Apparently Taylor Swift decided we were not doing enough unpaid detective work this week. Less than 24 hours before The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore arrives, Swift dropped a 13-second teaser for the “Patient Zero” music video Thursday morning, and somehow 13 seconds gave us more questions than answers (also, how has she already made the music video??? The logic of Taylor Swift will never be truly understood). The video stars Swift alongside Dakota Johnson and Colin Farrell and looks considerably darker than most of The Life of a Showgirl era. It will premiere in full during the MTV Video Music Awards Sunday night. CBS News
And those two casting choices may have just reopened a case I thought we were getting closer to solving. Remember the completely insane string of words Swift dropped directly into the camera during her Law & Order: SVU Emmys skit? “Saccharide. Aries. From the vineyard. North or South.” We still do not know what all four clues mean, but after seeing the “Patient Zero” teaser, I think we know considerably more than we did yesterday. Which means we have hours before four new songs arrive and ruin all of our theories. So, naturally, I think we should make more.
Taylor Swift’s ‘Patient Zero’ Teaser May Have Explained Two Emmys Clues
Let’s start with the easiest one: North or South. North Dakota. South Dakota. Dakota Johnson. Johnson appears prominently in the “Patient Zero” teaser, including a cemetery scene with Swift, and suddenly a phrase that sounded completely random at the Emmys looks suspiciously specific. Fans immediately made the same connection after the teaser arrived. E! News
Then there is saccharide. A saccharide is sugar. Colin Farrell stars as John Sugar in the Apple TV+ series Sugar. And who else unexpectedly showed up in the “Patient Zero” teaser Thursday morning? Colin Farrell. Again, it could be a coincidence, except at some point we have to acknowledge whose Easter egg hunt we are participating in here.
So, potentially, Saccharide = Sugar = Colin Farrell, while North or South = Dakota = Dakota Johnson. That still leaves us with Aries and from the vineyard, and I would very much like someone to explain those two before midnight.
That is why I am not closing the case on the Emmys sentence yet. If the Farrell and Johnson theories are right, Swift may have hidden two members of the “Patient Zero” cast inside an Emmys skit before we knew either actor was in the video. Aries and “from the vineyard” are still sitting there unexplained. At this point, we have spent so long staring at Taylor Swift evidence boards that we have officially become the evidence board.
‘Patient Zero’ and ‘The Encore’ Were Hiding in ‘Opalite’ for Months
The really annoying part is that some of this has apparently been sitting directly in front of us for months.
Go back to the “Opalite” music video. At approximately 2:34, there is a poster in the background reading “PATIENT FOR THE ENCORE.” Near the end of the video, four judges hold up scorecards after Swift and Domhnall Gleeson dance. Every one of them is a zero. Four zeroes. Parade’s breakdown of the “Opalite” clues
Now we have The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore, four new songs and a lead track called “Patient Zero.”
So, yes, I would like everyone to go back through “Opalite” because clearly we cannot be trusted to notice anything until Taylor tells us what we were supposed to notice. “Patient Zero” and The Encore suddenly look pretty obvious in hindsight. The question is what else is sitting in that video waiting for Friday to make us all feel stupid.
And that is the point of doing this before we hear the songs. Once we have lyrics, we can start actually connecting things. Right now, we have four titles, a 13-second video teaser and a woman who has made an entire fanbase deeply suspicious of background props.
The Four New ‘Life of a Showgirl’ Songs Give Swifties Plenty More to Decode
The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore adds four songs to the original album: “Patient Zero,” “Cleveland!,” “Pink Clouding” and “Babylon.” Swift said she wrote the songs after traveling to Sweden to celebrate the original album’s first week with Max Martin and Shellback. There happened to be a studio nearby, and, as Swift put it, they did what they do when they “feel anything at all”: they wrote more songs. She described the four tracks as being “born out of pure gratitude.” Variety Australia
“Cleveland!” is probably the easiest title to immediately connect to Swift’s personal life because Travis Kelce grew up in Cleveland Heights, but that tells us basically nothing about the actual song. More importantly, I need to discuss the exclamation point. Not “Cleveland.” “Cleveland!” Why are we yelling? Taylor has played this game with punctuation before—see “Florida!!!” and “CANCELLED!”—and Taylor Swift made me investigate the word saccharide this week, so an exclamation point is well within the jurisdiction of this investigation.
“Pink Clouding” may be the title we are most likely to get wrong. Pink clouding is an actual term used to describe a period of intense optimism or euphoria that can occur during early addiction recovery. Healthline’s explanation of pink clouding That does not tell us what Swift’s song is about. It gives us something much more useful right now: something to look for. Pink. Clouds. Euphoria. Fantasy. The feeling that everything is wonderful when reality may be considerably more complicated. Go back through The Life of a Showgirl and find anything that suddenly looks different now that we know the title.
Then there is “Babylon,” which may be the title I am most curious about simply because it is last. The original album ends with “The Life of a Showgirl,” while The Encore adds four tracks after it and leaves us with “Babylon” as the new ending. Babylon already comes loaded with ideas about wealth, power, excess, beauty and destruction, and it is not completely new territory in Swift World. She referenced the Gardens of Babylon in “cowboy like me,” and Babylon appears again in “us.,” her collaboration with Gracie Abrams. Does either connection matter? No idea. But why does Babylon close the show?
Put that one on the board.
Swifties Have Until ‘The Encore’ Drops to Make Their Predictions
This is the fun part.
Friday we get “Patient Zero,” “Cleveland!,” “Pink Clouding” and “Babylon.” Sunday, we get the complete “Patient Zero” video at the VMAs, with Swift, Johnson and Farrell and cinematography from three-time Oscar winner Emmanuel Lubezki. After that, we can dig into the lyrics, callbacks and Easter eggs and rank all four songs.
But right now, we still have time to be completely wrong in public.
So before The Encore drops, I want theories. What does Aries mean? What does “from the vineyard” mean? Are saccharide and North or South really pointing to Colin Farrell and Dakota Johnson, or is there another layer underneath them? What the hell is “Cleveland!” about? What are we supposed to find in “Pink Clouding”? And why is Babylon the end of the show?
Most importantly: What is currently sitting directly in front of us that we are all going to feel extremely stupid about tomorrow?
Does this theory hold up?
Share your theory in the comments below! Taylor has the receipts, and now so will we.
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