EVIL "MANAGEMENT" BEINGS

In the early episodes the band comes together, gels, plays a few gigs, does some cool "Burning Man" stuff and try to sort out their situation. But once they come into contact with Big Red Management, a major new factor comes to bear on the series: much of what takes it out into "X Files" territory, even Anne Rice/Buffy/Twilight aspects, with a bunch of sexy, controlling, hyper-normal beings that share a lot of the qualities of the contemporary vampire, but without the legacy characteristics.

The identity of these higher beings who have engineered their deaths, brought them together, and are forging them into a tool that creates control over their listeners is a mystery to the band throughout. But "Management", most immediately the sexy Red herself and her stark, controlling superior Julian, are interesting in their own right.

Are they Gods? Vampires? Alien Invaders? The Anti-Christ? Cthulu cultists? Agents of human evolution? And what are they after? How long has this been going on? They exert total, hallucigenic control over band members and anybody in their "downline". This power is also exerted by the band on listeners and latecomers to the band like Jaxi and Nick. Whoever the "Managers" are, they provide clues as the series moves on: hints at their own culture, their racial history, the ways in which they experience the pyramid of power to which they have been "recruited". We also get glimpses of their superiors, some of whom seem questionable human. But if not human... what?

There is no reason for these attractive, powerful, sexual people to be any less complex than the Vampire myths or the Matrix. They are animated by a force that seems to span time and space, and appear to have very definite ideas about where the are taking the human race. There are also competitors: other managers with other bands who might have different goals. Unfortunately, any contact between Raptor and other bands creates perceptual morphing that makes them look like dangerous monsters.

The whole question of who the "Managers" are and what they're up to could take years to unwind. Leaving the other problem: what is happening to people because of what they are doing? There is definite evidence that they are affecting events of current history.