Pirjo's Attempt to Murder Shirley

Pirjo’s attempt to murder Shirley begins as a calculated trap disguised as a tour of the Nature Absorption Academy’s solar-power control room. When Shirley’s expertise makes the exposed direct-current wiring an unreliable weapon, Pirjo abandons the immediate attack and shifts to confinement: she presents isolation as a spiritual purification, removes Shirley’s means of measuring time, and locks her inside a remote house. The episode’s menace lies in how readily Pirjo makes the academy’s language of care and transformation serve a plan for killing.

The Failed Electrical Trap

Pirjo first weighs whether the control room can be used to kill Shirley. She wants Shirley to enter ahead of her, reasoning that if the first shock paralyzes her and she falls, Pirjo will not be able to lift her. She considers retrieving a cable kit from the garage and connecting Shirley to it, but even as she imagines the method, she doubts whether it would work: the fuses might blow, or something might short-circuit. Despite that uncertainty, she decides Shirley has to go and invites her into the office, telling her she will explain what the academy has in mind.

Inside, Pirjo identifies the room as the control room for the solar-power system. She waits before following Shirley in and pulls a rubber glove over one hand. With the power production rising and the sky brightening through the skylight, she checks the effect gauge and prepares to push Shirley’s hand into the exposed wiring. The cover plates have been removed from the junction boxes, she explains, presenting the danger as an accident waiting to happen while positioning Shirley beside the wires.

Shirley’s response defeats the setup. She knows that direct current is not likely to kill in the circumstances Pirjo has arranged: lethal exposure would require unconsciousness and wires attached to opposite sides of the body, with the current prolonged enough to cause catastrophic internal injury. She also recounts how Thomas Edison warned that direct current would not kill without excessively prolonged torture, and says the current in this room would only sting. When Shirley offers to replace the cover plates, Pirjo lets her hand drop. The knowledge Shirley brings from her electrician father has turned Pirjo’s apparent safety warning into a failed murder attempt—and shown Pirjo that this method cannot be trusted.

Purification as a Cover for Confinement

Pirjo replaces the failed electrical trap with an offer that makes captivity sound like opportunity. She tells Shirley that she will be out of a job when she returns and proposes paid work at the academy: the salary would depend on commission, London usually provided plenty of applicants, and the position came with a small apartment. Before Shirley could begin, however, she would have to undergo the same purification process as Valentina, who had gone through it about a year earlier. Pirjo describes a month of isolation from worldly concerns, devoted to letting nature absorption settle within Shirley until she becomes neutralized. She presents confinement as a spiritual prerequisite for employment, and leaves Shirley’s silence unreadable rather than treating it as agreement.

The setting gives the proposal its physical force. Pirjo points out a timber circle still under construction and says the work team will move on to the houses and assembly rooms after it is finished, in just over a month and a half. For now, Shirley is to stay in a completed purification house in the new quarters. Its high ceiling, wood cladding, colored tiles, thermal construction, and skylights make it beautiful, but the high windows, seven or eight meters above the floor, offer no view of the outside. Shirley recognizes that the room’s brightness does not mean access to the world beyond it: for weeks, the yellowish walls and grey-speckled tiles will be her surroundings.

Pirjo then removes the watch Shirley has brought with her, claiming that otherwise she will keep checking the time during the first day. Without it, Shirley feels stripped of time as well as freedom. When she asks whether anyone could hear her if she became ill and shouted, Pirjo strokes her cheek and reassures her that they would. She leaves, locks the door, and turns the key twice. The gesture makes the truth of the arrangement plain: the promised job and purification are a pretext, and Shirley has been shut away where she cannot readily call for help.

The Water Is Cut Off

By the second day of Shirley’s confinement, Pirjo was measuring the risks not only inside the house but across the surrounding grounds. She watched the men working on the timber circle several hundred meters away and judged the distance sufficient to muffle a cry for help. But one worker had walked toward the house, and she could not rule out another chance encounter. Pirjo calculated that Shirley might become too weak to shout effectively after four or five days, yet could survive for at least twenty. The gap between those estimates made waiting feel dangerous: a long death meant more time for someone to hear her.

Pirjo considered poisoning Shirley, knocking her unconscious and slitting her wrists, and other ways to accelerate the killing. Each carried the risk that the body, or a message Shirley had left behind, would be discovered before Pirjo could hide the evidence. Shirley’s weight posed a further practical problem, since even starvation would leave Pirjo with a body she would have to drag a considerable distance. Her initial plan was to let Shirley die without food or water, then break down the door and place the key in Shirley’s hand, staging the death as suicide. But the wait was too long. Pirjo went back to the house not to kill Shirley directly, but to turn off the water; without it, Shirley would die sooner, and she could not put out a fire if Pirjo later chose to set one with surgical spirit and a match. Pirjo’s calculations reduce the supposed purification to its actual purpose: keeping Shirley isolated, making her death look self-inflicted, and protecting what the academy had built.

When three days had passed, Shirley could no longer sustain her reassuring explanations for Pirjo’s absence. The decisive change came when the water stopped abruptly: the flow did not dwindle, and the last drops vanished from the sink as she watched. Searching her bag for anything useful, Shirley realized that the shoes with large buckles, nail scissors, and file were missing. Pirjo had helped her pack, so their absence did not seem accidental. Shirley understood that she was not expected to leave the house alive. She also connected her situation to Wanda Phinn: Wanda had been at the Nature Absorption Academy, Shirley recalled, and Pirjo had made her disappear. The question of what had happened to Wanda now sharpened Shirley’s own danger rather than offering a way out.

Shirley refused to let the realization settle into surrender. She planned to regulate her body temperature by dressing and undressing and calculated that the water remaining in the toilet’s S-trap and cistern amounted to about eight liters. Because she had been relieving herself on the floor rather than flushing, she could conserve that supply, though the remaining water was fouled by traces of urine and feces. The house’s construction, initially presented as a beautiful retreat, became an obstacle she had to test physically: through much of Thursday she scratched at the wallboard but loosened it by no more than one and a half millimeters. She then tried to wrench the metal drainpipe from beneath the sink, hoping to use it to punch through the wall. After sleeping deeply for a couple of hours, she woke dizzy and, without thinking, flushed the toilet. When she saw that less than a liter remained, she stood staring into the pan and began to cry, her eyes still dry.

An Unresolved Contest of Time

The episode, dated Wednesday, May 14, and Thursday, May 15, 2014, ends without showing whether Pirjo’s plan succeeds or whether Shirley escapes. Instead, its final measure is the dwindling water: after Shirley accidentally flushes, less than a liter remains. That loss follows her effort to conserve what was left, making an ordinary reflex suddenly consequential. Pirjo had treated time as an accomplice, calculating how long Shirley might survive and how long she had to prevent discovery; Shirley’s struggle turns each passing hour into a practical contest over her body and the house around her. The scene closes on no rescue or death, but on Shirley staring into the toilet and crying with dry eyes—the immediate crisis sharpened, its outcome still open.