Orin survey, the wheelchair man — "But not the same. The choice…"

The wheelchair man's survey backs Orin into the theme's cleanest confession of what the era lost when everything became choosable. Old broadcast TV inflicted itself on you — the reruns, the schedule, the low-denominator predictability all arrived unasked, and that inflicted familiarity was the comfort. Once InterLace made every entertainment available "again and again without surcease" at the flick of a choice, the comfort curdled: choosing ruins it somehow. This is the vacuum diagnosis the whole theme is built over — a population handed total freedom of what to watch discovers that freedom is precisely the burden the old passive schedule spared them, and the thing that will finally kill them is the one cartridge that removes the choice again by being impossible to stop.