What Each Pill In Maniac's U.L.P. Drug Trial Actually Does

The characters in the new Netflix show Maniac have a lot on their minds —literally. Annie (Emma Stone) and Owen (Jonah Hill), the show's main characters, are part of a paid drug trial meant to cure all pain, suffering, and mental heath issues through a series of three little pills. How convenient.

The drug trial, called U.L.P., is run by Dr. James Mantleray's (Justin Theroux) mysterious Neberdine Pharmaceutical Biotech team. The trial is intended to identify how a specific person processes distressing situations, then rewrite their brains so that he or she is no longer bothered by those situations. No more pain, no more problems.

But how does it actually work? For each phase of the three-stage trial, Annie, Owen, and the seven other trial participants climb into futuristic white chairs, ingest a letter-shaped pill, and upload their consciousness to the G.R.T.A super-computer mainframe. The pills send participants hurtling through his or her past, blending traumatic memories with subconscious-infused hallucination sequences. Each subsequent pill builds on the revelations garnered from the previous pill's hallucinations with ever-increasing degrees of fantasy.

This is what each phase of the trial was intended to achieve.