11.22.63 Episode 6 recap revisited: All roads now lead to Oswald

11.22.63 Episode 6 is titled Happy Birthday, Lee Harvey Oswald. It originally dropped on March 21, 2016.

At this point in the eight-episode run, the story jumps ahead six months. It’s now October 16, 1963. Jake Epping is inching right up to the edge of Kennedy’s assassination. The series digs even deeper into the idea that the past fights back, pulling Jake and everyone around him into a dangerous territory, both emotionally and morally.

In 11.22.63 Episode 6, Jake faces bigger threats than ever, not just to his mission, but to the people he cares about. Surprises come out of nowhere. Betrayals, close calls, and everything in between remind you that history doesn’t want to be rewritten. While all this unfolds, Lee Harvey Oswald is working at the Texas School Book Depository, drifting further away from Marina, his wife. His life is coming apart at the seams, and you can sense that something dark is waiting just around the corner in November.

11.22.63 Episode 6 recap: Happy Birthday, Lee Harvey Oswald

It is now six months after the bloody collision with Johnny Clayton, and the narrative picks up on October 16, 1963, a little more than a month before the date Jake Epping has been racing toward since the start. There is a sense of inevitability with the time jump. Everybody has moved on, and nothing is solid. The past, to say the least, is more awake than ever.

Having lost Marina, Lee Harvey Oswald finds employment in the Dallas Book Depository, a fact that falls with chilling weight. In 11.22.63 Episode 6, there is an FBI agent outside the building who confronts him, and in doing so, casually lets him know how much Oswald has been watched over and that Marina has left him and is never coming back. The experience pierces the paranoia of Oswald even before he returns to his personal life.

Oswald follows Marina to a friend’s house. She is pregnant again and obviously more stable without him. Although she is glad that he has work, she is not going back because she must get surrounded by kind people. Oswald, who fails to express love in a containing way, reminds her that they are married, which only reiterates the reasons why she left. Marina’s friend suggests that she will come back someday, but the moment is more of an omen than a hope.

In the meantime, in 11.22.63 Episode 6, the collaboration between Jake and Bill Turcotte is crumbling. Bill is left alone in Dallas to do surveillance as Jake spends the majority of his time in Jodie taking care of Sadie. When George de Mohrenschildt visits the Oswalds and tells about the most recent attempt on General Walker, Jake is confident that Oswald has fired the shot, but Oswald dismisses the charge with laughter.

The ambiguity revives an old debate between Jake and Bill: Is Jake triggering history before it has happened? Bill questions whether the butterfly effect has made Oswald go astray. Jake refuses to believe that they have not been meddling in it. Bill’s answer is simple: If Jake is confident enough, then why not kill Oswald?

Jake doesn’t have an answer. He confesses that he is still haunted by the killing and that he wants badly to stop November 22 without killing anybody.

In Jodie, Sadie is looking forward to what she believes will be her last operation, a cosmetic one to minimize the scar left by Johnny Clayton. It is not vanity; it is about the end of a chapter. She does not want to be hospitalized anymore. Jake, who is secretly financing her procedures with gambling money, rolls another die to pay the money, ignoring hard-learned lessons from the past.

Sadie gets a glimpse into a wider world in 11.22.63 Episode 6, when she has some quiet time with Principal Deke Simmons and Miz Mimi. Mimi tells Jake that she is dying of cancer, and she does not want him to waste time as she and Deke had to. Love, she tells him, does not ask permission.

In Dallas, everything goes wrong.

During surveillance of the apartment Oswald lives in, Jake can hear a birthday party- and the voice of Bill among the others. He hurries there and finds out that Bill has integrated himself into the life of Oswald completely. Bill insists that he is assisting, that Oswald has not even spoken of Kennedy. Jake cautions him that it is futile to grapple with the past because it will fight stronger.

In 11.22.63 Episode 6, a lamp is knocked over almost at the same moment. Oswald discovers one of the surveillance devices inside it.

The effect is explosive. Oswald is already paranoid and angry, and then he falls into a frenzy, raging on the subject of government surveillance and freedom, and throwing his apartment into ruins as those nearby attempt to calm him, to no avail. Jake is left wondering whether this moment, and not the Walker attempt, is the actual spark.

Jake finds Bill kissing Marina outside. The conflict escalates to violence when Bill gets home. Bitterness oozes as Bill is outraged that Jake gets Sadie, and he is the one who has to listen to Oswald beat up Marina every night. Bill, drunk, desperate, and angry, draws a gun on Jake and sends him out of the house, screaming that he is done with the mission, and with Jake, and with Kennedy himself.

The past has discovered a new weapon in 11.22.63 Episode 6.

The following day, Sadie is taken to the operating room, and Jake can see the Yellow Card Man. This same menacing character, who was to stop Jake the first time he entered the past, accompanies Sadie to the operating room. Jake panics and breaks down the locked doors, stopping the process in the middle of the operation. The physicians discovered that Sadie was not receiving oxygen. She lives, but the surgery was not continued, and the scar was not removed.

Sadie starts to ask herself, aloud, whether she is in the path of Jake. He says she is not, but the facts tell otherwise. The larger issue that Jake faces is evident when he goes back to Dallas and finds Bill sitting on a porch with Oswald and holding a rifle. Bill is not merely compromised; he is dangerous. In 11.22.63 Episode 6, Jake realizes that he is the second shooter.

Playing along, Jake informs Bill that Marina has gone into labour and needs him. Bill willingly follows him to a mental institution. When Bill starts raving about time-travel and the future, physicians tranquilize him and place him in a mental facility, promising Jake that he will not be released without his consent. Jake watches, unmoved. The mission comes first now.

Having neutralized Bill, Jake then turns to George de Mohrenschildt, who is viciously interrogated by Jake about the truth. George says there is no conspiracy. He made friends with the Oswalds merely because Marina was lonely, because to assist her directly would anger Lee. George is visibly appalled when asked about Kennedy. Why would he want the man who stood up against the communists who destroyed his homeland dead?

In 11.22.63 Episode 6, the realization hits hard. No network. No handlers. Just Oswald.

Jake recalls the warning of Al; in case there is no conspiracy, then to stop November 22 is to stop Oswald himself.

Jake makes a phone call to Sadie in a phone booth before taking action. He proposes over the line and requests she join him in the future. She promises she will answer him when he gets home.

Jake never makes it that far.

The bookies he has swindled find him and are angry that he has tried to place the same bet in different places. They surround him in an alley and beat him savagely.

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Jake passes in and out of consciousness in the hospital, where he hallucinates Sadie and his ex-wife from the future, Christy. The roles have switched, and Sadie is watching him over. Physicians inform her that Jake has been severely traumatized and that it will take time to recover, provided that he recovers.

The future, again, is uncertain. And the past is by no means over as of 11.22.63 Episode 6.

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