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Why is ‘war’ between sides, so scary?
You have the main hallway, and the interface rooms. It's not like it's all that easy to send an invading force through. Biological warfare is a possibility, but it's only really good as a first strike weapon. For anything else, just sealing the doors could be pretty effective.
Prime World Germphobia
- The treatment of the phenomenon seems somewhat inconsistent. People routinely wear face masks and use UV hand sanitizers. The cultural custom of shaking hands is no longer even routine. As such, even incidental personal contact ought to be viewed with trepidation, yet the Prime Earth hospital personnel think nothing of allowing Howard and his daughter free run of the hallways with no personal protection. Or, for that matter, Raash doesn't seem to think twice about handing his keys to Alpha Howard. What is the basis on which people assume others are infection-free on Earth Prime?
Prime World German Political Parties
- From the initials on the blackboard, it's easy to see that the German political landscape was altered considerably due to the effects of the plague from 1996 - circa 1999-2000. The parties are: OKP, FGD (or RED?), RBO, HAN. Given the much higher emphasis on health regulation in Prime Europe, it is reasonable to suppose that the platforms of the parties differ primarily in their approaches to how health care should be promoted and improved. It's not entirely clear what the German names might be; OKP will almost certainly end in "Partei", and FGD may be "Freies Geeintes (or Gesundes) Deutschland", which might be a reinvention/merger of the FDP and NPD. The RBO seems to do well in both West and East Germany, so it may be the predominant "big tent" party that would approximately correspond to the midpoint of the CDU and SPD in the Alpha world, while the other parties seem to be more geographically bounded - HAN in particular seems to concentrate only in the Eastern states, and may be composed of something akin to Die Linke/WASG.
Losing Count of Travelers
- How could the conspiracy get any significant number of agents into the Alpha universe? There's only one heavily monitored path between worlds. It should be simplicity itself for a side to track exactly how many visitors are checked into their universe at a time.
- Plus, they are shown taking photographs of everybody who crosses but don't seem to compare those against their own staff and their families? Obviously they don't anticipate the depth of Indigo's plan but you'd think such a security-focused agency would think of checking for doppelgangers.
- There’s a very clear visa system in place. How is it that so many doppelgängers of high ranking / well connected individuals are able to out-stay the length of their visas by years and decades without significant follow-up?
Interface Rooms use a secondary gateway?
- The first episode implied that the interface rooms were a window between the universes, but subsequent episodes were pretty explicit about the main creepy hallway being the only way in or out. So, I assumed, OK, I guess the Prime interface agents go through the Crossing every morning? But then the most recent episode confirms that there IS a separate gateway there? With much less security? And it's got to be several times larger because it takes up that whole hallway, plus it's in an entirely separate part of the building? Is there some way of creating new gateways? Or is that just a plot hole?
- The best I can figure is that the interdimensional rift could be reasonably wide or deep, it's just buried in the ground over most of its area. After the gateway opened it was originally only exposed in the well-known hallway, but they may have excavated a bit more later, in a space close enough to still go right up to and through the portal (wait...didn't we dig up a chunk of granite just like this yesterday?), in order to construct the interface room once the diplomacy system was getting going.
Why bother with Interface at all?
- Aside from providing some awesome Cold War sign/countersign aesthetics, Interface rooms seem completely unnecessary. People routinely go through the crossing carrying documents. Wouldn't it be much more effective (and involve many fewer people) to just run couriers back and forth? Not to mention just putting in some telephone lines.
"Management" security and credibility in the last two episodes
- After all that paranoia, they deliberately dismiss EVERY other guard from the building and leave exactly one guy (with a pretty blackmail-able backstory) between the prisoner and the top-secret gathering? And why even bring Mira to the building at all?
- After such a shocking policy shift, how is it nobody has discovered a room full of corpses in the floor management "works on"? And for that matter, if the agency is starting to shut down operations, wouldn't someone end up swinging through that floor anyway just to review the building status and start closing things down?
- With Management supposedly saying "have a nice life!" and then straight up disappearing, have none of the professionals who've made this their life's work expressed any doubts or mutinous intent about shutting down the gateway? I can see how the secrecy, plentiful supply of armed guards, and occasional delivery of sharply worded orders from mysterious radio boxes could keep people in line while Management was still actively manipulating things, but it's hard to see "welp, I guess the portal's closed forever!" lasting very long without someone enforcing it. With the status quo being shattered anyway, I'm surprised nobody started questioning the wisdom of blindly following orders sight-unseen on the spot! I suppose this might've been part of the plotline of season 3.
