the point remains the same that Latvia Mike seems confident that at some point there will be enough disconnectivity between himself and Mikey that Mikey could die and Mike wouldn’t be affected. This assumption on Latvia Mike’s part speaks to knowledge that he has about his own iterative origins.

The clearest piece of evidence in support of my theory comes just a couple episodes later with episode 54, Connectivity . Mikey, Edgar, Marissa, and Anne are all working together at Base to troubleshoot the issue of Ravi having witnessed Mikey breaking into Tier Two. Anne suggests popping the tires of the golf cart that Marissa and Ravi both use on their patrol routes so that he doesn’t witness Mikey’s break-ins.

And then Latvia Mike shows up looking like he “had been thoroughly chewed up and spat out”, with injuries including a clouded over right eye and a missing thumb that is long scarred and healed over.

This is already pretty wild in that this tire popping correction that Anne, Edgar, and Marissa are planning has skipped right over Mikey. Mikey is unaffected by this plan to pop the tires. Even more interesting is that Michael is unaffected by the plan to pop the tires.

But that is not the most damning evidence. Latvia Mike shows up angry, disoriented, and emotional. And in that state, in the middle of him issuing this correction to prevent his abduction, it seems like he let’s something pretty damn important slip:

“I just have one minor correction here: did it never occur to any of you dolts that if the cart is out of commission on a certain night that SOMEONE might be captured and interrogated, imprisoned, tortured, used as a blackmail pawn and generally be a profound hindrance to Base for YEARS? All because the cart didn’t get fixed in time? That cart has to come crashing through the border of Tier 2 or Mike Walters is in trouble. So, if you’re going to go through with that, could you do O.V.E.R. Mike a big favor and make sure you drive one of those nails right through his brain stem while you’re at it and save us the trouble? ”

Let’s zero in on that for a second: “could you do O.V.E.R. Mike a big favor and make sure you drive one of those nails right through his brain stem while you’re at it and save us the trouble?”

Here, Latvia Mike strongly implies his connectivity to an OverMike. He essentially tells Mikey to kill OverMike, thus killing Latvia Mike, to prevent him from having to go through being “captured and interrogated, imprisoned, tortured, used as a blackmail pawn and generally be a profound hindrance to Base for YEARS”.

Between the tire popping correction skipping over Mikey, and Latvia Mike himself implying connectivity to OverMike, it seems pretty likely that Mike is correct, he isn't connected to Mikey. He doesn’t even seem to be connected to Michael in the episode given that Michael was still a cowboy and seemingly unaffected by the correction but that feels less certain at this point (more evidence that Mike is not connected to Michael will come later though so hold your horses, pard).

The next time it’s implied that there is not connectivity between Mikey and Mike is in episode 65, double knot . Mikey has recently escaped from the compound after his second imprisonment there (this is after Punished transported Mikey to the Latvian woods) and has been scooped up by Latvia Mike and Michael. On the ride back to Riga the following exchange takes place:

MIKEY: Oh! Oh, I have–I have notes from a mattress. Here–[paper crinkling] Here, read them it was definitely a Mikey but it wasn’t me. I found them in the mattress in my room at the compound. He must’ve put them there. Mike none of this happened to you? I was hoping you’d remember something.

MIKE: No, can’t say that I do.

Latvia Mike did not experience a second stay in the compound. This is not entirely surprising at this point given that we know from episode 55, The Surprise Field Trip, that Latvia Mike and Michael had no idea that the compound was based in Latvia until after the two of them came back to Mikey’s time period to establish Satellite Base.

Latvia Mike and Michael never experienced a second stay in the compound (something Michael obliquely confirmed in his phone call to Ty Betteridge in episode 60, Ready to Die) or the Hunter’s destruction of Base. This is made even stranger by the fact that Mikey’s second stay in the compound is never corrected despite the fact that the Hunter’s attack on Base is corrected (Alaska Mikey makes this explicit when states that he knows nothing about the Hunter’s attack on Base or even what Base is yet was still transported to the Latvian woods by an unknown party when Mike goes to talk to him in episode 71, studies ). This implies that regardless of whether the Hunters destroy Base, Mikey’s second stay in the compound always happens. Which should mean that if Mike and Michael are connected to him, that those events should’ve theoretically propagated forward in time, much like what happened with the nails and the golf cart’s tire.

The next bit of evidence isn’t so much proof that Mike is an OverMike but more that he and Michael are disconnected from Mikey. What I am referring to is the existence of Mustardseed and the runaway OvEdgars and OverMikes.

When these two things are introduced Mike and Michael are just as in the dark as Mikey. They have no idea who Mustardseed is and the events of episode 78, Ax make that extremely clear. Furthermore it’s in episode 84, Panther , that Michael first learns about the existence of the runaway OverMike and OvEdgars. Which, again, their existence is never corrected. Instead the runaways are captured after their escape and consolidated.

This implies that Latvia Mike and OverMike’s connectivity broke down at some point between the events of episode 48 (the event that the tire popping plan was meant to correct) and whenever it was that OverMike and OvEdgar made all those runaway iterations (which is implied to have have happened around episode 79, Mutiny). I’d argue the disconnection point is likely prior to episode 60 (Ready to Die) seeing as the OverTeam is executed along with everyone else at Base and Latvia Mike is totally fine (well as fine as one can be when lost at sea with your older cowboy iteration).

This means that if someone wants to take out Latvia Mike specifically, they would need to kill OverMike sometime prior to the events of Ready to Die, or, like we see in 109, if you don’t care about preserving any Mike Walters iterations, you could simply kill Mikey prior to him iterating himself.

The next time we see Latvia Mike possibly slipping up is in episode 100, Clipshow . It’s a blink and you miss it sort of exchange and on its own doesn’t seem like much but, taken together with everything that has come before, it reads like Mike speaking without thinking:

MIKEY: Edgar said that he didn’t send anyone. What do we do?

MIKE: Take Bruno into Michael’s room and lock the door, Mikey.

MIKEY: W-What? Why?

MIKE: Because there’s an extra iteration of you out there and we don’t know what’s going on.

MIKEY: I don’t see why that means that I have to go hide. He’s an iteration of you, too.

MICHAEL: Do what he says, Mikey.

Latvia Mike looks out the peephole of the door and sees a younger iteration and jumps to the natural conclusion that it is an iteration of Mikey. Note that he doesn’t think it’s an iteration of MW, which is a little odd. MW and Mikey are approximately the same age. A younger iteration is just as likely to be an iteration of MW as it is Mikey (if not more so given how iteration happy the OVER team was in Mikey’s iteration of the timeline). It’s made all the more ironic by the fact that it is OverMike (specifically Mustardseed’s husband) who is standing on the other side of the door.

This episode also reintroduces the idea that Latvia Mike is disconnected from all of this time period’s OverMikes at this point in time because he seems completely unworried about Michael and MW executing the poor party crashing OverMike. It’s true we don’t see OverMike actually killed in the episode as it happens off screen but if Latvia Mike is connected to this specific OverMike, he is putting on a very good act and also seeming to take it on faith that Michael and MW won’t actually kill this OverMike, never mind the earlier evidence that Mike had no idea about Mustardseed’s identity or the existence of the runaways.

If you’ve been sitting there screaming at the screen that I skipped right over one of the biggest pieces of physical evidence that Latvia Mike and Mikey aren’t connected, don’t worry, I’m getting to it. That’s right: Mikey’s brand.

This brand has survived corrected timelines again and again and yet Latvia Mike and Michael are NEVER mentioned as having it and they are NEVER asked to show the brand as proof of their identity. On the contrary Latvia Mike seems to always check for Mikey’s brand.

Notably when Mike shows up in episode 135, The Conundrum Of The Cowboy's Codex, Mikey does not demand that Latvia Mike show the brand to prove himself, while Mikey DOES show the brand. In fact Mike’s “proof” that he is Latvia Mike is merely:

MIKE: Wedding ring, cauliflower ear, a couple more wrinkles than you

And that’s it !

When it comes to Latvia Mike the brand is NEVER brought up as a means of proof and yet Latvia Mike uses Mikey’s brand as a baseline for proving Mikey’s identity time and again. Most recently, Latvia Mike does a brand check on Mikey in episode 153 when Mikey decides to do some futurescouting and drops by Mike’s house five years in the future.

This next bit from episode 166: Lucid/Psychedelic may or may not be anything but I thought it worth noting because Mike has often made clear distinctions between himself and Mikey and yet he says the following to MW, who is notably 32 OverMikes in a skin suit:

MIKE [addressing MW]: You're me and I drink almond milk all the time

The final hint that Latvia Mike’s iterative origins stem from an OverMike (as of this writing) is in episode 167: Contradiction/Connection. Michael, Mike, MDawg, and MW all show up at the Crust Punk House to talk with Old Man and they end up roping in Skinner. During their conversation Skinner brings up Skuzz being kidnapped and wants to know if any of these Mike Walters iterations had anything to do with it.

MICHAEL: None of us cowboys knows no one by the name of Skuzz. SKINNER: Skuzz? Skinny, messy hair, too cool for school, might have tried to work Broken Social Scene into the conversation while you were killing them or kidnapping them or whatever it was you did to them…

MIKE: Wait, Skuzz Skuzz? Like the one who mows the lawn at O.V.E.R.

SKINNER: No, dummy the other Skuzz. Yeah, of course that Skuzz.

Mike is the only iteration in the room who seems to know who Skuzz is. Which doesn’t have to mean anything but seems notable if he is in fact an OverMike. If Mike is an OverMike whose experience of this time period was never marred by the existence of Mustardseed, then Mike spent considerable more time working and living at OVER and therefore had greater opportunities to get to know the landscaping team at OVER. Skuzz doesn’t seem to even ring any bells for Michael, meanwhile Latvia Mike is able to correctly identify whom Skinner is talking about.

So where does that leave us?

My theory is that in Latvia Mike’s experience of this time period, he was Future Base’s OverMike. But in Latvia Mike’s experience of this time period things shook out extremely differently. My theory is that the OVER team was much more involved in Future Base’s goings on than they are in Mikey’s iteration of the timeline. In Mikey’s iteration of the timeline, the OVER team is rarely included unless Base requires them to sneak into Tier Two. This is a huge point of friction between the OVER team and Mikey’s Base. Yet this friction does not seem to have existed in Latvia Mike's iteration of this time period (or at least not to the point that it exists for Mikey’s Base and Mikey’s OVER team seeing as Mustardseed and the runaway OVER iterations are unique to Mikey's experience).

For Latvia Mike I think that, unlike in Mikey’s iteration of the timeline, the OVER team continued to exist as an extension of Future Base for years. After all in episode 82, Digging , when Latvia Mike’s attempt to correct Michael’s disappearance using a calculator fails, one of the things that Latvia Mike attempts is breaking into Tier Two with Edgar to see if using the security.exe program will overcome whatever barrier is preventing Latvia Mike from issuing his correction. Again this isn’t some major piece of evidence but it does suggest that Mike and his Edgar are still familiar with 116E, Tier Two, and the security.exe program, something that Michael mentions being a vague memory for him at this point.

I think at some point Future Base transitioned Latvia Mike and his Edgar to some sort of Satellite Base within Latvia Mike’s own time period and is likely where they got the idea to establish a Satellite Base in Latvia in Mikey’s time period.

I believe that more than likely in Latvia Mike’s experience of the timeline, his and his Edgar’s roles shifted from being the OVER team to becoming a “disconnected corrections team” much like the role that Mikey’s OVER team’s played in episode 72, Council , in which they act as a corrections team for the peace treaty meeting that Base holds with the Hunters. So while Future Base works on their projects and conducts recon and technology retrieval missions, the OVER team (made up of Latvia Mike and his Edgar) are disconnected from their iterations (much like Tex and Outlaw seem disconnected from theirs) and able to respond to any timeline disturbances and issue corrections to protect Future Base.

When events start to diverge more drastically in Mikey’s time period, I think Base realized that they needed a team back there to stop the ground shifting from under Future Base’s feet and undoing all of Future Base’s progress. When Michael traveled to Latvia Mike’s time period to help out (and escape from living in a time period without an Edgar), they had the perfect opportunity to establish a remote Satellite Base in the past with Michael and Latvia Mike, both of whom were tethered to Future Base's time period by Latvia Mike’s Edgar who would run missions from five years in the future.

So. If Latvia Mike is a disconnected OverMike, how the hell did he become disconnected? I don’t have one specific theory for this but let’s at least look at different ways it seems one could become disconnected.

In 168: Anonymous Councils/Edible Bombs , we first learn about disconnectivity devices. They are rare and expensive. MDawg recognizes it for what it is but it’s not made clear who else is familiar with them other than Other Chris and Old Man. It’s possible that Future Base got their hands on some disconnectivity devices and used them on Latvia Mike and his Edgar but it feels unlikely. Then again, maybe five years in the future time travel technology has advanced such that disconnectivity devices are easier to come by.

Another way you might become disconnected seems to be as result of an incomplete correction. In the 101 timeline when the Hunters completely take over via a major correction (or many many many corrections layered on top of one another, who knows), Tex and Outlaw somehow are unaffected by the new timeline. They retain memories from the previous iteration of the timeline and are unaffected by the Hunter’s changes despite the fact that those changes clearly go back before Mikey and Edgar got together since Mikey and Edgar are not even dating in as of 2023 in the 101 timeline. If that can happen accidentally, more than likely it is something that can be done intentionally though I imagine it would take quite a few attempts to achieve the desired results and would be incredibly risky.

Another possible way to create disconnectivity might be for an iteration to somehow correct their own creation. We know that the calculators solve paradoxes and it seems to me that if an OverMike corrected their own creation, that iteration would still have to exist in order to have issued that correction. But without the iteration event, the iteration that issued the correction would exist as a disconnected individual.

Finally, one of my favorite disconnectivity practices is one that I think we are actively watching play out between Mikey and Michael. That is, through prolonged and significant interaction with/exposure to a past version of yourself that you start out connected to. This method I think takes significant time and exposure and that connectivity likely degrades slowly over time as the two iterations continue to interact and influence one another’s experiences of the timeline. This is why I think that Mikey will never “become” Michael.

Which one do I think Latvia Mike and his Edgar used? No idea!

Now I know what you’re thinking. If this is true and Latvia Mike is a disconnected OverMike, why on earth hasn’t he told anyone? Why is he keeping this a secret?

The answer is simple. It’s just smart. It’s good infosec and a matter of self preservation. Look at Mystery Hunter and Punished Hunter (and H, if we are counting him separately from Mystery). The fact that we don’t know their iterative origins makes them much more difficult to kill.

Mike keeping this secret doesn’t have to be nefarious. We’ve seen time and time again that limiting the spread of information is key to staying alive and controlling the timeline. Latvia Mike can trust Mikey, MW, and Michael all he wants but that doesn’t make it safe to propagate the information of his and his Edgar’s iterative origins. Latvia Mike himself makes this point to Mikey in episode 153, Futurescouting when. When Mikey is suspicious of Tex for not sharing information Latvia Mike makes this case:

MIKE: I will admit that is odd, but I would be cautious about jumping to conclusions. You know as well as I do that there are lots of good reasons to not tell someone everything you know, even if you know and trust the person.

In the WOEBEGONE universe, keeping one's iterative origins secret, even from the people you trust is just smart. Hiding that information isn’t even about distrust, it’s about propagation risk—something which can happen accidentally very easily. Mike not telling Mikey (and possibly Michael) his iterative origins isn’t a sign of disloyalty or even distrust among iterations, it’s merely a sign of self preservation (never mind the preservation of Latvia Mike’s Edgar) because once that information is entrusted to anyone other than yourself, your very existence is at risk should that information reach the wrong people.

Now, why do I think that Latvia Mike isn’t connected to Michael? There are many little hints at this scattered throughout the show but I’ll just highlight a couple of them including a pretty major one from the most recent episode as of this writing.

First, even if they were connected at the start of the Latvian Sat Base’s creation, I think Michael has changed Mike’s trajectory such that Mike can never become Michael. Michael pulled Mike out of a deep depression and has repeatedly tried to guide Mike to make better, healthier choices than Michael has.

A more specific moment that points to Michael not having connectivity with Latvia Mike is back in Episode 51. Michael asks Mike what his experience of Rugby was, something Michael would presumably know if he were connected to Mike.

Indeed most recently in episode 172, Ghostfire, Latvia Mike says pretty specifically that he will not turn into Michael/Old Man and that in five years he won’t be doing the things that Michael/Old Man is currently doing:

MIKE: You’ve seen me and Old Man in a room together. That's me from the future—kind of. He’s not necessarily me, but he is, but that doesn't mean that like five years from now that I’m going to be doing all the things that he’s doing now.

In the same episode Latvia Mike goes on to explain connectivity and gives the following example:

MIKE: If you killed me, Old Man wouldn’t die even though I keep saying that he’s quote, ‘me from the future’.

Given that killing Mikey on his first day at OVER in 109 successfully eliminated all other Mike Walters iterations, thus preventing Mike and Michael from existing, this statement from Mike (that his death would not kill Old Man/Michael) seems like an especially important claim because Latvia Mike is indicating that there isn’t connectivity between himself and Old Man/Michael, who as of that episode is the closest Michael iteration we have.

Now, if Latvia Mike and his Edgar are not connected to Mikey and Mikey’s Edgar, what does that mean? There are likely many ramifications of this being true but the one that leaps to my mind is the cure for Edgar.

Mikey floats the possibility that since his Edgar has consolidated with Edman—who supposedly was cured by OI—that Mikey’s Edgar might also be cured. If Mikey’s Edgar is cured, that cure should propagate forward to all the other future Edgars that have connectivity to Mikey’s Edgar.

Of course, if Latvia Mike’s Edgar is a disconnected OvEdgar, that would mean he did not receive the cure . While disconnectivity is, in many ways, protective and a tool that can be used to shield iterations from potential timeline meddling from hostile parties, in this instance it spells Latvia Mike’s Edgar’s doom. Mikey’s Edgar, Michael’s Edgar, MDawg’s Edgar all would benefit from this cure (so long as Michael’s Edgar is indeed still connected to Mikey’s) but Latvia Mike’s Edgar is still slated to die before October 2025.

Worse, because Latvia Mike is hiding the fact that he’s a disconnected OverMike, his own Edgar’s death is misleading to Mikey and Michael. It would give Mikey and Michael the impression that their Edgars didn’t receive the cure and that they are still slated to die even though they very well may not be.

Only time will tell if this theory will bear any fruit but I’ll tell you right now, I’ve gone looking for evidence that specifically disproves it and it doesn’t exist. At least not yet. Of course, as with all things, only time will tell.

#woe.begone #woe.begone spoilers #woebegonepod #latvia mike #michael walters #w.bg #wbg spoilers #wbg #woe begone #connectivity #I have been slowly working on this post for months #I cannot believe I finished it the DAY an episode came out that essentially helped provide even more evidence for my theory #mikey walters #I seriously might create an AO3 account just to have a place to put w.bg essays because tumblr is not fun when it comes to formatting

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