tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-42713731892160225472024-03-04T21:15:10.725-08:00Murderboarding Inc.Anna Hammetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10095633218958433882noreply@blogger.comBlogger299125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4271373189216022547.post-76118523027479901732017-09-29T19:52:00.000-07:002017-09-29T19:52:18.506-07:00The Original - Westworld S1 E1<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Westworld, which took the world by storm, is according to the initial press release sent out by HBO is "a dark odyssey about the dawn of artificial consciousness and the evolution of sin, exploring a world in which every human appetite, no matter how noble or depraved, can be indulged." The ten episode series was inspired by the 1973 feature film, written and directed by Michael Crichton. It is written and produced by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, with Nolan directing it. It's an visual experience not to be missed. </div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Taken from HBO Press Site. All Rights Reserved.</td></tr>
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We begin with episode 1, aptly titled "The Original." The first thing about Westworld and one of the most important things to remember is that everything is significant and everything is layered. This includes the episode titles. The first episode is partially a visual tutorial for what we are supposed to expect from both the park and the show. The other part is laying the groundwork for the road ahead of us. </div>
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The credits do a masterful job of blending the delightfully catchy and yet unsettling theme music with images taken from the inner workings of the park. Because who hasn’t wanted to see behind the scenes at an amusement park? <br /><br />“Bring her back online.” The first words out of the mouth of someone we’ll come to know quite well over the course of the season. Juxtaposed against the images of a clearly naked female form. The form in front of us is one of the hosts. That’s the term that the Delos Corporation uses for their robotic creations, who are lifelike to the point where you can almost not tell the difference between one of them and an actual flesh and blood human being. This host in particular is Delores Abernathy and she is the main vehicle through which the season's story is told. </div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1200/1*DuoHHmHXC03_LA0n938RGQ.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="533" data-original-width="800" height="213" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1200/1*DuoHHmHXC03_LA0n938RGQ.jpeg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Taken from HBO Press Site. All Rights Reserved.</td></tr>
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The questions asked of Dolores at the beginning are very reminiscent of of the Voight-Kampff test from Blade Runner. It’s clear that these hosts have already passed the Turing tests. Delos has leapt over the uncanny valley and made artificial lifeforms that so closely resemble humans that you would not be able to tell who is who except for one feature. The hosts are programmed to never harm a guest, they can't even swat a fly away if it lands on them. That alludes back to Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics: </div>
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<li>A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.</li>
<li>A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.</li>
<li>A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.</li>
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Delos has an interesting way of interpreting those, but we'll get to that a little later. </div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1200/1*mD3xfrCcE1fG7U4Dur0gow.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="533" data-original-width="800" height="212" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1200/1*mD3xfrCcE1fG7U4Dur0gow.jpeg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Taken from HBO Press Site. All Rights Reserved.</td></tr>
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There’s a train that takes you into the park. Teddy who we don’t know as a host yet - seems to be just another guest at first. This is where we’re introduced to the idea that some of the hosts are paired off, as well as being introduced to the park’s concept of the narrative loops. Because for the most part, the hosts are automated. So the scene in the bar, the raid at the Abernathy farm, Teddy's arrival on the train, all of those are part of a loop. </div>
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As Delores says, there are "no chance encounters." Everything is engineered and manufactured for the pleasure of the guests.<br /><br />The show also doesn’t shy away from the fact that given a place where there are no consequences, where you can do/say anything you want, that most people will immediately sink to their lowest, basest desires. Including things like rape, murder, necrophilia, and a whole host of other not necessarily society approved actions. It’s important to note here that the hosts cannot fight the guests off unless they’ve been programmed to struggle and even then it would only be a token effort as they cannot harm the guests at all. So there is that automatic power imbalance there between the guest and the host. <br /><br />It’s also telling that behind the scenes in park management, the Behavior departments deals with the coding and programming, but the departments dealing with the physical aspects of the hosts themselves, the actual shell that houses that code is named Livestock Management. Because the hosts, while they look human, are no better than livestock to Delos Corporation and everyone working there at the park. <table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/600/1*Y22FrjHdlCmc6Y2ArSPPAw.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="533" height="320" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/600/1*Y22FrjHdlCmc6Y2ArSPPAw.jpeg" width="212" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Taken from HBO Press Site. All Rights Reserved.</td></tr>
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<br />We’re introduced to the Man in Black - who has been coming there for 30 years and who tells Dolores that he didn’t pay all this money cause he wanted it easy. He also tells Teddy that he’s not the man he thought he "was.” The battle between them is when we’re first clued into the fact that Teddy isn’t a guest but a host. It also tells us that this park is very expensive and very elite. <br /><br />Based off the reset, we know they’ve got a quick turnaround for repairing any damage caused to the hosts and then getting them back into the park. The levels of craftmanship that goes into these creations is astounding - both the hosts and the park itself. It’s truly on another level. <br /><br />This is where we are introduced to one of the central figures of the show, Bernard Lowe as the head of the Behavior department. Bernard is with Elsie Hughes, one of the behavior techs as they discuss the latest code push and the something extra that got slipped into the code at the last minute. The “reveries” as we find out they are called are tied to specific memories that the host has, memories that haven’t been purged yet from the host. Memories are normally purged at the end of every narrative loop and for a good reason. Given what is inflicted on some of the hosts by the guests, the memories being purged is a good thing. No one wants to have to handle a host with PTSD or who’s holding a grudge against someone. That way lies danger and very costly lawsuits. </div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Taken from HBO Press Site. All Rights Reserved.</td></tr>
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Speaking of legal terms, on the show's promotional website, <a href="http://discoverwestworld.com/">DiscoverWestworld.com</a></div>
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you can find the official Delos Terms and Conditions and they're rather fascinating to read. I've underlined and bolded certain sections for emphasis. </div>
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<br /><b>TERMS OF DELOS DESTINATIONS</b></div>
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<br />IMPORTANT! PLEASE READ THESE TERMS AND CONDITIONS OF USE CAREFULLY BEFORE ENTERING THE DELOS DESTINATIONS COMPOUND (THE “SERVICE”), AS THEY AFFECT YOUR LEGAL RIGHTS AND OBLIGATIONS IN RESPECT TO YOUR USE OF THE SERVICE.<br /><br />1. ACCEPTANCE OF TERMS: Upon entering the Delos Destinations Port of Entry, you are agreeing to the terms and conditions as laid out in this document.<br /><br />2. LIMITATIONS OF LIABILITY: Upon use of The Service, you agree that Delos, Inc. is not responsible for any injuries that are the result of gameplay. Recreational activity within the Delos Destinations compound does contain risks, and every effort will be made to ensure the safety of every guest. However, Delos, Inc. gives you license to experience the parks as you see fit, and certain injuries may occur.<br /><br />(a) You dissolve Delos, Inc. of any responsibility financial or criminal that would result from dismemberment, broken bones, heart failure, loss or loss of use of hand and foot digits, shock, marital and relational strife, child endangerment, psychological trauma, delusions or hallucinations resulting from the realistic nature of the park experience, and/or any other physical, emotional, and psychological effects resulting from strenuous park activities.<br /><br />(b) Statistically speaking, you are more likely to die from lightning strike than to die while in a Delos park. However, the following causes of accidental death have occurred within the Delos Destinations compound: buffalo stampede, self- cannibalism, accidental hanging, drowning, 3rd-degree burns, autoerotic asphyxiation, blunt force trauma, allergic reaction to non-native plant life, falling from great heights, common manslaughter, tumbleweeds. You absolve Delos, Inc. of any wrongdoing if you or anyone in your party suffers bodily harm while using The Service, and you agree to not sue or prosecute Delos, Inc. or any of the smaller entities falling under the Delos Corporation.<br /><br />(c) All weapons and equipment used within Delos parks are the exclusive property of Delos, Inc. Gun ammunition contains proprietary safeguards related to bullet velocity, and tampering with gun safety features or ammunition automatically transfers liability to you and absolves Delos, Inc. of any injury or death that may occur as a result.<br /><br /><b>(d) All livestock within the Delos parks are Hosts, <u>with the notable exception of flies. </u>All humanoid and animal Hosts within Delos parks work to keep guests safe, even when the narrative calls for them to appear to endanger guests. Please note, the appearance of danger is not the same as true danger, and all Hosts utilize the Good SamaritanTM reflex to prevent bodily harm. </b>However:<br /><br />(e) Delos, Inc. shall not have a liability to you by reason of any delay or failure to perform if the delay or failure to perform is occasioned by circumstance beyond our control, which shall refer to any act of God, storm, fire, casualty, unanticipated work stoppage, power outage, satellite failure, strike, lockout, labor dispute, civil disturbance, riot, war, national emergency, Governmental action, Host malfunction, or other circumstance beyond our reasonable control.<br /><br />3. RULES OF CONDUCT: All guest activity within the parks of the Delos Destinations compound is unrestricted and without limitations. However:<br /></div>
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(a)<u> Upon entering the Delos Destinations compound, you agree to voluntarily divest yourself of all cameras, cellular devices, and electronic technology capable of recording your park experience, including virtual reality recorders and devices, and holographic recreation devices. There is no video recording, audio recording, or written recording allowed within the park. You are allowed to utilize the in-park Host character PHOTOGRAPHERS, whose narratives allow for you to take Delos- approved photographs. These photographs will reflect the time period and location of the park narratives you are playing. No other photography is allowed.</u><br /><br />(b) You agree that you will leave the Delos Destinations compound on your appointed leave date, and you will make no attempt to hide within the parks and avoid your leave date. A maximum of twenty-eight (28) days is allowed for being within the parks before guests must proceed to the Mesa Gold area for decompression. Any attempts to use the parks to avoid local, federal, or international court dates, jail or prison sentences, prosecution, or payments agreed upon in civil court or arbitration will not be supported by Delos, Inc.<br /><br />(c) Please act responsibly while a guest at the Mesa Gold resort and while utilizing the Mesa Bar. Please be mindful of other guests, families, and children. Please note that while utilizing the Mesa Bar, you may interact with Delos, Inc. employees; any ideas pitched to Delos, Inc. employees automatically become the property of Delos, Inc., in perpetuity. Also, any mention of human-on-human crime admitted to a Delos, Inc. employee must be brought to the attention of Delos, Inc., and if falling within the laws of the Territory, may have to be reported to local authorities.<br /><br />4. COPYRIGHTS AND TRADEMARKS: The Service and all materials included are protected by copyrights, patents, trade secrets or other proprietary rights under the respective laws of the Territory and are the exclusive property of Delos, Inc. These materials include, but are not limited to: the intellectual property of all Delos Destinations parks, the Host characters, Hosts’ programming code, the names of locations within the parks, the narratives within the parks, the recipes for specialized food and beverage items within the parks and featured at the Mesa Gold resort, text, photographs, graphics, video and audio content.<br /><br />(a) As such, you may not copy, reproduce, distribute, publish, enter into a database, display, perform, modify, create derivative works, transmit, or in any way exploit any part of The Service.<br /><br />(b) Using The Service is a privilege, and by doing so, you agree that you will make no attempt to remove anything belonging to Delos Destinations from the compound. You will not remove any food or beverage items, any Hosts, any clothing, any weapons or equipment, any signage, or any Host body parts from the compound. The only items you may remove from the compound are in-world photographs taken by designated Hosts. All other items are strictly forbidden.<br /><br />5. INVESTIGATIONS/VIOLATIONS: If Delos, Inc. or any Delos Entity believes, in its sole discretion, that a violation of these Terms has occurred, it may take any and all corrective action it deems appropriate without notice, including contacting local authorities on the mainland. All human-on-human crimes taking place within the Delos Destinations compound will first be investigated by Delos, Inc.; Delos, Inc. has successfully avoided providing personal data in response to a legal process involving outside court entities for its entire history of existence. However, Delos, Inc. reserves the right to disclose personal information requested by a law enforcement agency, and shall have no liability to you for such disclosure.<br /><br />6. PRIVACY: You are guaranteed absolute privacy while using The Service as outlined in this document, and all guest activities connected with use of The Service remain strictly private and confidential.<br /><br />(a) You agree that while in the parks, you will respect the privacy rights of other guests, and you will not endeavor to record for the purposes of sharing the activities of other guests in the parks. You will not at any time, directly or indirectly, disclose, disseminate, or duplicate park activity pertaining to your or other guests’ gameplay.<br /><br /><u>(b) By entering the Delos Destinations Port of Entry, you acknowledge that Delos, Inc. controls the rights to and remains the sole owner of, in perpetuity: all skin cells, bodily fluids, secretions, excretions, hair samples, saliva, sweat, blood, and any other bodily functions not listed here. Delos, Inc. reserves the right to use this property in any way, shape, or form in which the entity sees fit.</u><br /><br />7. MISCELLANEOUS: These Terms cannot be changed or terminated orally. Any failure of Delos, Inc. to exercise or enforce any right or provision of these Terms will not constitute a waiver of such right or provision. No waiver by Delos, Inc. of any provision of these Terms will be of any force or effect unless made in writing and signed by a duly authorized officer of Delos, Inc. Delos, Inc. may assign its rights and obligations under these Terms, in whole or in part, to any party at any time without any notice. Delos, Inc. reserves the right to deny access to all or part of the Service to you or any person in its sole discretion without notice or liability of any kind.<br /><br />So yeah, that's one hell of a document right there. There's so much packed into this document and we'll be coming back to it in later episodes. It addresses the safety protocols they've put into the hosts to make sure that the guests are not in any actual danger. It addresses the privacy concerns necessary to having a park that is built on the concept of a live-action Choose Your Own Adventure book. Do anything, go anywhere inside the park, be the hero or the villain...the only thing holding you back is your imagination.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Taken from HBO Press Site. All Rights Reserved.</td></tr>
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However perfect it all looks, there’s trouble in paradise and we get the first inkling of that with the talk that Teresa Cullen, Head of Delos’ Quality Assurance department and Bernard have, talking about how nervous code pushes make her and how while there hasn’t been a critical failure in the park for thirty years. “They all rebel eventually," a surprisingly self-aware and chilling statement from the Quality Assurance head. That interaction leads into the “Unscheduled Activity in Cold Storage” which Bernard and QA security chief Ashley Stubbs go investigate. </div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Taken from HBO Press Site. All Rights Reserved.</td></tr>
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<br />This is where we are introduced to the mad genius, Dr. Robert Ford himself, creator of the park and the hosts. We also get a glimpse into some of the behind the scenes park infrastructure, which leaves a lot to be desired, in some areas. Since the cooling system in cold storage has been down for weeks, so Stubbs says, “But no one’s complained.” One can only gather that whoever is responsible for keeping those systems running probably has other higher priorities that making sure the decommissioned hosts in cold storage don’t melt. Why they are keeping them down there is anyone's guess at this point, but it stands to reason that strange whims by mad geniuses are indulged if said geniuses make a lot of money.<br /><br />It’s a little shocking at first to see all the naked decommissioned hosts there, but it just re-emphasizes the mentality that the hosts are not treated or viewed as humans in any manner by the staff of Delos incorporated. Ford and the second host ever built, Old Bill are sitting there having a drink and chatting. As Ford says, Old Bill’s a good listener. <table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1400/1*S_8ZWhlFgDQ_MMRknM5MoQ.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="503" data-original-width="800" height="201" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1400/1*S_8ZWhlFgDQ_MMRknM5MoQ.jpeg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Taken from HBO Press Site. All Rights Reserved.</td></tr>
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<br />Flashing back to the park, every time we see this loop repeat itself, we get a little more information each time, going a little deeper and getting more details. We also see that the hosts are not tied into these loops to the exclusion of all others. They can deviate and improvise, depending on the Guest’s interactions with them. <br /><br />This time it’s different, the Man in Black tells Delores that he has other plans and to have a pleasant evening before he goes and sits down at the betting table at the Mariposa. <br /><br />Teddy is with a group of guests out on a bounty hunt and the sheriff glitches very badly, scaring the guests. This causes some concern with QA and Teresa tells Bernard that if there’s so much as an unscripted sneeze, she wants to know about it. We’re also introduced to Lee Sizemore, who is the Head of Narrative and an asshole. We also learn that at any given point, there are at least 100 interconnected narratives running in the park for the delight of the guests who come there for their full immersion experiences. </div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/600/1*SoA7dtggoB_clw1ICMu8eQ.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="533" height="320" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/600/1*SoA7dtggoB_clw1ICMu8eQ.jpeg" width="213" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Taken from HBO Press Site. All Rights Reserved.</td></tr>
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You also see where a fly lands on Teddy and he can’t even bat it away. This is part of the coding of all hosts. Unable to hurt anything they haven’t been programmed explicitly to, and never ever hurt a guest.<br /><br />Delores is painting when some guests happen upon her. They’ve got a little boy with them and she helps him feed the horse and then there’s this exchange where the little boy tells her “You’re not real. You’re one of them, aren’t you.” This upsets Delores, to the point where she hastily packs up her things and leaves. <br /><br />Flash over to Daddy Abernathy doing his chores and in the process, he finds something in the dirt and picks it up. So when Delores comes back, he’s sitting in his rocker on the porch and he tells her that he found this in the fields today. She says it doesn’t look like anything to her and that’s something we’ll hear again. But her father sees it for what it is and wonders about it. It’s a picture of a lady standing in an urban center - could be NYC, could be somewhere else. <br /><br />Lee and Teresa are having a moment on the Mesa. Where we learn a bit more about Lee and his particular him-ness. Lee doesn’t believe making the hosts more lifelike is really necessary. Though he also asks when Teresa plans to rotate home, which just conveys the idea that working at this park is not dissimilar to working or living at an amusement park nowadays or crews on an oil rig or cruise ship. Lee’s point ties back into the whole uncanny valley phenomenon - the park only works because the guests know that the hosts <b><i>aren't </i></b>real. The mention of the “Dr. Ford factor” gives us the wonderful quote of “If our fearless leader goes off the deep end, you want his job.” We know already in the first episode that while it may look perfect, this place is far from it. There are internal tensions both in and out of the park itself. This also gives us a hint of possible external conflicts as well. <br />Because as Teresa points out so very eloquently, “This park is one thing to the guests, one thing to the shareholders, and something completely different to management.” </div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1200/1*KiCODZl1mnzy9fEfqAONeg.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="533" data-original-width="800" height="213" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1200/1*KiCODZl1mnzy9fEfqAONeg.jpeg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Taken from HBO Press Site. All Rights Reserved.</td></tr>
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Westworld, I should point out again, doesn’t do <b><u>anything </u></b>by accident. Everything is planned and accounted for, and automated. There are failsafes and redundancies built into the system. Teresa’s complete and utter refusal of all of Lee’s bullshit is so very refreshing. “Management’s real interests etc.” Lee’s smart enough to guess there’s a bigger picture, but not smart enough to see what it is. <br /></div>
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Fading back to the park and really I can’t say enough about the authenticity of the park’s hosts and settings. Both good and bad. </div>
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<br />Kissy the dealer, as part First Nations dealing with the treatment and mentalities that were authentic to the timeperiod for that minority group and then he gets taken by Man in Black because he’s got something that the Man In Black wants.<br /><br />Another host glitching, this time in an altogether different way and going back to the earlier point, this is why it’s good memories get purged so Walters don’t happen. The reveries giving Walter the ability to hold a grudge and start taking it out on all of those who’d killed him in past loops. Proving that the sheriff wasn’t an isolated incident and these aberrant behaviors can be linked back to the recent code push with the reveries. Though Walter is heard to say something interesting “Not going to die this time, Arnold.” He’s acting way outside his parameters and that sends Teresa and QA into a tizzy. </div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1200/1*wT489Jz23q96Doe6c-8nrw.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="533" data-original-width="800" height="213" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1200/1*wT489Jz23q96Doe6c-8nrw.jpeg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Taken from HBO Press Site. All Rights Reserved.</td></tr>
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<br />Because the automated hosts are supposed to stay within their loops, keep to their scripts, with <i>minor </i>improvisations. Obviously, Walter’s behavior is far from a minor improvisation. So they pull all the updated hosts so that they can roll them back. They isolate the bug and it is connected to the reveries code that Ford slipped in there. The reveries were mistakes, just like how evolution came to be. We are all products of a million mistakes, one after another. <br /><br />Ford monologues for a bit here about how self-delusion is a gift of natural selection, and how we can cure any disease, keep even the weakest alive, possibly even resurrect the dead. We’re done. This is as good as it gets. We are at the pinnacle of what we can achieve as humans. He also asks Bernard to “indulge him the occasional mistake” because Ford enjoys playing the part of the benevolent mysterious genius father-god. <br /><br />The Man in Black is looking for answers and we know he means business and that he’ll do whatever he can to get them. Kissy’s trying to run and we know this is going to end badly for him. We also get some idea with some of the wide shots here about exactly how vast the park is. The scope of Westworld is staggeringly huge. “You know about games, don’t you? There’s a deeper level to this game. A lot of wisdom in ancient cultures.” These statements are loaded ones, they play into the negative and racist stereotypes of the First Nations people. It also gives us a small clue at where the Man in Black might be heading with his search and to no one's surprise, it's not anywhere good. </div>
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/600/1*DQElsNnU2wAbrkhAKu3bXw.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="533" height="320" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/600/1*DQElsNnU2wAbrkhAKu3bXw.jpeg" width="213" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Taken from HBO Press Site. All Rights Reserved.</td></tr>
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Delores starts her loop again but her daddy ain’t right and she knows it. So we get this exchange: “I had a question. A question you’re not supposed to ask. Which gave me an answer you’re not supposed to know." It's clear that Delores has no idea what even to do with this.</div>
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<br />“Hell is empty and all the devils are here.” He grabs her and whispers something and she goes running to town, looking for the doctor. Clem and Maeve watch her running around, yelling for a doctor before she runs into Teddy again. Before they can leave though, the bandits come into town. <br /></div>
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Back behind the scenes, the model of the park gives us another clue into exactly how massive this park really is and what a HUGE undertaking it has to be, in order to keep it running as smoothly as it does. <br /><br />The score too is appropriately chilling and thrilling in the appropriate places. Teddy winds up dying in Delores’ arms. Maeve and Hector sass at each other before Maeve kills the hosts that are coming after Clem. We never do get Hector’s speech, that Lee punched up and was so excited about. Since a guest kills Hector first and we further see exactly how socialized everyone is to treating and thinking of the hosts as something not human. <br /><br />“Look at her wriggle.” <br /><br />“Go get the photographer.” The dehumanizing of the hosts is a constant theme throughout the entire show. </div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1200/1*-lSIrJ_KbPBaqOkeQBIWig.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="533" data-original-width="800" height="213" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1200/1*-lSIrJ_KbPBaqOkeQBIWig.jpeg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Taken from HBO Press Site. All Rights Reserved.</td></tr>
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<br />Delores tells Teddy their paths are tied together and that “we’ve only just begun” and she’s not wrong. There’s a huge amount of foreshadowing in that line alone and in the positions both of them are in as she says it.</div>
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<br />We’re also introduced to more of the key phrases that the staff uses to corral the hosts. “Soon this will all feel like a distant dreams. Until then may you rest in a deep and dreamless slumber.” <br /><br />There are all these hosts that were violent and then there was one that was not and that was Delores’ dad. Peter Abernathy, still holding the picture and as of now, we have no idea where it came from. So Stubbs is asking about the dad and the results are confusing. His primary drives are all still there, the herd, his wife, and his daughter and that’s was sends him round the bend. His need to protect Delores his daughter. He has to tell her. He has to warn her. “The things they do to her. The things <b><u><i>you</i></u></b> do to her. I have to protect her. She’s got to get out.” <br />We’re miles beyond a simple glitch here and it shows in the interactions that Abernathy has with Ford too. </div>
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1200/1*Z4uiKSPiTDHp1GRIJ9WmVQ.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="533" data-original-width="800" height="213" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1200/1*Z4uiKSPiTDHp1GRIJ9WmVQ.jpeg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Taken from HBO Press Site. All Rights Reserved.</td></tr>
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Dr. Robert Ford: What is your itinerary? </div>
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Peter Abernathy: To meet my maker. <br />Dr. Robert Ford: Ah. Well. You're in luck. And what do you want to say to your maker? <br />Peter Abernathy: By most mechanical and dirty hand <br />[laughs] <br />Peter Abernathy: . I shall have such revenges on you... both. The things I will do, what they are, yet I know not. But they will be the terrors of the earth. You don't know where you are, do you? You're in a prison of your own sins. These violent delights will have violent ends. </div>
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Remember that. It’ll be important later on. <br /><br />Contrasting the nudity of the hosts to the staff who is always fully clothed, head to toe with long pants and sleeves. You don’t see a whole lot of skin from staff members. It’s yet another trick trying to socialize/normalize the idea that the hosts aren’t anything but property, livestock to be handled however you care to. </div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1200/1*E2gWmRkqijmz8RDFSUoG1A.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="533" data-original-width="800" height="213" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1200/1*E2gWmRkqijmz8RDFSUoG1A.jpeg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Taken from HBO Press Site. All Rights Reserved.</td></tr>
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The episode brings up the idea of would you ever hurt a living thing, which of course raises the idea yet again of what counts as a living thing? Most people say by default, of course not, but is that really the truth? <br /></div>
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Delores is the oldest host in the park and that’s said by Stubbs in an intonation that really means something if you pay attention to it. Being the oldest in the park is something to take note of, it’s a rare distinction you get the feeling. <br /><br />Back in the loop, except this time, Daddy’s been replaced with a different host. We see Peter and Walter being taken to cold storage. The Man in Black is taking Kissy’s scalp off.<br /><br />And then. <br /><br />Delores kills the fly. Ending episode one with a startling bang. </div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1400/1*lL_8IgtmlMCF9mbJFScPLg.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="800" height="179" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1400/1*lL_8IgtmlMCF9mbJFScPLg.jpeg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Taken from HBO Press Site. All Rights Reserved.</td></tr>
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DJhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02876918775305146898noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4271373189216022547.post-34073666309031001452016-09-02T04:09:00.001-07:002016-09-02T04:09:26.903-07:00But I Wanna Esplode! Helix 1x03 274<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Previously on Helix! An unknown mutation zombie disease, going with most of the zombie/slash/outbreak tropes so far, including the one where anyone who says "People have to know what's going on up here" dies. So that's cheerful!</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">No jaunty music when we come back from the very brief previouslies, and mostly they're brief because the first two episodes were fairly concise and general to establishing setting, tone, and characters. Very minimalist, to go with the first couple of shots of water dripping from the tap. Very serene, in a way, water dripping is often used to indicate serenity, except it also serves to contrast Julia's experience a moment ago which was anything but. Julia's unconscious on the floor, as it turns out, or semi-conscious when Alan gets to her. She claims she passed out while taking a shower for standard decontamination procedures, and from her behavior it's hard to say whether or not she consciously is putting it out of her mind, unconsciously blocking it because it was traumatic, or lying through her teeth because it was traumatic and she doesn't want to think about the possibility of having been exposed to the black goo of doom. We do get very rapid cut flashbacks, but that could still be subconscious mind. In any case, Alan will walk her back to her quarters because it's not safe to be out there alone. He's not wrong, either. </span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyZkbIQEshfc9jQLLcu3njl-I5YH0QniK3WXNdu2CL6MyRcK5Y8n-p3Efn2LiUBhKdu4Nz0QGwwYk9IYl8fAanSQmXnE-uOl5J8AIErFg9R4q_xKGw7tK_Ydz1qbewxOyEbhADSY8xilw/s1600/HelixS1E03C01.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyZkbIQEshfc9jQLLcu3njl-I5YH0QniK3WXNdu2CL6MyRcK5Y8n-p3Efn2LiUBhKdu4Nz0QGwwYk9IYl8fAanSQmXnE-uOl5J8AIErFg9R4q_xKGw7tK_Ydz1qbewxOyEbhADSY8xilw/s320/HelixS1E03C01.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Underscoring this is Alan standing in a corridor and tilting his head up at the ceiling as we hear banging noises. Alan, what happened to it's dangerous to go alone </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: line-through; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">take this</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">? Is this do as I say not as I do Alan? (Hint: It's always do as I say not as I do Alan.) He goes into a lab that looks like it could have been Peter's lab maybe? From the close up angles we're getting glimpses of faces and blurred everything else so it's hard to tell how big it is; whatever the lab was they had a glovebox and a light-up table (what honestly is the purpose of those light up tables if you're not using it for drafting or drawing or something else needing backlighting? does it help with looking bare-eyed at petri dishes? if any scientists know, please speak up) and various sample tubes. It's also one of the labs connected to an observation station. So, potentially any lab in the base. Fortunately we're not going to be here long, Alan gets off a hello are you in here and turns to look at nothing on the floor, or a place where something would have been, before Peter does the jump scare behind him. I feel a need to once again note that we're not seeing them standing next to each other a lot. Just in case anyone wanted to know why it's so startling later. Anyway, Peter's standing behind him looking even more blood filled around the eyes and not at all with it, though he doesn't move to attack. Instead he just sort of gurbles out "help me" and collapses.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Speaking of collapsing, several shots after the credits of Sarah including lip-licking and trembling hands indicate that at best she's nervous and at worst she's actually suffering from some kind of condition. She's also isolated and lit up with red at first before the camera pulls back to reveal the situation she's actually in: briefing the base scientists, or some of them, with Doreen on how things are going to go from now on. Basically they're to report to Doreen if they experience any kind of symptoms. This is not reassuring, either the implications about Sarah or the best they can do for the potentially infected scientists. One guy in particular is deeply unreassured, to the point of asking for the drugs that make it better. So clearly this guy's not a medical scientist who's done any kind of practicing then (or he is and he just thinks he can do that without being annoying.) Doreen points out that the wrong meds could do more harm than no meds at all, so first they research, then they medicate. I'm not actually sure if this is a sly dig at House (the doctor, not the show) or what, but it amuses me to think it might be. Backing Doreen up is a beefy looking security guard with a baton that may or may not be electrified. Heh. Whether because of the threat of being beaten into submission or because he's reassured by Doreen's assertion that as soon as they know what they're dealing with they'll attack the disease aggressively, he does back off. We'll assume, because it's television, that he can't hear Doreen's next comment about wanting to yell at them, that that's more for the benefit of the audience. Because honestly it probably is. Sarah doesn't look entirely like she's paying attention, which may mean she's tuning Doreen's complaints out or may mean she's barely clinging to functionality. </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Over to Hatake and Ballaseros where they're talking about security doing constant sweeps and another two potentially infected being moved over to isolation, so there's at least one vector running around out there, probably two given the escapees we had last time. We already took care of Drs. Tracy and DeKlerk, so now is probably the time when people are starting to wonder where Dr. Raver. Never fear! That's what the Helix extras on the website are for, where we will be treated to the dulcet tones of Hiroshi Hatake / Hiroyuki Sanada delivering a Hamlet soliloquey in Japanese. Mmmm. Less mmm considering it's against the visuals of Raver potentially dying in the snow (keep in mind the monkeys), but still an element of mmm nonetheless. Daniel is worried about losing control of the base due to people panicking, which is not an unreasonable concern, but Hatake is more concerned with where Julia Walker is. Um? So much um. Especially since he doesn't seem to want to talk to her, just know where she is. Oh, hey, there's Peter! So that's one less vector to worry about. Alan's making snide remarks about the man Hatake has following him, heh. I have more sympathy for that because working a delicate operation of any kind, let alone epidemiology, is tricky enough without having someone staring over your shoulder or jostling your elbow at every step. Alan orders a number of tests I don't entirely think we're meant to hear, they sound like standard diagnostics, and Daniel wants to know how he found him. Well, Peter turned himself in. So it turns out all they had to do was stick Peter's brother out in a corridor and wait. Or at least I'm sure it feels that way.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Hatake would like an update on Peter's status, when Alan gets out of the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: line-through; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">glass prison</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> clean room. Correction, the status of his sedation, which implies that Hatake doesn't actually give a shit whether Peter lives or dies. This may or may not be true, given later developments. It's certainly true that at the moment the show is trying to paint Hatake as emotionless and pragmatic at best, and the villain of the show at worst. Certainly they could work harder and have people with big arrow signs following him going This Man Is Suspicious, but that's a little ... too much. And Hatake does have a point that Peter has gone to some bloody extremes to run around the base before. Including, you know, kill a person. Alan protests that morphine is adequate but when Serrrgio gets in on the act he caves and asks if there's a more secure place they can hold him. With the attitude of I'm Not Giving In But. You save that face, Alan. </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So, okay, sure, move him to the old base, because that's not ominous and doesn't have a long tradition of being the place of danger in horror fiction. Daniel gives us the run through on what's down here, mostly old labs and living quarters, and it's called Level R. It also contains maintenance, including oxygen scrubbers. That's not going to be important in any way later, just like the RFID chips. On the other hand the isolation makes it a good place to put hazardous material labs or storage and wait a second, a penny is dropping here, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">you put the most hazardous materials on the same floor as the fucking oxygen scrubbers?</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> I'm going to take a second to shriek about that. I mean, I assume they're not in close physical proximity, but I'm still going to shriek at what a bad idea that sounds like. At least the ventilation systems for the one hazmat lab Daniel shows them, he says, are separate from the rest of the facility. Even so, I'd actually put the CO2 scrubbers elsewhere. Preferably behind high security. I'm just saying. Oh, and for extra fun, Serrrgio is pointing out that there was nuclear radiation of some kind going on here. It's only when he points that out that Daniel admits that they had fusion experiments going on in here, but they haven't used the lab in over five years and they test every six months. So they're being as safe as they can be but that's still a nervewracking environment to work in because, viscerally, everyone who grew up during the Cold War and after Hiroshima and Nagasaki is aware of what nuclear radiation can do. I wonder what Hatake was doing when those bombs fell. I guess Daniel has a point, though, that it's a good isolation unit to contain vectors and the infected. Which is funny because Hatake and Serrrrgio were the ones all about containing Peter, and Alan runs away with it going "Great idea! Let's isolate and contain everyone!" He's not wrong, though. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Back upstairs. Julia's having issues. They appear to be flashback issues given that she's, well, the TV is showing us her flashbacks and she's holding herself and behaving as though she's having sensory issues. And then hallucinations! Great. Are those hallucinations or fears? The fact that she comes out of it behaving as if she doesn't know whether or not it's real indicates hallucinations. Julia, honey, saying you dont' get sick to a mirror is not actually the same as not getting sick. I know you want it to be, but it's not. </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Alan is delivering orders (Hatake's treating them like requests but they're totally orders) whent hey turn a corner and find oh look one of the infected doctors. Dr. Sulemani sort of staggers towards them begging for help, dripping black bile out her mouth and down her front? That's rather gross. And no one gets a chance to react before Daniel shoots her and sends us off into a commercial break. Daniel, with the gun. Was that really necessary? Peter applies first aid after the break with gloves on, so at least there's that but, was it really necessary to go in and dig out the bullet? (Hint: it isn't, always). Alan barks some orders that are more definitely orders this time to get her to a lab while Hatake dryly praises his quick thinking as saving her life, which Alan snarks shouldn't have been necessary in the first place.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">He's kind of got a point. Up in Hatake's office Daniel defends himself by saying the situation was escalating, but I didn't see any escalation happening anywhere, did anyone else? She was staggering towards them, in another half a minute or so she probably would have tried to collapse on someone, but if they had gloves they had plenty of recourse other than shooting her. Notably, Daniel protests that he was trying to protect Dr. Hatake, which. Heh. That's a tangled web we'll get into later. Alan reams out Daniel about shooting his patients, Hatake claims Sulemani's life as his responsibility, Alan claims it as his as senior doctor in charge of the plague, I watch this a year or so after it aired and think Hatake has a very different idea of claiming someone's life as his responsibility than Alan does. Heh. Alan lays down the law about no lethal force, and says that Hatake had better outlaw it or he'll pull his team and come back in six months for the bodies. ... I'm picturing how that ends now. I don't think it would end the way Alan expects.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Speaking of things no one expected, Julia is trying to get answers from Peter about what he did to her and I have to raise my hand and ask, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">is no one recording what's going on in his hospital cell</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">? Because she just outed herself as infected, although she could also make a case for it being an emotional thing given their histories. Peter seems to be trying to tell her something, so we'll have a nice long dramatic multi-angle wait while she slowly lowers her head to his ear. I honestly expected him to attack her again, or her to hallucinate that he was, but in this case the jump scare comes from Alan banging on the window to get her attention. It turns out he wants her for a briefing on how they're going to manage the level R thing, which is all well and good until they get to the part where they need to be able to tell who's infected and who isn't. And honestly, this is where I fall down on it all. What I would do in their case, what I think (once again: not an epidemiologist) they should be doing is simply isolating everyone who's even remotely been exposed, bringing them food and water and possibly conversation through a door for twenty four, forty eight hours, and if symptoms develop, then you know who's infected. It'd require locking down the base except for the outside team and maybe the security team, but at least you'd have an idea. On the other hand, I will also admit that may not be a viable solution because it would require a huge amount of tolerance and cooperation from the base staff, which so far has not been coming. Still, though. This is just asking for trouble. They discuss setting up a rapid response test, which involves synthesizing a pure form of the virus, which is actually viruses. Which are apparently not in any database existing, although that doesn't answer the question of synthesizing a pure form of the virus or what's in the vials in Peter's lab. Narvik A, it turns out, is most likely the liquifaction virus that killed the poor bastards filling up the very slooshy body bags. Narvik B is the one that turned Peter into a vector. We have some more of the standard "it'll take eight hours" "well you have four" trope, which at this point I think only is put into TV and film without an obvious outside deadline (it'll take eight hours" "Peter's not going to last four", for example) because we expect it and take it for granted. The infected monkey! The virus is being genome sequenced now, which sounds like a while you wait process but a quick Googling tells me </span><a href="http://www.popsci.com/scientists-can-now-sequence-whole-genome-in-26-hours" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">that is in fact what it has become</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. The future, ladies and gentlefolk! Doreen will go back to working that, which may be their best hope for a vaccine, sure why not. Serrrrgio will go with her for her protection, which she says she doesn't need him and I wholeheartedly agree. But that's a story for a shortly to come up time. The commlink window comes up in six hours and why-couldn't-this-have-been-used-for-the-deadline number of minutes and Alan thinks if they have the data to send to Atlanta (CDC headquarters, again) they might be able to handle this. Well then. We have a final grouping of shots between Alan looking back at Julia, then Julia looking at Peter, and then Peter looking at her as she leaves. Oh you wacky guys. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Alan is giving out instructions for what to supply the quarantine area with when Daniel comes to reassure him (I doubt it) that Dr. Sulemani is going to make it. Alan tells him to tell the base doctor to keep her sedated (Propofol) and walks off. Daniel doesn't feel this is good enough! He wants Alan to know that she was coming for Dr. Hatake, and to that I say do you know something about this virus that we don't, that suggests she'd blame Hatake or think he could help more than the rest of them? Also yes, Daniel, you are overprotective of Hatake. Also slightly overmilitarized considering he's advocating for shooting all the infected. Alan takes this to the next step of shooting anyone who might be infected, to which Daniel has nothing but after a pause walks off with "The only reason you didn't shoot her was because you didn't have a gun in your hand." No, no, I think the reason no one else shot her was because she was staggering and begging, not running. Remember, Daniel. Now is not the time for fear. That comes later. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Over in the lab Julia and Sarah have nothing but false positives and a whole lot of technobabble that, if it matches up with any of the other technobabble, is meant to sound more technological than relevant and either isn't as grave or isn't as suitable as it could be. But eh, it sounds good, which is the important part. We then get treated to a hand tremble from Jordan, and if Julia accepts her explanation as being probably just tired (that's a hell of an exhaustion tremor if so and a strong indication that she should be sleeping, not doing lab work, because god knows what could happen with a hand tremor like that in the lab) it's because she's likely infected, herself. If she calls Sarah out on it she'll have to face it herself. Sarah offers to go get some more samples from Peter's blood serum and Julia rushes off to do it, for any number of potential unprofessional reasons.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtMVz99GJmKLwn4xlOpYG1xj6bW5mjpPPi8Zx-JeaECI9HpgJT3fwyHIpBHUiaWHXkCjtvr5V9OYSquelCE-Fg3ti8DLgb6VZwL5hOAJdG9mbbXjZrVsreFHKIApvXYK0VCTYjz-jTbKQ/s1600/HelixS1E03C03.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtMVz99GJmKLwn4xlOpYG1xj6bW5mjpPPi8Zx-JeaECI9HpgJT3fwyHIpBHUiaWHXkCjtvr5V9OYSquelCE-Fg3ti8DLgb6VZwL5hOAJdG9mbbXjZrVsreFHKIApvXYK0VCTYjz-jTbKQ/s320/HelixS1E03C03.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Serrrgio is playing uninformed audience surrogate and giving Doreen a person to explain to that you don't cure a virus, you treat the symptoms and help the infected get better, and then you vaccinate the healthy population. It is, after all, a common misconception. That is not, however, a monkey. That is a sanitized lab table. After the break Doreen is inclined to confront Hatake, and Serrrgio is inclined to talk her out of it. Which, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">now</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> we know why he was doing this. And, okay, even then it seems a bit suspicious. He wants to go around Hatake is the summation of his arguments, and he wants Doreen to do it for him. Given that Hatake has stonewalled, obfuscated, and probably outright lied to them, Doreen is easy to persuade. Once they get out there and see the monkeys, though, and not only that but once Doreen sees where they are and starts wondering aloud how the hell Serrrgio found them all the way out here in the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">ice</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, well. It's hard to say if this is when she gets suspicious or just when she decides to call him out on it. You have to admit, seeing a few dozen monkeys frozen in the act of running for their terrified infected little lives is probably unsettling enough to decide you're going to do something reckless. like call out a maybe corporate or international spy on his bullshit lies. Heh. He insists on the engineer front (it may not even be a front) and then he admits to something which also may or may not be true, which is that there are people in the army who think this wasn't an accident. I'm almost entirely sure this is several kinds of a lie, which is to say that the individual words are true, there are people, they work for the army although their first loyalties aren't to the US military, they think it wasn't an accident because they know Hatake and they know that this was a field test. Of sorts. But at this point I'm getting ahead of myself and the show. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Over in the quarantine zone Alan is caring for the sick while Daniel is attending to the safety of everyone else when he gets word that one of the escapees has been found on that level. Huh. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Over in the lab Sarah has figured out the test! Apparently she has figured out that you combine white blood cells with bio-luminescing wait you're testing for white blood cell count? Do you have any idea how general that is? Never mind. It's a stupid test. It is an incredibly stupid test, and it is only slightly less stupid for Julia to go testing herself to make sure she's not infected when what you're testing for is </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">active white blood cells.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Dear god. The clippiness of the camera cuts will tell us that this is a stupid idea, because usually that only happens when something dangerous is going on.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So let's go back to the escapee, who is apparently trying to take down a door with a fire axe and calling for someone named Duchamp. Alan and the security dude show up and suddenly he's turning around with the fire axe and, okay, I get why you're freaked about Dr. Sulemani getting shot Mr. Fire Axe dude but brandishing a heavy edged weapon is not a way to go about not getting shot. Yes? Yes. Not only is he protesting he's not infected while snorting black bile, he's swinging the fire axe </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">at Alan and the security goon</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Good job. Oh, that's a security Daniel, too. Good planning. This isn't the best lightning nor is it the least choppy shots, although some of that is on purpose. He's talking about a cure, there's a cure? That's the first we've heard of this although it would not be the first time in fiction that a shadowy organization created a virus so they could do something with (usually profit off of) a cure. The cure seems to be called Sudra or Sodra or a thing like that. Then the security folk tase the doctor when he seems to be committed to one direction enough that they can sneak up behind him, and down he goes. Alan orders him off to the fusion lab for an illusion of control either for himself or the audience; I have no doubt Daniel was going to take him there anyway. And then Alan gets to knock and reassure the mysterious Duchamp that everything's fine, the scary man with the axe and the black bile has gone away now. Oh good. Everybody seems to be fine, Duchamp is from a French speaking company and denies any existence of a cure. Then locks the door with his biometrics before walking off. That's not suspicious at all.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Someone is doing something with blood? DNA? A centrifuge? I have no idea. Ah, no, that's growth factors and sequencing, Well, that's all well and good, that's normally a very boring procedure except for the fact that, um. Wow. Those are some impressive growth factors. That's sort of the instant evil just add water form of growth factors, as it erupts into a black mass of tendril-y... hardening foam? In archaeology camp once we trained on excavating trays of "artifacts" in sand by exposing as much as we could and then packing the whole thing in spray foam that hardened to something like an airy putty consistancy, that's what this is reminding me of. Mostly it looks like quick-growth evil plants erupting out of the petri dish. Black and red, that's a good combination. Doreen just stares for a moment which, honestly, I can't fault her for and she also had to get her hands out of the waldoes, before hitting the KILL IT OH GOD KILL IT NOW button. Which is in fact red. Hey, look, it was pushing its way out of the case. That's distressing.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">After the break Doreen and Serrrrgio are walking down a white uber-medical hallway talking about how dammit that wasn't supposed to grow like </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">that</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and Doreen wants answers. Let's all take note of the somewhat isolated and conspiratorial blocking here, not to mention the white uber-medical setting. Though it's also true that there's not much else of a set out here. Serrrgio reminds her about the disappearing monkey and suggests she not tell Hatake. No, that's fair, but are you going to tell Alan? And the rest of your team? That might be a good idea, especially since you've already stated you don't trust this so-called army engineer. No? No. </span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqKgeuyOO4UnI4pbGxnDujqBITjQswtGNIk1OovEuQFGOWX2ffc4qpdd3PKyCOxwmMEJ2e2eN4ivYlSI96kbaBxva4-PkETqkM_scNL7FBNo1d018E9lozMW_VpE9lCq3vh0ldhMuTplM/s1600/HelixS1E03C04.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqKgeuyOO4UnI4pbGxnDujqBITjQswtGNIk1OovEuQFGOWX2ffc4qpdd3PKyCOxwmMEJ2e2eN4ivYlSI96kbaBxva4-PkETqkM_scNL7FBNo1d018E9lozMW_VpE9lCq3vh0ldhMuTplM/s320/HelixS1E03C04.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Over in Hatake's office again Alan wants to know what the hell you have a cure? He's not so upset about it because, well, the source was a highly agitated and sick doctor trying to beat down a door with a fire axe. Or at least he isn't upset until Hatake tries claiming proprietary biotechnology at which point he gets cranky. I would, too. Proprietary technology only gets you so far when there are actual lives at stake. Although I have to wonder about what Alan thought he would get from Hatake's promises of transparency. He has to threaten him with newspapers instead of waiting for Hatake to talk to his board of directors. It works well enough that Hatake tells him SODRA (as I think they're saying it) is an anti-viral with a literally unbelievable cure rate. As in, no, I don't believe it, Alan, and neither should you. Alan asks him how many viruses he's tested it on, Hatake replies all of them, which I would take to be humor except Hatake seems to be one of those people who doesn't have a sense of humor that anyone is aware of. No, Hatake, you can't literally test an anti-viral on All The Viruses. Not without blowing your cover anyway. Alan will name a few viruses, Hatake nods, Alan points out that one of those viruses, smallpox, is only kept in the CDC and a place in Russia. Oh Alan, you sweet summer child. For those who want to know, yes, smallpox is supposed to only be kept in a certain few very specific places under heavy security protocols both physical security and biological, because supposedly we have eradicated it in the 1980s, and everyone is either vaccinated or unlikely to come into contact with it. This is also most likely a lie. There have been shipments of smallpox lost in the past, almost certainly a handful of countries have samples for their own experimental purposes, and a box of vials of smallpox was found </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">in a cardboard box behind a door in a former lab in Maryland.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> A few months after the first season of this show aired, no less. I was morbidly amused by that. But the main point is, Alan, dear one, you should fucking know better. He is shocked. Shocked to find lethal virus testing in this establishment. That's not the shocking part, the bad news is that SODRA has a 75% mortality rate. I fail to see how that constitutes no damage to host cells but okay, sure Hatake, whatever, that does in fact rule SODRA out as an option unless people get desperate enough to volunteer to be human trials for it. We'll get back to that later as Alan towers over/gapes at Hatake. Heh. I like that blocking on that shot, that is a funny shot.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Up in the lab where Sarah and Julia are working on the non-functional test Alan comes up to get them and find out who's infected and needs to be isolated in level R, and who isn't and can stay upstairs. Not that this is going to help anything I just. Seriously. Who came up with that. They start separating in one big room, too, which is not the best idea if you want to keep calm. Then you get a lot of agitated people wondering which group they're in, even if Alan isn't telling them which group is which. The obvious thing is, the ones who get to go back upstairs are the clean ones. The other obvious thing is that what they should have done was to have everyone go into a closed room, tested, wait for the test since it doesn't appear to take that long, and then be escorted away based on their result. But no. They had to go with the one where everyone reads off each other's paper and gets agitated when they don't get the right answer. Good job keeping the population calm, Alan. I can see why you're a respected whiz at this. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">According to the tests 43 are infected, and according to the dialogue that's almost 33% of the base, so, yikes. Alan wants to bring Bryce and Sulemani into the general population of the infected, because he hasn't yet been established as that much of a dumbass about human emotions. Yes, good, show a bunch of presumably infected people the shivering black bile spewing wrecks they'll become, that'll keep everyone calm, I don't think. He's not going to ask about anyone following orders either, he's going to go talk to Julia, who's sitting on a cot by herself. Which is both simple blocking and a bit in the way of foreshadowing. She praises his isolating this floor and says that people are settling in, to which he disagrees and says that people are scared. Really, and you're just going to help that along by keeping everyone in one room where they can see who's infected and who's not, and by bringing the worst off into the oh never mind. Moving on to Peter, whose vitals are all over the place and who may not live long enough to be helped by the vaccine or any treatment they can develop. Aaaheheheheeh oh god. Even he doesn't necessarily have much hope, says that grim side-profile look.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Elsewhere on the quarantine floor Daniel is carrying out Alan's dumbass order to mingle the extra sick population with the just starting to show symptoms, either because Daniel is not smart or because he's taking the position of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">fucking fine don't say I didn't warn you</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Oh look, here comes Sulemani charging out of the isolation area like that rat from earlier and, like that rat, attempting to vomit black bile into the mouth of one of the security guards. This isn't going to end well, although fortunately the initial scuffle doesn't end with Daniel getting biled considering he no longer has a face shield by the end of it. We do get the dramatic quick cuts of the bodies she left behind! Seriously, you didn't isolate them individually? What the hell kind of security team, lab researchers, what the hell kind of sensible human beings are you? Not very. Off she goes running, and the security guards that still have their face helmets in chase before she can infect anyone else. See </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">now</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> would be a good time to shoot her. Echoes of Muldoon in the background. (That's a Jurassic Park reference. God I'm old.)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sarah's still clearly stressed and locking up the samples. And almost falling over. Julia doesn't think she's fine, Julia thinks she's infected. Okay, being infected by Peter during the stockroom incident isn't the worst theory in the world, but she should at least be showing slightly more definitive symptoms by now, one would think? It's hard to get a definitive sense of time here beyond the date cards at the beginning of the episode, so we'll just go with relative dating like good archaeologists, which says her progression should be slightly behind Sulemani's and company. Julia does have a point about calling her out on her hand tremors and she is displaying symptoms of something, but Sarah is taking umbrage at the thought and implication that she would risk spreading disease by concealing an infection. So they both have good points. She takes the (let's all remember it's bullshit) test and it's clear. Julia attempts to apologize, I'm not clear on how sincere it is but hey, and then Daniel interrupts to ask about Alan and say he's got news about Sulemani. Because no one in this entire fucking facility is conscious of, oh, any kind of security protocols? Crowd control? Psychology of any kind? He's just going to blurt out that Sulemani's lose and she killed someone and then the troublemaker from earlier overhears and now there's a panic. GOOD JOB, DANIEL. Idiot.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxD5JG3D7RJXEoxH8ZkXGQb7XfYnlMa04jaXruf6KCBeTQ412kmysWIyVtbh5G5RWpB1wFHChSslekKi5pGW4GwFdTeWSXV4_ive0RWKAEjgRGflxjeHt8NVauvbH8tqSlNydJdD-1AUc/s1600/HelixS1E03C05.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxD5JG3D7RJXEoxH8ZkXGQb7XfYnlMa04jaXruf6KCBeTQ412kmysWIyVtbh5G5RWpB1wFHChSslekKi5pGW4GwFdTeWSXV4_ive0RWKAEjgRGflxjeHt8NVauvbH8tqSlNydJdD-1AUc/s320/HelixS1E03C05.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Everyone screams and panics. Like you do when you're already wrought up from maybe being exposed and infected with a fairly terrifying virus for which there is no effective test let alone any treatment or vaccine. There's a mad rush for the elevators, which isn't good when the hallways are .. okay, they're not skinny? But they're not built to accomodate a crush of thirty-forty-fifty people if you count the security guards. Julia and Sarah are slower to leave, Julia in particular because by this point she almost has to know she's infected. Oh look, here comes Sulemani, tackling a security guard and vomiting black bile all over his mouth. For the sake of horror we have fast time here for Sulemani infecting the guard and Julia's flashbacks of Peter infecting her, and a slow turn for her followed by some close head and shoulders shots as she sees Sulemani and I think at this point we're getting nothing complicated, just her realization that she is infected and she can't hide it any longer. Sulemani is her future. To underscore that she's going to have a coughing fit now. Meanwhile in the crowd Sarah and Daniel and even Alan are trying to get to her, to Sulemani. Basically to protect their friends and close out this scene. Daniel has a gun but loses it in the crowd because it's that much more dramatic later when Alan delivers a perfect head shot to Sulemani's forebrain. Where the hell did Alan learn to shoot like that, I wonder. Specifically like that, not just learning to shoot, because if he worked in some of the places and situations he describes later learning to shoot would be a defense mechanism. You don't want to pick up someone's dropped gun and not be able to use it. Daniel takes the gun from him after, while he's realizing he just shot a woman in the head, a woman whose life he fought to save. With a look from Daniel of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">see I told you so</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Yes, but the difference here, Daniel, is that she was actually charging and attacking people, whereas before she was staggering and desperate and scared and not actually trying to hurt anyone. Never mind. No one's pointing that out, Alan's trying to get Julia upstairs and not listening to her, though to be fair she's not being that clear until he looks down and sees the black bile on her hand. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Upstairs they go. Everyone's in civvies (except Serrrgio, who doesn't seem to have brough any) again, and Hatake is asking about Julia Walker. Again. Though in this case it makes a scrap of sense because it's the group of them and she's the only one missing. He does, however, get inexplicably upset, even going to the point of shouting at Alan till Alan says she's infected. Daniel suggests they seal off the level, which on the face of it and as Hatake points out sounds like a death sentence, but it turns out there's what Daniel thinks of as a week's worth of supplies down there. I really hope it's an actual week and not Daniel's idea of a week's worth of supplies, keeping in mind that these are not going to be rational people who divide up the food and water. Alan does admit, and it sounds like its' difficult for him, that he's lost control of the situation. The conclusion does seem to be that they're going to seal off the level, although Hatake is deeply concerned about Julia Walker gee I wonder why. And then Alan says when the satellite uplink goes live he's calling in the army for backup. Uh-oh. Serrrgio doesn't look too happy about that, gee, I wonder why. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sarah is taking something with water, that's the only reason I can think of to pour a cup that looks like it comes out of a bathroom and drink it like that. Oh, no, there's the pill bottle, she hasn't taken it yet. And she's been crying! That's a good, subtle cry ho shit the fuck is that scar on her back. The plot thickens! So does the blood. No, I kid.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Alan is observing Peter in the room of all the blue peaceful lighting when Doreen comes in. He starts muttering about 274, and it takes a couple examples to figure out that he means people he's lost. The ten students of Legionnaire's disease, ouch. What's bothering him now is that Julia is dying, emotional, that's fine, and also that he killed someone with his own hands. Which is also fine, really. He is a doctor, not an assassin or a soldier, it's likely that the times he's had to fire a gun before he hasn't stopped to see where the bullets hit, assuming they hit any living targets at all. Doreen expresses her faith in him to save Peter and Julia both. He nods, the way you do when you acknowlege that someone's trying to make you feel better but it doesn't actually do much to change what you feel terrible about. But then he asks her about the monkey. Heh. Why she doesn't just say what she found out here, and about the terrifying growth just add water virus, I will never know. This is one of the parts I dislike where they make people keep secrets from those they should trust because of the sake of drama and having to recreate the results later keeps tension etc. That she would keep it from Hatake, I can see. That she would keep it from Alan and not tell him while telling him not to pass it on to Hatake, I do not understand. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Julia comes back into the room where the alleged infected are, still with her black bile on her hand, and ceremoniously smears it on her white lab coat before pulling it off. Of course the act of pulling the jacket off rattles the vial in her pocket, which still reads clear. But... Julia's infected. So she races to the sample box that everyone said was the infected vials and of course half of them aren't green. She needs to tell someone! She runs to the phone and the first words out of her mouth are not in fact 'the test doesn't work' but 'where's Alan?' Idiot. I mean I get that she's panicking but the first words out of your mouth should always, </span><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">always</span><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> be the most relevant information. Of course it's right after she gets Alan on the phone that Ballaseros blows the satellite. So no more communication with the outside world for them. D'oh!</span>Kitty Chandlerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05524808952260453841noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4271373189216022547.post-66067428421310982712016-08-16T10:00:00.000-07:002016-08-16T10:00:07.703-07:00The Librarians S01E02 ...And the Sword in the Stone<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There will not be finishing off the Librarian with your henchthugs; there will be an Eve Baird slamming heads together until they drop. Literally! Giving rise to look, if you want something done right, fucking do it yourself. Isn't that ON the Evil Overlord list? If not it should be, and lord knows Lamia should be plotting what she'll do if Dulacque shows signs of weakness. I am just saying. This is only sensible. Jake and Ezekiel pelt on up to stare in horror, Eve is all LOOK YOU MORON I DON'T CARE ABOUT YOUR MAGICAL WOUND I WILL TREAT THE SYMPTOMS. Which at least gets Flynn to move his ass over to another artifact that'll delay death. Good! We like delaying death, especially when the entire Library looks like it's about to Do Something Bad. Besides get raided. So, yes, the magical healing oil of Bathsheba, which I'll let you look up the stories about her, but suffice it to say I totally would believe in that kind of an artifact. One of the more obviously named artifacts so we can all gloss over it and move onto the important part, which is hey guys, we don't need to find Cassandra, she kinda betrayed us. Okay, um, what about the still-oozing wound? Charlene will help! Honey, Charlene's busy trying to help save the Library itself, she wasn't counting on you getting stabbed by Cal, this is </span><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">why you have a Guardian</span><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Moron. Corridor of Doors! Deep in the Library! Go, all of you. Yes? Yes.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifpZBC1JcuUQyLrF2wmV1ELwTpm2i2f3dv6d8tAZ7Lp_iv1J5A78378EMunF-JBp3KbHUsal5tdWAgVQkmkTS_QI2IdPKeTPUxbZwkx2aZLQsI3dYgpNUKNaNiAP6aCMoW-25o3wqBL66e/s1600/lib102cc01.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifpZBC1JcuUQyLrF2wmV1ELwTpm2i2f3dv6d8tAZ7Lp_iv1J5A78378EMunF-JBp3KbHUsal5tdWAgVQkmkTS_QI2IdPKeTPUxbZwkx2aZLQsI3dYgpNUKNaNiAP6aCMoW-25o3wqBL66e/s320/lib102cc01.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Lamia sends everyone off to loot the easily-transportable artifacts, I facepalm and assume she doesn't care about if they survive because if this is what W13 was based off of? Some of those are liable to bite the hand that tries stealing them. Cassandra's having second thoughts, or maybe third thoughts, no shit Lamia and her henchthugs aren't nice people. I am amused, and I think I missed talking about this last recaplysis, that the Crown of King Arthur is itself absolutely </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">covered </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">in triquetras, both because that's one of my preferred symbols and because that's a massive Celtic-Catholic symbol still which does predate Christianity coming to the Isles. So it's appropriate on all KINDS of levels. Anyway. Cassandra wants reassurance that they're the good guys, and in fact Lamia won't say that. Just that they're going to change the world. You know, as much as I enjoy a villain who thinks they're really truly helping and what they're doing is right, it's kind of refreshing to have this level of camp straight out in the open. Let's put justifications on pause for a second to take a tally of artifacts: there's a golden chalice that's probably the Grail, an ornate Germano-Celtic cross that's proooobably Templar-related but I got nothing else for sure about its origins, a statue of Bast, the crystal skull from the beginning of Return to King Solomon's Mines (of Atlantis, says the placard), the Judas Chalice, King Solomon's Battle Staves, oh no the Holy Grail was also in that case so I'm not sure what the other chalice-thing was. Could be lots of options! I'm a little surprised the Spear of Destiny didn't show up in that same display case, but hey, there's a lot of loot to be had and it's a pretty powerful artifact, maybe it's chilling with some other chalices or something.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Ahem. Flynn Carson you </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">do </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">know that running like that with a nasty gut-stab is going to kill you faster, right? Just checking. And then a bell starts ringing! Which Flynn calls the Countdown Clock, and while we don't know exactly what happens when it stops we can go with the Library folding up into a much much smaller pocket dimension (cf.: "As big as it needs to be.") and taking everyone still inside with it. Since humans aren't really built to LIVE in itty bitty pocket dimensions, I'm gonna go with that being bad for Our Heroes. I absolutely fucking love Eve yanking Flynn out of horrified staring BY HIS COLLAR. Amaze. Lamia proceeds to call everyone out of the shelves, stop your looting if you want to take it with you, and they will yes please flee. In case we hadn't gotten the pocket dimension message before now (as I feel all good genre viewers should), Lamia will </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">also </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">exposition-dump for us. I'm fond of this as a writing choice. Villains get long monologues a lot of the time! Might's well use the trope to provide us with information/confirmation. And there's also information in there, though it's delivered so offhandedly it takes a second for it to sink in: the first Librarian just cut the anchor chain between our dimension and the Library's dimension. Does that mean Charlene? You could be forgiven for wondering if it does, but no, I'm like 90% sure that's Judson, because of a bunch of stuff in the Judas Chalice movie. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Corridor of Doors (say THAT one five times fast) turns out to stretch into infinity in either direction, or so it appears, despite the Library doing its best imitation of a reverse Katamari Damacy ball. All doors! All shapes and sizes and colors and labels and everything: the one closest to us as we cut over says THEATRE stage left, then there's a plain-ish brown door, then an arched… possibly Gothic? door, then a black door, then a red one, then a white, I am now humming Rolling Stones </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">and </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">muttering about color symbolism. Flynn hasn't a clue what to do, claiming he's never been this deep in the Library. I'd have to go back and watch all the movies to confirm but I think he might be right, or right in a sideways sense, on account of I'm pretty sure he's been to the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">heart </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">of the Library. This is not the same thing, however. We will now count down three bells, to two, while Flynn flails around all BUT SOMEONE ELSE DECIDE. No, honey, you don't get to absolve yourself of responsibility for this one, and Eve's gonna smack him until he chooses. Also Ezekiel, bless him for his survival instinct. Picking a door results in Eve literally shoving the baby Librarians through and once again yanking Flynn by his collar. She is so not here for your bullshit suicide plays when you COULD conceivably survive, for the love of fuck.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And they're in… a forest? With a freestanding door. Well, okay then! Personally </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">recognize the general area right away, but then I've watched Grimm, Leverage, and a bunch of stuff filmed in Vancouver, plus having visited the PNW recently, so I forgive them for not leaping to the right conclusion immediately. Plus, you know. Trauma of losing your home/being stabbed/losing something you didn't know you wanted and had just found, depending on who we're looking at here. No, Flynn, running through the door again is going to get you more forest, a self-closing door, and then a vanishing door. Be glad you didn't run through it while it was vanishing, I suspect that would've been miserable. No. No you just don't get to go home again. Not like that. Jake would like to know what the fuck is going on and if he's getting anything he can hit anytime soon. Ezekiel would like to believe in time travel. Kiddo, the sun doesn't stay in the same place on the planet all the time, it's not bound to be nighttime save over approximately half the Earth's surface. Flynn would like to file a complaint against time travel, and proceeds to comment about needing to eat more calcium because his blood's all crimson. Sit down before you fall down, for fuck's sake. Eve is not listening to Ezekiel's plotting about the local king and taking out her cell phone just to check, because </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">honestly </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">boys. No kingdom for you, Ezekiel, you're still in the US, unless we're talking Wacky San Franciscans we don't take well to royalty setting up shop here. And while Flynn may be able to figure position of the sun and land them all in Oregon by nothing but the power of his mind, Eve's power of common sense says hi I have a GPS and a map and I found a road. Isn't that much nicer than trying to use precious brain cells when you're BLEEDING TO DEATH? Yes? Yes. </span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEsr2_ULaW0sBeuZ21m-NUieknzXZfajlRGoE6umJkryaOlB6ALpfuLVVaSgfiDrRiO_OpDGVbra0Ej7a8JpKmYWi7St03cbfTPRpiBziBJ-WqQ0NDJWhSsKskPNQw-hDvwxXCRs4cXxkf/s1600/lib102cc02.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEsr2_ULaW0sBeuZ21m-NUieknzXZfajlRGoE6umJkryaOlB6ALpfuLVVaSgfiDrRiO_OpDGVbra0Ej7a8JpKmYWi7St03cbfTPRpiBziBJ-WqQ0NDJWhSsKskPNQw-hDvwxXCRs4cXxkf/s320/lib102cc02.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">HELLO JENKINS. HI JENKINS. HI. Eve, being smarter than the boys, is immediately suspicious of this nattily dressed stranger leaning up against a very convenient car and conveniently offering a ride and in conclusion TOO CONVENIENT ARE YOU EVIL, SIR. The music says no, he's not evil, he's just Mysterious and possibly A Trickster. Fortunately she can ask suspicious questions </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">while </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">getting in the car, protecting everyone, and so on and so forth. We will now have Eve and Jenkins establishing a somewhat opposite set of character traits, wherein he's calm and collected about everything and refuses to ask questions and Does Not Want To Be Involved, and Eve is not here for your bullshit, has a BIT of an emergency on her hands, and is disinclined to trust strangers. For good reason! On both counts, I suspect, though even now we don't </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">totally </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">have an answer on why Jenkins is so wary of getting involved and emotionally attached. I mean the obvious answers are obvious, I'm talking the specifics of what made him that way. Eve's still fixated on the hospital, I'm going to blame that on her military training for crises, which is fair, that's how we work! And she's had what, less than a week if that to get used to the whole hi, magic is real and magical wounds are a thing that we don't take to hospitals because magic is also SECRET okay. Besides, it gives us a perfectly in-character reason for Jenkins to go what no, no hospital, I'm taking you to MYSTERIOUS BRIDGE-TYPE-PLACE, with SIGILS OF POWER on the entrance. Guys, be a little MORE obvious, why don't you. At this point I think Eve is pushing because magic IS supposed to be secret so fucking cough up your knowledges already, jackass, and make them stop dancing around THEIR knowledges. Okay fine, sez Jenkins, no hospital because it's a wound from Excalibur and magic and doesn't heal, let me open up this dusty cobwebby old place with my giant keyring of mystical keys. And </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">now </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Flynn's catching up, though to be fair it's a bit harder to do when you're trying to focus on not passing out from bloodloss. Jenkins is still not here for your questions now that he's established his bona fides, aside from giving out his name like everyone should know who he is, and Jenkins honey we'd all believe you more about the detached shit if you weren't being so fucking obvious about the dramatic entrance. For fuck's sake, man. Flynn will now keel over in shock of finding the Library (sort of) again, and also, you know, regular shock and bloodloss. Someone get that man some more Bathsheba oil.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Or tea. Tea works too. That's magical tea, isn't it, Jenkins. Jake would rather have a beer. I'm with him, I never have The Tea Experience, I have, as Kitty calls it, the hot leaf juice experience. With like </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">one </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">exception I've ever found. Anyway, Jenkins proceeds to insult the everliving hell out of Jake, thereby no longer endearing him to me as much as he might like, and Flynn complains some more at Eve about trying to stop the bleeding. Well, at this point I'd go with more like slowing it, but she's not wrong: superglue and duct tape are are a pretty good starting point for that! If he'd hold STILL and stop making it bleed MORE, my god. On the upside, he's the one in best position to demand answers to what the fuck is going on while Jenkins complains about these damn kids in his workspace blah blah blah be more stereotypical why don't you. Well. It's an annex to the main Library, it's his workspace and not Judson's, yes he knows Judson, yes he's doing work here, no he's not telling you what it is he's going to distract you with ask for a book that's only in the Library. Any book! Apparently the unedited Isaac Newton is from Atlantis. OH REALLY. (Hey, has anyone written that historical fic yet? I'd read it.) It also has the very neat effect of making one </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">smaller </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">soundstage they need to shoot on, as opposed to the ginormous fucking soundstage (and probably CGI) of the full Library. Like it's very clever writing on MANY levels: it makes it easier to shoot for TV, it gives us an overall s1 plot of Get The Library Back, it gives Flynn some character development, and it reduces Our Heroes' access to absolutely everything they could ever want to fight evil. Jake gets some of his own back when Jenkins more or less admits that he and Judson argued about everything, suggesting that Judson wanted him out of his fucking hair at the other end of the country. Well, possibly, but realistically I more expect that the arguing was the sort that two immortals just DO to pass the time. Some of it was probably accurate, by the way Jenkins is harboring some bitters over not getting to handle the magical artifacts, though I'm not sure if that's bitters toward Judson or bitter at himself for not trusting himself with that much magic. Could be either! Or both! Anyway. Flynn distracts us from Jenkins' volumes of issues by blaming himself for missing everything and letting potential Librarians die because he wasn't good enough and now he's going to die and WOE WOE IS HIM. Okay, I mock, but it </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">is </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">kind of a massive life-changing and -ending event, and clearly his father-figure's trust in him was misplaced, by his standards. Also Eve should now tell the baby Librarians what's up, since her freakout is clearly motivated by actually </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">knowing </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">how long someone can walk around bleeding out like that. I think 24 hours is a generous estimate, but yeah, basically: you can keep pumping someone full of fluids, plasma, replacement blood even, but eventually with that kind of a gut wound you're going to die of the stress and shock and everything fucking else. And it won't be pleasant. Ezekiel and Jake are duly Not Okay With This.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Cassandra is also not okay, only she doesn't quite know it yet. Suspects, maybe, but doesn't know. For bonus points, Lamia's in all black and she's in black leggings and patterned whites and off-whites. Dulacque is thrilled, thrilled that she got out! And hopes that Ezekiel and Jacob got out, presumably because he's bored enough as an immortal to hold out for some decent opponents. Now allow him to be paternal and kinda gross; if this were a show like Leverage or The Mentalist I'd say they were aiming for neurolinguistic programming, but really it's just that hands on shoulders rubbing upper arms is a very very "I'm in control here" gesture while seeming to be caring. (And it could be an okay gesture for a relationship where that's an established thing! But here it's pretty clearly establishing dominance in a relationship with very little groundwork to go on, and even if Dulacque weren't the villain of the season I'd be wary of that.) Also he's in a gray suit because No Really He's Morally Ambiguous He Swears. His theme he's hammering on Cassandra with is that the Librarians are selfish to the point of suicide about keeping magic away from everyone else, which is a nice melding of cultural mores about suicide, I might add. Also that they'll cure her! And everyone else who can't be saved by science! Those are some huge promises there. I have so many questions about the logistics. Oh and no, Lamia, no stabbity death yet. Don't look so disappointed. I do love that this scene sets up Cassandra's desires for what magic is for versus what the rest of the Librarians believe, which I'm just betting is going to be a continuing source of friction into s3. She gets dismissed to "go rest," which is totally a cover for fuck off I need to plot with my second, but since Dulacque's playing gentleman villain he's not allowed to outright say that.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Lamia will now pout directly about not getting to stab someone. Well, not on Dulacque's new rug she isn't! I love the delivery here, it reads to me like he's entirely aware of the ridiculous over the top supervillain sound of it, and it might even be true, but he's putting on the show FOR Lamia in particular. That says a lot about what he thinks of her as his primary henchperson, and also probably about what he's told her about himself. I think the much more salient point is that having Cassandra around to solve any puzzles at the stone of King Arthur could be very, very useful. He tries sandwiching that between a joke about "mostly the rug" at the end, but I'm not buying it and I'm not sure Lamia is either.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiObWU0OiH0Ceh-sWWDmoisEPlCATCvZrNIqDBt57x0NMnLltwAJTgXDKkYkgAUck27Mbqg5iUQTaQTvDy6aJGdM89RHOM6wYKGhRv381PWP5GL1vkL6y5X14N6oVZWTR03z3h6VeYSdxz3/s1600/lib102cc03.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiObWU0OiH0Ceh-sWWDmoisEPlCATCvZrNIqDBt57x0NMnLltwAJTgXDKkYkgAUck27Mbqg5iUQTaQTvDy6aJGdM89RHOM6wYKGhRv381PWP5GL1vkL6y5X14N6oVZWTR03z3h6VeYSdxz3/s320/lib102cc03.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Back at the Annex, Eve's standing under a weeping willow trying to get herself together before she can get Flynn together. Jenkins, as the ranking member of the Library hierarchy (such as it is), comes out to find her and give her a pep talk. Lecture. Thing. You know, Jenkins, for someone whose stated philosophy is not getting involved in other people's shit, you're </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">really </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">getting involved in other people's shit. Yes I </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">do </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">plan to call out his hypocrisy a lot this season because it's funny. Ahem. I'm also finding it mildly hilarious that the ancient mysterious man who swears he's not doing emotions at all is the one to give Eve a lecture about the less-punchy aspects of being a Guardian. This is not a job JUST about keeping Librarians from being stabbed, shot, cursed, bitten, etc., etc., etc. This is a job about keeping their souls those of a Librarian, not giving into despair, and pushing them to save the world one more time. And put like that it's kind of disturbing in some respects, how hard they have to lean on this whole chosen-one-and-protector bullshit? Because that never works out well. But one of the huge points of the series, to me, is that no it doesn't work well, so let's </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">change it</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Jenkins explains that Judson and Charlene were basically his parents so go save Flynn from his grief and do your Guardian thing. I have to giggle at him again for two things: one, the assertion that everyone's going to die soon, well yes, Mr Immortal, I suppose you'd say that; two, the little self-satisfied kids-these-days huff after Eve walks past him.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I'm so entertained by the music when she walks back in looking for Flynn. It could be more blatantly Hi We're Going To Have Emotionally Uplifting Talks Now, but I think they'd've needed to steal from Beethoven for it. And Beethoven after he took a nosedive into the Romantic end of things. Flynn stop bleeding on the books, that's unhygenic, you know better. I admit Noah Wyle does a good teary-eyed I'm not crying you're crying look, but Eve is totally not having with this shit. She will allow him the dignity of sitting with her back at a 90-degree angle to him, so that they can pretend he's not falling apart at the seams and she can talk at him without freaking out that she's </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">making </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">him fall apart at the seams </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">more</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. I don't think Eve Baird is the kind of person who deals well with even temporarily dragging someone else's emotional wounds out into the light of day to help them heal. Fuck knows SHE doesn't like doing it to HERSELF. Ooh, I would totally read Einstein's translocation theories. It's a good conversational opener, gets Flynn talking about yay Library let's find a way back there this is totally my number one priority in life! Um. Sure, says Eve. Whatever you say. You know she hasn't seen you use any of the tools or artifacts or The Mystical Power Of The Library to defeat evil and save the world, right? And she pretty much spends the next couple minutes hammering on him with a cluebat about look, Judson chose you for your brain, dragged you out of hiding in the stacks of books and theory and gave you a chance to make a real difference and do some good in the world. And she's very very good at it! Up to and including dismissing his attempt to go BUT THEY MIGHT STILL BE ALIVE I SHOULD GO FIND THEM. No, dipshit. Go save the world one more time. And okay yes also look at Eve like SHE'S the world, because that's adorable. I love that they're just going to start with yes fine we have ridiculous chemistry and have decided this could be a thing, and also that Eve thinks it's hilarious how every time Flynn has an emotional crisis and goes to compliment her he gets sidetracked into WAIT A GENIUS REVELATION.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Okay, so a key, what about a key? Excalibur is a key! Or so Lamia said. It's a pretty powerful sword, but as Jacob says, I'd bet on the F-15 over the sword. As an Arthurian dork I'm going to sit here and roll my eyes a bit while Flynn gets around to the actual POINT, which is hey, the sword goes INTO the stone, which is a receptacle for magic, the sword is CHARGED with magic, yadda yadda find the ley line find the stone let's all go to London. Complete with a classic Flynn Carson round of dramatics via tossing the glowy globe o' ley lines up in the air. Just to show off. Dork. Yes, even the baby Librarians can come too, because they've got the other baby Librarian and the sword and crown of Arthur AND probably know where they're going AND Flynn is bleeding to death so yes, let's have a team effort. Jenkins, nobody believes your crotchety old man act. Flynn especially doesn't, though I could do without the mild asshole addition of hey book us tickets to London. And I have some sympathy for "but dammit the glowy globe is really distracting."</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Right. So! London! And the Jewel House in the Tower of London, because that seems like a great place to steal from. Specifically, they need a magical item to serve as a compass that'll then lead them to the stone and the ley line. Oh Eve, no, they're totally not stealing the Crown Jewels, and how much do I love her AUGH MUST STAGE WHISPER DAMMIT FLYNN voice. So much. No, the Star of Marrakesh, which is not in fact a real emerald of ridiculous size but let's associate it with John Dee and Good Queen Bess's salvation from magical assassination anyway, it'll give it that certain cachet. Also </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">they're </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">not stealing it, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Ezekiel </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">is stealing it. Oh that's all better then. Ezekiel says it's not actually that hard, presumably because he has a four-man team to work with instead of just himself. Vibration plates and pressure sensors, okay, that really isn't THAT much security. I'm going to assume that in addition to the very alert guards, the Jewel House has quite a considerable amount more security in real life, just for the sake of my sanity. They're going to steal a wheelchair! Eve is rolling her eyes and sighing about how is this her life also what the fuck why. Jacob will now complain about how she pushes people around, from his position in the wheelchair, and BAM into the Crown Jewels case, hello distraction, goodbye Star of Marrakesh. I'm with Ezekiel, oh my god you're using gum to attach a string to the mystical emerald of infinite worth? That's kind of wrong, Flynn. And now it's like walking a very VERY eager dog on a far-too-short leash while the alarms go off all over the place. Eve and Jacob have disentangled themselves from the mess somehow, just in time for Flynn to get in the classic(ally facepalm-y) line "follow the gem!" Security runs out after them to provide a nice tidy ad break, and we come back to a Totally Not Weird At All walk through a park that is totally in London and not Portland (look, once you've BEEN to that strip of park, you can't really mistake it for wherever someone wants it to be this week) with the gem leading the way. They have five minutes before the cops catch up with them, I question that given they're DANGLING A GIANT EMERALD ON A STRING USING MAGIC IN BROAD DAYLIGHT but sure whatever maybe someone'll dismiss it as just some people filming stuff. Ahem. Anyway, find the leyline and the stone and keep them from putting Excalibur back in. Back in? Yes, Ezekiel, the magic is in the sword, they want it in the ley lines, apparently you're decent with Arthurian legend and shit at magical theory. I don't even know how that works, but okay whatever.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Allow Dulacque to explain his villainous plan! I kind of sideeye him for this, as it's totally on the evil overlord list of Thou Shalt Nots, but he IS the kind of villain who wants everyone to be impressed by his evil genius. And he doesn't ENTIRELY think he's a villain. And given that this is a multi-person operation, he ends up trusting a bunch of other people with at least pieces of the knowledge of what's going to happen, so I can't say it's a terrible idea. Honestly the terrible idea comes later and is mostly Lamia's. Anyway, the point is, shoving the sword back into the stone is like jumpstarting magic by giving all the power it sucked up back to the ley lines. In this universe (and indeed in most magical theory where ley lines are a thing!), this allows them to rebuild their power and magic happens and yay, magic! They're underground walking through the construction workings while Dulacque lectures, and I have to say HE looks thrilled about magic in general. Lamia looks thrilled about magic-as-power. Cassandra looks like a kid who just found a candy store at Christmas. Dulacque will now wax eloquent about how they're standing in the culvert that used to be the Tyburn River, which was a significant branch of the Thames that got covered over … my research isn't giving me a certain time, but we'll go with latest possible date at 1858, post a couple of serious cholera outbreaks courtesy of the assorted tributaries and rivers being used as open sewers. Yes, London was really really awful for a couple centuries in there. Dulacque, however, remembers it flowing through meadows, not city, which strongly suggested that we go back at least before the Great Fire, which means the guy's pushing five centuries </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">minimum</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Yes, do please look at him all disturbed, both of you. He will move along and stop being weird at the mortals now, talking about finding the chamber using sonar and I think they really mean GPR (ground-penetrating radar), but I'll let it slide. And then they decided to dig and deal with the difficulties of air recycling and all that fun shit, rather than handle the magical traps on top of it plus the human security. Human security? Well you know, the Royal Family and all their associated people!</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Yes. Yes that is Buckingham Palace. Don't worry, it's only a model. Eve would like to file a complaint about how many incredibly high-security places they're having to get into, probably one part her sensibilities about having only days ago being on the other side of these kinds of ops to two parts This Is A Bad Plan And You Should Feel Bad. No, Ezekiel, you cannot forge something passable for the charity gala on less than twelve hours' notice, and stop making people royalty because that's REALLY dumb and sure to get you noticed. Do you seriously think these people don't pay super-close attention to this shit? My god. Eve stalks off listing off all the places they could and shouldn't break into, I will just note that at least one of those has since happened on-screen. Flynn is sure she'll be back. Yes! In time to save all your asses. Do you know how long it takes women to get ready and presentable for a gala like that, as opposed to you guys?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Especially when you don't shave properly, JACOB STONE. Kane's doing a great job of uncomfortable in a suit, considering the guy has to've worn plenty for Hollywood stuff! And we know he wore them a few times in Leverage. Flynn is nervous about Eve's absence, which is totally not helping them sell their presence here. Oh my god all of you stop fidgeting. So. They get made, Ezekiel's forgeries are crap AND he can run faster than the man who's been stabbed by a magical blade, embrace the power of and you guys. Jacob stop looking like you're going to brawl. Eve will now make her entrance under the guise of testing their security! Well DONE. Counter-terrorism, etc, well done gentlemen, also that is an amazing green on her. I so appreciate them letting Rebecca Romijn work her modeling skills, because believe me those ARE skills. Okay then! Out to the dance floor and giving the boys their marching orders to look for a secret passageway, while they take a turn around the dance floor in the hopes of keeping Flynn on his feet and Eve supporting him as subtly as possible. That must be a fuck of a lot of gauze and whatever else he's got taped over the stab wound, given he's not bleeding through the suit yet. The boys go off ostensibly to look for things that "look out of place" and are immediately distracted, first Jacob by explaining to a pompous ass that he's </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: line-through; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">wrong on the internet</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> about art and everything he's said in the last ten seconds is wrong like a wrong thing, then Ezekiel by some upper-class women wearing a fortune on their persons in the form of jewels. SIGH YOU TWO. Mom and Dad, er, Eve and Flynn, are having a Moment on the dance floor, by which I mean she says this is nice and totally skewers him on purpose by saying it's about surveillance, not about being with him. Aww, Flynn, that's okay, once you're not dying anymore she'll snog you for awhile. And then she finds out that they don't train the Librarians and you can just about hear her internal monologue start swearing in several languages because THIS IS A STUPID METHOD FOR MAGICAL ARTIFACT GATHERING, OKAY. Yes, Eve. It is. And yes, Flynn damn near died on his first mission and would've if it hadn't been for his Guardian, and now he will ulp and she'll be more forthright about her intentions. Note: more, not completely, they </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">are </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">in Buckingham Palace and Flynn </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">is </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">bleeding to death. But she's glad he didn't die, that he showed her that magic is real (which is totally not a euphemism for Feelings too), and they should dance together sometime when he's not dying! Yes. That's a good plan. They're really cute. Dulacque is not cute. Dulacque is Sinister and Irritated at these stupid Librarians showing up and trying to ruin his plans.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Down below, Lamia's getting cranky about their tight time schedule. Reinforcing her bad behavior by actually getting through the wall isn't going to help anything except maybe keeping your skin in one piece, dude. And that only very maybe. Some unknown amount of time later, they're bringing in fans and air recyclers and everything that makes it so they don't die before getting to the stone, also lights, oh hey there's an iron cage around the stone. You didn't think it was going to be that easy, did you? I honestly can't decide if Lamia's just that magically unversed that she doesn't assume it's cursed to kill, or if she's doing the standard Evil Second in Command thing and expecting to sacrifice someone just to demonstrate to Cassandra that they can't just cut through the metal. Hard to say! It freaks Cassandra out (as well it might, YOU try having someone get magicked into skeletal dust fragments in front of you and see how well you deal with it), Lamia sounds annoyed but that could also be a cover for mildly freaked out, we already know she's very used to violence. So! The control panel thing turns out to be in High Enochian, which for the purposes of this universe is a mathematical language based on ancient Greek and Hebrew. Considering that Enochian is a supposedly-divine language invented? discovered? by John Dee and also referred to as the language of the angels, I feel pretty good about them repurposing it to be whatever the fuck they want as a McGuffin. Cassandra thinks that yes, she can crack it given time, Lamia's take all the time you need sounds really, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">really </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">menacing, and yes let's give the power-mad woman the crown to wear, that's a great plan. And the sword! EVEN BETTER. I have to admit I'm impressed with her ability to flat-out get the respect of the lower-ranking henchthugs, because you would think by now one of them would've tried handling either artifact, but it doesn't seem so. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">While everyone else is fucking around with magical artifacts, High Enochian, and proving themselves better than everyone else, Eve's actually done her damn job. I'm sure this comes as a surprise to absolutely everyone. So, yes, standard counterterrorism, soft threat assessment, keeping an eye on the VIPs to be sure nobody tries to get to them, and… one dude who's completely out of place. Because that is definitely not an obvious door! Whoever did your setup for this fails, MI5, if you're putting everyone else on the entryways then fucking put a sniper or at least a spotter on a balcony to watch the secret door. Make it even a LITTLE difficult for anyone with even a modicum of tactical knowledge to identify the secret passage. For fuck's sake. Ahem. Oh, and the coat of arms over it belongs to the original architect of Buckingham Palace. Yeah that's not a dead giveaway or anything. Speaking of dead, Flynn is wobbly on his feet and fortunately that glass of champagne looks pretty full, so I don't have to swear at him about the stupidity of drinking alcohol while you're BLEEDING TO DEATH. To say nothing of not being hooked up to a collection bag and getting self-transfusions, like, this would be way smarter than whatever it is they're actually doing but also much more difficult to conceal. I'm going to pretend that's what they're doing whenever Flynn's in private and off-camera. Anyway. Time to collect the kids! Which involves Eve shoving both of them out of their conversations, getting Ezekiel to return gems, and distracting at least him with "here now hack MI5's comms and get them to bugger off while we get into the secret passage." Jacob will just have to deal with being interrupted from proving someone wrong </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: line-through; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">on the internet</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. I have to agree, this is a depressingly easy secret door to get into, but right now the important part is getting in, complain later. Jacob and Flynn will share a Manly Bonding Moment of you don't look so good, yeah I know but the crown is more important, okay then we'll leave you where you drop, HEY WAITAMINUTE. Flynn, I know you're dying and stuff, but leaving bloody fingerprints on the doorframe outside is a really significant tell, especially when there's been no word of a brawl at the gala. And while I may not think much of their tactical setup, they're at least doing a decent job of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">observing</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> shit.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Cassandra solves the puzzle, it goes all glowy, she steps AWAY from the iron cage of possible death because she's not stupid. Lamia is apparently going to trust the crown to protect her, or something, although I'd honestly hope that if you can solve the damn puzzle, it's not going to shoot an iron tentacle through your torso. Considering this is a mostly-comic universe (in the modern Aristotelian sense), though people do die, and this is supposed to be the good guys and all. Anyway. Iron tentacles disappear back into the ground! Lamia does not get impaled at this time. Cassandra, however, will get tossed into a dungeon cell. Seriously, Cassandra, what did you fucking expect? The woman dresses in black and leather and has henchthugs. Oh and she's very firmly in favor of them controlling the magic that's returning to the world. I don't know how much that's her and how much that's the effect of wearing the crown, although frankly I feel Cassandra should consider herself lucky she didn't get run through with Excalibur. I don't know if Lamia really needs the whole return to us hokey schtick as she shoves the sword back into the stone, but it probably makes her feel better. Humans and ritual, we know how that goes in the monkeybrain.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A less-secret door leads them to a wine cellar, which surely has </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">another </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">secret door, because why the fuck would you put a wine cellar behind one secret door in the first place. On the upside, it does have the benefit of being a total dead end with nowhere to run if you can't find the way out before the Queen's guards/MI5/etc get there! Jacob dates the section to George III by architecture and a bottle of wine, and oh oops there's the blue flash of doom they were all hoping not to see. At least it's not like the Ark of the Covenant and does not, in fact, melt everyone in the chamber. That's nice for them. Dulacque stop glowing blue in the eyes, that's fucking creepy. On the very definite downside, with Excalibur in the stone, magic's coming back, which means Flynn's bleeding out faster. Flynn you really should be going into shock any second now. We will now be distracted by Ezekiel accidentally finding the clue by way of wanting to steal a very expensive bottle of wine that definitely doesn't belong in this wine cellar. Yes, do find the lever to open the wall. Well done. The music would like you to have a big triumphant crescendo of winning. So. Through the underground passages, to the earthworks where Dulacque et al tunneled in from the side, Flynn shut UP do you want them to come SHOOT you as well as stab you? For fuck's sake, idiot. Also while it may be smarter to tunnel in, it takes a lot more time than wandering around and making with the distractions to get into the secret entries. Lamia's easily findable by her monologue to the henchthugs, who apparently think this is fucking cool enough to line up and be lectured while the stone flashes blue with magic sinking into the ley lines. Fortunately everyone's so focused on victory being nearly at hand that they don't see Team Librarians sneaking along to watch and then going well fuck, what're we going to do now?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Cassandra has some thoughts on that! She has, after all, had at least a few minutes of nothing but thinking about what she could do when she gets the fuck out of here. And presumably one of those thoughts was "wow okay these are not the good guys are they, fuck." Ezekiel is totally laughing at her and somewhat glad to see her. Jacob is SO not down for this. Flynn is not here for his reservations, fuck you, he got ganged up on about working as a team so fuck you they're working as a team. Also she was vulnerable and terrified and extremely susceptible to "we'll make the tumor stop killing you." Her plan is to make the cool water run through the warm air recyclers for a really effective fog machine, and for a nice bit of narrative exposition here, Flynn explains what each member of the team is doing while they're doing it. Jacob's fixing the fog machine, Ezekiel's rerouting the electricity to a set of specifications that are Possibly Mysterious, Eve is being the muscle and dealing with the henchthugs while Flynn gets to the stone and Lamia. Seems legit! Let's have a murky action sequence of kickass. I appreciate very much how they let Eve put herself in a dress that allows for some pretty significant range of motion - it's not the best, but for trying to be multi-purpose under the circumstances it's pretty good. I question the heels, but I always question women with military background wearing heels when they think they might see action. Because they're just the worst fucking choice. These are at least low-ish heels and look like solid shoes, so she's less likely to turn an ankle while kicking something in the knee. But still. Flynn's great plan for getting to Lamia involves a section of pipe wrapped in copper wiring and… fencing with an ever-more-bleeding wound. Yes. That is a great plan. Moronic martyr. Jacob also gets some brawling time in, keeping the henchthugs off Ezekiel and Cassandra's backs. I have to assume that Flynn always planned to lose this battle, because seriously dude no. And this is an interesting bit of foreshadowing that I'm quite certain was deliberate, so let's note it more completely as Lamia lists the baby Librarians off: one doomed, one fled, one abuses, Cassandra, Jacob, and Ezekiel, just to be extra-clear. What she misses is that everyone gets a second chance to be awesome. And also that Flynn believes that knowledge and wisdom will defeat the Serpent Brotherhood any day. Also electromagnets! You are such a goddamn showoff, Flynn Carson. Okay! So! The pipe turns into a magnet and yanks the crown off her head, giving him control of Excalibur who will save his life one more time, knock Lamia flying, and then wobble around being whimpery and sad.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; line-height: 1.38; white-space: pre-wrap;">I cannot believe you fuckers are giving me feelings about a dying sword. Just for the record. Though it doesn't help that they've gone for a sad/hurt dog with metallic edges to the sounds. Which is a pretty accurate anthropomorphization of Excalibur, I gotta admit, as portrayed in this universe. So. Everyone is apparently adequately down for the count, in true cinematic fashion we don't get to see unconscious bodies or people clutching their knees or midsections, the focus is all on everyone rushing to Flynn's side as he and his sword appear to be dying at the same time. Now, what I really want to know is stuff about Excalibur's forging and how he got all the magic and how much of his physical swordliness is held together by that magic at this point - given it IS a millennia or so old. But the upshot is that Cal did lose most of his magic into the stone, and thus he's dying. Some nice character notes here: Cassandra is Very Distraught, Eve is upset and teary-eyed but holding it together for the comrade-in-arms who's dying, Jacob appears to be the kind of upset and sad that results in looking for someone to punch, and Ezekiel has the neutral-but-upset face on of someone who's having emotions and really doesn't want to be. Flynn will now be EVEN MORE of a martyr and give the sword to Cassandra if she wants to use the last of the raw magic to cure her brain tumor. Eve thinks he's being an asshole. I'm inclined to agree with her. He's definitely being an idiot, given that he lists off all the people who are gone to the people who just followed him into uncertain death and clearly are attached to him already. And she's tempted! God is she tempted, who wouldn't be when someone's all here have this thing to save your life now. But Cassandra's not the one bleeding out in the next ten seconds, and she probably has a couple more years, during which she probably hopes to find a magic artifact that's safe to use to heal her. I'd hope for that, personally! Jacob has no fucks to give for someone who's even tempted, how does that stick up your ass feel, dude. Besides, Cal's shown himself to be a sentient sword and very attached to Flynn and how do YOU think he'd want the last of his magic used? Yeah, I think he'd want to save Flynn one last time. So does Cassandra, in the end, who can't take someone who cares about her dying in front of her. I think the magic also dry-cleaned his suit, which is a nice touch but he should possibly wipe the blood off his hand. (This Will Be Important Later.) She brought lampshades to this party and informs Flynn that he already saved her now for the love of god be glad you're alive and go spend time with your dying sword. Again I say STOP GIVING ME FEELINGS ABOUT A SWORD. I guess the tiny bit of magic left melting into the rock so nobody can misuse any remnants of Excalibur isn't going to do much against the magic already released, though I kinda wish someone had said something about that later because WOW does that not seem like the best plan.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Well, at least Flynn seems to realize that yes he does have a new family and he better fucking start acting like it now that he's back from the brink of death. Let's get out of here, shall we? With smug ponderation about how no situation that can't be solved by thinking. Flynn, honey, your life was saved by Cassandra having emotions and giving into them. I mean it was also the best possible course of action as far as keeping everyone alive? (And I kinda question why she didn't at least TRY it on herself after saving Flynn.) But that's a really tough call to make in the middle of a crisis. Humans do it wrong all the time. Oh, hey, here's a situation that's fun! Hide the crown from the tac-team that's demanding you put your hands up! One of them's covered in blood! Do think, Flynn. While you think, you can be grateful to Eve for having infinite worldwide contacts in various agencies, I'm pretty sure that's her old 2IC. So she'll spin them a story about what the fuck is going on here, and Flynn and the others can go on and get the hell out. Flynn NOW will you wipe your bloody hand on your pocket square or SOMETHING? For fuck's sake.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I still wish we knew what the funny story was, but Eve does it well enough to get everyone back home to the Annex in Portland, self-evidently, and here comes Jenkins striding out to the side street with three envelopes in hand which look suspiciously familiar. Our three baby Librarians look rather dejected and not at all like a team while they sit out by Jenkins' station wagon, except for the part where they're all in shades of blue and gray. In case we didn't get the message that this whole airline tickets thing is a total decoy. Jenkins stop trolling them about the secret moon colony, that's not nice. (He is ALSO in shades of blue and gray.) Hilariously, Flynn's in brown and green earth tones, and Eve's in black and white, as the Different Ones of the group. So! They go home like nothing ever happened, with some money in their bank accounts and that's that. Totally. Flynn, being emotionally incompetent, doesn't know what to do with Cassandra flailing a bit about "but magic and world much bigger and more amazing and… moving on is bullshit." I'm with her, for the record. In fact the guys seem to be, too, Jacob having started this line of questioning and Ezekiel totally suppressing it, but they're all waiting for an answer. Which is not coming. Flynn will just ignore them and wander off for Important Librarian Business With Jenkins, oh my god how have none of your ALLIES shot you yet, dude. Eve gives them the standard government agent rundown about NDAs and don't tell anyone anything ever, if you do, oh snarky Ezekiel, she'll visit you in the sanitarium. Important Librarian Business turns out to be Flynn bugging Jenkins with a list of things to try, all of which he has already and confirmed that the Library itself is lost. At least for now. Nobody's bringing up the serious logistical difficulty this presents, namely, where the hell are you going to keep NEW artifacts when they start piling up? You need a safe and secure location where they can't interact - it doesn't appear to be as drastic a problem of cross-contamination as the Warehouse made it, but then they always had infinite space in the pocket dimension and much better filing.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Back inside the Annex while Eve talks to the baby Librarians about… who knows what, Flynn tries one sad shave-and-a-haircut knock on the mirror. Obviously not expecting a response, let alone the two-bits and Judson showing up. So, the Library and Charlene are both intact, but Judson is done hanging onto this plane of existence. Not because he's ready but because Flynn is, which he has to actually drop like an anvil onto the idiot's head. At least they're not so emotionally incompetent as to NOT admit (even by not-admitting) that theirs was a father-son relationship, at this last meeting. Judson, predictably, is the more capable of them with the whole thing. He will now drop another anvil in the form of look, idiot, if you want to deal with the surge of magic courtesy of the Serpent Brotherhood, you won't have time to search for the Library. Not if you do it alone, anyway. Thank you, Judson, though with that little I'll-always-be fadeout I see where Flynn gets his flair for the dramatic. Even IF he didn't want to say it in front of Eve, he could've pointedly waited for her to back out. At any rate, Flynn continues to have his little revelation about no you know what, these rules are stupid and Judson just SAID I was in charge let's fix the problems with the people at hand. Who WANT to stick around. Judson will now reappear long enough to share an eyeroll and a go get 'em nudge with Eve.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">New plan! Yes, Flynn, you are just that slow on the uptake. The Library is totally laughing at you right now. Allow it to demonstrate by the "airline tickets" being invitations to work at the Library. Eve too! With the standard triumphant Library music. Cassandra looks like it's Christmas all over again, Jenkins looks HORRIFIED and shocked, shocked to find Librarians in his establishment. Nice try, Jenkins. His objections are from tradition and I'm reasonably certain just there to make sure Flynn's devoted to this whole thing. Eve's are that they're not qualified, which is the whole point of training them! So in conclusion it's a great idea and they shall henceforth be known as the Librarians-In-Training. ...yeah, I'm probably going to keep on with baby Librarians, it's shorter to type. I would like to know if you're planning to make a scale of not apocalyptic at all to very apocalyptic, just for shits and giggles. It can be like the X days without a velociraptor incident type of sign. Jenkins' new objection is that finding the Library is impossible, to which Flynn, now that he's had a last conversation with Judson and isn't, y'know, dying anymore, makes ridiculous pooh-poohing noises on the grounds of eating the impossible for breakfast. He's not wrong! Eve is slightly turned on by this motivated and bouncy Flynn. He will now give the baby Librarians a form of the welcome to the Library would you like to take this job speech, while Eve circles behind them all mama-bear protective. Aww Eve. Yes, Jacob, even Cassandra, and now Eve speaks up in her favor to remind them of the sacrifice Cassandra made, very much like she was planning this all along. Let's not forget that Eve Baird is a Colonel in a very macho unit, and knows exactly how to deal with this shit, even if she's not yet used to the laxity of a non-military command. Jacob's only stated goal is to help people, which I'm sure isn't the only one, just the one he's willing to show. Ezekiel, predictably, goes even further to the what-feelings-no-feelings-here side with chances to steal new and exciting things. And Cassandra needs to go hug her new… father-uncle-big-brother figure now. Yes you guys she's that demonstrative, oh my god will you chill out. (I'm sure someone ships them, by the way, but I really don't, for MANY reasons which will become clearer later.) No, Jenkins, still not your Library-Annex, etc. At this point I do believe he IS being an asshole out of disgruntlement that his routines are being disrupted, and also because he's got such high walls of self-defense up that he doesn't know how to deal with these three clusterfucks of issues.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">That's what Eve is for! Although her initial instinct is to go with Flynn because she's HIS Guardian dammit, she's actually walking him out because, frankly, he's survived for ten years without one. And he needs someone he can trust to watch over the future of the Library, if anything should happen to him, and they've already proved that the Serpent Brotherhood (among others, presumably) is more than willing to try assassinating them. So he needs Eve there. Hell, I'd go so far as pointing at the second white envelope Eve got as indication that the Library wants her there too, helping to train them and dealing with Jenkins being a crotchety ass. Hey! Flynn is having a moment of not total emotional incompetence and admitting that he'd love to travel the world with Eve at his side! At which point Eve's all okay fine the job's more important no that's the old way, says Flynn. Well fine. She's going to kiss the living daylights out of you now instead of being repressed. You can work separately and still date, make out, whatever form of relationship you want to have when Flynn checks in! Awww. I love that they didn't wait on this and instead went ahead and let it be messy and complicated and very, very human. Excuse Eve while she gloats during Flynn being a stammery schoolboy mess of WAIT WHOOPS yes ma'am I will totally come back alive. She's being very quiet and polite about it, but she's totally gloating. Meanwhile, Jenkins attempts to explain that he's in charge and otherwise be grumpy and intimidating, which is Eve's cue to stride in and play dominance games. And it is TOTALLY a game; if Jenkins really wanted to break out all his own immortal force of personality she might well lose. But the baby Librarians need to know that she's on their side and can be trusted, and this is a great way to do that. It helps that Eve's almost as tall as he is. All three of them feel the need to put in their two cents, grinning, about how no she's not bluffing, Cassandra setting Jacob's hackles up again, and he finally backs down and admits there's the clippings book.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A clippings book turns out to be exactly what it sounds like! Bunch of newspaper clippings, which, given that it's magical and belongs to the Library, is updated every day with new mysteries to solve. I note that Jenkins' insults become much less acerbic when he's getting to teach, which allows Eve to step back and watch and, eventually, survey the Annex for security measures and likely workplaces for everyone, I would guess. Plus that bit of wonder that's not going away anytime soon. Is anyone surprised that Jenkins is the kind of teacher who pulls the arrogant oh you'll NEVER solve THIS shit? No? Everyone sitting on their hands? Okay good.</span></div>
Anna Hammetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10095633218958433882noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4271373189216022547.post-88954722136346851362016-08-12T20:00:00.001-07:002016-08-15T20:35:36.567-07:00So Very Alive And Full Of Goo Helix 1x02 Vector<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Day 2 of zombie outbreak hell starts with interviews with the people locked in the room with Vector!Peter. Apparently he held them down and vomited black bile into their mouths. Ew. And worse than that, there are three more who ran after the attack. Peter's behavior suggests that the goal may not necessarily be something conscious (things are of course happening that we'll find out about later) but a drive by the virus to spread itself in this case by bodily fluid contact, and again I say Ew. Buuuut I'm also getting ahead of myself.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Since they've previously established (not to my satisfaction but whatever, I'm picky) that it's not airborne they're conducting these interviews in person, in the room, with UV lights and face shields and presumably other precautions against fluid transfer. Unfortunately all their precautions aren't going to help when they find out that there were three other scientists in there during the attack, who were also likely infected, and who are now at large. Because that's exactly where you want your vectors to be, I don't think. Sarah, Julia, and Alan spend a few minutes contemplating this out loud and giving us some numbers and nightmare scenarios while lit with creepy blue glow, in case we needed the mood further set (which since this is the start of a new episode when rerun, we might) and we move out to the hallway where a sort of decontamination airlock has been set up. Jules gets to poke the rats, Sarah gets to monitor the infectees and list off random disease symptoms so we know she knows what she's talking about I guess? Again, I have no idea why the science lecture is in here except to remind us this is a science thing. And hopefully Doreen will check in soon. We don't know what Alan's doing yet because Hatake's walking up with files on the three missing doctors. At least he's somewhat helpful! The missing scientists are Tracy, Raver, and DeKlerk, and now that I listen closer I can't tell what Hatake's denying. The specific dialogue is "Can you tell me if anyone's tried to leave the base in the last 24 hours" and the response is "no." and not to get all Clue here but given the conversation between Hatake and Ballaseros earlier I'm not sure if he means no no one has or no I can't tell you. Urk. Anyway. Alan plans to go door to door to look for the missing scientists and make sure everyone's safe, and in light of that latter goal Hatake is sending along security teams with stun batons and restraints. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> feel this is an entirely reasonable precaution to take given the whole ripping his way through the ceiling cutting someone's hand off at mid forearm thing. Alan is going to be stubborn and stupid albeit not openly. Julia is going to wobble between them by that look, though she doesn't have an argument for the safety of the base issue. Julia and Alan will then have an argument over who should be in charge while in the field and clearly it should be him. If I were Julia that is not the hand position I would have used to open that door. Ahem.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Doreen is performing a necroscopy on the monkey with what I feel are insufficient safety protocols, but on the other hand at this point my feeling on sufficient safety protocols involves using waldoes or other robot appendages from a safe position of outside a hermetically sealed box, so. I also feel the need to justify my not using any words like crazy-violent to describe the monkey because really, have you seen chimps? This is not outside the normal range of behavior for some monkeys, and lacking a recognizable species designator I'm going to go with the monkey was traumatized and perfectly capable of acting that way even without scary oil slick infections. Meanwhile Julia is messing with the rats. In a darkened lab. With clanking going on overhead. This won't end poorly at all. She drips something on the rat she's currently boxing and puts it on a shelf with several other squeaky animals and keeps looking at the ceiling as she leaves. Hi Peter! Creepy Peter. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Some good use of what I believe are called jump cuts? here (unless they've come up with a specific name for this type) just to make us feel the impatience and unsettled-ness of everyone in the room. The scientists are not about this whole being isolated with each other thing, citing contamination but also I think because they're making each other nervous, they're not allowed to be alone and recover in a more private setting from the trauma of the assault, and they're being ordered around by strangers who have been on base for a day and a half and with whom they haven't developed trust yet. They are also not about the being isolated for up to two weeks, and to put a cap on it Sarah looks too young to be in a position of authority over them. Hell, I think 26 is too young to have a masters and two phDs and be certified for a CDC field team, which I imagine takes a while. But this is TV land, so we'll go with it. Child geniuses, like one in a million occurrences, are a dime a dozen. And Sarah is confident in her abilities, which we could use more STEM women on TV like that. Unfortunately she also doesn't have the gravitas to convince either this viewer or the people in the room with her of her "we will have order." She's trying, though. Poor thing. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Alan, Daniel, and Serrrgio are starting with Dr. Tracy's room where, granted, she might be, see also things about being traumatized and being allowed to flee and isolate yourself in a place of safety from the last paragraph. We will now have a brief discussion on the merits of stun batons! Daniel is of the opinion that they are good things, can stop polar bears and super-charged super strong plague vectors. Serrrgio seems to think that delivering enough of a shock to stop a polar bear somehow limits it to being used on polar bears, which, um, your logic there being? No, Serrrgio, he didn't rip off the hand, that was a very clean cut which although an air duct doesn't provide enough room to gain the momentum to do that cleanly without considerable strength, also shows pre-meditation and coherence implying that the suggestion of a shock might be enough to make him back off as well. That was a bit convoluted so I hope you followed me on that one. Alan wants to know why the fuck you're using that on a human, which is an understandable point except that he could ask it in the form of a question about whether or not you can choose the level of shock. Because if you can, excellent! Lower level for agitated scientist, higher level for super-charged plague vector. They're going to start out with a lower level entry at least, not breaching but knocking and overriding the door lock and looking in to talk with her. Sadly, she's not actually there, although she was there between the sun room attack and left her eye protection on the bed. The room also looks tossed and there's a shatter patter on the window that looks like it's from a narrower impact point than a fist. Tough to say what, though. Either there was a fight, someone tossed a room, or she was in a state of considerable distress and agitation and disordered in the mind. Given what we've seen going on here so far, who the hell knows. We leave this location with the question of where the hell is she now and move over to Doreen and her necroscopy. There the hell she is now! Sneaking up behind Doreen.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Who then turns around in the next scene to see what's left of Dr. Tracy. With severe reddening around her eyes, sweating, skin that's not actually supposed to be that color, she doesn't look good. She's also exhibiting symptoms of paranoia which may be medically induced or may be situationally induced, see also Hatake and Serrrgio. Nonetheless Doreen tries to be casual and honest. Dr. Tracy wants to know who sent her, and that's a more reasonable question than it sounds. She's also coherent enough to understand and respond to Doreen's questions appropriately, she is a doctor, she doesn't want to go to isolation for reasons that sound like fear of experimentation. More jump cuts and fragmented speech and things we don't yet understand, the white room, Dr. Hvit. If you haven't seen this through yet, trust me, these are signs of disorder and agitation but not hallucination. Also Peter referenced the white room, indicating that there's a link between the two scientists or their projects or both. Doreen tries to continue to get her out and to I'm not sure where, an isolation room, a place of safety for both of them, something like that. Dr. Tracy gets even more agitated and refers to herself in the plural which I will spoil slightly here, is one of the first signs of what appears to be a collective mind between the vectors. Or maybe the vectors being possessed by the disease, which is itself possessed of a single mind.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Julia is watching security footage and still twittching at sounds in the vents, which Hatake either doesn't hear or isn't concerned by. He seems to think it's just the base settling. If I had an infected guy with no qualms about lopping limbs crawling through my vents I wouldn't be so sure. He does have a good point about her getting at least a minimal amount of sleep, both because the Arctic does mess with perceptions and because if she's going to function at top ability she needs to be fully loaded on sleep, food, water, etc. Julia is distracted from this very good point by something in the rat? cages first rattling the shelves they're on and then knocking the shelves over. Yeah, I'd be unnerved by that too. Although I question why this can't result from TV research into TV mutagens? Probably because you always need someone to go "X can't do that, there must be something else going on." </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sarah is not in a good situation. Which probably isn't entirely why she's put the suit back on but seeing her in the moon suit certainly reinforces the effect. The quarantined are getting restless and cranky, even the doctor who's clearly attempting to contain herself and be reasonable, and one is noticeably sicker than the others. She goes to check on him and tries to reassure him that things aren't as bad as they seem and, no, dude. They are pretty bad, and he has some of that pretty bad living and squirming around inside him, and all your promises that you won't let anything happen to him don't mean shit when he's probably very aware of the possibilities and which of them are more likely than others. Certainly he all but says as much. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">From bad to worse? More ominous? A man running in slow motion down a hallway only to be tackled by Serrrgio, he doesn't look good? But he doesn't look as bad as Peter does, for example. So he's probably in the very early stages. Several other scientists have come to stare and comment at the takedown, because that's what this situation needs is more peanut gallery and more potential infectees. Though they do have a good point that sometimes laying out exactly how bad the danger they're in is might sometimes be helpful in explaining to the bystanders what they need them to do. It might just send the scientists into a panic! There's a Men in Black quote here that's relevant, individuals can be smart and make reasoned decisions, people are dumb dangerous panicky animals. Scientists are no exception to the mob rule. This vector in early stages is DeKlerk, and Alan displays some humanity and hopefully earns some trust from the bystanders by asking for the man's first name, calling him by it, trying to reach him. It's not terrible bedside technique, and they haul him off to sickbay. Everyone covers their nose and mouth as the gurney passes, I'm not sure what they think that's going to do because it's not going to reduce the chances by much but sure, why not. And bystander spokesman wants to know why they haven't been evactuated yet. Oh honey. Oh you sweet summer child. I don't know if this is his fear talking or if he genuinely hasn't yet figured out that they're not going to evacuate the base until they're sure the evacuees aren't going to just bring the disease back with them. I mean, clearly you don't need an epidemiology degree to guess that, I figured it out, but you do need a certain mindset which he may lack. (I make no comments whatsoever about what this says about my general mindset.) Alan doesn't volunteer this answer either and doesn't explain at first what's going on, why he hasn't airlifted or sled-dogged or whatevered them out yet, but the guy just has to push and bring up the concept at least of the almighty CDC, and, dude, it's not like the CDC can yell at the viruses until they behave. Alan is as irritated as I am by this and offers up a particularly nasty scenario of how the virus escapes to the gen pop. He doesn't even go into the airports, which are incredible locuses for exchange and travel of disease, seriously, you will never fly again when you put some thought into it. And now the bystander group will not protest again for at least a few hours! If nothing else because Alan's scared them into compliancy. Julia is morbidly impressed, her words say impressed and her tone and voice say morbid, and they have a brief argument over whether or not she's doing something useful by not working on what he assigned her to. She's working on what she thinks is a lead and he wants her working on what he thinks will turn up a lead and ultimately it turns out to be an argument over how each of them is coping with their history. Together, they are coping very not well! The details of who thinks whom is doing what and why are irrelevant compared to the stalking off going on. Both of you get your heads screwed on straight, this is neither the time nor the place for fuckery. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sarah's in drug storage! It's a dark room with a dimly lit cage for presumably the more dangerous drugs. Nothing's going to go wrong here, absolutely, so at this point I'm not actually surprised when Peter bangs up against the cage for the jump scare. After the break Peter is saying you're here for it? you're here for a reason. Yes, she's here for a reason, she's here with the CDC but he says it's not her, it's Walker. Without any clarification as to what's Walker, the reason, the subject of the question. And then he goes up into the ducts again. This is as good a place as any, although I'm sure I'll note it elsewhere, but this is as good a place as any to note that Neil Napier who plays Peter Farragut is fucking short. I don't actually have a height listing for him and I don't feel like chasing it down, but I'm going to go with between 5'6" and 5'8" or so for height, given later shots. And I mention this because up until this point they've done a good job of not showing this at all. He's either been on a gurney or he's been moving through ducts horizontally, or he's been crouched where you'd expect him to be shorter, or he's been moving by himself through areas with no reference point. Since he's supposed to be menacing here, he is very menacing, and usually on TV that implies large, tall. Big. This is not an accident, this is on purpose for several episodes. I'll bring this up again later. </span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiriz3xW7czh-2fyGrGUMBhYOyoT5maKRx_B5KtWVJvZNjJy2YLN0824LXAhqC_q84VJvGWp9CNqREFGvNqLD5JYnmkgsQLkFmeWBvXg36Ijas9mIQbWAcAbflcrPQtpRhi3DLHWShqO78/s1600/HelixS1E02C03.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiriz3xW7czh-2fyGrGUMBhYOyoT5maKRx_B5KtWVJvZNjJy2YLN0824LXAhqC_q84VJvGWp9CNqREFGvNqLD5JYnmkgsQLkFmeWBvXg36Ijas9mIQbWAcAbflcrPQtpRhi3DLHWShqO78/s320/HelixS1E02C03.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So, Peter wanders off and Sarah is disturbed and we cut to Julia going through files. With Hatake watching. She finds evidence of Narvik injections and asks Hatake what it is, Narvik A and Narvik B, and he offers actually no explanations of what either Narvik A or Narvik B is. Good job obfuscating, though. Since he speaks with a slow, deliberate cadence impatient Julia goes digging through cold storage to find vials of the stuff before she's finished listening to Hatake not explaining what Narvik is, talking about how he encourages his staff to take risks instead. Good job, dude. Julia asks what he was working on, who else was working on it with him, Hatake says she met them earlier in bodybags. Oh thanks, Hatake. Julia puts back the vials with body language that suggests </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">ew i touched it </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">more than anything and then says they need to replicate his experiment. Finally, someone's doing good science!</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Meanwhile back at the monkey necroscopy Dr. Tracy is pacing and babbling. I like babble! It's sometimes informative. In this case she's regretting whatever it is she worked on which involved gene recombination and replication? Probably retroviral gene therapy of some kind. Yeah, see, remember what I was talking about, about mutations? There appear to be some jump cuts in here; regardless the whole thing is edited to shake up viewers and underscore how erratic and out of it Dr. Tracy is. She also isn't actually talking to Doreen although she's talking at Doreen at some points. Rather she's talking to someone she seems to have worked with a while ago, on these viruses. She says you can't expect a virus to follow instructions which, see? mutations! and then concludes with she's not taking the fall for this alone which is only a conclusion because that's when Doreen lunges for the door. Tracy is kind of terrifyingly strong, leaning over her and trying to vomit the black stuff into her mouth. Thank god for face shields. As she's doing that though, she collapses, allowing Doreen to get up and open the cage door. Dr. Tracy isn't as much of a threat anymore, it seems like her body was making that last effort to expel the poison or spread the poison or whatever it was doing, and as she asks what's happening to her Doreen pauses in the doorway with a sympathetic look and sigh. Doreen, pausing for sympathy is what gets people killed. You silly woman. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Alan quizzes Sarah on how exposed she was, is she okay, yes she's fine, he didn't attack her and everything's fine. Serrrgio finds empty bottles of morphine sulfate, which Alan takes as a good sign because if he's lucid enough to self-medicate for pain, particularly when said self-medication process involves injections, he's possibly lucid enough to be reasoned with and recaptured before he infects everyone else. It's a good plan and a good assumption except it also predicates on the notion that a lucid Peter is a friendly Peter, which given everything else in this scenario I would not be so sure of. Sarah isn't so sure lucid equals to benign or reasonable, she tells him about the conversation about being here for a reason and mentioning Walker. Neither of them yet know what this means. And when they find out they won't be happy! Serrrgio interrupts having decided that he left them a trail to follow, although with all the blue light and blurry perspective outside of the focus on the person who's talking (or who we're supposed to be focusing on) it's hard to say what kind of trail. It's interesting, this particular style of filming when we're in sparse sets with very little in the way of props or decoration and narrow perspectives. A lot of times everything else is either physically removed or blurred out except one, maybe two people; it keeps us hyperfocused on what we're supposed to be focusing on, but it obscures other details that might come in handy. A metaphor for people's (and by people mostly I mean Alan, Julia, and Sarah) states of mind? Or simply an overall of how we're supposed to interpret the show. It works in the audio, too, or at least in my particular case certain words and phrases didn't register in my consciousness until second or third watching. Again, hyper- or mono-focus. Anyway. Serrrrrgio's going in to look for Peter, not taking Alan into the ducts with him this time but allowing him to join him via radio. Makes sense, given that Alan's not supposed to be trained for any kind of incursion, combat, work against an active human hostile, etc. We move to the next scene with some Die Hard banter that gives Alan an Old, a lot of humming for background noise and a good Dutch angle on everyone walking through the corridors at least after the first shot so that we're aware this is supposed to be suspenseful. Something skitters past! Alan has a point about checking behind him, and there's not much way to keep his head on a swivel in there, but of course when he looks around there's Peter all bloody eye that may be a detached retina or just burst blood vessels, black goo around his closed mouth and hand reaching for his face. Because that's exactly what you want to see in a narrow duct. Gross. Alan looks up. Going by the breathing over the audio and the grill, Peter may well be looking down at him.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">After the break they bring Serrrgio out of the vents and his pulse is steady, he doesn't have black bile on him, he looks okay. His equipment is undamaged and fairly comprehensive as far as physical protection from disease goes so that's a plus. He wakes up ish, doesn't have much in the way of a coherent story to tell and given what we saw of the attack I don't blame him, and he seems to think he was hit by one of the shock batons. So, no, electrical charge doesn't do much to restrain or stop Peter either. Good to know. Ish. Daniel gets a message over the radio about the elevator alarm and something (more likely someone) trying to leave the base. Because that's exactly what everyone needed.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Julia and Hatake are conducting their rat experiments. Narvik A's subjects are almost at a hundred percent mortality rate, complete with a misuse or to be more accurate modern use of the word decimated. (A truly decimated population would be at 90%, I pedant so that the rest of you don't have to because I know I wasn't the only one thinking this.) Narvik B's subjects, on the other hand, are all infected but alive. Mostly alive. They look quite a lot like Narvik B's subjects, all of them full of blackened blood and pale and generally zombie-ish. Because this show was working on being a zombie show until abruptly it wasn't, around midway through the first season. Though less in the tradition of the post-apocalypse zombie shows we've been having lately, you've got to give it credit for going the medical horror route. Anyway. Hatake holds forth about how he's missed real lab work and uses words, phrasing that Julia remembers from her mother. It turns out she was also a scientist, a cellular biologist, now long dead. Hatake's in the middle of asking about her father when there's a bang on one of the cages, preventing us from pulling on that thread much longer. We can tell it's a thread even now, although we don't know the shape of the tapestry, because there are very few wasted words in this script; like the set, it's very lean and clean. In fact, come to think of it, most of the wasted words are ridiculous science talk, less wasted and more extraneous about setting the mood rather than developing the plot or characters. The banging is actually a rat flinging itself at the glass walls and then going and attacking an as-yet-uninfected rat? vomiting black blood into his mouth. And we can tell this is CGI because rats don't move that way, even directed ones, but at the same time there's no obvious CGI markers and it is, say it with me now, fucking creepy. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The quarantine situation is getting even worse. Sick and now supine doctor is pleading for everyone to be calm but the other two are definitely not happy. There's an argument that culminates in Sarah being held hostage by Bryce with a needle to the back of her shoulder/suit. I'm not entirely sure what he's aiming for but I don't supposed it matters. Dr. [???] keeps insisting that they can help, but given that all three of them appear to be infected I'm not sure what kind of help she thinks they're going to be when they're clearly not operating at peak capacity. Well, let me correct myself, what kind of help she thinks they're going to be that they can't be from within quarantine. At any rate, this is enough to bring Daniel and then Alan in his moon suit down to try and talk them out of doing something entirely stupid. By doing something entirely stupid himself! Although I will admit that by this point, if they're not showing any symptoms despite having been in close proximity to a number of infectees, it probably isn't airborne? I still wouldn't be sure. Alan takes his hood off as a dramatic gesture, and it seems to work because in the next scene Sarah is free and both of them are out of their moon suits. Alan tells her she did a good job, and they have a moment to breathe and reassure each other that they're all right, they did their jobs well, there was no risk of airborne infection anyway. Along comes Julia! To maybe tell them that they're wrong? </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">No, to show them the Narvik rats. Hemorrhagic shock and liquification (technically, again, liquefaction) of internal organs, lesions, pretty much a hemorrhagic fever for the A subjects. For the B subjects, aggression and a compulsion to spread the contagion. Which Julia denies is similar to rabies when but in fact that's how rabies works, along with several parasites and other varying icks the human body can become infected with. Rabies, possibly the rest of the lyssavirus category (see again my lack of CDC/epidemiology credentials) cause behavior changes in order to spread the virus, including aggression and agitation. Toxoplasmosis causes behavior changes in order to spread the parasite. This is not new behavior in viruses, this is old, well documented behavior and I have no idea why Julia's resisting the idea and clinging to it as new and scary. The degree to which it manifests is new and scary, yes, vectors on steroids is apt, but this is not new. Actually it should be almost scarier for being turned up to nine-thousand because if the virus has jacked this common behavior up that high, what else has it done? Anyway. The discussion of silly ends with Daniel coming in and summoning Alan to talk to Hatake, which is good because Alan has a few questions for him and I hope they all start with "What the hell, dude?" Or the moral equivalent. They've worked their way around to Peter is basically a plague vector on two legs, which both ties into the infected Dr. Tracy talking in the collective person and at the same time doesn't explain a goddamn thing about certain other parts of the show. I'm sure they'll get to that. At any rate, Alan leaves with the ominous comment that we're not dealing with a single virus anymore, I indulge in a brief Single Virus In Search Of parody pondering, and we switch to outside. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">One of the scientists is trying to escape on snowmobile, it looks like the one from the corridor. Serrrgio is trying to talk him into returning back to the base and doctor stupid is having none of it, citing transgenic experiments and a virus vault. (Meaning basically experiments of introducing foreign DNA into host DNA, transgenics. Retroviral gene therapy among other forms.) Doctor stupid is scared. Doctor stupid has not yet realized there's a military guy of dubious provenance and origin who just arrived at the base shortly after things went to heck and right before they went further straight to hell, who's pointing a flashlight at him and telling him he can't let him leave. Doctor stupid, frankly, as a character, deserves everything that's coming to him. And he's referring to the monkeys! Calling what was done to them an abomination, that kind of explains the expressions on the monkeys faces. But then he will compound his stupidity not only by refusing to go back inside (and Serrrgio's right, his tauntaun </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">will</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> freeze before he reaches the first marker) but also by saying they have to tell the press, everyone! Mysterious military interloper does not like that. Mysterious military interloper prevents the telling of people with stabbing. Honestly, this isn't just predictable in television, where its predictability is mitigated by the fact that this development/hinderance is only a small part of the plot, this is predictable in real life, too. Corrupt agencies aren't interested in their dirty secrets getting out and it's definitely been proven that they will ruin lives and/or kill people to prevent it. But no. Stupid doctor's gotta stupid, and ends up dead for it. Brief shot of three colors of lights to emphasize both technology and eeriness takes us to...</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sarah and Julia gearing up for something. Sarah is having trouble putting her glove on which Julia ascribes to nerves, telling her that she doesn't have to, she can handle it herself. Sarah's fine, really, no, she's fine, absolutely fine here, and whatever else is going on will have to wait until Doreen finishes introducing the very advanced Dr. Tracy and using the word monkey about five times. I love you Doreen. They bring Dr. Tracy into the quarantine room, allegedly straight into the ICU chamber, when Dr. Haven starts seizing. Allegedly seizing. What happens instead is that once Sarah and Doreen are well and truly distracted they shove Doreen into the ICU containment and Sarah up against the wall until she's knocked unconscious. Thereby demonstrating that advanced infectees are totally capable of complex actions if it furthers the virus's goal of more infectees, etc. In this case that means escaping first. There's something fairly unsettling about that. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Hatake is looking out at the quarantine cell, not the one Doreen is in but a different one, the one they had Peter in. Thinking. Pointing out to Alan that the virus was less of a danger before the CDC came, where Alan points out that his people were the ones doing the attacking. And he chides Alan for not having the situation under control, whereupon Alan chides him for not giving them all of the fucking data. Okay, chides is a mild word, even if Alan is being milder than I would be. The things I would say, though, you can't say on basic cable. He brings up the patient escapes, the monkey. The infected monkey, no less. And the experiment Peter was working on that he wasn't briefed about. Hatake claims to not have known about that but it's more of a claim by implication, although much smoother than he's been in the past. Consider what he's saying, first of all that Alan should ask Peter about that, implying that he neither knew nor authorized it and that Peter acted alone without outright saying either of those two things. Then saying that he would never condone something so reckless, which is much more of a solid argument that he didn't know except that we know something Alan doesn't. We know about the conversation Hatake had with Ballaseros where it was made to sound like Hatake was under some sort of coercion. So perhaps he wouldn't condone working with the Narvik virus, but also perhaps he wasn't given a choice. Alan doesn't know this, so he's forced to take both words and implications at face value. The rest of us are grinding our teeth. Alan accepts it and moves on to containment, which he conditions on complete transparency and threatens to pack the CDC up and leave, albeit tacitly, if Hatake doesn't agree. Heh. Oh Alan, you have no idea what you're getting yourself into.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Alan goes in to talk to Julia, who has been examining herself in the mirror like she thinks she's been infected. Which is not the worst move ever, really. More than that, Alan is confessing to being overprotective and emotional, and I'm rather impressed by that. Julia does the usual you don't need to protect me thing, Alan admits to not being much able to stop, everyone is cute, and thankfully this fairly boilerplate conversation lasts only long enough for everyone to deliver their stock lines. Serrrgio is burying something outside. Gee, I wonder what that is. Sarah is examining her shaking hands. Diskynesia is not one of the symptoms, so something new is going on with her. Hatake is looking at surveillance photos of Julia Walker, which is a whole new dimension of terrifying to his character. He also has far, far more books and an extensive library of carefully leather bound books, more so than we were led to believe. He goes over to his desk then, rubbing his eyes and taking out some contact lenses. All well and good, plenty of people have contact lenses, but how many people use them to hide their silver fucking eyes, hmm?? Hah-hah! Bet you didn't see that coming! Well, no, but it does explain a lot about Hatake's absolute reticence to tell anyone anything. What else is he hiding, one wonders. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And we close with Julia taking a shower to jaunty cheerful music, so of course something fucked up is about to happen. A wild Peter appears! Peter uses infect by assault and kiss! It's super-effective! Also super gross. The music would like us to be cheerful about this. Fuck you too, music. </span>Kitty Chandlerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05524808952260453841noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4271373189216022547.post-19030371771743412802016-08-12T20:00:00.000-07:002016-08-15T20:34:52.550-07:00So Very Alive And Full Of Goo Helix 1x02 Vector<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Day 2 of zombie outbreak hell starts with interviews with the people locked in the room with Vector!Peter. Apparently he held them down and vomited black bile into their mouths. Ew. And worse than that, there are three more who ran after the attack. Peter's behavior suggests that the goal may not necessarily be something conscious (things are of course happening that we'll find out about later) but a drive by the virus to spread itself in this case by bodily fluid contact, and again I say Ew. Buuuut I'm also getting ahead of myself.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Since they've previously established (not to my satisfaction but whatever, I'm picky) that it's not airborne they're conducting these interviews in person, in the room, with UV lights and face shields and presumably other precautions against fluid transfer. Unfortunately all their precautions aren't going to help when they find out that there were three other scientists in there during the attack, who were also likely infected, and who are now at large. Because that's exactly where you want your vectors to be, I don't think. Sarah, Julia, and Alan spend a few minutes contemplating this out loud and giving us some numbers and nightmare scenarios while lit with creepy blue glow, in case we needed the mood further set (which since this is the start of a new episode when rerun, we might) and we move out to the hallway where a sort of decontamination airlock has been set up. Jules gets to poke the rats, Sarah gets to monitor the infectees and list off random disease symptoms so we know she knows what she's talking about I guess? Again, I have no idea why the science lecture is in here except to remind us this is a science thing. And hopefully Doreen will check in soon. We don't know what Alan's doing yet because Hatake's walking up with files on the three missing doctors. At least he's somewhat helpful! The missing scientists are Tracy, Raver, and DeKlerk, and now that I listen closer I can't tell what Hatake's denying. The specific dialogue is "Can you tell me if anyone's tried to leave the base in the last 24 hours" and the response is "no." and not to get all Clue here but given the conversation between Hatake and Ballaseros earlier I'm not sure if he means no no one has or no I can't tell you. Urk. Anyway. Alan plans to go door to door to look for the missing scientists and make sure everyone's safe, and in light of that latter goal Hatake is sending along security teams with stun batons and restraints. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> feel this is an entirely reasonable precaution to take given the whole ripping his way through the ceiling cutting someone's hand off at mid forearm thing. Alan is going to be stubborn and stupid albeit not openly. Julia is going to wobble between them by that look, though she doesn't have an argument for the safety of the base issue. Julia and Alan will then have an argument over who should be in charge while in the field and clearly it should be him. If I were Julia that is not the hand position I would have used to open that door. Ahem.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Doreen is performing a necroscopy on the monkey with what I feel are insufficient safety protocols, but on the other hand at this point my feeling on sufficient safety protocols involves using waldoes or other robot appendages from a safe position of outside a hermetically sealed box, so. I also feel the need to justify my not using any words like crazy-violent to describe the monkey because really, have you seen chimps? This is not outside the normal range of behavior for some monkeys, and lacking a recognizable species designator I'm going to go with the monkey was traumatized and perfectly capable of acting that way even without scary oil slick infections. Meanwhile Julia is messing with the rats. In a darkened lab. With clanking going on overhead. This won't end poorly at all. She drips something on the rat she's currently boxing and puts it on a shelf with several other squeaky animals and keeps looking at the ceiling as she leaves. Hi Peter! Creepy Peter. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Some good use of what I believe are called jump cuts? here (unless they've come up with a specific name for this type) just to make us feel the impatience and unsettled-ness of everyone in the room. The scientists are not about this whole being isolated with each other thing, citing contamination but also I think because they're making each other nervous, they're not allowed to be alone and recover in a more private setting from the trauma of the assault, and they're being ordered around by strangers who have been on base for a day and a half and with whom they haven't developed trust yet. They are also not about the being isolated for up to two weeks, and to put a cap on it Sarah looks too young to be in a position of authority over them. Hell, I think 26 is too young to have a masters and two phDs and be certified for a CDC field team, which I imagine takes a while. But this is TV land, so we'll go with it. Child geniuses, like one in a million occurrences, are a dime a dozen. And Sarah is confident in her abilities, which we could use more STEM women on TV like that. Unfortunately she also doesn't have the gravitas to convince either this viewer or the people in the room with her of her "we will have order." She's trying, though. Poor thing. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Alan, Daniel, and Serrrgio are starting with Dr. Tracy's room where, granted, she might be, see also things about being traumatized and being allowed to flee and isolate yourself in a place of safety from the last paragraph. We will now have a brief discussion on the merits of stun batons! Daniel is of the opinion that they are good things, can stop polar bears and super-charged super strong plague vectors. Serrrgio seems to think that delivering enough of a shock to stop a polar bear somehow limits it to being used on polar bears, which, um, your logic there being? No, Serrrgio, he didn't rip off the hand, that was a very clean cut which although an air duct doesn't provide enough room to gain the momentum to do that cleanly without considerable strength, also shows pre-meditation and coherence implying that the suggestion of a shock might be enough to make him back off as well. That was a bit convoluted so I hope you followed me on that one. Alan wants to know why the fuck you're using that on a human, which is an understandable point except that he could ask it in the form of a question about whether or not you can choose the level of shock. Because if you can, excellent! Lower level for agitated scientist, higher level for super-charged plague vector. They're going to start out with a lower level entry at least, not breaching but knocking and overriding the door lock and looking in to talk with her. Sadly, she's not actually there, although she was there between the sun room attack and left her eye protection on the bed. The room also looks tossed and there's a shatter patter on the window that looks like it's from a narrower impact point than a fist. Tough to say what, though. Either there was a fight, someone tossed a room, or she was in a state of considerable distress and agitation and disordered in the mind. Given what we've seen going on here so far, who the hell knows. We leave this location with the question of where the hell is she now and move over to Doreen and her necroscopy. There the hell she is now! Sneaking up behind Doreen.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Who then turns around in the next scene to see what's left of Dr. Tracy. With severe reddening around her eyes, sweating, skin that's not actually supposed to be that color, she doesn't look good. She's also exhibiting symptoms of paranoia which may be medically induced or may be situationally induced, see also Hatake and Serrrgio. Nonetheless Doreen tries to be casual and honest. Dr. Tracy wants to know who sent her, and that's a more reasonable question than it sounds. She's also coherent enough to understand and respond to Doreen's questions appropriately, she is a doctor, she doesn't want to go to isolation for reasons that sound like fear of experimentation. More jump cuts and fragmented speech and things we don't yet understand, the white room, Dr. Hvit. If you haven't seen this through yet, trust me, these are signs of disorder and agitation but not hallucination. Also Peter referenced the white room, indicating that there's a link between the two scientists or their projects or both. Doreen tries to continue to get her out and to I'm not sure where, an isolation room, a place of safety for both of them, something like that. Dr. Tracy gets even more agitated and refers to herself in the plural which I will spoil slightly here, is one of the first signs of what appears to be a collective mind between the vectors. Or maybe the vectors being possessed by the disease, which is itself possessed of a single mind.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Julia is watching security footage and still twittching at sounds in the vents, which Hatake either doesn't hear or isn't concerned by. He seems to think it's just the base settling. If I had an infected guy with no qualms about lopping limbs crawling through my vents I wouldn't be so sure. He does have a good point about her getting at least a minimal amount of sleep, both because the Arctic does mess with perceptions and because if she's going to function at top ability she needs to be fully loaded on sleep, food, water, etc. Julia is distracted from this very good point by something in the rat? cages first rattling the shelves they're on and then knocking the shelves over. Yeah, I'd be unnerved by that too. Although I question why this can't result from TV research into TV mutagens? Probably because you always need someone to go "X can't do that, there must be something else going on." </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sarah is not in a good situation. Which probably isn't entirely why she's put the suit back on but seeing her in the moon suit certainly reinforces the effect. The quarantined are getting restless and cranky, even the doctor who's clearly attempting to contain herself and be reasonable, and one is noticeably sicker than the others. She goes to check on him and tries to reassure him that things aren't as bad as they seem and, no, dude. They are pretty bad, and he has some of that pretty bad living and squirming around inside him, and all your promises that you won't let anything happen to him don't mean shit when he's probably very aware of the possibilities and which of them are more likely than others. Certainly he all but says as much. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">From bad to worse? More ominous? A man running in slow motion down a hallway only to be tackled by Serrrgio, he doesn't look good? But he doesn't look as bad as Peter does, for example. So he's probably in the very early stages. Several other scientists have come to stare and comment at the takedown, because that's what this situation needs is more peanut gallery and more potential infectees. Though they do have a good point that sometimes laying out exactly how bad the danger they're in is might sometimes be helpful in explaining to the bystanders what they need them to do. It might just send the scientists into a panic! There's a Men in Black quote here that's relevant, individuals can be smart and make reasoned decisions, people are dumb dangerous panicky animals. Scientists are no exception to the mob rule. This vector in early stages is DeKlerk, and Alan displays some humanity and hopefully earns some trust from the bystanders by asking for the man's first name, calling him by it, trying to reach him. It's not terrible bedside technique, and they haul him off to sickbay. Everyone covers their nose and mouth as the gurney passes, I'm not sure what they think that's going to do because it's not going to reduce the chances by much but sure, why not. And bystander spokesman wants to know why they haven't been evactuated yet. Oh honey. Oh you sweet summer child. I don't know if this is his fear talking or if he genuinely hasn't yet figured out that they're not going to evacuate the base until they're sure the evacuees aren't going to just bring the disease back with them. I mean, clearly you don't need an epidemiology degree to guess that, I figured it out, but you do need a certain mindset which he may lack. (I make no comments whatsoever about what this says about my general mindset.) Alan doesn't volunteer this answer either and doesn't explain at first what's going on, why he hasn't airlifted or sled-dogged or whatevered them out yet, but the guy just has to push and bring up the concept at least of the almighty CDC, and, dude, it's not like the CDC can yell at the viruses until they behave. Alan is as irritated as I am by this and offers up a particularly nasty scenario of how the virus escapes to the gen pop. He doesn't even go into the airports, which are incredible locuses for exchange and travel of disease, seriously, you will never fly again when you put some thought into it. And now the bystander group will not protest again for at least a few hours! If nothing else because Alan's scared them into compliancy. Julia is morbidly impressed, her words say impressed and her tone and voice say morbid, and they have a brief argument over whether or not she's doing something useful by not working on what he assigned her to. She's working on what she thinks is a lead and he wants her working on what he thinks will turn up a lead and ultimately it turns out to be an argument over how each of them is coping with their history. Together, they are coping very not well! The details of who thinks whom is doing what and why are irrelevant compared to the stalking off going on. Both of you get your heads screwed on straight, this is neither the time nor the place for fuckery. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sarah's in drug storage! It's a dark room with a dimly lit cage for presumably the more dangerous drugs. Nothing's going to go wrong here, absolutely, so at this point I'm not actually surprised when Peter bangs up against the cage for the jump scare. After the break Peter is saying you're here for it? you're here for a reason. Yes, she's here for a reason, she's here with the CDC but he says it's not her, it's Walker. Without any clarification as to what's Walker, the reason, the subject of the question. And then he goes up into the ducts again. This is as good a place as any, although I'm sure I'll note it elsewhere, but this is as good a place as any to note that Neil Napier who plays Peter Farragut is fucking short. I don't actually have a height listing for him and I don't feel like chasing it down, but I'm going to go with between 5'6" and 5'8" or so for height, given later shots. And I mention this because up until this point they've done a good job of not showing this at all. He's either been on a gurney or he's been moving through ducts horizontally, or he's been crouched where you'd expect him to be shorter, or he's been moving by himself through areas with no reference point. Since he's supposed to be menacing here, he is very menacing, and usually on TV that implies large, tall. Big. This is not an accident, this is on purpose for several episodes. I'll bring this up again later. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So, Peter wanders off and Sarah is disturbed and we cut to Julia going through files. With Hatake watching. She finds evidence of Narvik injections and asks Hatake what it is, Narvik A and Narvik B, and he offers actually no explanations of what either Narvik A or Narvik B is. Good job obfuscating, though. Since he speaks with a slow, deliberate cadence impatient Julia goes digging through cold storage to find vials of the stuff before she's finished listening to Hatake not explaining what Narvik is, talking about how he encourages his staff to take risks instead. Good job, dude. Julia asks what he was working on, who else was working on it with him, Hatake says she met them earlier in bodybags. Oh thanks, Hatake. Julia puts back the vials with body language that suggests </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">ew i touched it </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">more than anything and then says they need to replicate his experiment. Finally, someone's doing good science!</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Meanwhile back at the monkey necroscopy Dr. Tracy is pacing and babbling. I like babble! It's sometimes informative. In this case she's regretting whatever it is she worked on which involved gene recombination and replication? Probably retroviral gene therapy of some kind. Yeah, see, remember what I was talking about, about mutations? There appear to be some jump cuts in here; regardless the whole thing is edited to shake up viewers and underscore how erratic and out of it Dr. Tracy is. She also isn't actually talking to Doreen although she's talking at Doreen at some points. Rather she's talking to someone she seems to have worked with a while ago, on these viruses. She says you can't expect a virus to follow instructions which, see? mutations! and then concludes with she's not taking the fall for this alone which is only a conclusion because that's when Doreen lunges for the door. Tracy is kind of terrifyingly strong, leaning over her and trying to vomit the black stuff into her mouth. Thank god for face shields. As she's doing that though, she collapses, allowing Doreen to get up and open the cage door. Dr. Tracy isn't as much of a threat anymore, it seems like her body was making that last effort to expel the poison or spread the poison or whatever it was doing, and as she asks what's happening to her Doreen pauses in the doorway with a sympathetic look and sigh. Doreen, pausing for sympathy is what gets people killed. You silly woman. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Alan quizzes Sarah on how exposed she was, is she okay, yes she's fine, he didn't attack her and everything's fine. Serrrgio finds empty bottles of morphine sulfate, which Alan takes as a good sign because if he's lucid enough to self-medicate for pain, particularly when said self-medication process involves injections, he's possibly lucid enough to be reasoned with and recaptured before he infects everyone else. It's a good plan and a good assumption except it also predicates on the notion that a lucid Peter is a friendly Peter, which given everything else in this scenario I would not be so sure of. Sarah isn't so sure lucid equals to benign or reasonable, she tells him about the conversation about being here for a reason and mentioning Walker. Neither of them yet know what this means. And when they find out they won't be happy! Serrrgio interrupts having decided that he left them a trail to follow, although with all the blue light and blurry perspective outside of the focus on the person who's talking (or who we're supposed to be focusing on) it's hard to say what kind of trail. It's interesting, this particular style of filming when we're in sparse sets with very little in the way of props or decoration and narrow perspectives. A lot of times everything else is either physically removed or blurred out except one, maybe two people; it keeps us hyperfocused on what we're supposed to be focusing on, but it obscures other details that might come in handy. A metaphor for people's (and by people mostly I mean Alan, Julia, and Sarah) states of mind? Or simply an overall of how we're supposed to interpret the show. It works in the audio, too, or at least in my particular case certain words and phrases didn't register in my consciousness until second or third watching. Again, hyper- or mono-focus. Anyway. Serrrrrgio's going in to look for Peter, not taking Alan into the ducts with him this time but allowing him to join him via radio. Makes sense, given that Alan's not supposed to be trained for any kind of incursion, combat, work against an active human hostile, etc. We move to the next scene with some Die Hard banter that gives Alan an Old, a lot of humming for background noise and a good Dutch angle on everyone walking through the corridors at least after the first shot so that we're aware this is supposed to be suspenseful. Something skitters past! Alan has a point about checking behind him, and there's not much way to keep his head on a swivel in there, but of course when he looks around there's Peter all bloody eye that may be a detached retina or just burst blood vessels, black goo around his closed mouth and hand reaching for his face. Because that's exactly what you want to see in a narrow duct. Gross. Alan looks up. Going by the breathing over the audio and the grill, Peter may well be looking down at him.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">After the break they bring Serrrgio out of the vents and his pulse is steady, he doesn't have black bile on him, he looks okay. His equipment is undamaged and fairly comprehensive as far as physical protection from disease goes so that's a plus. He wakes up ish, doesn't have much in the way of a coherent story to tell and given what we saw of the attack I don't blame him, and he seems to think he was hit by one of the shock batons. So, no, electrical charge doesn't do much to restrain or stop Peter either. Good to know. Ish. Daniel gets a message over the radio about the elevator alarm and something (more likely someone) trying to leave the base. Because that's exactly what everyone needed.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Julia and Hatake are conducting their rat experiments. Narvik A's subjects are almost at a hundred percent mortality rate, complete with a misuse or to be more accurate modern use of the word decimated. (A truly decimated population would be at 90%, I pedant so that the rest of you don't have to because I know I wasn't the only one thinking this.) Narvik B's subjects, on the other hand, are all infected but alive. Mostly alive. They look quite a lot like Narvik B's subjects, all of them full of blackened blood and pale and generally zombie-ish. Because this show was working on being a zombie show until abruptly it wasn't, around midway through the first season. Though less in the tradition of the post-apocalypse zombie shows we've been having lately, you've got to give it credit for going the medical horror route. Anyway. Hatake holds forth about how he's missed real lab work and uses words, phrasing that Julia remembers from her mother. It turns out she was also a scientist, a cellular biologist, now long dead. Hatake's in the middle of asking about her father when there's a bang on one of the cages, preventing us from pulling on that thread much longer. We can tell it's a thread even now, although we don't know the shape of the tapestry, because there are very few wasted words in this script; like the set, it's very lean and clean. In fact, come to think of it, most of the wasted words are ridiculous science talk, less wasted and more extraneous about setting the mood rather than developing the plot or characters. The banging is actually a rat flinging itself at the glass walls and then going and attacking an as-yet-uninfected rat? vomiting black blood into his mouth. And we can tell this is CGI because rats don't move that way, even directed ones, but at the same time there's no obvious CGI markers and it is, say it with me now, fucking creepy. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The quarantine situation is getting even worse. Sick and now supine doctor is pleading for everyone to be calm but the other two are definitely not happy. There's an argument that culminates in Sarah being held hostage by Bryce with a needle to the back of her shoulder/suit. I'm not entirely sure what he's aiming for but I don't supposed it matters. Dr. [???] keeps insisting that they can help, but given that all three of them appear to be infected I'm not sure what kind of help she thinks they're going to be when they're clearly not operating at peak capacity. Well, let me correct myself, what kind of help she thinks they're going to be that they can't be from within quarantine. At any rate, this is enough to bring Daniel and then Alan in his moon suit down to try and talk them out of doing something entirely stupid. By doing something entirely stupid himself! Although I will admit that by this point, if they're not showing any symptoms despite having been in close proximity to a number of infectees, it probably isn't airborne? I still wouldn't be sure. Alan takes his hood off as a dramatic gesture, and it seems to work because in the next scene Sarah is free and both of them are out of their moon suits. Alan tells her she did a good job, and they have a moment to breathe and reassure each other that they're all right, they did their jobs well, there was no risk of airborne infection anyway. Along comes Julia! To maybe tell them that they're wrong? </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">No, to show them the Narvik rats. Hemorrhagic shock and liquification (technically, again, liquefaction) of internal organs, lesions, pretty much a hemorrhagic fever for the A subjects. For the B subjects, aggression and a compulsion to spread the contagion. Which Julia denies is similar to rabies when but in fact that's how rabies works, along with several parasites and other varying icks the human body can become infected with. Rabies, possibly the rest of the lyssavirus category (see again my lack of CDC/epidemiology credentials) cause behavior changes in order to spread the virus, including aggression and agitation. Toxoplasmosis causes behavior changes in order to spread the parasite. This is not new behavior in viruses, this is old, well documented behavior and I have no idea why Julia's resisting the idea and clinging to it as new and scary. The degree to which it manifests is new and scary, yes, vectors on steroids is apt, but this is not new. Actually it should be almost scarier for being turned up to nine-thousand because if the virus has jacked this common behavior up that high, what else has it done? Anyway. The discussion of silly ends with Daniel coming in and summoning Alan to talk to Hatake, which is good because Alan has a few questions for him and I hope they all start with "What the hell, dude?" Or the moral equivalent. They've worked their way around to Peter is basically a plague vector on two legs, which both ties into the infected Dr. Tracy talking in the collective person and at the same time doesn't explain a goddamn thing about certain other parts of the show. I'm sure they'll get to that. At any rate, Alan leaves with the ominous comment that we're not dealing with a single virus anymore, I indulge in a brief Single Virus In Search Of parody pondering, and we switch to outside. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">One of the scientists is trying to escape on snowmobile, it looks like the one from the corridor. Serrrgio is trying to talk him into returning back to the base and doctor stupid is having none of it, citing transgenic experiments and a virus vault. (Meaning basically experiments of introducing foreign DNA into host DNA, transgenics. Retroviral gene therapy among other forms.) Doctor stupid is scared. Doctor stupid has not yet realized there's a military guy of dubious provenance and origin who just arrived at the base shortly after things went to heck and right before they went further straight to hell, who's pointing a flashlight at him and telling him he can't let him leave. Doctor stupid, frankly, as a character, deserves everything that's coming to him. And he's referring to the monkeys! Calling what was done to them an abomination, that kind of explains the expressions on the monkeys faces. But then he will compound his stupidity not only by refusing to go back inside (and Serrrgio's right, his tauntaun </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">will</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> freeze before he reaches the first marker) but also by saying they have to tell the press, everyone! Mysterious military interloper does not like that. Mysterious military interloper prevents the telling of people with stabbing. Honestly, this isn't just predictable in television, where its predictability is mitigated by the fact that this development/hinderance is only a small part of the plot, this is predictable in real life, too. Corrupt agencies aren't interested in their dirty secrets getting out and it's definitely been proven that they will ruin lives and/or kill people to prevent it. But no. Stupid doctor's gotta stupid, and ends up dead for it. Brief shot of three colors of lights to emphasize both technology and eeriness takes us to...</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sarah and Julia gearing up for something. Sarah is having trouble putting her glove on which Julia ascribes to nerves, telling her that she doesn't have to, she can handle it herself. Sarah's fine, really, no, she's fine, absolutely fine here, and whatever else is going on will have to wait until Doreen finishes introducing the very advanced Dr. Tracy and using the word monkey about five times. I love you Doreen. They bring Dr. Tracy into the quarantine room, allegedly straight into the ICU chamber, when Dr. Haven starts seizing. Allegedly seizing. What happens instead is that once Sarah and Doreen are well and truly distracted they shove Doreen into the ICU containment and Sarah up against the wall until she's knocked unconscious. Thereby demonstrating that advanced infectees are totally capable of complex actions if it furthers the virus's goal of more infectees, etc. In this case that means escaping first. There's something fairly unsettling about that. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Hatake is looking out at the quarantine cell, not the one Doreen is in but a different one, the one they had Peter in. Thinking. Pointing out to Alan that the virus was less of a danger before the CDC came, where Alan points out that his people were the ones doing the attacking. And he chides Alan for not having the situation under control, whereupon Alan chides him for not giving them all of the fucking data. Okay, chides is a mild word, even if Alan is being milder than I would be. The things I would say, though, you can't say on basic cable. He brings up the patient escapes, the monkey. The infected monkey, no less. And the experiment Peter was working on that he wasn't briefed about. Hatake claims to not have known about that but it's more of a claim by implication, although much smoother than he's been in the past. Consider what he's saying, first of all that Alan should ask Peter about that, implying that he neither knew nor authorized it and that Peter acted alone without outright saying either of those two things. Then saying that he would never condone something so reckless, which is much more of a solid argument that he didn't know except that we know something Alan doesn't. We know about the conversation Hatake had with Ballaseros where it was made to sound like Hatake was under some sort of coercion. So perhaps he wouldn't condone working with the Narvik virus, but also perhaps he wasn't given a choice. Alan doesn't know this, so he's forced to take both words and implications at face value. The rest of us are grinding our teeth. Alan accepts it and moves on to containment, which he conditions on complete transparency and threatens to pack the CDC up and leave, albeit tacitly, if Hatake doesn't agree. Heh. Oh Alan, you have no idea what you're getting yourself into.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Alan goes in to talk to Julia, who has been examining herself in the mirror like she thinks she's been infected. Which is not the worst move ever, really. More than that, Alan is confessing to being overprotective and emotional, and I'm rather impressed by that. Julia does the usual you don't need to protect me thing, Alan admits to not being much able to stop, everyone is cute, and thankfully this fairly boilerplate conversation lasts only long enough for everyone to deliver their stock lines. Serrrgio is burying something outside. Gee, I wonder what that is. Sarah is examining her shaking hands. Diskynesia is not one of the symptoms, so something new is going on with her. Hatake is looking at surveillance photos of Julia Walker, which is a whole new dimension of terrifying to his character. He also has far, far more books and an extensive library of carefully leather bound books, more so than we were led to believe. He goes over to his desk then, rubbing his eyes and taking out some contact lenses. All well and good, plenty of people have contact lenses, but how many people use them to hide their silver fucking eyes, hmm?? Hah-hah! Bet you didn't see that coming! Well, no, but it does explain a lot about Hatake's absolute reticence to tell anyone anything. What else is he hiding, one wonders. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And we close with Julia taking a shower to jaunty cheerful music, so of course something fucked up is about to happen. A wild Peter appears! Peter uses infect by assault and kiss! It's super-effective! Also super gross. The music would like us to be cheerful about this. Fuck you too, music. </span>Kitty Chandlerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05524808952260453841noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4271373189216022547.post-55722379666269535302016-08-09T10:00:00.000-07:002016-08-09T10:00:25.121-07:00The Librarians S1E01 ...And The Crown of King Arthur<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We open in Berlin, to much swearing, because oh FUCK YOU GUYS that's the same fucking alley between sound stages you used in fucking Leverage for the SAME FUCKING CITY. If you're having crossover problems now, join the club and pull up a comfy chair, 'cause we're gonna be here awhile. (Worse, I'm pretty sure I know the exact area of Portland that is, because it looks awfully similar to Grimm's sound stages.) Rather than a librarian in the shape of Noah Wyle (yes, I've seen the movies, there will be references, I recommend watching them for the sheer camp value if nothing else, though you don't need it for the backstory here), we have anxious law enforcement raid music! And a group of people in full raid gear with a blonde woman leading the way. Hi, Eve! I'll just say here that absolutely the only reason she doesn't have a helmet on is because the camera needs to identify her somehow, and while some people miiiight be able to look at body type and the way she moves and say, oh, that's a woman and the rest of them are men and she's taking point so she's the leader, that's not something you generally bank on in the first thirty seconds of your pilot. I deeply appreciate that that IS the only way to ID Eve, too. Well, that and the fact that all her team has assault weapons and she's got a handgun. But again: this is not actually a procedural law enforcement show, and given the audience likely to be watching Librarians you don't want to rely on everyone's knowledge of the visual tropes. Which is interesting, because the entire directing style is very deliberately similar to typical procedural while Eve's the only main character onscreen. Apparently they have a WMD in the giant warehouse! Oh what great fun. And all of Col. Baird's men, with the exception of the guy I'm pretty sure is the new guy, are utterly loyal to her and do not need more than the basic verbal commands. And she has utter faith in </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">them</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, given that she knows exactly how long it should take the other guys to get into position out of her line of sight. Like. This is such delightful competence porn. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I'm not so certain about how the raid itself is carried out: either they got bad intel on the amount and kind of resistance they should expect, or the writers decided the shootout was more exciting than everyone going stealth and being badasses that way. Anyway. Bad guys realizing they're badly outnumbered and running off! Eve spotting them and disappearing from her team without backup. EVE. Though this is in keeping with our initial presentation of her as someone who takes more risks than she should, but is competent enough to pull them off, and as such has managed to get herself promoted up the CoC despite being a woman. And let me tell you, given that every other person on her team appears to be a man? Yeah. Also that little smile right before she jumps down a level, which is probably a good 15' easy, tells us all about her adrenaline junkie issues too. It turns out that our bad guys, whoever they are, are of the fine fuckit we'll blow ourselves AND YOU up, which suggests this was either a trap or exceedingly poor planning. Or maybe the Library itself arranged this somehow, considering it's there to get Eve and Flynn in the same place at the same time. I am quite certain the Library has that power. Yes, Eve, the giant bomb of doom is beeping because it's armed, and either there's too many layers of concrete or there's some other kind of fuckery (technological? magical?) interfering with the radios. But what we do have is Flynn tunneling through the steam vents and complaining about it! At length! And as is his custom, he will now proceed to confuse the shit out of everyone, including the bad guys. Eve would like backup or a second gun so she can hold one on both the known bad guys and her new problem. You can SEE that without her having to say a WORD. Unfortunately getting to her ankle holdout is a nonstarter at the moment.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Flynn is not here for your mundane WMD, he's here for the Opal of Samara. Samara itself, for the interested, is a Russian city slightly north of western Kazakhstan, officially established over the 16th and 17th centuries as anything more than a useful bend on the Volga. Like many Russian cities, it was renamed after the October Revolution and was indeed very important during WWII, as the "backup capital" should Moscow fall. It was, however, never the site of any battles so far as I can tell. According to Flynn, it was stolen (stolen, Flynn, let's be honest here) by Teutonic knights from Jerusalem during the Third Crusade. Which was the last of the Crusades to have even a plausible gilding of religious motivation, as opposed to looting and revenge. Apparently wherever it got stored (Samara? somewhere else in Russia? WHO KNOWS THANKS FLYNN), the Thule Society or similar stole it and meant to use it. And oh hey look there's a magical safe. That's probably for the best. Fucking Nazi occult assholes. (Interestingly, the symbol on the pillars looks like an ibis or maybe a stork. You guys, mixing your occult symbols never EVER leads anywhere good when you're doing ceremonial magic, I'm just saying.) Anyway. Apparently the reason it's locked away is because it summons demons without controlling them, and who knows if or where there's a control crystal! Er, opal. Mechanism. Thing. (I can blame that slip on Haven, right? Moving on.) Actually, Flynn probably does know but he's not telling. I have a lot of respect for the kind of person who keeps up that kind of random stream of patter without giving away anything too critical at the time, although frankly Flynn could probably stand to take some lessons in the latter half of that from Tony Stark. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This looks like the kind of magical safe that could be opened with, I don't know, specific sound frequencies? Suggests the tuning fork, anyway, except Flynn you are not a musician do better. And definitely don't set off the trap for creating flesh-eating zombies. For once Baird and the bad guys are in agreement: NO NO ZOMBIES THAT'S BAD. I like how none of them are questioning this at this point, Eve because she's smart enough to recognize an expert in his field when she meets one and I suspect the bad guys because they're too bulldozed to know what to believe. No, apparently the fix to the trap is some kind of alphanumeric code keyed to Bible verses. I sincerely fucking hope you mean Torah verses you guys, which would SEVERELY fuck things up, although given the timeframe it's entirely possible it's the Christian Bible. ...in which case I hope you know which version you're using in which translation. Yeah, I wouldn't be all that good at focusing with a beeping suitcase nuke either, Flynn, I can't blame you there. It does kind of set up for more bullets on top of the beeping, though, which you would think would be worse. (You would be wrong, because Flynn Carson is a terrifying adrenaline junkie, but it's a normal person reaction.) Other downsides nobody ever tells you about archaeology: DON'T SNEEZE ON THE ARTIFACTS. You mean the dust-covered ones? That reek like centuries of - yep. Those. Don't sneeze on those. Oh, hey, stations of the cross! I love how Eve's all okay fine Mr. Know-It-All, do YOU know how to defuse a nuclear bomb? Yes. Yes he does. What he does not know is how to give coherent directions. Don't is a very important word when you're talking about things that can kill you all! AS YOU ARE MOST OF THE TIME, FLYNN. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Now we move along to me getting to geek out about random Christianity knowledge! Eve is entirely correct, and betraying her likely upbringing as being Catholic (there's other options, not least among them Lutheran, but for TV shorthand Catholic is the most common), in that if you learn the Stations of the Cross you learn the 14 stations dammit. And there are 14 stations, and they're that way because when you have two thousand-odd years of historical basis for liturgy, new stuff gets tacked on, osmosed from other religions, and flat-out made up because it fits in with the theological point people are trying to make. But Flynn is also correct, in that only eight of the stations have direct scriptural basis, and since they're working with something that predates the 1600s (when the 14 stations took more or less the form they have today), we're going with the eight in Scripture: Jesus is condemned to death; he carries his cross; Simon of Cyrene helps to carry the cross (whether this was voluntary or not is variously attested); Jesus meets the women of Jerusalem; Jesus is stripped of his garments; the Crucifixion itself; Jesus' death; Jesus is laid in the tomb. Those are actually the only ones IN the Gospels that, by the time of the Third Crusade, the Church had agreed were canonical. (Did you ever wonder where the fannish term came from? It came from Church debates about what's heretical or not. I PROMISE YOU WE ARE NOT AS BAD AS THEY WERE.) I am not even remotely fucking touching the fact that at the point where they're talking, the Bible would have been in LATIN. Not in English. And for that matter, the Vulgate Bible was only confirmed as the Catholic Church's preferred version of the Latin in the 16th century, so presumably the death trap surrounding the Opal of Samara postdates that </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">or </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">you're working on a wrong version of the Bible and about to explode. (Prior to the Vulgate, they would've had a collection of versions known as the Old Latin, or Vetus Latina: the history of how the Bible is put together is a FASCINATING one and I highly recommend looking into it if you're a history nerd. It honestly explains so, so much about our culture when you realize that Christians have been fighting about this shit for two millennia.) Also technically I wouldn't call John 19:17 the condemnation; I'd move that a verse up to 19:16, but okay whatever the Church would probably argue with me about it. No, Flynn, you are not 50% less likely to die, let's go with 25%, giving 5% to the guys with guns getting a lucky shot in. Given they do seem to be that fucking stupid and suicidal about charging Eve while she's trying to dismantle the nuke. 45% to the nuke, 5% to the evil terrorist whatevers, and 50% to the death trap which is NOT fully disarmed THANK YOU FLYNN CARSON. Ahem. I'm not quite sure how we get from the Gospel of Luke to 2-2-5-6-6 as the disarm code: Luke is the third Gospel, the chapter and verses are 23:26-31 (or 27, depending on if you're including Jesus' speech to the women or not), but whatever, I'll go with it. See also: different Bibles! Besides, it lets them get the great moment of easy-to-say numbers in chorus. Eve, please punch Flynn for being a condescending jerk about you knowing your Bible. Though I do love him then demonstrating that he's capable of counting bullets while disarming the death trap of Crusader doom. I suspect Eve would've been JUST fine without the help, given the guy's enough of an idiot to forget range of efficacy. </span><br />
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Opal acquired, last terrorist disarmed and knocked out (Eve ZIPTIE HIM are you a professional or not), time for a moment of "wait what, what the fuck just happened, who are you, what the hell." Oh she is definitely going to punch you for the flip "I'm the Librarian" answer, dude. Just as soon as you stop Batmanning around the place long enough to be gotten. But the Opal is only the Macguffin to get them introduced and kick off the main plotline! It doesn't even bear scrutiny past this point. Have a title card instead… oh, oh, we're just going to be screamingly blatant then? And go for the crown of King Arthur? See, this is when I knew this show was a) written for me and b) going to punch all of my Arthuriana buttons. ALL OF THEM. I should note, by the way, before we get any deeper into this kind of flaily nerding-out analysis, that I'm fully aware that there's only so much you can cram into a TV show, even with the incredibly rapid-fire dialogue that Librarians is so good at. This is why we have the blog! To fill in the gaps and talk through the things that have to be skipped over for reasons of time, and also so we can talk technical aspects, where possible. ...so far I may have been </span><span style="color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">slightly </span><span style="color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">too distracted by history nerding to remember that, but we'll see!</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Next day, in New York, just outside the Metropolitan Library in Midtown! A strange man calling Flynn on the phone, being stalked by Matt Frewer in a black suit and hat. GEE. I WONDER. Is the random guy gonna die? Is Matt Frewer gonna kill him? Telegraph a little harder, I can't tell! We go through a series of no-you're-not-yes-I-am until Flynn stops being obfuscatory and contrary and goes wait, you're serious! And know shit! Yes, you arrogant fuckwit. (I love Flynn, but ten years of gallivanting around on his own and surviving has made him even MORE of an arrogant ass than he was to start with, and I appreciate that the writers aren't handwaving that.) That said, the strange librarian or whoever he is, is now a was, because Dulaque stabs him in the middle of the lobby and whispers that the crown is his. I should note, for the doubters, that it's actually entirely possible to stab someone with a narrow blade and make it look like you only bumped into them hard, and then to get out and away before the blood and falling over clues everyone else in. It takes a lot of training and a certain mindset to be capable of it, but it's possible. (I note the training specifically because it seems the diaphragm was pierced, making screaming difficult-to-impossible.) And, of course, the one paper that Flynn needs flutters up the steps to land under his shoe! I'm gonna go ahead and blame that one on the Library taking matters into its own hands. As it were. Let's just pause on the photocopy of the painting, shall we? Which I'm not sure is an actual painting in our universe either, but it's titled Knights Fighting Barbarians, two separate dates? maybe? I'm not sure what C 10 CA is supposed to be, 1150 AD is definitely a date and dated for the general audiences; CE has entered best-practice scholarly usage. The best I can think is C10 is 10th century and ca is circa, but then the 1150 AD date is contra-indicated; probably ~C10 is the date of the battle in the painting and 1150 is the date the painting was done. Stylistically I find that most plausible, and since all the notes strongly suggest we're looking at Camlann or at least late-Arthur period, the 900s are about as late as you can reasonably go for a historical Arthur figure. Much more accurate would be somewhere between 3-500 CE, but okay, whatever, it's Librarians, I'll play. The rest of the notes ask who the barbarians are (Vikings, Huns, and Celts are the three suggestions, so we're going with a Roman Arthur), lots of ?! over the idea that the crown is in the painting, and an art historian type note about how the exaggerated position of the far-right figure gives an air of movement and draws attention to the fallen figure that might or might not be Arthur. Well. Flynn's not happy!</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Eve's not happy either! Clearly just arrived home from the airport, given her bags which sort of match her personality but frankly I think there should be some kind of bright-colored something or another. If you travel that much, you have an easily identified mark that differentiates your black bag from all the other black bags. Or navy bags. Or brown bags. Whether that's colored ribbon knotted around the handle or decals or something else doesn't really matter, though I suppose Eve being an agent of awesome she might also take pride in not NEEDING anything other than the particular pattern of dings. Also I bet she gets to avoid the TSA lines. Excuse me while I have envy. There's about a week's worth of newspapers on her stoop, though no mail, it's a brownstone walkup which says a good deal about how much money she's making, aaand that is a totally barren but very nice kitchen-dining area! I want it. I will fill it with extra counter space and a pots and pans ceiling rack and pretty pictures or stencils. Eve does not want a month of leave. Eve have you ever taken leave in your LIFE? Judging by her offended exasperation and the utterly empty apartment I'm going with no. Seriously I think the elliptical? machine is like the only piece of personal anything in the first shot. Apparently she even sits on a folding chair to eat. Eve, Leroy Jethro Gibbs is a warning to others, not a role model. Also there are free weights and kettlebells in what should be either the dining room or the living room. Note, let's shall, that this apartment is so empty I'm actually having some difficulty telling for sure what rooms are intended for what purpose. Now I </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">will </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">give her credit, despite the fact that the fridge is empty save a bottle of water: the more classic thing would be to have the fridge growing all kinds of horrific things in leftover takeout containers. So at least Eve cares </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">that </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">much about this place, that she's keeping it clean. And yes, yes this is a depressing apartment, you could DO something about that? Fuck knows that she should be getting enough overtime and hazard pay to afford an interior decorator if she's not naturally inclined. (This also will serve as a GREAT contrast to the Library later.) Speaking of! Hello, white envelope! In the tradition of magic messages everywhere, it only shows up when she's home alone. Aww. Just in case we were in any doubt about its provenance, the music gives us the lilting flute for the Library's theme, and oh hey, magically appearing gold script! Mind you, I don't think she has any intention of accepting this position when the letter appears, she just wants to hunt down the Librarians and find out what the everloving fuck happened in Berlin, especially since her report is probably what got her benched. Yes, Eve, talking about magical artifacts and appearing-disappearing crazy men is a great way for your SO to decide you've been overworking.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Next day, or possibly just after a shower and change of clothes (aww interview clothes! she could possibly scream I'm From The Government And I'm Here To Help more, but she'd have to have the earwig and sunglasses too), Eve walks past the sleeping lions and goes to find out what the fuck. It is a very pretty building, and she's not wholly immune to that even if her personal decorating style is the very definition of spartan. And here we come to a question: I would dearly love to know exactly who at the front desk knows just enough to point people with white envelopes at Charlene, and if they know anything MORE than "just enough," and indeed how much of the MPL is in on knowing about THE Library. Alas, we get no answers. Just Charlene being obfuscatory and indignant as only a librarian can because NO DAMMIT FLYNN NO FOOD AROUND THE BOOKS. AND HER BUDGET IS VERY TIGHT, FLYNN CARSON. I have to assume this is by the way of getting Eve to fuck right off, because she in </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">no way </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">looks like she's delivering food, but white envelopes don't exactly come around every day. Particularly for someone who's been without a Guardian for ten years. Charlene will now do her very best impression of a terrifying grandmother or possibly maiden aunt, not quiiite as far as pinching Eve's cheeks but everything else yes! It also serves to discombobulate Eve enough to draw the boundary of stop touching me, but then she answers questions and follows along with her what the fuck look on. It's kind of great, especially because it's the what the fuck borne out of absolute confidence she can handle anything this place throws at her. I have more questions! Who the hell are the two young women sitting at the reading table? Are they Library interns? Is Charlene teaching them her job? Are they Serpent Brotherhood? WHAT IS GOING ON. The nameless guards that are even more government than Eve are at least self-explanatory. And the John Rogers catchphrase of "adorable." I MISSED THIS CATCHPHRASE SO MUCH Y'ALL. Do you know how many years I had to suffer with only Leverage rewatches to tide me through.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Into the all-white elevator! Down the metaphorical shaft! The not very explanatory at all exposition about what the Guardian to the Librarian is and how they work, which given it's somewhat unique to every pair is, I feel, reasonably hard to give. Common sense and brawn is a decent place to start with, I suppose. Apparently whatever Eve signed without looking it over (BAD GOVERNMENT AGENT NO BISCUIT) includes permission for Charlene to babble about magic and artifacts, because oh hi there casually making the newbie's head explode. That's mean, Charlene. You're getting far too much joy out of this. Oh there is definitely such a thing as magic, that is I believe the Spear of Longinus right up front. Also while we're talking continuity with the movies and things inspired by them, I should admit that until the pilot I didn't realize there was a cheesy TV movie trilogy out there. Which I of course watched. (Stana Katic plays a vampire. You should totally see that for the cognitive dissonance.) So instead to ME, this started out as a gleeful return to Warehouse 13, until I came to understand how much W13 was paying homage to this. And then I might have squeed a lot. Additionally, yes, this is filmed approximately ten years after the Quest for the Spear, the first of the movies and the only one in which Flynn has a Guardian. (She dies. Then he vows never to get a Guardian killed again, blah blah blah.) Eve will now proceed to rewrite her entire understanding of how the world works as fast as possible. AwwwwwEve. And the matching golden lions! I love them so. Charlene gives the initial "you got the white envelope, therefore the Library needs you" speech to nudge her forward out of her shock, because it is not exactly difficult to parse out that two things Eve Baird responds to are a) being needed for some greater purpose and b) being told she can't do something. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The second part of that is forthcoming! Hello, Flynn. Fencing lessons with Excalibur, which changes to Flynn giving Cal orders to keep Eve from getting any further into the Library. Flynn, don't be a total ass and at least ATTEMPT to read Charlene's body language. Does she LOOK coerced into this? For fuck's sake. On the other hand, it does give us the rather blatant foreshadowing that wounds caused by Excalibur never heal, Eve needs a moment to get some words that are OMG EXCALIBUR. I feel you, sro. No, Flynn, it's not a fake letter. Oh my god. Although claiming a sword, however personable, as your best friend, is totally a good reason to have serious social issues. Flynn and Charlene have a wholly predictable argument over who sends the envelopes (not her! the Library!) and whether Eve's going to be his Guardian or not, and Flynn goes all shouty at the ceiling. Flynn WHAT did I just say about being an asshole. And now Eve will demonstrate that nobody tells her fuckall about what to do, Charlene looks like she needs to go get the popcorn, and Flynn continues to act like he's about twelve by trying to run away and shut the door in her face. Ah yes, the annex room! Where every surface is covered in books, maps, parchments, lamps, the card catalogue takes up at least a third of the visual space, and if there's not much outright decoration beyond the skylights and the molding on the columns and balconade, the rest makes up for it. Also by Eve's expression, actually the kind of place she thinks of as homey even if she hasn't done anything to make </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">her </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">home resemble it. No, there are no other Librarians (yet), and Charlene is not coming to your rescue, Flynn. Judson! Has his portrait draped in black for those of us wondering where the fuck he is, and was the mysterious asshole father figure, basically. Okay, not always an asshole, but when he was mysterious? Definitely. Also it sounds like Flynn's mother's died too, and is not in fact trapped in a mirror being a spirit around the place. Eve please don't shoot the nice spirit. Or grope him. God I love Judson. I also love Flynn's refreshing bluntness, now that he's slowly dealing with the fact that she's not going away and the people he thinks should be getting rid of Eve aren't going to do anything either. Changed, Judson, is I believe a polite word for "gone slightly wrong in the head and probably has some PTSD." At a minimum. He's also the one with the right words to point out to Eve that she was already doing Guardian-like work before now, and the Library thinks that plus her being herself is the right combination to make her THE Guardian. So suck it up and consider that.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Philosophical maunderings will have to wait, because Flynn's going to be irritable about trying to solve a murder. Which only gets Eve to come needle him into coughing up details about it. Flynn really does work better with someone to bounce ideas off of, especially when that someone is telling him he's not as smart as he thinks he is. (Which he isn't. He is VERY smart, but sometimes he gets tunnel vision.) No, he doesn't know what the painting is, no, he doesn't have any leads that seems more solid than any others, there's just this guy dead on his doorstep. So! Says Eve. The obvious place: how did he know to come here? Given the Library is in fact incredibly secretive and people tend to be careful not to let on about its existence. Well… white envelopes? OH BUT WAIT, indeed, there ARE a bunch of people who know about the Library from… ten years ago! And being a library, they keep RECORDS of all this shit, so somewhere if the dead guy got an envelope they'll know. Great! Get better fucking organization, Flynn. (I am just not touching the number of PhDs anyone has on this show, okay, it hurts my brain to consider the sheer workload. Although not being all in hard sciences with practicum requirements probably helps a little.) Oh but wait, there's more! There's a guy who was at a NATO conference on bioweapons, also in the ledger, died in a car accident last month. Everyone has a bad feeling like this. And Eve has a smartphone! God I love good use of technological advancements. Plane crash for the next one, several more deaths and disappearances, and they're only hitting up the top dozen, which is to say the ones most likely to be a threat to the Serpent Brotherhood's plans. Except for the people who never came in for an interview! Apparently Flynn knows Ezekiel Jones by reputation, presumably as a thief, and will now pelt out the door to find the first person who's actually IN New York. Sliding down the banister. Flynn I </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">know </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">half of this is an act to try and keep Eve out. Quit it. She would also like you to stop trying to order her around and does not need permission fuck YOU.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And they're STILL arguing about this once they get to the hospital. Flynn's basic argument is that everyone leaves, dies, or both, and therefore fuck having a partner. Eve is predictably not buying this in the least. How's that complete lack of attachment ideal working out for you, Flynn? Because from here you look pretty fucking miserable. They're here for a woman named Cassandra Killian, who is not the EMT nor the woman on the stretcher, and may I just say that while it'd be nicer representation-wise if they DID have a woman of color talking, it's really nice to see four women… five women! On-duty nurse too. In a scene, and at least one of them is not white and probably one more. We get the standard run-down of symptoms, sudden onset high fever, headache, fell over passed out basically. Which, yes, for just about any other situation would in fact indicate meningitis! Fever, stiff neck, photophobia, sore joints, nausea and vomiting, all of those do fit the common symptoms, and given that meningitis is the sort of thing that spontaneously shows up in student populations it's not a bad guess! I honestly don't blame the poor doc on ER rotation for starting there. Also when you've got that high a fever it's a good guess that regardless of what else you should do, pushing broad-spectrum antibiotics should help your body fight off whatever the fuck invaded. And looking over the symptoms for psittacosis and where stuff differs, they actually haven't listed anything for me that deviates from where it overlaps with meningitis; it's purely on the strength of the parrot feather. Whiiiich I don't think is totally unreasonable but you need a better argument than that. Still! Worth looking into, run the tests, and make sure that the poor woman gets her parrot medicated too, because you do NOT want to venture forth for the psittacosis epidemic. Nooo. That would be bad. Plus you can't exactly not handle a parrot if you want it to be happy and healthy, they're flock animals, PS please don't get one unless it's a rescue and you really know what you're doing with birds, okay. I'll spare you all the longer rant. Meanwhile Cassandra's got some serious issues going on which look like some form of autism? or other neurodivergent stuff going on, but she hasn't been able to make herself stop free-associating to the math of the whole thing. Quantum physics isn't actually my strong suit, so I'll just let these bits go, and only say that WOW that is EXACTLY the right mental image for when I'm trying to juggle all the bits of a Murderboarding analysis, or all the bits of any other large project. I'd have to go look at other floaty mind palace CGI to tell you exactly why this one doesn't bother me as much as the others, but I think it has to do with the fact that it demonstrates the actual level of chaos inherent in the system. (Unlike, say, Sherlock, where they seem determined to tell us he's practically a robot. Sorry, no, brains are the fucking chaos butterfly in action.) Cassandra's especially! I have some synesthetic tendencies, but I damn well don't have all five common senses involved. Though there are more than five senses. Ask me about what I can remember when proprioception gets involved. Anyway. We get the rundown on what synesthesia is, the usual you're in danger come with us if you want to live speech, followed by I'm The Librarian.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8spP-X7F4SGi1PTZHrXiY9X2FAG7C3mW6cu_FByWw_6g2ikWEzMRugVmyBKbBsKaJv9cRHeUUveQuoVf4HHhQYE7Y6nkdBUEuaZSwDxavM2NoVowMOqvc8WkqTk7hqhvEx-ekoA_I3eOZ/s1600/lib101cc04.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8spP-X7F4SGi1PTZHrXiY9X2FAG7C3mW6cu_FByWw_6g2ikWEzMRugVmyBKbBsKaJv9cRHeUUveQuoVf4HHhQYE7Y6nkdBUEuaZSwDxavM2NoVowMOqvc8WkqTk7hqhvEx-ekoA_I3eOZ/s320/lib101cc04.png" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline;">And then we move straight into married-couple-partner bickering! There are two more people to get in, but they're on opposite sides of the world and Eve points out very firmly that he needs her help if he wants them not to fucking die in the getting there. She's off to Oklahoma where there might be ninjas, Flynn you are such an ass, and he's off to… Switzerland! Ezekiel what are you stealing from Geneva. Well so far he's reminding me a LOT of Alec Hardison with less of a heart. That </span><span style="color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline;">is </span><span style="color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline;">a very pretty dagger! Both of those are pretty daggers. Ezekiel you have got to get something other than "I hack the system" to deal with people who might want to kill you, for fuck's sake. At least Flynn brought a taser, or the artifactual equivalent. Turns out the reason Flynn knows this guy is he went off to steal something while Flynn was artifact-hunting for the Library. Involving an evil mummy. Oh dear god I want the flashback episode. Can it be like The Rashomon Job? Pleaaaaaaaase? Ahem. Fortunately, Ezekiel is one of those people who's pretty easily convinced to go just about anywhere, especially with the promise of curiosity fulfilled. Like why people are trying to kill him. I'm a fan of the snarky banter and the not quiiite as smart as he thinks he is; it reminds me of an ickle!Flynn in a lot of ways. Not that Flynn would want to hear that.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">For our final piece of the ensemble, we go visit Oklahoma, where Christian Kane's native accent can come out to play! Enter a bar, with your stereotypical Southern 20-something woman blowing off steam by getting drunk and riding the mechanical bull until it throws her, and then hitting on the nice man who picks her up. Hi not!Eliot. I'm just gonna call him not!Eliot until we get his name, is that okay with everyone? Oh good. Not!Eliot is also not!interested in the woman who's probably 15-20 years younger than he is, which makes me think better of him right off the bat. Even if he is flirting, it's the kind of no harm, no intent flirting that a certain kind of man is actually really good at. Oh, and here's a strange woman all in black with a snake tattoo on her arm. I WONDER IF SHE'S EVIL. One of not!Eliot's drinking buddies is going to go ask her out because he's an idiot who thinks he's a player, an assessment the other buddy seems to more or less agree with, though he's not willing to say it out loud. Other-buddy is either a closer friend or taking a mild swipe at him for that comment (or both!) by asking after his apparently alcoholic and incompetent father who owns the oil pipeline that not!Eliot works on. Why is he here and not off being a kickass scholar somewhere? Because family duty, probably. There's a LOT of emotions tangled up in "too drunk to work and too stubborn to die": regret, bitterness, longing for something that never existed except maybe in very early childhood, a kind of love-obligation-withered respect knot that I don't think even the sword that cut through the Gordian knot could handle. Jake Stone is a very complicated man, as it turns out, because when his not-actually-a-player friend comes back to complain that the new woman in town won't even talk to you if you can't explain her tattoo, you can just SEE him going CHALLENGE ACCEPTED. Also let's note that he's got a lot of image stuff tied up in how he's presenting himself. The other guys are in baseball caps and patterned work-shirts. He's in a black Stetson and a pinkish buttondown work-shirt that could pass for dressy without that black t-shirt under it, and maybe the right pair of pants. In other words, this is a man who wants everyone to </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">see </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">a cowboy Okie, but can't quite help showing that he knows a lot more than he's telling.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Ooh, she's even got a British accent. Jake, stoppit. JAKE STOP PLAYING DUMB. Eye-talian my ass, you ass. Also he is way too obvious about checking to be sure nobody's looking. (File under: ways Jake Stone is not Eliot Spencer.) But then he breaks out the perfect Latin pronunciation, man, I bet that's been rusting since the days of playing Lindsey on Angel. That takes me baaack. Nicely done, though! Helps that Latin does kinda roll off the tongue if you know any Romance languages at all, and I'd be surprised if Kane didn't speak at least a little Spanish, at minimum. Anyway, Lamia's running around with an ouroborus and a Latin-translated line from Yeats' "</span><a href="http://www.potw.org/archive/potw351.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Second Coming</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">" on her arm, specifically "The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned." (I should note that yes, I typed that from memory and yes, there are variations in versions of the poem. I actually know the one where the shadows of indignant desert birds reel instead of wind, and the sands of the desert, but then I think everyone should get to see the variations too.) (I have not been a fan of this poem since I saw Babylon 5 I don't know WHAT you're talking about.) Anyway! Lamia introduces herself, says hi you're Jacob Stone, and that is never EVER a good sign. Never trust someone who identifies you by both names with an expression like that on. And indeed, it's time for the requisite bar fight! Enter Eve. I'm going to assume Lamia was keeping that katana under the bar, because she sure as fuck doesn't have a trenchcoat on for katana space. Enter… a lot of ninjas? Or rather, the stereotypical portrayal of ninjas, you all probably know the lecture about real ninjas hide in plain sight dressed as normal workers for the area, yes? Good. Nice Indiana Jones tip there with the bullwhip yanking Eve's gun out of her hands, though alas for that making it a real fight. I also really appreciate several things about the staging in this fight: one, bottles do not break that easily and you could probably use them to stave off a blade for at least a little while. Two, they're at least </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">trying </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">to show Eve is a more skilled fighter than Jake, though the problem with that is that Rebecca Romijn is definitely less trained than Christian Kane, so there's honestly only so many tricks they can do. JAKE. DEAL WITHOUT YOUR HAT. You are not actually Indiana Jones. Two barstools later and a dash out the door and they're home free to his… muscle car of some kind, there's not really a good enough look at it other than it's black and low-slung. And makes pretty noises. So, quite understandably, he'd like to know what the fuck, well-trained government agent type woman? Well, your expertise! Nooo there is no expertise here, except Eve has access to the Library's resources and lists off the Sorbonne and Cambridge as places he was accepted for an arts degree, but turned them both down. IQ 190, which in TV shorthand just means "really omg smart wtf." And it's been twenty years since then (THANK YOU FOR MAKING PEOPLE PLAY THEIR AGES), but he's been publishing under a pseudonym about Native American and European art history. Um. These things would seem to be wildly divergent fields, I am just putting that out there? In the meantime he's been working on the oil rig by his hometown. Sooo a little bit set in his ways maybe. You say. The music would like us to believe this is some kind of grand declaration of personhood. Jake is not amused OR impressed. Especially that first one.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Now at the Library, with hilarious and totally deliberate setup, because Eve Baird brought in one and a half of the baby Librarians, NOT all three, so you know Flynn left them to Charlene's TLC while Eve and Jake made it halfway across the continent. Like you do. Also I would guess that this is the next day, going by wardrobe changes, or at the very least everyone's had a chance to shower off travel grime and change. Ezekiel will start us off with some name-calling, which I guess is appropriate since he IS the youngest, Jake tries and fails utterly at making it better, and the three kids will now be distracted by wait this elevator, with the fast, and the down, and the really fast HOW ARE WE GOING TO STOP. Eve will just be back here with that little smile of "I totally did not have this exact reaction a few days ago lalalala okay I admit it's funny to watch other people be noobs." Also she's enjoying Cassandra snarling at both guys. So, then! We get not one, not two, but THREE separate reactions to the whole thing: Ezekiel trying to play the bratty little brother who's Too Cool to be impressed and can't help smiling, Cassandra utterly DELIGHTED and full of wonder, and Jake with the thick defensive layer of no, fuck you, if this is real then he has to have feelings about it and he doesn't WANT these feelings OKAY. Never mind that he's then the first one to start demanding confirmation on his identification of the pieces; up front and center we've got the Spear of Destiny (or Longinus' Lance, or any one of the half dozen names assigned to it) and the Ark of the Covenant. Cassandra asks after Bigfoot and Dracula, and the actual answer is yes to both but not anymore to Dracula on account of that whole killing him thing. Eve's government agent face is still great but cracking around the edges into "I really don't want to burst out laughing so I'll just smirk some instead."</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrx8auvkPuURlQ5HkzH2CUu8vzBbBcnSVQh8unOdUUjxF_sUZenBiLvF4oWLg5pGWeaX-_0vCCnZKRagZEXrRYVS-EQ98DMAkadHDHK6aZ1miMyXoeKZ-47F6c3C8jgmpJp4Poe8lPaOU_/s1600/lib101cc05.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrx8auvkPuURlQ5HkzH2CUu8vzBbBcnSVQh8unOdUUjxF_sUZenBiLvF4oWLg5pGWeaX-_0vCCnZKRagZEXrRYVS-EQ98DMAkadHDHK6aZ1miMyXoeKZ-47F6c3C8jgmpJp4Poe8lPaOU_/s320/lib101cc05.png" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">No, Flynn, your definitions of helping are definitely not everyone's definitions of helping, let's just leave it at that and let Eve do the briefing, okay? Okay. Blah blah exposition, ten years ago where was everyone? Well, Cassandra was in hospital with her tumor, Flynn when ARE you going to learn to think before you open your mouth. So right there we've got motivation for someone to betray this group, and also significant pathos. Flynn will, having stuck his foot in it up to his knee, continue to babble about what he's guessed and what it is and how bad is it really, which wouldn't </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">look </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">like a gesture of kindness to most people but I'm pretty sure he's trying to save Cassandra from having to put on the spiel herself. How's that stint on ER serving you for rattling off oligodendroglioma, Noah Wyle? Because that was pretty nice. The details they don't get into for lack of time and basic decency are, these are tumors, non-cancerous but nothing in the brain can be considered exactly benign, depending on treatment, location, and genetic signature of the tumor patients can live anywhere from a few years after diagnosis to 11+ years. Basically, eventually the tumor will squish portions of your brain you need to live, and then you die, but until that time you're more or less okay; seizures are common and most treatments tend to be treating symptoms rather than going through endless iterations of chemo/radiation/surgery, not least because the survival rate for the cures is often worse than this particular tumor type. Ahem. Cassandra gets the awkward question from Ezekiel of all places, no, she's not dying </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">yet</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, just someday. Jake is going to scowl the tumor out of her brain, evidently. Honey, that's not how it works. Promise. And Cassandra will now make a desperate bid for a change of subject with HEY BUT MAGIC EXISTS THAT'S AWESOME RIGHT GUYS? Yes. Yes it is. Eve is more than willing to help her, hassling the other two for why they didn't show, though Jacob comes in for it first and Ezekiel's only asked implicitly. "Because I already had a job" is a dumb answer, Jacob, everyone here already had a job when the white envelope showed up. Except, arguably, for Ezekiel, unless you call crime a job. He does! He also says he's been stealing stuff since he was a kid, which begs a WHOLE lot of questions about who raised him (if anyone), who taught him to steal (Archie is that you), and just how fucked up he is about anything most of us would consider normal life and attachments to people (very). Although to be fair, the motivation of who the fuck is trying to kill me would get </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">me </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">to go somewhere I wouldn't normally, even if I think avoiding a magic library is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard of. Ahem.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Jacob has a valid question: okay, magic's real, where the fuck IS it then? Well, that's the Library's job now isn't it. Thank you, o exposition stick. Instead of paying attention to the contents of Flynn's mini-lecture about ley lines, magic, and artifacts, I'm going to go right ahead and stare at the images of artifacts themselves. Also I want the glowy globe. How come everyone but me gets a 3D map thing. So: crystal skull, one of the Mayan step pyramids which if you made me guess would be the one at Chichen Itza, Excalibur, a crown that's probably Arthur's, a necklace of some kind probably European and beyond that I'm not venturing a guess, the Sphynx, and what's almost certainly the Sangraal. And then I think the boxy thing is probably the Ark, but who knows for sure, we don't get as good a look at that one. Yes, Cassandra, good ear, definitely focus on the fact that Flynn appears to know Excalibur and calls it "he." That's not wholly sarcastic, by the way, since she has a better handle on genre conventions than anyone else here does. The whole magic existed, got pulled out of ley lines and put into artifacts, industrialization sped the process along, now we try to keep the bad guys from getting and using magic? Yeah that's stock from half a dozen different worlds off the top of my head. Which is probably why she's not paying much attention to it. So now they get down to the difference, which is hey, the bad guys are trying to kill you, what're we gonna do about that? Well, says Eve, the woman who tried for Stone had a snake tattoo! Oh well Serpent Brotherhood, Flynn is not at all happy to see you again. Ninja assassins blah blah sent to kill us? Yes. Wait, not ninjas, no ninjas in Oklahoma, Flynn ONE of them is going to punch you if you don't stop trolling them. Or Jacob could get distracted by the painting which he names the Crown of King Arthur, yes, that would be a good reason for people to kill the good doctor who was on his way to visit Flynn. Sidebar here, by the way? There actually is no legend about the crown of King Arthur like this, at least not in my knowledge banks which are fairly vast. In point of fact, none of either the Four Treasures of Ireland </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">nor </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">the Thirteen Treasures of Britain are crowns, although Llywelyn's coronet is about as close as you get, and since the Welsh tend to claim Arthur every chance we get, that's my best guess as to where it comes from. I'm sure Arthur </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">had </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">a crown, but the legend Flynn relates here? Totally made up. Still, it's a great Macguffin for the purposes of why would the Serpent Brotherhood want it, and a good way to bring up the obvious question of "okay but magic is awesome?" Yes but like all things, humans are great at taking awesome stuff, in both senses of the word awesome, and turning it into weapons. Really, really vicious weapons which would cause mass destruction </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">without </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">the nuclear radiation. I mean, there'd be other major downsides, but non-arable land would be less likely as one of them. Anyway. Flynn is going to do this without them, right up until he realizes that Jacob doesn't know where the piece is and… oh wait. Ezekiel does, and Cassandra knows how and when to get them all on flights. Actually I don't quite buy that the Brotherhood was trying to wipe out the competition so much as they were trying to prevent them from showing up and doing what they just did for Flynn, which is put all their knowledge together and give him a lead. After all, without Flynn, there's no real reason for them to get involved. At which point I start </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">seriously </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">questioning Dulacque's motives behind the original murders. Now, to all appearances they needed the Librarians to go track down the Crown for them because they were at loose ends, but stay with me: Dulacque is more than capable of being even twistier, and doing this on purpose to get everyone together for purposes of increasing the number of found artifacts. And possibly something else in his long game, but we'll start with that, since he definitely wants the Library and everything in it. Anyway, all the baby Librarians are totally willing to go beat these assholes to the Crown, Flynn is not willing to take them with, Eve will now override him with some of the smoothest fuck-you-I'm-in-charge I've seen in awhile, and Flynn is left gaping at their backs while I cackle. I love the little dance of "we don't want to shove you out of the way but DO stop standing in the door please" that Jake and Cassandra do. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Judson will now appear in his mirror, wise choice not startling the shit out of the newbies on top of hey did you know magic's real and your lives are in danger from people who want to make it more usable. And he brought a cluebat about NOT DOING THIS ALONE to apply to Flynn's thick skull, for all the good that does. (Hint: not much.) Flynn makes flappy motions over WELL THEN GO and Judson points out that it's got nothing to fucking do with when </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">he's </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">ready, he's waiting for </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Flynn </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">to be ready, how much of a dumbass are you really dude. Don't answer that. Flynn is not in touch with his emotions. Flynn would like to join Jake in the land of masculine stoicism and brooding. Yes, honey, I know losing your father-figure hurts, but you do kinda gotta move on sometime, and a spirit, an aging bureaucrat, and a sentient sword are not actually the best company, especially when you're off questing to save the world. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">While nominally the question of how the fuck did the Crown of King Arthur get from Camelot or Camlann or Avalon or where-the-fuck-ever all the way back over to Munich, it's not really that odd. There's all kinds of myths surrounding Arthur going back over to Brittany or some other part of France, there's equally all kinds of myths connecting France and Germany, and, as Jake points out, the Goths sacked a lot of places. Even if you don't buy the historically it was the Goths who sacked Camelot argument (because to do that you have to buy that Camelot itself existed), it's well within the bounds of plausibility for British artifacts to have ended up pretty much anywhere from Spain to the Holy Land, and Scandinavia to North Africa. Or, indeed, anywhere the British Empire colonized: so really ANYWHERE. You can work with that, if you make your mythology convoluted enough! Southern Germany's not much of a stretch. The music would like us to know that this is a Momentous Discovery Of A Clue, followed immediately by Ominous Brass. Hello, Ominous Brass and a Lamia with some henchmen! See, this is why I'm not 100% convinced they ever needed to follow the Librarians' trail, since they're already on the painting, although they could plausibly have followed them to Munich and researched the museum to find the painting's location on the flight. None of the Librarians are any good at noticing danger when knowledge is right THERE, so Eve gets to handle them all herself, plus, you know, great physical comedy. Cassandra, as the resident mad genius, will enlighten us that it's been estimated to be painted in 1146 CE, installed with the museum's opening in 1546 CE, Jacob starts getting his geek on about the Roman Hypothesis. Oh my god he's so cute come here and let me geek out with you forever about Arthuriana, honey. Which is to say, scholars wanting to prove the historicity of King Arthur argue that he was one of the Roman legionnaires who stayed behind, married into the locals, Camelot was one of the Roman cities, yadda yadda. EXCEPT OH NOES: the painting is fake.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline;">Eve will give us some nice punching to accompany that little revelation, and I have to admit that for all the comedy value the music's lending, the fight scenes are choreographed to indicate that she is really, really not a woman you want to fuck with. Those are some precise, </span><span style="color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline;">hard </span><span style="color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline;">hits she's dishing out, to opponents who outweigh her by a good 100 lbs at least. Meanwhile Jacob's explaining that the first recorded use of carmine in paintings was in the 1500s. While that is true, a really good historian would know that first recorded use doesn't mean first </span><span style="color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline;">use</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline;">, it means </span><span style="color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline;">latest possible beginning of that use.</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline;"> Think about all the shit we do that doesn't get written down until five, ten years after the fact - less of that's true now with the internet and communication being what it is, but consider a time when paper, parchment, anything of that nature was in fact highly expensive and time-consuming to make. So that's not indicative. What would be indicative would be carbon-dating all the paintings with carmine in their composition to attempt to narrow down a range of dates. Anyway. I'm totally nitpicking here, let's move on, Ezekiel points out that the frame is anchored into the beam and you can't steal it or move it, and I think it's safe to say he'd've spotted the hidden door or other such thing already. I have a question about why nobody from security is asking them to please step AWAY from the painting, but hey, maybe rules are different in Munich. Cassandra finds the binary code in the frame, everyone would like to question what the fuck the importance of the others' discoveries is, Flynn would like them all to shut the fuck up. Yes, Flynn, this is what dealing with you is like ALL THE TIME, congrats, enjoy. He is, however, also far more accustomed to treasure hunts than these three, and walks everyone through the whole, okay, it's a fake painting, why would a fake painting be here? To send a message, and specifically a message about a location! Well okay then. That's a lot of fucking work and I'd love to know who's responsible for it, AHEM DULACQUE I AM LOOKING AT YOU AGAIN, ditto Jenkins, because fucking really? You expect us not to go looking at the two Arthurian legends currently in existence? I'm just saying. So, fine, the code on the frame is a location, the museum itself is the key because the painting is a fixed point in space, let's go find shit out while Eve dislocates some more shoulders and… possibly an elbow OW and kicks bad guys down the stairs. Hey, at least she kept it relatively discreet and away from the artwork! Outside is a sundial with a Latin inscription, are you seriously fucking telling me that nobody's tried translating that in all these years? I don't buy it. Although I suppose it's possible, given the extra layer of security at the standing stones themselves, that they went, found the stones, and went ha ha nice trick you guys. Still. There's people like </span><span style="color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline;">me and Kitty</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline;"> around who study and translate dead languages for shits and giggles, and you're really saying that's stood here just fine for years? I'm going to pretend that the coordinates were encrypted by the painting and Flynn decrypted them in his head. Lamia is pissed and exasperated and now, yes, will have to start following them. Eve is still gonna punch Flynn or kiss him if he doesn't fucking quit that. Right now she's leaning more toward punch. And the crown is in the Black Forest because of course it fucking is, I knew that by the time they said Munich.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So! In the Black Forest, which looks suspiciously like Grimm's Black Forest, which in turn looks suspiciously like the Pacific Northwest, ahem, Flynn put your head back in the car you are not a dog you're a feral cat. Or possibly a bird of some kind. If we're anthropomorphizing. (Suddenly I really want THAT ep.) Cassandra packed a lunch, aww, that's both great character building and good foreshadowing, and Jacob would like Ezekiel to lay off. I would too, but because it's a lot easier to run for your life when you have the food to keep running. Just saying. Serpent Brotherhood has a helicopter. I'm with Eve. Eve, go argue Charlene into letting you guys have a helicopter, I'll get the popcorn, that's within budget, right? Flynn insists that they have the advantage because all the clues will be on ground level. Well, he's not wrong about where the clues are, since I rather doubt anybody flew a dragon in when they hid the crown - for one thing, the dragon would then have gone back to steal the fucking thing, so it's just a bad idea all around. But Eve is also right. Listen to Eve, Flynn. Oh hey, Lamia's getting instructions from Dulacque, who is completely unamused and unimpressed and a lot of other un-s over why doesn't she have the crown yet. Also, unless we're assuming he's way dumber and/or crazier than he is (in the clinically insane, cannot fully control his own actions sense), I would take that warning as being motivation to </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">her</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, not impatience from </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">him</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Dulacque is perfectly capable of waiting a hundred years, but he'll be irritated over the inevitable changes to his plans as life happens. He would </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">rather </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">have the crown and get it over with and win. But he has contingencies for both. Never assume otherwise.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Now Eve and Flynn will have their first sort-of relationship conversation! Awwww you guys. Which is totally barely subtext about "I think you're really hot and I like you tons but we totes can't afford distractions so clearly there will be no boning or emotional entanglements RIGHT?" Yeah, nobody believes either of you. At all. Do YOU two even believe yourselves? Yeah, Eve, you'll have to get used to Flynn breaking off anything that might be a compliment or smack of direct Feelings in order to chase after his next shiny. Sorry not sorry? Although I have to say, I wouldn't mind being compared to a henge! Especially if it stored treasure. Ahem. So, yes, it's a henge, more specifically it's a henge of the stone circle variety which </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">is </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">rather rare in continental Europe; most examples are in Brittany, not southern Germany. Earthworks and timber henges are found throughout continental Europe. They did a nice job with the set, too, making it a smallish, partially fallen henge, an outer and inner circle, and guys you are </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">standing in a fucking clearing while a helicopter circles</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. This is going to show your location sooner rather than later. Eve will go stall them, Eve will take Ezekiel? O-kay, sure, we'll go with that, although I guess Flynn's not wrong: this is a puzzle, not a lock, and he needs Cassandra and Jake's brains more than Ezekiel's. Also, you know, mildly expendable. Also if Eve can lure them away from the chopper, he can fuck around with it. I'm totally on board with this plan. I am also on board with Eve trolling the shit out of him, although I wouldn't be surprised if he really </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">did </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">have another FBI file. This is a guy who's been stealing shit for somewhere on the order of ten, fifteen years? Which is over a third of his life, maybe half his life, maybe longer? So really. They probably at minimum have notes about whether or not he's recruitment material as a CI.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Back at the circle, Jacob starts translating the symbols and Latin for us: they're supposed to be there four days after Solstice. Which one? Not sure! I'll go with summer, since that's appropriate to Arthur. Everyone's waiting for that day to conveniently be today, and I'm honestly so fucking relieved that it's not. Like, this is what Librarians does, I know that, but the thing is we're </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">so </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">primed for the trope it's still a relief. It is not today! Flynn could do the math over the course of several days, triangulation and whatnot, I even more or less understand what he's talking about? But it won't take Cassandra that much time, as long as she has the numbers. I am once again going to skip trying to translate the math into something that makes sense; I'm probably barely capable of understanding it </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">if </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I have the refresher on my trigonometry, I'm crap at explaining, just take my word for it that she's being kickass about doing about five different trig problems IN HER HEAD. Or, well, in her hallucinations. I admit, if I had hallucinations with my math I could probably do them in my head too. Also augh that makes her so vulnerable while she's mathing. I dislike. Stone also dislikes, and especially isn't fond of her collapsing mid-calculation because everything ends up overwhelming her. A trick that I didn't know for synesthetes is apparently to focus on a very strong associated memory with one of the senses, which calms the hallucinations and synesthesia to a point where you can actually do anything. Well that's… useful, really! Out of Umberto Boccioni's memoirs, evidently, though I can't find any ready confirmation of his synesthesia on a quick google. Cassandra ends up sharing (I'm sure she'd call it over-sharing) that she balanced the checkbook in her head when she was twelve, and her parents were so proud, and that was the last time (she thinks) they were proud of her. Oh honey. Jacob, saying parents ain't ever easy is masking a whole lot of your own shit. Luckily, Flynn found the thing! We can leave uncomfortable conversations alone now. Locked in some very old, very well-made iron which they'll need a welding torch to cut through. Which he didn't pack, but Cassandra did, by way of the O2 tank in the first aid kit and all the food she brought. I'm going to sit here laughing for awhile, especially at Jacob's expression of THIS IS EVERYTHING I EVER WANTED HELL YES.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline;">Eve is indeed going to use Ezekiel to hotwire the chopper and fuck with the bad guys, it's GREAT. Also let's note that he doesn't actually confirm that he can hotwire it </span><span style="color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline;">or </span><span style="color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline;">fly it. But it does its job, which is to draw Lamia and the henchthugs back there while Flynn makes a cutting torch out of a picnic lunch. I am </span><span style="color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline;">so totally </span><span style="color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline;">handwaving the science here, I'm pretty sure that shouldn't work as well as it does, but we can go with it. I think it would WORK. I'm just not sure it'd work TV-fast. Flynn dashes off to go see what Eve's up to as far as punching goes, Eve is up to many punching so irritated wow. Unfortunately, she doesn't appear to've brought a gun to this swordfight, which means once Lamia starts in with her sword she is </span><span style="color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline;">severely </span><span style="color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline;">outmatched. And I think she would've been okay if she could've gotten to the crowbar Ezekiel lost! But of course Flynn will come save the day because he's an ass like that. I mean, on the plus side, it gives us some really really pretty seconds of swordfighting! And Eve can now go save Ezekiel's ass, because he is way WAY more of a kick 'em 'til they're down and run for it person. And now, as it turns out, they hotwired it to explode somehow. I'm not asking how, this is Electric Entertainment, if they're NOT making shit explode at least in the pilot and then every few eps I'm concerned. We will ignore Lamia surviving the concussion blast from that just as much as we're going to ignore there being NO WAY that Jacob or Flynn should be able to handle that door oh my fucking god, you guys, no. So! We have the Crown of King Arthur now. Win! Win? No, that's a throwing knife, get the fuck out of there. Also Flynn could you maybe take the Doctor for a little less of a role model? I'm just saying.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So! Back at the Library, placing the not all that period crown onto its velvet cushion to presumably keep it away from the other artifacts. I have to say, they have </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">much </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">better display than the Warehouse did, although arguably the Warehouse made it harder to find shit. Which is a different form of protection for the artifacts! We also get a(nother) movies reference, this time to the first one with the Spear of Destiny and yadda yadda interdimensional pyramid saved the world, yes, Flynn, you </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">are </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">showing off. A little. Because you're feeling replaceable. I promise, nobody thinks that except you and maybe Ezekiel. Eve is rolling her eyes at you while she mother hens the baby Librarians out to the office. Annex. Thing. Charlene would like a moment to discuss budgetary concerns, which Flynn could not be </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">less </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">worried about if he tried. Instead he brings up Judson maybe leaving and, not for the first time, I seriously question the depths of his and Charlene's relationship, since she clearly plans to go yell at him. Is he maybe her many-times-great grandfather? Or what. Not that answers are forthcoming.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">is </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">forthcoming is Jacob waxing rustic cowboy about how this was great and all but he's gotta get home to the family. Wave those issues around a little more, dude, I think I missed being smacked in the face by the three-ring binder of them. Ezekiel pokes at him for it, quotes Robert Browning of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">all </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">the things, and then proceeds to wave his issues around by saying that stealing's the only thing he's any good at. Okay, you guys, normally we're having dick-waving contests, not issues-waving contests, and if you combine the two you're gonna get papercuts in places you really don't want them, I'm just warning you. Flynn would like Ezekiel's awesome thievingness to get his ass out of Flynn's Library. I sympathize; as much as I'd like them all to get the therapy they so desperately need, Flynn is both included in "all" and also not set up to headshrink these guys. That's more Eve's bailiwick, not that she's good at facing up to it for awhile. Cassandra asks the obvious questions - or at least, obvious if you're the traitor! It's actually a relatively subtle bit of foreshadowing, especially as compared to the reveal of her brain tumor. But asking about how one becomes a Librarian, and if one of them would be the next one if Flynn dies, that's pretty much the nail in the coffin that doesn't need the klaxons sounding to add to the dramatic irony. I mean, they do because of course they do, I'm just saying, it's not even a mystery anymore, or shouldn't be, to those of us with any narrative savvy at all.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Perimeter alarm! Which is updated and everything since the last break-in, and the door is a magical portal that has to be disabled from the inside, which only makes the conclusion </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">more obvious</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, not that they have time to think about that just now. Hi Lamia and henchthugs. I love how blatant Jake is about looking at Ezekiel, and the "wait you're looking at me? oh yeah okay that's fair but no" look he gets in turn. Flynn dispatches everyone else to go get Charlene and himself to go after the Crown, with Cal. Okay, Flynn honey, I don't think you've thought this through. You're going to put yourself and a magic sword near an artifact DIRECTLY RELATED TO IT, and you think this is a good idea. No. Bad. You know magical theory better than that. Take Eve, for fuck's sake. I do have to give Jacob the points on "he's got a flying sword!" I want a flying sword too. So say we all. Into the shelves, where Jacob needs to start saying SNEAK SNEAK SNEAK in order to be worse at it, oh my god, and we have the requisite in-words version of the conversation they had in looks earlier. Mainly because they don't know each other well enough to </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">really </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">have the conversation in looks, and for damn sure Jacob doesn't trust Ezekiel enough for it yet. That's nice, boys, but shut up and run please. Though that's a good way of confirming that neither of them's the traitor!</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Which leaves us with an empty display case, a pissed off Flynn, and one member left of this little trio who could be the traitor, which I think he knows by the way Cassandra doesn't look scared so much as sad and resigned when she shows up with Lamia. He just doesn't want to believe it. And so! A rematch, with a sword that Lamia is way too happy to see, the boys yelling about both being attacked with excellent comic timing, and Flynn's Disappointed Dad face. Noah Wyle could definitely not have pulled that off ten years ago, but now? Oh ow. He battles ninjas, Lamia grabs the crown and we should be very worried, and I'm briefly distracted by the idea of Charlene the badass grandma swordswoman. Yes PLEASE. She's not even scratched, just her clothes torn. She and Judson are going to do Something Big to the Library that's going to take both of them and probably won't leave either of them alive after, which Judson is fine with since he's ready to move on, but technically Charlene still has a life. Even if it's a life comprised of receipts and auntie-ing at Flynn a lot. Since we're ramping up to the cliffhanger, we keep cutting back and forth, and I have to give the sound design and editing teams major, major kudos here: I totally feel for Cal. Nooo you leave the nice sentient sword alone he wants to be with his friend. I also appreciate that the combination of Flynn and Excalibur's will are </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">almost </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">enough to overcome the Crown, which gives us all kinds of interesting suggestions for what Flynn's powers might be. Which, as I recall, has been hinted at through all the MOVIES too. Argh. Oh well. Flynn's been stabbed, Cassandra remembers things like These Are Bad Guys and She Doesn't Really Want To Be A Bad Guy, just in time to get hauled back by the henchthugs, aaaand Lamia goes for blah blah villain monologue reveal plan, ordering them to kill Flynn, and we fade to black.</span></div>
Anna Hammetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10095633218958433882noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4271373189216022547.post-56819502067322209502016-08-05T20:00:00.000-07:002016-08-05T20:07:11.949-07:00No GIR That's Bad Helix - 1x01 Pilot<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So, we open with whiteness, because that's not an overarching motif or anything, the whiteness that swallows everything. It's two days before The Event. And then we have some zombie horror staple, people in clean suits walking down a corridor while a computer says very loudly over the very loud machine humming, Contamination! Contamination! Yes, we get it, computer, we get it, shut up. This is why all alarms of this type should come with an Okay-We-All-Know-Noise-Off switch. This is intercut with flashes of Peter all black-bloodied up, I'm having fond memories of X-Files and the oil slick of doom. Different corridor! The flashbacks become more clear, Peter was running, dragged into this room, and now we have something that's going to become a staple of Helix as we know it, the juxtaposition of jaunty pleasant music and horror. We have a horrific scene playing out mute before our eyes, but when I say mute I mean very little sound is coming from the scene itself especially when compared to the machine humming and the loudass Glados knockoff a second or three ago, but rather the sounds are coming from the jaunty fun soundtrack playing over the background. I've got a pair of brand new roller-skates, do you know the way to San Jose, etc. Though only one of those will become a set of arc words. Well, I'm unnerved, as no doubt they meant me to be, how about you? </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And the music is coming from </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: line-through; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">inside the house</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> an iPod or some other player device within the lab. A bio-lab. With monkey cages. That's not ominous at all. We have the requisite scene of gore and horror, science gone horrifically wrong as displayed by blood and other things. The aesthetic of the lab is about what you'd expect for a Hollywood lab, everything looks like it might have been clean and bare and there's not much in the way of extraneous furniture, when something went horrifically wrong. Man, would I love to have the budget some of these scientists have. Glowing blue computer RFID locks! And of course, the two people in isolation suits moon-walking down the corridor. Moon-walking not in the Michael Jackson sense but in those exaggerated steps you have to take because you're in a giant hermetically sealed suit. Let's have a look at our dubiously titled protagonists! I'm not so much dubious because they're morally ambivalent, although they are, but because the screen time given later in the episode suggests these aren't the protagonists. Regardless, the fact that they're placed first paints either them or the situation as significant. The fact that they don't end up dead in this first scene, or otherwise incapacitated, weighs it heavily towards the person rather than the situation.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So. Hatake! Hiroshi Hatake is serene and scientific amidst horror, but also grave. He understands the seriousness of what's going on, but he detaches himself from it so he can work unobstructed and without distraction from feelings. He's also isolated, by the suit, an isolated observer. Note the deliberate way he moves towards Peter. His mercy is a distant thing, the abstract mercy of giving water from a plastic titration bottle, while still sealed in his suit. Abstract, albeit with some signs of satisfaction, note of progress being made. So he's capable of looking at a scene of bloodshed, trauma, and sickness, presumably with people he either works with or knows in some way through working in the same area, and calculating what happened and whether or not it progressed from their experiments or was an unrelated incident, etc. And he looks at a bloody, chaotic scene that clearly resulted in one person diseased, possibly injured, and in pain, and calls it progress. A very, very cold person in a lot of ways, and not a man with whom to fuck.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Contrast Hatake's opening with Alan's, which is clean and pristine but not in the least bit neat. He's in an office and the architecture is very open, very full of light, very clean. Well, except for the piles of papers and books everywhere. They are in neat piles though. Way neater than my office, I can tell you that much. He's also completely mentally out of it and scattered and disorganized, very emotionally intuitive but not very put together. He has to ask someone, clearly his minder (and because this is television his minder is a young conventionally attractive woman and no doubt there will be sex at some point in the future, look, I blog the bad as well as the good) and probably his assistant of some kind, protege? Probably, let's check off all the ticky boxes we can. She, of course, knows exactly where what he's looking for is, and what he's looking for turns out to be an old pump handle. That </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">definitely</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> looks out of place in the office. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Okay, now that we've had a brief scene with each of these men, let's take a look to examine the parallels and differences between the two. The first one's obvious: Hatake is introduced in darkness, filth and blood, and chaos. He is anonymous, not just because of the suit although that's not helping, but also because no one's said his name yet, he's had very little meaningful interaction with anyone, we have no sense of who he is other than a doctor in a clean suit. Whereas Alan's had a fair bit of dialogue to show that he's scatterbrained but attractive enough to win the tolerance and affection of this young woman. He's introduced in the light and the open air, in a clean if untidy environment, and even the ways it's untidy are safe. Banal. Paperwork everywhere, that's nothing, that's normal and shows he's busy and in demand. There's no suit and apparently no reluctance to talk and engage for Alan, he's willing to ask for help and willing to converse and be teased. He's also not in a hostile setting though, because let's all keep in mind that Hatake is introduced in an evnironment that, for all he knows, might kill him. That's a situation he might should be used to, from what we learn of him later. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Okay, we'll leave Hatake in his remote lab for a while and continue with Alan, who is lecturing on the history of epidemiology. Which makes sense, given that the title card told us this was the CDC! In Atlanta, I don't actually know if they have training camps there but it's a fucking huge facility, so why not. (I tried looking on their site but got a web of broken links. Clean it up, CDC, there are probably post-doctoral people who want to learn from your teachings.) Now, what he's saying about the cholera outbreak and the medicine at the time attributing it to bad air, this is true. It's a reasonably famous case, it is historically significant because of the study and the </span><a href="http://www.umapper.com/maps/view/id/43438/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">subsequent mapping</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and the discovery, and they did take off the pump handle to stop it. For extra bonus points that have nothing to do with anything, the physician's name was John Snow. One can presume that John-with-an-h Snow knew something after all. (Further reading: </span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Ghost-Map-Londons-Terrifying-Epidemic--/dp/B003QTD4T6/ref=sr_1_1_twi_kin_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1439514193&sr=8-1&keywords=the+ghost+map" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Ghost Map</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> by Steven Johnson). Alan is making a point here about careful observation and scientific study, also the point that they have to be meticulous in their progress because if they fuck up, thousands of people could die. He's going to make this point by tossing </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">a vial of cholera at a student.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Of course, that's not actually cholera as he says a moment later, and she's less a student and more of a ringer, still, that's a nerve-wracking way to make a point. He talks about the sacrifices they'll make, family and loved ones, heh. We'll get to that in a second. First he has to defuse the room by saying that's just scotch, give his booze back. Then the family and loved one comes into the room! Enjoy the last shot, by the way, of clean-shaven and cleanly presented Alan because I don't think he appears again for maybe the entire series.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8IV9cE5-x0RWxXP10MLwQZKtfIIePWMxCX2tg6fGrHDMp5GspP5ptlMbGAaQxiNsqek_K7lpjcnOvwQj9TKo7n9zEoZqDV4wH5yXE7QQNIUUD4kK0GnDcHJKD3h_1zH7QnKJOUBfe38Y/s1600/HelixS1E01C02.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8IV9cE5-x0RWxXP10MLwQZKtfIIePWMxCX2tg6fGrHDMp5GspP5ptlMbGAaQxiNsqek_K7lpjcnOvwQj9TKo7n9zEoZqDV4wH5yXE7QQNIUUD4kK0GnDcHJKD3h_1zH7QnKJOUBfe38Y/s320/HelixS1E01C02.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The person coming in is not in a suit and while she's clearly clean and well presented, her color and texture choices are more field-work looking than office job. I know this because of my learnings and also because of doing icky-hot sweaty dig work. Not the same kind of science but similar principles, you want durable clothing that tends to come in drab colors, you're going to be striking the balance between covers everything that might get hurt or infected with keeps you at a reasonable temperature, not to mention the balance between professional chic and functional. In this case it's mostly the color and cut lines that suggest field clothes, as I'm sure it was meant to. Also to contrast with Alan given that he's in blues and blacks and she's in green-brown and red. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Okay, over to the office where a guy in military fatigues is introducing a possible retroviral outbreak in a remote Arctic outpost. Because that never ever goes poorly. Two people dead and one already infected and it's all so bright and shiny in here we might lose track that this is the scenario we were introduced to the show with. Serrrrgio! Sergio Ballaseros, a military guy who we might be forgiven for thinking he's going to buy it in the first three or four episodes, because a lot of the time that's what happens to give the scenario weight or to screw our heroes over even more by taking out the guy who's most resourceful or skilled. Anyway! So, he's theoretically Army, CoE and so on and he's escorting the rapid response team up to the Arctic, including Dr. Walker, who is the lady in field clothes. She doesn't look happy about any of this, though to be fair no one does because, you know, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">retroviral outbreak. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Army also is seizing jurisdiction despite the fact that that's technically not, you kno w, legal, as Alan's ringer points out, that area of the Arctic is international territory. What doesn't get underlined is that just because Arctic Biosystems is granting them access that does not mean they have jurisdiction to arrest or try anyone, that just means they get to investigate and then I believe the procedure is to present their findings to an international court? Do we have an international law student or practitioner in the house? Anyway. The US Army is sharing jurisdiction with the US CDC because this is Helix, a US show, and not Crossing Lines (a show about an international team that patrols the Eurozone, which would be more like the makeup of what I would expect to be investigating a base in international territory). In international waters jurisdiction is determined by the country of origin/alliance of the ship on which the crime takes place, presumably with Arctic Biosystems it would be the country of origin or head office of that company? </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Any</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">way. US show, US agencies so audiences don't get confused. And Alan would want to know why him, and so we find out that Walker requested him because the infected patient is his brother. The twist of it being a brother is good, that's not a usual choice. It gives us the emotional attachment without falling back on the usual tropes.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And we're flying up! I'm going to call that a helicopter even though I think it's some other kind of VTOL. That's a whole lot of featureless white which is very pretty and also very easy to get lost in, in case we didn't know from everyone saying Arctic all the time. Alan is giving out tasks and also names which is good because I can't keep calling Sarah his ringer for the rest of the series. That turns out to be her name, she's working with him on the autopsies, Julia Walker's on history of the illness, Doreen, the other woman we saw earlier, is on animal control, Doreen would like to know why Serrrgio's with them. Yes, I'm going to keep calling him Serrrgio because it amuses me. He is a systems engineer, to analyse the base's infrastructure to check for vectors. He is also a skilled hand at snark to snark combat, as he and Doreen will now show. Hot agent and BSL4 protocol (BioSafety Level Four) basically means treat this as though the air can kill you, which to be fair it possibly can! This is the kind of level on which most hemorrhagic fevers live, smallpox, the really scary shit. It involves full suits, multiple showers, pressure airlocks, UV rooms, etc. Walker objects on the grounds that this will take too much time, I and Alan would argue that getting sick and dying horribly would take even more time. Walker and Alan will now degenerate into bickering, so we can leave them and go on to Doreen explaining to Sarah and us that they used to be married, only Walker slept with Alan's brother. Who they're now going to rescue. This isn't going to be awkward at all! Especially not with Doreen poking Sarah in the soft bits by calling Walker better than her and bringing out her crush? Flirtation? and waving it around like that. I can't tell if Doreen is doing that to poke and be amused or if she's doing that because unspoken, un-pointed-out issues aren't going to do anyone any good in a speed exercise.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Once on the ground we're treated to a very blue light and an introduction to Dr. Hiroshi Hatake, head of research. I'm just going to stop right here and say that Hatake gave rise to a sort of a scale we now use at Murderboarding, a scale of how much a character is trying to keep secrets and they come out anyway, leaving that character saying "... I didn't mean for you to find out like this" or something along that lame excuse line. So that'll give you some idea of one of Hiroshi Hatake's roles in this show! Another is to smoulder, because Hiroyuki Sanada does that. Maybe that's just me. That's just me, isn't it. Moving on. Hiroshi is pessimistic about Peter's chances and he's been in and out of consciousness and by the way he hasn't locked down the base yet. Walker and Alan are understandably cranky about this, leading to the first Hatake moment of "wait let me explain why I have done this thing which to you seems stupid because there are Things I Know That You Do Not." Sometimes it is stupid! Sometimes it is not, and in this case he does have half a point in that the afflicted all work in the same lab and since contamination doesn't appear to have spread, it doesn't seem to be airborne. I and probably the other doctors (Doreen in particular is scornful of his 'pretty sure') would be happier if he outright said the infected area had been locked down immediately but okay. So far so not entirely unreasonable. And the VTOL's leaving for warmer climes that do not turn airplane fuel to jelly. A quick google search suggests that it turns to jelly about thirty degrees warmer than night-time here, which is -70, so yes. If I were the VTOL I'd take off too. Doreen is the voice of all of us, enjoying at least the reassurance of a potential quick escape. Sarah is the voice of reason, not directly but implicitly pointing out that if no one can get out of the base without freezing to death at least the thing is pretty much contained. Heh. That'll come in relevant later in all sorts of ways. Actually what she says is that they can't risk leaving before they achieve full containment. Oh you sweet summer child.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Speaking of things that will come in relevant later! As they go down in the elevator Daniel passes out the subcutaneous RFID chips which will give everyone unrestricted access to the base and which can't be taken off of them without removing a hand. So guess what's going to happen later. Also RFID chips will undoubtedly allow Daniel and Hiroshi at the very least to see where everyone's gone and where everyone's going, so that's not going to come in handy later at all either. We have a roll call of 106 scientists from 35 countries, 15 support staff (going by the people we see later either that's all security or there's more support staff or he said 50 and I have to stuff marbles in people's mouths again) and while that's a lot of potential patients, that's at least also not a big casualty count if everyone dies of unknown pathogen. Look, it's a worst case scenario, okay? (Obviously it won't happen, it's a TV series, but you have to allow for possibilities because the characters sure as hell are.) For reference or maybe perspective, there are almost 200 member states in the United Nations, so this represents maybe a sixth of that, and probably the most financially stable with the most emphasis on science. A lot of the Scandinavian countries, the big ones like Russia, Germany, France, Spain, China obviously Canada and the US, Japan is the easy guess by Hiroshi Hatake but he might be an immigrant to somewhere, so we can't say for certain. Somewhere in Africa although I'm not sure which countries are the big scientific researchers that would require this kind of remoteness. Another famously international show, Stargate, had everyone with their country patches on their arm, sadly we get no such bonus here. And there are a LOT of levels in this base, most of them apparently underground going by the outside height of the building. </span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyHNnS-mHV9RiiczcYeZwzV36vVuRbXakVDxrrccf3iJz9S5pGeQBpA-AEe52pqdmcn7Nf0LPWdhDLUnBm5DrWfXD1sXixFKcwZ3QA7FM_JFmlhtXafFd9V2A6gwLbUHnuRzGvc_SE7Gg/s1600/HelixS1E01C03.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyHNnS-mHV9RiiczcYeZwzV36vVuRbXakVDxrrccf3iJz9S5pGeQBpA-AEe52pqdmcn7Nf0LPWdhDLUnBm5DrWfXD1sXixFKcwZ3QA7FM_JFmlhtXafFd9V2A6gwLbUHnuRzGvc_SE7Gg/s320/HelixS1E01C03.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Alan gives Hiroshi a list of demands, including any contacts within the last 48 hours and full access to all living and work environments and materials. This is not unreasonable, but of course Hiroshi's not going to comply in the slightest. And now Alan wants to see his brother. Hoo boy. For this they suit up with medical tape over the gloves and everything, and Julia attempts to defuse some of the tension by telling Alan how she hasn't spoken to Peter in a long time. Since that night, in fact. Alan thinks this relates to her having issues with impulse control, she doesn't answer this with either an affirmative or a negative. And she is, of course, worried for him. Them? Ambiguous. The interesting part of this scene though isn't so much the dialogue as the combination of dialogue with acting with the clear, sharp cuts in editing. Normally these cuts would be smoother and softer viewpoint shifts, but instead it's sharp, it's disorienting to how we normally view television. First they're sitting with their backs to each other and then, cut, they're sitting next to each other, cut, they're in a different position again. Contrast this with how smoothly their voices go over what we're seeing, and it gives a subtle nudge of uncertainty and unease. Me likey.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Not at all subtle unease: Walker and Alan in suits with full face masks and we only see their faces because Hollywood magic, cases lined in red fake-velvet with shiny surgical tools, monitors bleeping and flashing big 'critical' signs, Peter himself with bloody eyeballs (capillary damage I would think but possibly also detached retinas) (Do Not Google This) and blood vessels distended and probably breaking under the skin all over the place. Eyes darting around like either he's lost control of his optic muscles or his higher brain functions. Or both! Embrace the power of and when you're talking about unknown pathogens. We get the requisite spooky shots of people in white suits with independent air supplies walking around in a glass case </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: line-through; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">of emotion</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> of plague and doom and people outside the glass case watching from shadows and obscured by the reflections in the glass. This is stock, this is visual tropes from all the outbreak horror, but it's a trope because it works. Both to set the mood and as shorthand, the visual equivalent of This is Srs Business. Alan's trying to communicate with Peter, who is so not home right now. Along the lines of communication (nice juxtapose there) Sarah asks Daniel about uploading information to the CDC. They don't have a T1 but they have an optical network that uploads information to a satellite for an hour each day. So at least that's something, and more than they might otherwise have given the remote location. On the other hand that's also a single communications channel to the outside world, and that will be relevant later, too. Sarah comments on his knowledge, and it turns out he learned it from Hatake, who's his foster father, adopting him from an orphanage in Barrow. This will </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">also</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> be relevant later! But not in the way anyone expects. Alan is still trying to communicate with Peter, who can barely respond and not in any way that indicates for certain whether or not he understands what Alan is saying or what he's replying. He does say something about The White Room, though. I'm being oh so good you guys, I will not earworm you even though I am right now. Alan's trying to reach him wavers between professional and emotional. Which, at least he's not breaking containment protocols so he can wibble verbally all he wants, and Walker's clearly keeping an eye on him. And on the blood sample which, eh, I don't know if black is an in-character hyperbole here, or a descriptor we're meant to accept because that's not black so much as very, very dark red. (Look, I deal with dyes and other colored liquids on a regular basis, I know how very dark liquid interacts with light, and the very edges of the liquid at the bottom are red before the light is completely absorbed. But that could simply be because having a black liquid show up on camera is sometimes hard.) While Alan is distracted by the black blood Peter will attack him with way more energy than he maybe should have! Miraculously in the ensuing struggle, it doesn't look like anyone's suit gets ripped or anything, but this should definitely be a warning sign that of course no one will heed. Walker manages to get some sedatives into him that take effect quickly enough, so all we get is a very angry Peter shouting something about how everyone lies. And the funny part here is, Alan and Walker have no reason to assume that this means sabotage, hidden agendas, or anything on the part of Arctic Biosystems because of their history of infidelity before! Oh good. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Alan is doing a field job of coping afterwards, which is to say he's coping exactly enough to get him through to the next task, and the next task, and the one after that, and not at all beyond that. I'm liking the blocking here, the women in warm red/pink clothes and Alan in, heh, black, and everything else beyond that in shadow. Julia up front, Sarah in back and more distant, Doreen is Ms Not Appearing In This Shot which isn't significant at all of course. (Given the series finale I'm laugh-sobbing even harder.) And then everything fades to white because that's what you do in the Arctic. It's only slightly more uplifting than a fade to black, and much more of a transition given that we're already pretty dark to begin with. It also thematically goes with the white room Peter mentioned, which is thematic although by now we've had so much info heaped upon our conscious and subconscious minds that it kind of slips right by there. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Okay! Over to less angsty things, mice! And what looks like a fucking zamboni crossing in front of the base, I don't even. Lots of wind power out here though, that's not entirely unreasonable if those turbines can handle the cold and we don't have to worry about bird death since, heh, what birds. Doreen is taking a history from Daniel: Peter's been assigned to that lab for six months ish, he doesn't know what Peter was working on, which isn't out of the realm of possibility given that he's ostensibly head of security. And given what he's already learned and expressed expertise in it's not out of the realm of possibility that he's guessed what Peter's working on, but he's also taciturn enough not to want to say that to strangers? Maybe. Doreen will now discover the lack of mouse/rat sex organs here, which, um. First of all, don't you want a broad spectrum of responses even across gender lines if you're testing things, don't you want your rats as natural as possible, the rats are already fairly isolated so I don't think breeding is going to be a problem oh never mind. I'm not entirely what purpose this line serves, except it does give an indication of how Arctic Biosystems is all oh yes here we'll take a perfectly good rat and </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: line-through; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">give it anxiety</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> fuck with it to make it BETTER. We don't need a problem to fix, look we made it better. And this is, in fact, the nutshell in which Helix lives. (</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A:</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> "LOOK WHAT I HAVE DONE I HAVE MADE IMMORTALITY." "...you fucked up a perfectly good virus, look at it, it's got zombies.") And no, lab rats aren't more docile if you neuter them. Unless of course you neuter them after you fucked them up in other ways first. But I digress. Daniel also would like Doreen to believe they do not have monkeys, to which Doreen's disbelief is limited in its expression only by the show's airing on a basic cable channel. If I were her I would be starting at "the fuck you say." Daniel doubles down on his no monkeys! Literally. No, Daniel. No one believes you. I don't believe you, Doreen doesn't believe you, the surprised face in the jar which we will not pull out when we find the monkeys does not believe you. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Over to Peter and the other two victims, which have been liquified and are now pouring out of the bag. So it's a good thing they're in those nice clean suits isn't it! Perfect helmet for throwing up into and having it splash back on your face. Doubling down on the gross, though I can't say I blame her. The skulls also might have been scarred by whatever liquified the flesh into black goo, so that's fun. Is anyone else having X-Files flashbacks? Cut to Sarah washing herself up at the sink and promising that won't happen again, no, Sarah, you work for the CDC and if you're on a rapid response team that will totally happen again. Besides, you didn't contaminate anything or yourself, you're probably fine. Alan takes a moment to swing on the pendulum between what the absolute fuck and this is an unprecedented level of cool new virus. Liquification (google tells me this is actually liquefaction, I'm sorry) of organs is a stretch, what most hemorrhagic fevers do, which I believe are the most common type of disease that does this, is they disrupt the cellular integrity of a number of different organs, destroying them and destroying a number of blood vessel walls, creating uncontrolled bleeding and thus giving the impression of liquifying. It's pretty horrific even without the full-body liquefaction, which Alan rightly refers to as heretofore unseen levels of destruction. Sarah will get started on the samples, I think? Julia will talk to Hatake about what the researchers were working on, Alan will... do something else. That is not reconcile with his allegedly dying brother. Okay then.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Doreen will take off her suit way before anyone has any idea whether or not it's airborne, how long has that rat been exposed to air from the diseased rat? Not nearly fucking long enough. Yeah, I know, time compression for television, look, I get paranoid about this shit, okay? Doreen and Serrrgio make small talk about their respective careers, rats, the various lies being told around the base. I made that last one up but it's still true. And when Doreen finds monkey hair down the drain it's even more true! Yes, what are they hiding to do with these monkeys they said they didn't have.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Hatake's office is surprisingly full of warm colors and plants for someone who works out in the middle of the fucking Arctic. Or maybe it's not surprising at all. It's also ridiculously clean and ordered. Hatake comes in (we hear the door hiss so he's not just coming into camera range) after a second while they contemplate the Arctic and attempts to bond with her via small talk about how pretty and timeless and they get more accomplished without the distraction of the outside world. Julia would like to know if by outside world he means regulatory agencies, which from what we've seen so far is not inaccurate! Hatake will now proceed to be disarmingly helpful about providing files and documentation, a bullet points summary of what Peter was working on: mutagens. I question Julia's use of the word dangerous, although she could be referring to the clearly dangerous effect whatever those mutagens were (assuming they were) had in the lab. Hatake responds with you wouldn't want to let your children play with them and from the vantage point of having seen the whole series, I have to go off into a corner and laugh hysterically for a second now. Okay. Much better. Hatake asks Julia if she has children, it's a smiling warm moment that gets slightly stalkery with the way he looks at her, but also serves as a facepalming moment of foreshadowing for later. Much more obvious at the time is the way he answers way too quickly in the negative to Julia's question about, can he think of any connection between these mutagens and the unknown pathogen. Way, way too quickly. At least take a five-count to pretend to think about it, Hatake. This is why you can't have nice things. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Alan is looking around Peter's room! It's the same sort of sparse and clinical clean that Hatake's lab was, although Hatake's lab was more ordered than Peter's, I think. There are a few things in stacks. There are very few personal items and absolutely no sign of any extraneous piles. Which at first seems sinister, and it probably is, but on taking time to think about it it's probably also a sign of how much effort it takes to get any large amount of material out there. Peter may not have been here long enough to accumulate personal items, or he might have more research materials that he wanted to bring out rather than personal goods. Or, again, it's meant to be sinister and imply how much of his life is empty and/or taken up by work. And to pull our focus to the One Personal Item that Alan takes hold of, a childhood photograph of the two of them! Aw. Fairly boilerplate shortcut to brotherly love amidst a sea of what looks like landscapes and dog, interrupted by Sarah with her lack of results. Alan quickly goes back to looking for information like he'd done something shameful. Oh look a flash drive. With video diaries on it? The entry he selects is 224, which may be a number in a series or may be February 24th, hard to say. He begins with a status report, sort of in the manner of someone who's keeping track of a few basic things for physical health purposes. Given the potential psychological effects of being that close to the pole I can't say he's wrong to keep track like that, let alone Factors We Do Not Know About At This Time. He's apparently seeing someone with all the tepid enthusiasm of a man attending a tax preparation seminar. Dude, break it off already. Alan pauses and rewinds over Peter saying he's glad about being up here and that he understands certain things now, because that's never ominous at all. He zooms in (I don't see a zoom button on that panel does anyone else? He's just touching the screen, and it zooms. If my computer did that I'd have to keep resizing and refocusing even more than I already do) on Peter's hand making a gesture, tapping his collarbone. Dialogue with Sarah clarifies this for us that it's a secret signal they used to have when they were kids, meaning run like hell. Not just run like hell but run from their authority figure, their father figure, which will also be semi-significant or at least thematic later. The way the dialogue between him and Sarah is structured also gives the whole exchange a suspense or horror movie quality, with the same cadence. Heh. In case we didn't know what kind of show we were watching. And because these conversations always end with something on the theme of "run like hell", in comes Julia to interrupt whatever might have been said next to tell him that he needs to come to isolation about Peter. </span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqpYV-VW2a851LvuwI2TMNpWTUQdkocAVnctjMitM-D7KOHTHF7u6fBqKfWXpjWVtHci8j7r1MjefENQq92FpowEVjRmlhUfYzZ9SUcEWeMK8OQgavv2ATHiUqewdkBZKcTbWrVTwKD4w/s1600/HelixS1E01C05.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqpYV-VW2a851LvuwI2TMNpWTUQdkocAVnctjMitM-D7KOHTHF7u6fBqKfWXpjWVtHci8j7r1MjefENQq92FpowEVjRmlhUfYzZ9SUcEWeMK8OQgavv2ATHiUqewdkBZKcTbWrVTwKD4w/s320/HelixS1E01C05.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The first person to enter the next scene isn't Alan but Daniel, while the computer solemnly warns us about contamination. Why yes. Peter's gone. Somehow escaped by oh my, ripping a hole in the roof. We cut that scene off in mid "contamination" and move to Hatake and Alan arguing about whose fault that was. Guys. What about setting aside who fucked protocol and focusing on the fact that </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">a plague vector is running around loose in the facility, hmm</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">? Hey, remember those RFIDs everyone was injected with? That'd be a good thing to remember now! Julia also raises a good point which is how the hell did a man supposedly on the brink of death not only stand up on his bed (one hopes, otherwise he jumped and that's a hell of a thing to do) and tear open the ceiling, but also hoisted himself up and into the whatever ducts or space is between the ceiling and the next floor. That's an impressive feat for a person in their full health, never mind plague-vector Peter. Daniel has answers to at least the immediate and urgent parts of these questions! Which is that they've sealed the entire floor and deactivated Peter's chip, at least so far effectively trapping him, and they're going to flood the area with halothane gas. A quick look tells me that halothane is an inhalational anesthetic but also unstable in light, so, um? That may or may not be a problem if he's in the crawlspace or ducts, I guess. Define, unstable, though. Is everything going to go funny and then explode? 'cause I don't wanna explode. It's been around since the 50s, though, so presumably they have some idea of what the potential side effects would be (rarely dangerous but side effects have been noted) and how fast and far it'll spread. Alan would like to register his objection to... something? Oh, to Daniel talking about retrieving his body, because Alan wants his antibodies. Well, to be more accurate, Alan's protesting for Peter's life on the basis of antibodies and usefulness, which isn't a bad argument to make although I don't think antibodies immediately become inert after death. Then again I also don't think halothane gas is supposed to cause death. Then </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">again</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Daniel might be planning for death less as a side effect of the halothane and more as a result of the interaction of halothane and the black bile plague. It's hard to say because everyone's upset and taking conversational shortcuts. At least they've stopped West Winging it. And Hatake brings up the most urgent relevant point, which is to </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">contain the walking plague vector thank you.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Release the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: line-through; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">hounds</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> gas!</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Alan wants to go up with Daniel. Daniel doesn't want Alan to go up with Daniel. Alan isn't giving good reasons either, but that's only because he doesn't have any. Hatake just agrees, and we cut to the next scene without finding out if they're taking appropriate protocols to deal with the plague vector. Serrrgio and Doreen walking down a hall! Power-walking down a hall. The kind of walk people with Authoritah do, only because of the interplay of light and shadow both in the hallway construction and in the hallway lighting the whole thing has a definite ominous feel to it. Doreen is in lab coat white, Serrrgio is in his fatigues and talking about how they should just go ask about the monkeys and they have unrestricted access anyway, while Doreen is talking about how this way is more fun and waving her wrist at the door lock. Three times, take a shot. What was that you were saying about unrestricted access, Serrrgio? This also suggests she's right about not getting a straight answer from Hatake. Serrrgio will atone for his momentary naivete by finding away around the lock with liquid nitrogen. I honestly don't see why they needed to explain what liquid nitrogen does when your average science-fiction movie goer knows that adding liquid nitrogen to an object makes it freeze and shatter. Especially since according to all the science nitpicking I've read that extraneous line of dialogue was wrong, it rearranges the molecular strength. Anyway. Freeze and shatter. Etc. They're in!</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We have three (take another drink!) repetitions of people clearing sectors before Daniel pokes Alan about check in dumbass. Alan is not so sure Peter's in there, Daniel is sure because Daniel is running on a lot of assumptions about what Peter can and can't do, the speeds he can move at, his strength, etc. Since it's time for spooky things, very little of this is actually lit by anything other than ambient TV lighting and flashlights. We intercut Alan crawling through the vent with Doreen and Serrrgio finding evidence of monkeys. Cages, fur, debris, smell. Busted cage doors from rage monkey escapes. None of this is very good. Oh look, Peter has black mucus. How the hell can you even tell that's black and not just dark blood oh well, never mind. The smears indicate something dark green-brown to black, so no, probably not blood. Certainly not normal blood. Good job, Alan, because Peter was so coherent last time he'll come right when you call him. Doreen and Serrrgio continue to inspect the cage area and track down a "way too smart" rat as the music in the background ramps up our nervousness in a Jaws-ian fashion, and something goes skittering behind Alan's legs down a cross duct! Alan hears it, and I'm not so sure that was a good thing. DOREEN WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING. Why are you going after the potentially diseased rat with oh god that's not a rat. Still, why are you going after it with nothing but your bare hands and a flashlight? Predictably, it attacks her with a jump scare, only to get clocked on the head by Serrrrrgio. He gets some extra r's for that one. Doreen would like him to be sure when he checks her for skin breaks etc, and I'm just going to say that they're eliding for time on this one because a full-on inspection would take more time than TV pacing allows. No, she's clean. Meanwhile Alan has found not-Peter, by the glassy stare he's found a dead body stripped of its uniform and lying in blood. Oh goodie. Too dead, though, to be what skittered behind him, so Peter's still in there somewhere and evidently the halothene gas didn't affect him in the slightest. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In the next scene the body is lowered down while Daniel reads off just enough of his CV that more sensitive viewers might empathize and be sad that he's dead. We also get a concluding shot as the body is lowered of the stump where his hand used to be. Remember what I was saying about Demolition Man, RFIDs in hands ripped off, etc? Yeah. Peter saw that movie too. Alan did not see that movie. Alan if you had seen that movie you would know exactly why he cut off his hand. The plan about everyone stays in their room or travels with a partner isn't a bad one though. As is the question about how the virus made him stronger instead of weaker (Alan says why but it's the same question, by what mechanism). </span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcr4rZWEOtlkcO3Zhz7fup4naZe3QfG1LfjLiheUpCphxsMXS7HyEhVDGqn1AEdpL1E_Gq_13_V9h2GI7NDfFRJvX6rbh8kyR0MeiMMEvRxzCWW0dQdHS7uDiP7bj3oysPspyQU81BMqI/s1600/HelixS1E01C06.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcr4rZWEOtlkcO3Zhz7fup4naZe3QfG1LfjLiheUpCphxsMXS7HyEhVDGqn1AEdpL1E_Gq_13_V9h2GI7NDfFRJvX6rbh8kyR0MeiMMEvRxzCWW0dQdHS7uDiP7bj3oysPspyQU81BMqI/s320/HelixS1E01C06.png" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Julia and Sarah are in the lab! They are not finding any current viral structures. I don't have enough virology experience to nitpick the science here, but I do have enough general knowledge to hmm at Sarah suggesting it's not a current virus. For the reasons she goes on to explain, science teams have discovered viruses in the ice cores, there seems to be some debate in the real world currently as to whether or not it could be a threat to current human populations. I believe the last known science was, assume potential threat until proven otherwise. In this context, it's as good a potential source as any. Julia will respond to this perfectly good theory by making a personal remark. I feel like I'm going to be talking in Demolition Man voices for at least the rest of the episode (maniac has responded with a scornful remark!) which at least is less than six minutes away. Yeah, Sarah, you can deny it all you want because it hasn't been actualized yet but you know damn well what Julia is thinking because you know that other people are thinking it, too. Because, among other things, you can't be a woman in a STEM field and not be sexually harassed or have sexual assumptions made about you, apparently. Julia, stop pushing. You have work to do, stoppit. I mean, I can imagine why she's pushing, everything about the situation stings, but stoppit. The tiny squiggling... virus? Prion? Thing in the microscope screen will distract her at least, so they've found </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">something.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Julia turns it over to Sarah to finish while she goes to look for Alan to get his attention on the thing and what the everloving fuck is Serrrgio doing. We're going to have to take some of those r's away from you buddy. He's assembling something out of what looks like a hidden or sealed compartment in a pack. It's a satellite! That attaches to a coded handheld device by which he's sending a message. The coded handheld device tells him to </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: line-through; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">feed it a stray cat</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> do something as yet undetermined, and off he goes back into the blurry white from whence he came at least at the moment.. Ah but that's not the end of the scene! Which woudl have been good symmetry for entrance and exit. As he turns to go back he turns around again as though he realizes what he's just walked through and HOLY SHIT IT'S A FIELD OF TERRIFIED FROZEN MONKEYS. Oh that's not creepy or anything. There's anywhere from fifty to a hundred monkeys there, I supposed I could probably count and estimate but I don't feel like it. Nyah.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Back in the lab Hatake is watching Sarah, Julia, and Alan from a darkened observation room. Because that's not creepy either. Sarah talks about how they weren't sure what they were looking for until they started looking for prehistoric crap, something about a paraspherical? See also my insufficient knowledge base for this kind of thing, although I believe what they're referring to is the shape of the virus which impacts how it behaves and the effects it has and how it binds to the human body. I think. She shows them the zoomed thing, we focus back on Hatake and Serrrgio's coming up to talk to him. Whatever he was doing out in the snow, Hatake knew about it, although it's unclear whether that's because Serrrgio told him or because he is a spying spymaster. Hatake is the visual focus of this scene, too, until Serrrgio starts talking about failure to adapt. Whatever that means Hatake interprets it for the threat it clearly is, telling him that the delivery will be on schedule. Sergio the Traitor says that the schedule changed when the CDC shows up, so we've taken our first step from the zombie outbreak genre to the conspiracy genre. Though they're obviously not mutually exclusive. Hatake claims to have had nothing to do with the CDC and Serrrgio reads from the stock book of Now I Have To Clean Up Your Mess. Eh.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Meanwhile Sarah has found a minimal but statistically relevant mutation that, through no scientific mechanism given (lack of consultants available to properly fake up the science? The scene doesn't require it at least), implies the virus is changing or mutating Peter. This is, to some extent, actually something that can happen; a retrovirus will occupy a cell and insert a copy of its own DNA into the cell in order to replicate itself using an enzyme unique? to retroviruses called reverse transcriptase. There are current research projects involving the use of retrovirus for genetic therapy even in the real world, at least I suspect they're current, the most recent article I found on a cursory search was from 2011. Anyway. The underpinnings of it imply that it's possible, albeit obviously not to the scale depicted in the tv show as far as we know. Yet. That's why it's television and not news.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And we conclude with very clearly infected and kind of gross looking Peter walking down a hall to the jaunty tune of Do You Know The Way To San Jose? which clearly, given this show, means something fucked up is about to happen. Because that's how this show rolls! We don't see what the fucked up thing is, thank god. Just that he goes into a room, there's screaming, and black bile spatters on the window. Yum. Who's hungry. Blood pudding, anyone?</span></div>
<br />Kitty Chandlerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05524808952260453841noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4271373189216022547.post-6959808910638222352016-03-14T14:03:00.001-07:002016-03-14T14:03:23.335-07:00Age of State of the BlogThose of you following me on Twitter may have noticed a recent downtick in activity, especially of the sort that talks about blogging at all. Some of you may have noticed the broken arm and the subsequent WOW I AM HIGH ON VICODIN tweets.<br />
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(We're not talking about how much of February I may not remember clearly.)<br />
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So! I know we promised to start posting eps around this point for Helix and Librarians, and Kitty is just about ready with her first two eps (I believe she's just got to pull screencaps), but I am... behind. Very, very behind. On the plus side, I have a plan of attack and expect to be able to post ONE ep around March 25th; on the minus side, I actually do have a bunch of stuff I'm trying to catch up with all at once. But I can type and think clearly now, which is a nice change from basically all of February, and I should hopefully be at a point where I can work down a few minutes of an ep most days, more on the weekends.<br />
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The story, for those who want it, is that I slipped on ice that'd gotten snowed on while I was in for my fiddle lesson the beginning of February, and while I managed not to land ON the fiddle case (and indeed it wasn't even out of tune), I broke my arm. In two places. And had THE WORST urgent care experience of my LIFE, up to and including failure to take X-rays of my wrist that would have told them about the bone chip. Because I am me and have epic skills, I did this just exactly enough to require Vicodin, a sling, and perpetual ice, and not enough that I needed a cast or surgery. I know. I was impressed too. I'm coming up on six weeks out from it, though, and I've been improving pretty damn rapidly. Those of you who've been around awhile know that this means I'm going to inevitably push, but I will try not to fall flat on my face when it comes to blogging. Or, you know. Fall on my wrist. Again.Anna Hammetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10095633218958433882noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4271373189216022547.post-36903341252950295492016-01-12T10:22:00.002-08:002016-01-12T10:22:32.047-08:00The State of the Blog Awakens<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As promised, the state of the blog post-Haven, post-holidays, and post-sleeping like we're teaching ourselves to hibernate.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What we're never doing again: </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">That. We are never, ever working to weekly deadline again. It was fun while it lasted, but we're frankly not getting any younger, and we're rapidly becoming the sort of stodgy 30-somethings who want our weekends back for housework. And TV marathons. And sleep. Shut up. Besides, we want to try to bring you better quality analysis, including a lot of the technical aspects that we know we let drop in recent posts in an effort to ensure everything got out on time.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What we'll be replacing live +24-blogging with: </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Anna is going to start up with The Librarians s1 & s2; Kitty will tackle Helix which has a limited run of two seasons. We'll aim to alternate weeks starting the middle to end of March, after we build up some backlog, so that we have time to continue writing at a reasonably leisurely pace. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The other great thing about this is that we're going to post during any currently-running show's hiatus, which will allow us to evaluate each ep in light of the larger whole of each season. With the move toward a significantly more serialized form of storytelling on TV, this is honestly the best way to continue giving you recaplyses without second-guessing every single week's developments. Sometimes this is fun! A lot of the time it leads to disappointment.</span></div>
<br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As a result, we're also considering branching out some: we've had at least one request for Jessica Jones, which will have to wait for us to finish watching before we make a decision yea or nay. (Hopefully this week/end!) There's a couple other shows we might do, but frankly we think you'll have plenty to keep you busy reading from now until the next time our lineup changes.</span>Anna Hammetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10095633218958433882noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4271373189216022547.post-75652986459227608412015-12-19T17:08:00.003-08:002015-12-19T17:08:17.915-08:00Be Unbroken Haven S5E25 Now<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Previously, on Haven. CroaShat was a manipulative asshole of a would-be father, Vince decided to go be a barnvatar because that seemed more useful than grieving Dave and probably killing himself, Laverne became the police station in the noirest episode ever to noir, Duke got pwned in the black-eyed horror of Croatoan, Dwight got his daughter back and is not sure how this is a trap. CroaShatDaddy continues to be abusive but reveals that he can use the Troubles however he damn wants, including to save baby Mara's life, and Duke is blaming Nathan (and Audrey) for his becoming a killer. I… cannot say he's entirely wrong there.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We return to Audrey having gone back to the station, presumably having walked? It's night, she's making her bed on the camp cot in the chief's office, and Nathan is being adorable with his snacks. Aww, she still loves Baby Ruths! Alas, that is granola but he is happy to see her! Ahem. Laverne's apparently decided to dispense only the healthy stuff, or as healthy as you can get out of a vending machine. Oh Laverne. Per Nathan's nudging, Audrey updates him on how much of a world of shit they're in, which is to say: lots! Several worlds' worth. (Say that five times fast.) He's not making threats, he's just promising to make people his idea of happy, which is clearly warped, she's not wrong that that's in a lot of ways more scary than an outright threat. An outright threat has recognizable boundaries on it, not necessarily limitations but it presents a defined scope. A complete stranger coming in and imposing his ideas of happiness on everyone else? That's a lot of unknowns to deal with. And of course he desperately wants his daughter back. I find it interesting that Nathan makes the point (and Audrey doesn't argue) that she's </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">not</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Croatoan's daughter, whereas they were pretty quick to allow as how she was Charlotte's daughter. Partly that's a pacing issue, but partly I think that's also an indication of how thoroughly they're rejecting Croatoan and all his works. As it were. In the meantime, we revisit for the umpteenth iteration that they need to fix the aether core and that no they don't have any brilliant solutions, nor has Vince come up with anything now that he has access to the databases in the controller crystal. Blah blah Duke, blah blah holing up and Dwight's keeping Vince away from Duke, etc etc etc exposition. Though I do find Nathan's unshakeable faith that they're going to get Duke back awfully adorable and heartrending in light of what happens. But adorable.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLhOIONMthrK3IzRc_gJpEwMXC55_NywdcSPfVfpJ2C6xdNPYm3t7Y20Uwo_sh7u3GEDiQX6pERtT-t6YwOhi-9-fdKh5StPEJiNOJtNDpSifGyU4Qb4twBzO6W1Ymy3ieDs9izgjJFfQ/s1600/haven525cc01.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLhOIONMthrK3IzRc_gJpEwMXC55_NywdcSPfVfpJ2C6xdNPYm3t7Y20Uwo_sh7u3GEDiQX6pERtT-t6YwOhi-9-fdKh5StPEJiNOJtNDpSifGyU4Qb4twBzO6W1Ymy3ieDs9izgjJFfQ/s320/haven525cc01.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Currently, getting Duke back is the last thing that's happening, as some poor kid we can't make out clearly runs down the boardwalk in the pouring rain. I'm not drawing explicit parallels here to the first murder we ever saw in Haven and the first time Duke and Audrey met, with him fishing her out of the water in the wet in the middle of the night on the dock but yeah, I'm totally drawing a parallel. It's a dark parallel, but it's there and I'm reasonably sure it's on purpose. Evidently Duke, or Croatoan, or some part of the Crocker Trouble, involves becoming the kind of excellent hunter who lies in wait for their prey rather than chasing it to exhaustion. I don't remember Duke being quite this good at it - capable of it, but not prone to using it. Kid looks familiar, but it takes some time to place him, which makes it a good thing that Duke provides the expo-speak for a bit. Of course then it turns into villain monologuing, which Eric Balfour clearly had fun with but did they have to hammer on it so much? Apparently yes. Victor Kirby is Vanessa Stanley's nephew, has her Trouble of touch a person, see their death, and Duke's here to collect for Croatoan. Victor would like to know what the fuck this is a terrible Trouble, which makes for more monologuing: apparently CroaShatDaddy wants this so he can show Audrey how glorious the future could be. Oh for fuck's sake, you're a really BAD villain, dude. Unlike Vanessa, apparently Victor can't see how he dies, despite having tried, which is probably for the best, given that that was part of what drove his aunt to her death. And he gets to see Duke's death which still involves a pale tattooed arm, never mind that Duke would like to believe that becoming Croatoan's pet Crocker will prevent the vision from coming to pass. I… sure, Duke, you keep on believing that while the credits roll.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Dwight's on the phone with someone, in a rather LARGE white house. To the extent that I'm comfortable calling it a mansion, and the grounds are practically an estate. We speculated some that this was Vince's house in this scene when we first see it but I'm going to spoil you a few minutes ahead right now because, no, apparently it's the Haven Overlook Club. And a hearty fuck you all, too. For those of you who don't know why we're swearing, the Overlook Hotel is the hotel from The Shining. Fuck you all. Argh. Okay, we'll stop, upshot, big big white house type thing, with tall ceilings and rooms with views and a staircase and a </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: line-through; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">pond</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> dock. It probably was a house before the club got ahold of it. Giant back deck and patio doors, nothing new and exciting in Vince's programming about fixing the aether core, he insists he feels okay because of course he does. Nathan will also call bullshit on this. And well, Nathan, you see the reason Dwight's not telling you where the controller crystal is is because then he'd be exposing Lizzie's location. Whether or not she's really his daughter, he's not able to stop the emotional reaction that she </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">must </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">be and therefore she is there for protecting. Hell, even if she's not she's still a whatever taking the form of a small child, and for damn sure THAT would hit Dwight's protective instincts hard. I would still not be surprised if this clubhouse were Teagues property, to wit: all the dustcovers on the furniture, the fact that a good chunk of the style matches the creepy farmhouse of creepy that was Dave's hideyhole originally, and the overall aura of understated elegance speaks to old money. Which we know the Teagues have. Along with half of Haven. (Speaking of which, with Dave dead and Vince is a crystal, who the hell did they put in their wills? Dwight? Nathan? Very maybe Duke or Audrey? Very</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> very</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> maybe that last one given that they already know she's vanished and come back two three times already and that's not the kind of person you want being a legal heir to anything. Though in Haven, who the hell knows, it might even work.) Lizzie's playing in the living room while Vince calls Dwight on not telling Nathan about the sudden reappearance of his daughter. Actually no, I don't think Dwight </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">is </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">afraid they'll </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">take </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">her. I think he's afraid that if he lets her around Nathan and Audrey and everyone, either it'll become more real once other people who are also real and not crystals interact with her and therefore it'll hurt more when he loses her again </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">or</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> she'll turn into a ravening hellbeast there to get under people's guard, pun intended, and do damage that Croatoan couldn't. Or both. Both is good. Vince suggests an aether creature, which isn't entirely implausible except I don't see Croatoan giving up that much aether. Product of a Trouble, though, oh hell yes. Lord knows there's enough resurrection or apparition Troubles running around. Three that we know of just off the tops of our heads (Hopkins which we know Duke has although without refinement Lizzie wouldn't be able to interact with her environment, Moira and Noelle's, as well as Ona's, are actual resurrection Troubles). And Dwight is going with no that's not my daughter she's dead, in the fond faint hopes of not over-attaching to this little girl and then having her ripped away again. Oh honey.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Speaking of oh-honey, hi possessed Duke out on the sidewalk being all black-eyed and unnerving. Dwight, you KNOW kids can tell this shit, stop lying to your maybe-daughter. His response to this is of course to send the vulnerable away and stand between them and the scary person, which Vince agrees to after a reluctant bit of arguing in which at least Dwight is realistic about his ability to hold off Duke Crocker in all his Crockery. I'm going to be over here giggling at the fact that this seems to indicate Vince can pick his glowy crystal ass up and move it himself. I mean, not that surprising given that we had no idea Howard was a glowy rock for a few seasons, but HILARIOUS on a level that is probably greater for how little I slept Thursday night okay. Lizzie is not okay with going with Uncle Vince. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Uncle </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Vince? Hide and seek is for now enough to keep her from asking more questions, but seriously Dwight: kids know this shit and you're kind of a crap liar to her. Though I'm tempted to argue they're smarter and more emotionally attuned to their parents than even the writers think. Anyway. Vince takes Lizzie off and Dwight starts counting down, which is not at all symbolic of anything why would you think that.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Gloria's got yet another body in the ice cream truck of disturbing, confirms that Victor got stabbed by someone who probably was Duke, and she would like to file a complaint over Vicki giving the baby apple juice. Personally I'm with Gloria on this one, Vicki who the fuck taught you how to take care of a baby and is there seriously no formula left in town? I know they're cut off, but for fuck's sake, NO APPLE JUICE. No wet nurse either? Which I would also more than half expect as a plausible solution. No dairy animals? She said, flapping a hand at the ice cream truck. Or did he never replace the cows that died in season one. Anyway, yeah, that's not going to work, but Vicki! And her Trouble! That might do something. For the aether core, not for the baby, although my lack of sleep conjures up mental images of Vicki conjuring up infinite bottles of formula. Hee. We are then distracted from possible solutions to all problems by the appearance of one CroaDaddy on the shore. Gee, I wonder if this is a deliberate attempt at divide-and-conquer, it's SO DIFFICULT TO TELL. Also he has some kind of teleportation Trouble, which who knows where he came by THAT. There's a couple of options, the Aarons shadow-killer Trouble from Ain't No Sunshine (1x08) which assumes these are projections and illusions rather than actual teleportation, and the Stamoran evil twin Trouble (Friend or Faux, 2x08), particularly with greater control and finesse. Or something similar, or combining the two Troubles, which granted assumes that Duke had those Troubles to start with. Anyway, the important part is that he's capable of it in himself, and we later see he can definitely do it to others as well, ruling out the shadow-killer one. He also has some kind of bulletproof Trouble, the anti-Dwight Trouble? We do know William and Mara liked to do them in pairs. There's a definitely mocking hat removal and look going on, reminding us all of why William Shatner is a much revered actor and I'll be behind the couch now. Nathan. STOP FUCKING SHOOTING THE CREEPY MYSTICAL THINGIES. STOPPIT. THAT NEVER GOES WELL. Allow CroaShatner to be eerily affable at them, which is mildly funny even under the circumstances and is much more hilarious if I'm picturing Lucas Bryant and/or Emily Rose off-camera going OH MY GOD IT'S WILLIAM SHATNER. Nathan also do not punch the mystical thingie, he's not making threats so much as promises about liquefying your innards. We already do know of at least </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">one</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Trouble that can do that, and also ew. That's probably the organ-legging Trouble. Ew. (</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">K:</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> See if they'd kept their mouths shut and their Trouble censuses in mental rolodexes everyone would be a lot better off. Or is that just me.) (</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A: </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Not EVERYONE has an elephantine memory, dear. For example, I keep mine externally in Red Lion. >.>) Audrey challenges Croatoan on what the fuck why, and he coughs up oh no, he means for </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">her </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">to design the Troubles to take his revenge on their home dimension, these are for him to play with. Can you hear the facepalm through the internet? Just checking. No, he's not here to check on Duke or anything at all like that, though I suppose if Nathan and Audrey are trying to hide that they know there's some kind of creepyass connection that's one way of doing it! Slightly more unnerving is the fact that he says Duke's fine like he doesn't care if they know there's some kind of creepyass connection. He's here to make Nathan an offer he can't refuse. Or so he thinks: go away, fuck off and give him his "real" daughter (note the use of the emphasizing possessive here </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">his</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> daughter, not for you Nathan), here's an uber-creepy clone-copy of Audrey he just made you now go beyond the shroud and live happily ever after. Wow. You have… absolutely no idea what actually makes people tick, asshole. Congratulations! </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">After the ad break, copy!Audrey continues to look vapid and sweet. This is the kind of shit that makes me wonder about Lizzie, though to be brutally blunt about it, Lizzie is young enough that she still fits the idea of what Croatoan thinks father-daughter relationships should be. (We could list all the ways he continually infantilizes Audrey but we'd be here all day, you'll have to settle for us listing it when it occurs to us to do so.) And if he's pulling on Dwight's memories of her, I have at least a little more faith in Dwight's rationality! She might be overly-sweet sainted-lost-child-returned-from-grave, but if she's really been brought back as a full person then at some point he'll have to deal with anger and sadness and pouting and teenage hormones and the full range of human emotions, in intensified having first experiences form. This, here? This is a copy of the real Audrey, who is herself arguably a copy of Mara, or an alt-verse version of Mara, and she looks… bland, almost blank. Compare against Audrey's very intense, strongly felt anger as Croatoan explains that he'll drop the copy and Nathan off somewhere outside the shroud and they can go have a nice little white picket fence life with no memories of Haven. Um EXCUSE HER does she not get a say in this? Why he thought she'd like it! She can help her daddy dearest create all the Troubles and go rule over their world muahahaha and all the while she'll know that Nathan is being taken care of in the best way possible! Here, he'll try and drive more of a wedge between you about as blatantly as he can, is it working? Nooooo. No, Croatoan in addition to continuing to demonstrate his lack of understanding about emotions and how they work, he has not personally run up against the stubborn of Mt. Wuornos, who is a) unimpressed by the I'm her father I know her better than you bullshit and b) unimpressed by inducements to run away from danger. He will now demonstrate by pointedly walking around Daddytoan and putting himself between her and her biodad as they march the fuck out of there. Aww, he looks like a petulant teenager instead of an immortal all-powerful mad scientist! Watch your back, Nathan.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Dwight evidently will take Duke's eyes going back to normal for a sign to wander outside and reveal the Overlook Club sign, causing much shrieking and swearing and FUCK YOU and so on. He's nominally here to find out what Duke wants, which given that Duke's chewing the scenery in his villainy like he can eat it instead of aether makes a great delaying tactic. Stalling is also a good way to let off some steam over he wants to kill Duke in revenge for his betrayal etc etc, whether or not Dwight believes at this point in time that Duke is acting with impaired consent is somewhat irrelevant to the emotions he's expressing. Duke-toan insists that no, that really is Lizzie in there and by the way Dwight you should just fuck on out of this conflict and go raise your daughter. Yeaaaah that's not happening. Nor is Dwight going to cough up the controller crystal anytime soon, so now the stick! Which is that Croatoan will take Lizzie away again, or send Duke to kill her for him, if Dwight doesn't go get it. This is in no way going to </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">severely </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">backfire on them, and it's this kind of shit that makes me really certain Duke's will has been fully overridden. The Duke Crocker we know and love is more than capable of conspiring rings around everyone and using all their weaknesses against them, and moreover he knows what those weaknesses are. This Duke-toan is being used as a great big melodramatic weapon and enforcer and nothing more, which is a shameful fucking waste of his abilities - something I absolutely believe of Croatoan with his superiority complex, but also a good indication that Duke is only doing this because he can't commit suicide for whatever reason. (Possession, belief that it's immoral, some corner of his brain still wants to live… take your pick.) So. Vince comes back in from putting Lizzie into a hiding spot upstairs, or so I assume, I have all of the issues with do not have the fucking discussion of whether or not the small child is human, illusion, demon, aether creature, etc., when you do not 100% know she really IS upstairs and </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">well out of fucking hearing range oh my god</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Fortunately that is not the subplot here, the subplot here is that Croatoan has an exceeding number of issues which include overidentifying with Dwight. Which is… not at all surprising, considering. Vince contradicts him, pointing out that Dwight looks like a full person again, if not in those exact terms. And he's not wrong. Lizzie existing again would give Dwight something to live for that isn't "protect the town until a bullet finally catches me in the head or the shower some morning." Emphasis on </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">live </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">for, not just survive for. We didn't even get that out of Dwight and Charlotte although there were very early glimmers. More in the way they were squashed after her betrayal than anything. Right now with this there's a lot going on emotionally in this scene, and at most half of it is being said, but what </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">is </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">said is heavy enough: Dwight finally admits that he was suicidally depressed after Lizzie died, and Vince admits that he always felt responsible for it because he was leading the Guard and they were the fucking idiots who showed up with guns at the door of a bullet magnet. This might be the most blatant they've ever made the father-son relationship between these two, and goddamn do they sell it. The gist, though, is that if this is a lie or if Croatoan manages to take Lizzie away, either by literal un-creation or by sending Duke to kill her, then Dwight </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">knows </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">he's going to completely break. Whether that's break in the direction of psychotic murder in the most clinical sense, or simply stripping off his vest and firing a gun, who knows. Let's not find out. Vince knows that he's never had the power to fix death, to make anything about Lizzie dying right again, and hangs a lampshade over the irony of Croatoan doing this one good thing maybe. Yeah stop talking before you make Dwight cry, Vince.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Over at the Laverne station Vicki is attempting to draw the aether core with what looks like a crease in the paper standing in for the crack. It just might work! Gloria is fussing over her, as well she might considering Croatoan will totally come after this if/when (more like when) he finds out what they're doing. No aether core for you, puny mortals, you know not what you do. I have to say I'm really enjoying the unity of these three women here working with what they have to fix Haven and I REALLY WISH WE HAD MORE OF IT, DO YOU HEAR ME. Yes, we will keep harping on this problem Haven has even unto the last minute or so. I mean, Vicki is an awesome character. Gloria is amazing, and we were so, so lucky to have as much of her as we did. And if you add Audrey into the mix you have a perfect Goddess triumvirate! I'm not even kidding, you could maiden-mother-crone the hell out of this trio and it would be wonderful. Alas, it is not to be, but we do get rewarded with some maternal instinct from Gloria in Vicki's direction. Aww. Nathan comes in with coffee and news of more security cameras up and a solid perimeter, for which he is rewarded with Audrey pulling him aside to tell to him a thing, that's never good. Oh, no, never mind, she's just fussing over him taking the offer. And on the one hand, YES. I think we can safely say there is not a living person in Haven who doesn't want this over with for one reason or another, Croatoan for all the wrong reasons and everyone else because dear god when will this be over. But does he want the copy and the fake happy ending? No. No, he doesn't. Yes, okay, fine, she did the thing and asked him if he wanted out and no. He doesn't. End of speculation more than discussion, Nathan's pep talks tend to run towards the brief, full of declarative sentences. And in this case interrupted by Laverne beeping to get their attention and show them Duke coming through the door. Well, shit.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And after the break he's coming through the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">walls</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Because as nifty as the ability to manipulate your doors and walls is, when your opponent can phase right through them it's awful limited unless you want to keep playing pea and shell games. Which might be what Laverne's doing! In between sending Duke pictures of an insolent monkey oh my god. This is why we love Laverne, y'all. Duke is surprisingly gentle about closing the laptop, I kind of expected a full on flipping things in rage, but no, he's going for the quiet scary. That doesn't necessarily help. He also does dunk his fingers into the coffee as a test of how long they've been gone, so that's not going to help them stay hidden for long. Oh goodie.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">From actual peril to fake peril, in which Dwight's selling it just a </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">little </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">too hard, in a manner not altogether unfamiliar to us: it looks closer to Adam when he first showed up and was trying to reel himself back in. The floor is lava! But they're safely on the couch. But they have to rescue the princess, who I assume would normally be a doll that doesn't currently exist, whereas she is definitely not the princess, she's Lizzie the Lionhearted and he's Dwight the Dauntless. Awwwwww that's adorable. And a test, as it turns out, where he serves as her escort on the pillow-stepping-stones across the lava to rescue the princess. And melts his feet, because it </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">has </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">been several years so he's rusty. But they played last week! So that's going to be a fun series of explanations one of these days, and I think we've established that this makes Dwight's hair a sorrow mullet. I'm not even kidding, I'm pretty sure he'd chopped it short for the hiatus webisodes with Lizzie's story in, which means that he then failed to attend to matters of personal hygiene and upkeep out of grief. Dwiiiiight. Vince STOP TALKING ABOUT THE KID DYING. Even when she's been distracted by milk and cookies. Which are also a test, as he exposits to Vince for his and our benefit, he started up a tradition of milk and cookies that included Lizzie's favorite and least favorite cookies in the shape of a flower, and milk, and if that's really his daughter she'll know that. We-ell, these are the benefits of a specific resurrection Trouble, or possibly shaping a person out of someone else's thoughts and memories about them. Because lo and behold, this test is passed, and both men will be shocked and terrified now thanks ever so. Vince, being less emotionally compromised in this instance, recovers faster, but that look on Dwight's face says PLEASE DON'T MAKE ME BELIEVE IN MY DAUGHTER'S RETURN TO LIFE. Neither he nor we want to know what the fuck he'd do if Croatoan threatened his daughter.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Stalking Duke is stalking. Down the hall while behind a wall Nathan and Audrey have their guns out and we're getting the standard we don't have much time quick do the thing dialogue. Sadly, after that, we get just enough of the exposition we </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">just heard a few minutes ago</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> to give Duke time enough to walk in. Honestly at this point I would have preferred some panic-induced hands shaking being the thing that delays them rather than repeating things we've heard two or three scene changes ago. I guess the repetition doesn't have to last very long, at least, Nathan is marginally more reluctant about shooting Duke now than he was before, albeit with a much more solid stance, but even the margin that's left is enough to let Duke advance and only give them a short delay in which to scramble out of there. Guys. I swear to god if you'd just folded the fucking paper instead of talking you would at least be one step closer to having a weapon against Croatoan. Ah well. This does give us Gloria, wonderful Gloria stepping between Duke and a tripped up Vicki and trying to talk him down with all her maternal strength. Oh honey. You can see all that it costs her when Duke is all "I should have killed you" and how much she cares about the poor Croatoan'd bastard, it makes me wish we'd gotten more Gloria-Duke moments, really. Fortunately Nathan is there with something long and sticklike to bash Duke upside the back? back of the head with. Unfortunately when Vicki tripped she also dropped the drawing, which means Duke has control of the aether core. One well-placed rip and there it goes! </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">After the break I have at least one big question, which is shouldn't that have just reverted the aether core back into its component truffles? I mean, obviously and apparently not, but why? Because Vicki's Trouble trumps that? If so, I can see why Duke's all yes Vicki mua ha ha I'm coming for your delightful Trouble, because damn. That's one powerful Trouble. Again with the palm cutting. Why is it always the palm cutting. Is Croatoan just healing those muscles he's got to be slicing through every time he does this? Because ow. Vicki and Gloria are not so quietly freaking out too, behind Nathan and Audrey, though for them it's more imminent death and less would you PLEASE stop doing that. Dukatoan. Why the freaking and clinging and not running the hell out I do not know. I would be running the hell out! Okay, let's be fair, I'd be running for the weapons locker, which this time doesn't even have a lock I have to defeat but rather a guardian I have to convince to give me a damn gun, but that's not what they're doing. What we're doing instead is focusing on Audrey giving Duke the speech. Not the speech he seems to be expecting, the other one. The one where, somehow and amazingly, she apologizes to him for putting him through hell and using him for his Trouble and then giving him the hug we've all been screaming about him needing for at least the past several episodes. To break it down somewhat more, first Duke mocks her in some very strange cadences and her tendency to talk to people, and when Audrey says she won't let him kill Vicki he calls her out on her encouraging him to kill when it's useful to her. As opposed to, not that he gets a chance to say it explicitly although that's clearly where he's going, useful to Croatoan. Nathan tries to go with the power of friendship but Audrey is banking on the power of regret and apology, not going into the specific details of each death but laying out a fair bit of what we and others have been saying. About using Duke, about ignoring his needs after, and the consequences of leaning too hard on the Crocker Trouble and this particular Crocker. Who is coping by telling himself, and never more was this apparent than right now when he's leaning on it to fight what she's telling him, that this was his destiny and there was nothing he coudl have done to change it. Except, really, who knows from fighting destiny better than the woman who's been fighting it harder than she ever has any cycle before? Uh-huh. And she's all but admitting that she wrapped him up and threw him in the barn door, so to speak. And she's outright admitting that it's exhausting fighting, well, destiny is a bad word for it, let's not call it destiny, let's call it the expectations of people more powerful than you, who frame the world you have to live in. I mean, yes, Audrey's been railroaded into the barn, Duke's been railroaded into being.... I don't know what, a dagger superglued to a syringe? But these are railroads built by people. Really, really screwed up people who have way more power to build such railroads than they should have. And yes, it would be easier, and much less exhausting to give up, give in, be a good savior, conform and be quiet. Word choice deliberate, because as Audrey tells him she draws her strength from picturing the person she wants to be, she poses the question of who are you back to him. Hi Duke! We want you to go back to being a pirate too. Y'all should have given him those hugs way earlier. And oops. Croatoan was, at least, to some extent, controlling him because he sure's hell knows Duke's not his playtoy anymore.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiICtAjc5ZoUWH4g5lJpO2E81gd9IuOjM39_S6QrY3dT7dUtoaZrJnJF_ljRs2CINKdjybYWmimmSYZaKC2c4Wwnk9LJgHJeAk6fcF5V1YJDilkNw9jCriJopWLcfEUhZXPiNNBuqKXup8/s1600/haven525cc03.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiICtAjc5ZoUWH4g5lJpO2E81gd9IuOjM39_S6QrY3dT7dUtoaZrJnJF_ljRs2CINKdjybYWmimmSYZaKC2c4Wwnk9LJgHJeAk6fcF5V1YJDilkNw9jCriJopWLcfEUhZXPiNNBuqKXup8/s320/haven525cc03.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Over in the Overlook not-hotel of disturbing small girl (at least so far it's only singular, but it's a singular that reminds us a bit of Kirsten Dunst back in her Interview with a Vampire days, you're welcome, we're here all week to ruin happy family reunions), Lizzie's instructing her father in the way of eating the cookies you don't like. I am so with her on the disgusting nature of peanut butter cookies ew. Dwight has one last test, asking her why they always eat a cookie they don't like, and apparently this is a very simplified metaphor for life. As such things go, I can even get behind it! It's age-appropriate, and it's a good little consistent lesson that Dwight is participating in </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">with her</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, so it's not just parental fiat declaring that this should be so. Eat the bad cookies life hands you and eventually the good ones will come back around again, and indeed it looks like they're sort of sandwiching the peanut butter cookie in between the chocolate chip, or maybe eating the peanut butter cookie first and getting it over with, in Lizzie's case. Aww. She doesn't have significant emotional memory attached to Dwight getting shot up in Afghanistan, but definitely does with her mother leaving them. I can only assume this is because of military spousal shit, or Troubles, or both? Both is good. We'll go with that. But they still have each other! Let's just twist that knife a little deeper my god you guys. Dwight looks like he's been gutted, anyway.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The first order of business, after hello it's nice to have real Duke back again and Nathan asserting his confidence in his ability to beat Croatoan, is let's get Duke the hell out of town. No see he did that once and it didn't WORK he's gonna go beat an aether-devouring bastard now. I… I don't think that'll work out for you, Duke. I do also have several questions and thoughts about his little side-trip out of Haven, first that we still have NO IDEA who the fuck Walter is, was, will be, whatever the shit, but I really want to punch HIM now for shoving Duke into coming back to Haven to be a good little possessed Trouble-eater. Second, assuming the near-future vision was accurate, it implies two things: one that they definitely needed the controller crystal or they'd've been permanently fucked, and two that in order to lend Duke enough faith and strength and love and whatever else you want to call it to kick Croatoan out of his head, he needed both Nathan and Audrey to be there and focused on him and his needs. And yes we are totally avoiding getting to the death scene of WHY and also NOPETOPUS and also FUCK YOU. (</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">K:</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Bring me my mighty Nopetopus chariot! The Glendowers can be the drivers.) (</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A: </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">They can also bring Duke up out of the sea burial. Yep. Totally what happened. We are living in denial-land here.) No, Duke wants his revenge on Croatoan for all the shit he made him do, which makes total sense as a first emotional reaction and absolutely zero tactical sense. Allow Audrey to demonstrate by pointing out what'll happen if Croatoan gets his hands on one of Duke's Troubles and they </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">don't </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">know which it is oh wait, over in the creepy little girl's room in the creepy house on the creepy hill Croatoan is rubbing his thumb and forefinger together and they're… glowing. And Duke's Troubles are floating out of his eyeballs like back when Mara turned him into a Trouble bomb and he was leaking Troubles off around the edges, and Audrey will now panic. Audrey. Are you or are you not an extradimensional humanoid alien who can control aether? Well fucking ACT LIKE IT, WOMAN. Seriously I don't fucking know why Duke gets to turn into an evil mind-controlled weapon and come back again but Audrey can't be, what, polluted by the aether? Audrey go take the Troubles and fucking turn them into a new fucking aether core, or the stash for them, or… no? No. Panicking it is. And Duke announcing that they have to kill him, focusing on Nathan because of course he's been reminded of the tattoo recently. I hate everything.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">His assertions only get stronger after the ad break, they have to do this before it's too late, whatever that's defined as. For all anyone knows it already is too late, given Croatoan's control of aether he could've pulled the several Troubles he wanted specifically and you could all be completely fucked. Nobody is making this argument. Also let's just note here that Audrey's in white and Nathan is damn near the Man in Black right now, just in CASE we didn't know who was going to commit the deed itself. Duke could you please sound a little less happy about the idea of getting to finally die? And could someone please not agree to kill the suicidal man when he's in the middle of crisis? Nathan and Audrey are trying, but the wall of No, Hell No, The Fuck You Say isn't holding up too well under the emotional onslaught of look I would do it myself but I need not to bleed out so Croatoan can't yoink my Troubles. And also the talking like a rape victim; we haven't outright said it (I think?) but this </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">is </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">far enough a loss of autonomy as to be a kind of rape in and of itself. See many many discussions about Jessica Jones for more in-depth detail on loss of bodily autonomy and physical control of one's actions as rape. He's STILL on about destiny. Would someone please come up with a counter-argument? Anything? Bueller? No. I would also point out that if Duke really wanted to commit suicide himself, there's got to be rope strong enough to hang himself with, and that wouldn't end up with bleeding out. This really does scream both last plea for help of a desperate and suicidal man, and a little bit revenge and turnabout for the murders he committed at Audrey and Nathan's behest. Though if they were going to do that it would've been more appropriate to make Audrey finally fucking get her hands dirty. Gloria is also not up to this task, though I think her apology is fairly sincere, in that she knows very well why she's being asked (her son, and now grandson who was saved by Duke being re-Troubled) and also knows herself well enough to know that she can't. Duke will now rant even more as another drop of aether peels off and heads for the hills, that if this keeps up then Croatoan wins and they can't imagine how bad it could get, and Duke rejects that reality. Eventually Nathan is very, very reluctantly persuaded, as more aether leaves, and I think he does it as much in case losing all those Troubles literally rips Duke to pieces instead of giving him a death he asked for. Which, frankly, is a valid concern and one I wish they'd spelled out rather than leaving us to extrapolate. Nathan goes for the most ineffective way of killing someone </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">ever</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, he's not even putting proper pressure on the carotid and jugular to kill bloodflow to the brain and make Duke not have to be conscious for being smothered. Hell, this is TV, they make it look easy to snap necks all the fucking time. Instead the staging puts Nathan </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">below </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Duke while strangling him to death, as if to indicate that it really truly is Duke in control and Duke's wishes. And to be fair to Duke, once he starts getting what he said he wanted he's mostly not struggling except in the way humans </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">always </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">struggle to live as a hindbrain reflexive movement. Audrey tells him they love him, Nathan tells him he's brave and he'll spend his life trying to repay everything he owes him, and Gloria makes herself watch until the end despite her horror and sheltering Vicki from it. And then there's the tattoo, and it looks like an embrace instead of a violent death, and it's very reminiscent of Londo and G'Kar, for those of you who know your Babylon 5. Except that came at the end of a very long life, and was a decision made less in the heat of the moment.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXezbMbZayq_2O58sSSwLnYmaB6XlOo_Bm_NPcwwG8DQlD9Is5Fg-IydJt_UDuhZWjyjMaFkw1-4nf7f8tvvCq85fz6RlP5F-L_g7CZlO7Fsj03D6k95SPEQlj3UelqldkYeC2Fkm81rw/s1600/haven525cc04.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXezbMbZayq_2O58sSSwLnYmaB6XlOo_Bm_NPcwwG8DQlD9Is5Fg-IydJt_UDuhZWjyjMaFkw1-4nf7f8tvvCq85fz6RlP5F-L_g7CZlO7Fsj03D6k95SPEQlj3UelqldkYeC2Fkm81rw/s320/haven525cc04.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">One approximate eternity later, after we've sobbed and screamed and thrown our laptops and gotten very drunk and sobered up and restocked our liquor cabinets and contemplated more drinking, we have some use of complete lack of score to emphasize how painful this is. Just so Vince's words can echo a bit more about how this wasn't who he was. Good news, Croatoan doesn't have all of those Troubles that just died with Duke! Not that we have any idea of how many those are, which ones they were, whether or not Duke died to prevent the organlegging Trouble and the acid touch Trouble from falling into Croatoan's hands, or whether all that was left was, I don't know, the gravedigger ghosts from Hamlet Trouble? I remain distinctly unconvinced of the necessity of Duke's death, here, and unmoved by the whole thing. Well, except to punching, but that's a short distance. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Anyway.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> So, that's the good news, Croatoan doesn't have those Troubles whatever they were and whatever good that did, and the bad news is that they don't have the aether core. Around this time is when we reinforce, by Audrey looking over her shoulder and Dwight coming up to hug her instead, that Nathan is off sitting by himself red-eyed and wet-faced. And doing this thing, by the looks of it, where he's staring off into nothing until he makes himself look at Duke's body again, and then he can't look anymore, repeat cycle. heh. Gloria being the coroner enlists Dwight the soldier to do the pragmatic, necessary work of dealing with the body, touched with a compassionate note about burial at sea with Jennifer because, yeah, he probably would have wanted something like that. That's about where Nathan can't anymore, and goes for a walk. Audrey can't, either, though I think in this case it's guilt that she couldn't earlier that keeps her there rather than any sense of Nathan wants to be alone I'll give him space. Oh </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">everyone.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And we're back in the yellow house of creepy! The most unsettling part about this, or at least the most unsettling that I'm thinking of right now, I'm sure I'll think of something additional later, is that CroaDaddy appears to be staying in the young girl's room. Not as in living, that'd be two shades beyond, but definitely sitting and spending most of his time there and oh dude you have so many issues. Hey, speaking of lots of issues, here's Dwight! CroaDaddy doesn't look in the least bit surprised. Then again his emotions are sort of slipping off his face there, like he doesn't give enough fucks to keep up the pretense. Ugh. Dwight wants to know why the hell he wants the controller crystal anyway, it's not like he can do anything with it. Well, no, actually, he can, and apparently one of the things he wants to do with it is to rebuild the entire house they're in and make it a home for him and his daughter and they'll be a family again and notice how he's not using any form of conditional in this? In his mind it's a done deal. What Audrey wants, as per usual apparently, doesn't enter into it. At any rate, yes, his happy little family without Charlotte of course oh there's the button! Button button, who's got the button, it's Dwight! Who is mashing on it by getting all furious and righteous about CroaShatner murdering Charlotte, and that look he gets in return is nothing quite so much as an </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Excuse the hell out of you?</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Dwight is kind of giving away the homeworld here, but it's entirely possible particularly given Dave's memories that he doesn't need to, that CroaShat already knew. Especially with that expression. CroaShatner will now list all of Charlotte's betrayal, having him banished (note how </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">he</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> says she had him banished and Charlotte only said he was banished, not that we're ever going to get an accurate story here), then poisoning Mara with lies. Um? Hm. More on that later, Dwight's going to rant on about Mara was evil, Charlotte was something he's going to get interrupted by CroaShatner being crude and testing him, is my guess, to see if he'll admit to anything, and then outright telling him you're lucky I'm busy or I'd murder you horribly for taking my woman. Yes, that's almost literally how he phrases it. And then, since he's extra pissed at Dwight but still in control enough to stay on target, he reminds him of his choice; the crystal or Lizzie, which one does he want to give up. It even starts kind of terrifyingly vicious, there's a moment there where it looks like Shatner's going to bite something, a finger, a throat, hell if I know. And then the anger seems to pass and he starts drawing parallels again, look, I know what it's like to miraculously regain your daughter, you don't want to lose that, do you? Dwight at least </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">says</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> he's going to be back with the crystal in a few hours, which seems to calm CroaDaddy further back into his staring off into a pensive distance. Which is good because I don't want to see those teeth out of Shatner again. That was fucking unnerving. Give those back to Randy Flagg.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Audrey has Duke's whistle, when we get out of the Casa Del Creepy, and is staring at a picture of the three of them because masochism and grief and remembrance and other very common coping mechanisms. Which Laverne, presumably after a suitable time of mourning, covers over with a cat picture. Aw Laverne. Sadly, she doesn't get much time to recover because first the phone shrilling and then footage on the laptop of Nathan returning and then... leaving? It's not until Laverne switches to the outside view that Audrey gets alarmed, though. As well one might because Croatoan. This time not teleporting them offscreen, just leading Nathan away. What the hell did he tell him or do to him to make him walk away like that? I mean, I fully believe Croatoan is capable of coming up with something to say to Nathan that would get him to do that, especially as compromised as he is now. I also wouldn't put it past him to have some sort of pied piper Trouble, either. We get to find out what it is after a commercial break and a panover, at which point Nathan has brought lampshades to this party. I wouldn't be so quick as to assume threat, but it's certainly more likely! CroaDaddy continues to be more amused by Nathan than anything else at least outwardly, and even goes so far as to compare him to William. And call him a moron. I'm... I'd have to say this is overprotective and vaguely threatened father more than a reasoned judgment given that William has been one of the few clever threats we've seen (arguably in some ways more so than Croatoan given that he showed a greater aptitude for predicting emotion) and also given that William was one of the few people who caught and held Mara's attention in Daddy Dear's absence. Also given that William was devoted to Mara and thus to playing around with the aether experiments, can we hit that Freudian slippery patch of parental substitute? I think we can! Skipping past all that, CroaDaddy is here to offer his condolences over Duke. Nobody believes you, CroaShatner. We have both a Lying Cat AND a Witch Valerie here for you (imagine LYING on one side and LIAAAR on the other), particularly when he goes into his unimpressed face and Duke walking away from greatness and, um, no. Extra no. No to that narrative, no to your offer, with an added helping of fuckyoucakes. They're like pancakes, only angrier. Even more so when CroaShatner implies he's done something with Audrey, or at least that she's not in Haven anymore. Except it's not that, it's something far, far creepier, evidently he's dumped? the Fraudrey into the seat of the blue Bronco and when Nathan steps towards him to be all rarr what have you done with Audrey, down drops Nathan! Poof goes Nathan! Poof goes the blue Bronco and Fraudrey! Out of Haven and out, so CroaShatner thinks, of the picture and his life and his realm of concerns. Oh CroaShatner you have not yet gazed upon the magnificent intractability that is Mt Wuornos the Stubborn. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Audrey is not here for your someplace familiar bullshit, CroaShat, she's here because she knows you've turned it into a hideout. I suppose that qualifies as familiar, but what he means is somewhere that reminds her of childhood and that's not what she's here for. No, she's here to find out what the fuck he's done with Nathan. More than fair, considering! CroaShatDaddy spins her a long and just </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">barely </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">plausible line of bullshit about how Nathan changed his mind and claimed he'd said his goodbyes, that killing Duke was the last straw and he couldn't stand to stay in Haven any longer. Nathan is now beyond the shroud! Etc. Just enough truth mixed in with the lies, all delivered in that steady bland paternal-patriarchal tone of bullshit so it's hard for Audrey to tell what's true and what's the lie. And to be fair, she hasn't seen Croatoan actually teleport anyone but himself, and as far as we know he did get Nathan into a blind spot on the cameras.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1dqNgPpThI2nv0lvHFkFL_sR0KFgmwqnHtFd5JiEenEnp8aONCArJd-kQwGIkb39WA8kPeNR0jM7s4URqrgh2xh2pGMYEC0FR7gOaNs1qxJc_kIy8Qou9mpSQQdkKZkKfaW5Z4FH2xSQ/s1600/haven525cc05.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1dqNgPpThI2nv0lvHFkFL_sR0KFgmwqnHtFd5JiEenEnp8aONCArJd-kQwGIkb39WA8kPeNR0jM7s4URqrgh2xh2pGMYEC0FR7gOaNs1qxJc_kIy8Qou9mpSQQdkKZkKfaW5Z4FH2xSQ/s320/haven525cc05.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Meanwhile Nathan </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">is </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">outside the shroud, is with Audrey's copy, and is in a diner somewhere along the coast! Let's have just enough of a fisheye lens to start it all on a surreal note. They both have confused what the fuck this is all very weird looks on, and now will hang lampshades by actually saying as much, this is weird, what's with the weird stuff, the waitress interrupts and they quiz her about if she actually saw them walk in. No. No she did not, mind you Judy (is that a Judy Garland nod to being over the rainbow, as it were?) sometimes isn't paying that much attention, but she gives at least momentary credence to the idea that they just appeared out of thin air. Croatoan these are really terrible cracks in your reality manipulation. Sloppy, dude. Interesting, though, that Nathan's slowly adjusting body language to indicate that yes he can feel all of the things, not just Audrey anymore. But they'll figure it out, they always do, figure </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">what </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">out I'm not sure since it doesn't seem as though Croatoan's gone to the effort to giving them, say, a place in the outside. Knowledge of what their jobs or vocations are, where those overlap, all of that good stuff. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I'm not entirely sure where the whole part about Nathan leaving because of the tragedy of having to kill his friend couldn't take much more of this comes from, I'd almost suspect Howard or something like, because that smells suspiciously like an understanding of how emotions work. Which Croatoan has not shown a significant aptitude for yet, legacy of spending a great deal of time in solitary in the void? I wouldn't be surprised, we know that solitary confinement has deleterious effects on humans, and while we have no data on interdimensional aether-manipulating thingies, there have to be some effects. Anyway, this is when CroaDaddy goes from just barely enough sell straight into oversell, though we have to pause for a moment of oh fuck you when he refers to saving the world becoming too exhausting. Fuck you, you were LISTENING weren't you. Grrr. But moving on from that, isn't it better that Nathan's away from here, safe and happy? Because once the experiments start things will get volatile, oh god, that's one word for it. I'm picturing something more like after the Troublesplosion when everything was deadly and messy. Having failed at oversell and failed to push Audrey's protective buttons Croatoan will now grasp at an even flimsier straw, the Nathan abandoned you one. Dude, you're showing your emotional impotence here, particularly if you think </span><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">you</span><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> not abandoning her is any kind of a selling point. That's a threat, not a perk, dude. Especially in the creepy house of creepy childhood re-creating and the creepy infantilization and what sounds like a Bob Ross quote. Bob Ross as Croatoan is even less what I wanted to picture. Although it does go with the moods and emotions affecting Troubles. And with that he will go over to the window and instead of giving us the A Storm Is Coming line, he'll just give us the oncoming storm as a visual. No, it's not a storm so much as it is a, heh, an abrasion Trouble? Wearing the fabric of reality </span><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">thin</span><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, so to speak? Uh-huh. And soon it will rain down aether, and they will begin their work, but it won't seem like work because they'll have casual Fridays and I've gone from Bob Ross to Denny Crane, help. He's so damn gleeful. And then, see, can you pick the part he shouldn't have said? I can! It'll take a few hours, so she should go and make her peace and so on and meanwhile you can just about see Audrey going </span><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">aether there will be aether I can make a new aether core</span><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> behind the horrified expression. Fortunately CroaShatner is too focused on the part where her life is with him, now, to notice that she has other plans. </span>Anna Hammetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10095633218958433882noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4271373189216022547.post-83661680974498150342015-12-19T17:08:00.002-08:002015-12-19T17:08:09.511-08:00Will The Circle? Haven S5E26 Forever <div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We'll just skip the forever long previouslies and get right to it. Audrey's come back to the station and she's giving Stan instructions about getting the town to stay away from the cloud. Stan's in street clothes! Awwww. And he tosses out a gas leak cover story joke, because </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">that's </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">gonna work so well when a few weeks ago you explained all about the Troubles and whatnot. Although I admit in my vague headcanon for post-series, "gas leak" has totally become an in-joke with the entire town. Audrey is not really having with this levity, telling him to go spend time with his nonexistent family. He says he doesn't have one now, which could be, given he's been awfully stereotypical bachelor cop for the series, the PD's been disbanded and that was his family, or could be a variety of awful things happened to whatever family he had, or could be he moved in from outside Haven and now he's cut off and doesn't expect to ever see them again. That was horribly depressing. Stan deserves all the good things for putting up with this shit for so long, why you so fucking mean, writers. Audrey would like to spend time with her remaining family, except Nathan is not so much with the here.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Apparently the creepy diner of creepy is working on getting even more so: it's named Boondocks, and the sign out front proclaims it to have the Best Pancakes in Cleaves Mills. Excuse us while we run screaming for the hills. Goddammit you guys. (Point of amusement, the typography is reminiscent of a Boondocks Diner in Deadwood South Dakota. I suspect hoopleheads in the writer's room or on set design.) Neither Nathan nor Audrey's copy remembers how they got here, Audrey notes that it's Maine: blueberries, lobster, maple syrup, and for those of us who do not slow the ep down to catch all the little details, Nathan will bring up Cleaves Mills in a line reference. Moving on, Croatoan did a REALLY TERRIBLE job with the reality manipulation. Like I'm honestly impressed, you have to kind of work to make it that bad: no memory of anything but each other, no memory of where they lived or worked or any of the standard biographical details. AND it's so obvious that the second Nathan reaches for any of it it's just not there. Gee, does this remind anyone of anything like, oh, an interdiction? Well, okay, beyond that everything else feels weird, because this is not Audrey Parker who digs at a mystery until it's solved come hell or high water, this is Audrey Parker who loves Nathan beyond all reason and measure and just wants them to be together and happy. Not, as we'll learn, in that order. The only thing he can think to question is her assertion that they know each other, which she then proves to him by citing the Bronco and its terrible maintenance costs, his love of Patsy Cline and terrible singing, and the fact that when they first had sex he was canonically, shall we say, eager. So this Audrey remembers either Nathan's Trouble or she's had that bit smoothed out into Nathan was celibate for a very long time before her, hard to say with that ambiguous phrasing. Nathan is not fond of this gentle teasing stoppit, but okay she knows him. We'll note that this proof does </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">not </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">go the other way, and when he takes out his wallet to see if they can even pay for breakfast, well, no ID, but there's $200 in there! In small-ish bills, going by the stack and the $5 on the bottom. That's so generous of Croatoan. When was the last time he knew how much inflation was in this world? Inquiring minds. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Back in Haven, Audrey's smelling Nathan's pillow. Oh </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">honey</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Vince interrupts her by calling to let her know that Dwight may or may not have gone off the deep end, currently willing to give up the controller crystal in exchange for keeping Lizzie. Maybe. We hope. Lizzie is reading something with a lighthouse and a ghostly man on the cover of it fuck youuuuu. That poor lighthouse. Vince is not at all sanguine about this whole giving him up to CroaShatner. I don't blame him. I don't entirely blame Dwight's fuck it we have nothing to lose and my DAUGHTER is back so </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">have something to lose again, though if he stopped to think for even a few minutes about this he'd quickly come to the conclusion that Croatoan is a lying shithead who lies. Which is why tactics that prevent thought are crucial! Possibly the one good tactical decision CroaShatner's made the whole time he's been out and embodied, apparently he was a lot smarter as a gas cloud. Audrey's all okay no I know this lying shithead why does he want it but we HAVE a house. Also her "that'll never happen" is about the same tones as our "well that's fucking creepy" when we're informing the screen of such things. Just in case you were wondering. Search your programming, Vince, you know it to be true - wait wrong franchise. Apparently they don't actually NEED an aether core to build a barn, that's just the easiest way to do it and they'll have to do everything exactly right. Let's go stop Dwight! And bring Nathan! Um, says Audrey's face, let's not talk about where Nathan is. Or what's going on there. Roll credits before Vince can pick apart the whys and wherefores of that expression.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The diner of disturbing is emptying out after the morning rush, and copy!Audrey wanders back in to announce that the truck's full up on gas and Slim Jims (aww) but the DMV says their plates have never been issued? I have so many questions, starting with how'd she get that info out of the DMV. Does she still have law enforcement instincts from Audrey Parker? Not at all surprised by their lack of existence, though, and Haven isn't on that map Nathan's got, but he means to head up the coast because of this nebulous gut instinct. Copy!Audrey has no idea what the fuck, but she's willing to go with it up until they both get distracted by the bloody head wound. Which must be several hours old or it'd be a lot messier, or very small, or both, but yeah that's a bit worrying. Also worrying Nathan is that this Audrey doesn't want to go up the coast anymore, the excuse she gives being maybe the person who hurt you is there and she doesn't want him hurt more. That is, in fact, rather unlike the Audrey we know, who'd be more inclined to go "okay fine but I'm going in front and bringing my sidearm." Because really. Nathan will now demonstrate that he knows her, or at least knows people, by stating that it's not about that, it's about her being afraid of what they'll find up the coast, so she wants them to run away and settle down somewhere else. Nathan. Stop lying, nobody believes you're going inland at all. Except maybe copy!Audrey. Which is just further indication that she's not really Audrey Parker, and that Croatoan has no fucking idea who Audrey really is.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Everything the fucker knows is about aether, let him demonstrate by staring up at the growing void in the sky augh. Audrey is here to kick ass and call names, and distract CroaDaddy with her very valid and genuine anger rather than what's actually happening. I do love that by now we've had enough episodes of Actions Were Taken That We Didn't See to pretty strongly guess that Dwight's in on this plan and Audrey's currently lying through her teeth about </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">their </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">plans. Which she doesn't really explain so much as fling emotion and defiance into his teeth and then imply that they're going to take the frontal assault approach. Actually she does sound rather a lot like Mara in places here, also fuck you CroaDaddy for this bullshit "I gave Dwight and you what you wanted" nonsense. You don't KNOW what they want because you never bothered to fucking ask if it was a fair trade. And Audrey's not wrong about Lizzie coming back breaking Dwight, but as long as he gets to keep her it's more of a breaking-open of scar tissue and emotions that he's let lie dormant for years. The kind that hurts but ultimately heals. And along those lines, I definitely appreciate that she's laying this out where it's her and the population of Haven against CroaDaddy and Dwight, thereby not giving CroaDaddy a reason to take Lizzie away until they can't conceal his involvement anymore. Pretty sure that was a part of the Actions Taken That We Didn't See. She will continue to distract him with the whole wobbly about Nathan, and there are people here willing to fight, and what's with the hammering you guys? Are you trying to barricade him in, or make him think that's what you're doing? Or at least that sounds like hammering although I guess it could be gunshots, given the next scene. We could use that one spelled out a bit more and the whole not getting the crystal part spelled out a bit </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">less</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Oh hey it's a light… no, it's an armory. Shaped like a lighthouse. WELL OKAY THEN. Yeah, those were probably gunshots, indicating that this is pretty close to the yellow creepy house. There's a King in Yellow joke here somewhere. Also a roadblock with McHugh leading a squad of Guardsmen with various guns, and if that doesn't tell you this is a deliberate setup I don't know what will. Dwight's not even in his big black SUV of kickassery, either, he's being trailed by someone else shooting and by the sound of it there's some bullet holes in the back windshield already. On the plus side, if the bullets are taking the shortest distance between them and Dwight, that means there's a layer of glass and carseat to go through before they hit his vest, which should slow down some of the stinging. On the minus side, this many people emptying their clip, as McHugh instructs, is probably going to fucking break ribs. Also the Guardsmen are not so much in the know with this, and McHugh is not fucking happy about the plan but he'll deal with it. Not aiming probably does help cut down on the chances that Dwight takes a bullet to the brachial artery or neck or head, I will say. And he's taking the very sensible approach of running around as much cover as he can get, though I have to wince at him maybe keeping the crystal under his vest? What the fuck were you gonna do if that thing got cracked? Assuming it can't be cracked by a gunshot or, hell, falling on it, not the safest of assumptions! Fortunately it doesn't, and more fortunately the armory's great protection against getting hit again. Plus, Audrey's assumptions pay off this time: Croatoan can in fact teleport them over to the armory with full intention of getting the damn crystal, and proceeds to dump the Guard in the harbor. I will just note that a) they will not be fucking fine, it's fucking winter and have you heard of hypothermia? and b) that's a great way for someone's Trouble to get set off and get people killed you asshole. So yes I do still think you're "cruel and brutish." At the very least brutish and unthinking, which amounts to the same thing in this case. Inside, Dwight's peeling off the now-useless vest (and I do wonder if he's got a second vest on under his jacket, which seems likely given the amount of brass and lead on the floor) and wincing. Like I said: at the very least bruised, probably some cracked ribs, guy's lucky nothing broke enough to puncture internal organs. Why yes! He has the crystal. He will now summon Vince by calling his name, toss the crystal over Croatoan's head to him, and that's three of four sides of the labyrinthine circle called. I'm not kidding, that's how they're standing. They've even got the this-world people on one pair of points and the other-world people on the other, albeit one of the this-world people is now a barnvatar. This would've worked better with Nathan, definitely, to close the other side of it, but apparently they don't strictly need him. And they're powering a new barn with the aether inside Croatoan. That's actually really clever! And hilarious. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So, back in the white space of the barn, with Croatoan trying and failing to use the Troubles, Audrey explaining the trap with a very condescending 'Dad,' and Vince thinks it's working but it needs time to ramp up. Vince put the teeth away, I saw that. No-o you don't get to punch your new barnvatar, CroaShatner, that's not nice. Dwight is also not nice, and thinks he's high for ever thinking that he would sacrifice the entire town for the sake of his daughter. He's grieved her once, asshole, he's tried his very hardest not to attach to the new Lizzie, and in conclusion fuck you. Except the one problem with this plan is that the person powering the barn has to do so voluntarily and Croatoan rejects this reality and substitutes his own. Well fuck. Though I have so many questions about that: was Mara the only thing powering the barn? Or was it not necessary to be voluntary when they had an aether core to work with? Or is it necessary that it be voluntary because CroaShatner is acting as the aether core right now? Define "powering," is this the power of love or the power of the aether core? Because if agreement was required regardless then I'm suddenly a little more okay with the initial idea of "rehabilitating" Mara inside the barn over the course of five centuries; she may have agreed on the grounds that she thought she could break out eventually, and it may not have worked, but that's still </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">slightly </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">more of a choice than we believed she had. Even if that choice was "go into the barn or we kill you," accompanied in all likelihood by Charlotte pleading with Mara to take the option that doesn't involve permanently losing her daughter. Mara's agreement to the barn solution does kind of go with CroaDaddy griping that Charlotte corrupted her, at the very least. That aside: Dwight also gets dumped into the harbor (we hope), CroaDaddy has creepy assertions about learning the hard way, and now he'll make it rain aether with further villain monologuing about forcing Audrey to use aether on people, become Mara and embrace her talent and blah blah BLAH shut up dude. Audrey has a bargain to make: fine, she'll call you Dad and do whatever you want IF you take all the aether, put it in her, along with all the Troubles, and they leave Haven and never return. Which, at this point, it's not like she's got a single fucking thing left to lose by going there, and there's a pretty good chance that she's doing this to try and make herself so full of aether that </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">she </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">can power the barn by </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">choice</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. CroaDaddy appears to know things she doesn't, or thinks he does, that if she does this she'll embrace her power and like it and yay father and daughter being evil conquering conquerors together! He looks so proud and loving. It's so terrifyingly fake. She'll even admit that she can feel all the aether and the void and whatnot, which we knew before but maybe Croatoan didn't, or hoped but didn't know. Hard to say. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Over on the shore where Dwight washed up, we hear a very familiar voice call him 'Quatch. ONE LAST SASQUATCH I am a-okay with that. Though it gives us EVEN MORE questions: how IS Duke there? Hallucinating is sort of an option, but Dwight hasn't shown any other signs of a psychotic break and Duke's doing and saying things that indicate he's really present. For limited definitions thereof, since his mouth isn't moving and he seems to be projecting his voice into Dwight's head. Um. Okay then. Say we, and says Dwight's face. Also you're dead? Says Dwight in a tone that's less incredulous and more I saw your body but this is fucking Haven so who the fuck knows. Yes, he's dead, but you should still listen to him. ...that's our Duke. I miss our Duke. I am also so fucking blaming Walter for this, I don't know how, I have theories involving the visions and the bleeding tree and Duke absorbing that blood which might have been Walter's and therefore Walter's ability to be an obnoxiously smartass knowing ghost, and this might not be accurate in the least but SOMEHOW this is his fucking fault. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This is a familiar but strangely empty stretch of road along the coast, and if you squint you can see where Haven and the lighthouse probably </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">should </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">be, across the harbor. Or maybe that's the island with the barn. Nathan's staring up the road like he can out-stubborn whatever's woojed him into forgetting his entire past save Audrey. Copy!Audrey is so not okay with this. Nathan would like to point out that that's weird and unsettling, for which she has no reply other than can we please get the fuck out of here? No. No they cannot. And no, he doesn't see anything, but he can sense something, he uses the word "feel" which gets copy!Audrey to jab at his inability to feel things normally (that aren't her) in ways that are a bit crueler than our Audrey would use under the circumstances. Not that Audrey can't be kind of cruel in her teasing! But she picks her time and place for it a lot differently. This is a cue for Nathan to remember something about how "we" used to get a low fog that meant no visible sun but its warmth came through the clouds clearly, and I think you mean home, Nathan, you're feeling home. Copy!Audrey is I think lying when she insists she feels nothing except cold and annoyed at Nathan being weird. No, they still can't go, something's drawing Nathan to this stretch of road and keeping him there, and as they stand and stare copy!Audrey's immunity to the shroud kicks in. But HOW is she immune to the shroud? Is this because of what Croatoan made her out of? Aether, or himself somehow, or what? (I'm having a very disturbing Adam-and-Eve moment here how about you.) However it works, taking Nathan's hand transfers at least enough immunity to let him </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">see </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">the fucking shroud, see that he's on the outside of it, and means that copy!Audrey is remembering… it's not even clear what, but enough that she knows her original self is in there! Oh yay.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">She-me-Audrey-the-walrus is also whipping aether around like nobody's business while CroaShatner looks on in beaming paternal pride. Are you creeped out some more? I'm creeped out some more. There's got to be a ceiling to the creepiness somewhere but we haven't found it yet, and it's all even worse because Shatner </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">does</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> do paternal very well, just watch old Star Treks and how Kirk treats his crew for an non-evil example. And now we cut back and forth between Audreys, to heighten the contrast between them and demonstrate the urgency, while copy!Audrey explains that she's remembering more now that she's close to Haven and the shroud and the aether. Or possibly because CroaShatner's attention is elsewhere, though the interdiction didn't seem to be a thing that needed continuous concentration? Copy!Audrey was created not born, and her defining trait is supposed to be her love for Nathan (and, we'll note, NOT her love for the town, which is part of why Nathan loves Audrey [and Sarah, and Lucy]), and well. She does! In other news, Croatoan still doesn't know what love IS when expressed as an action rather than a feeling. I have no doubt that, as he's said a lot, he loves Mara and wants to love Audrey as though she were Mara. But he's NOT capable of ACTING like it, or allowing her to act like herself and express her love, should she ever feel it, in ways that Audrey would. Croatoan's love is that of a person for an object, not a person for another individual. And copy!Audrey isn't the same as the real Audrey, and calls Nathan out on knowing the difference even when he didn't know what he knew. (This… actually also helps with the whole oh my god Nathan Sarah and Lucy have their own personalities and memories, even if they have significant points of congruence.) For extra bonus heh, the background score in this scene is titled "Nathan Feels It" in the track listings and seems to be meant for significant moments in their relationship. Whether or not it involves the actual parties in the scene. He admits he did know something was wrong, and she tells him to go be with the Audrey he knows and has loved before. This actually makes her MORE like his Audrey, causing a brief flail of but what happens after we go through the mystical fog thingie that I don't remember? What about you? IGNORE IT, NATHAN, THIS IS RIGHT. She says, dodging right past that question and the fact that she's actually crying and continuing to speak the hard truths. Well </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">that </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">is </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">definitely </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Audrey. Which gives us at least momentary sad over the fact that her crossing the shroud means she's going to vanish now. After Nathan has a nice long montage of memories hitting him, in a short but pretty damn complete tribute to their relationship through the series, right up to the last thing he remembers before getting Croa-whammied. And copy!Audrey reminds him that she loves him (actually she says we love you, for her and real!Audrey) and then disappears into the mists. Oh honey. I'm actually not 100% certain that she's meant to be gone-gone, I'd kind of like to believe there's an Audrey Parker somewhere outside of Haven who's trying to move on past her heartbreak. Probably not, though.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This is Dwight's cue to come sauntering up with Duke! Well, Duke is sauntering. 'cause he's a pirate. Not that Nathan can see him, or you bet your ass we'd have a huge reunion YAY MY BOYFRIEND'S HERE hug. Or at least a flinch towards that and then a flinch away. Instead, nothing, just a what the hell how'd you get here Dwight? And a what the hell Nathan was that Audrey? Uh… yes? No? A not-real Audrey? Dream Audrey? At least part of what's making Dwight ask that, no doubt, is the poleaxed-stricken look on Nathan's face not to mention the threat of tears? actual tears? He certainly sounds like he's sniffling back tears for a second there, and Dwight has a moment or so of looking like he wants to give Nathan all of the hugs. Everyone deserves all of the hugs at this point, but later. As for Audrey, no, it wasn't. Kind of. Not really. Maybe. He doesn't know how the fuck to answer that, let's move on to how you got here, Dwight. Uh… Duke brought him. What Duke? That Duke! ...Dwight are you cracking up? Well, at a bare minimum he's getting irritated with Duke being a smartass fucker. Listen to the smartass, Dwight, he knows shit, apparently. I still fucking blame Walter, this is SO Walter-ish. And Duke-ish at the same time, which is the thing that makes me believe it probably is ghost!Duke and not Walter wearing his skin. I sure as fuck hope it's ghost!Duke, anyway. No, he doesn't know why Nathan can't see him, but fucking tell him where Audrey is and that he needs to get up to the old armory asap. Quit arguing and tell him, Dwight. Nathan still isn't sure Dwight isn't completely hallucinating this, but what the fuck ever, Dwight somehow found him on the correct road at the exact moment when he was coming out of the shroud, so he might's well act as though this is the truth! It wouldn't be the weirdest thing to happen in fucking Haven. With a last thank-you and a final go save Audrey relayed by Dwight (which is the one line we don't hear from Duke), the guys part ways, Nathan to the armory and Dwight to follow Duke wherever the fuck he's leading.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I think that's at least twice as much aether as was in that mine shaft earlier, and that's still less unsettling than CroaDaddy being all paternal. He's fucking thrilled by all of this. He's about jumping up and down. Stop distracting her you utter jackass, and now we're up to four times as much aether, and she still isn't breaking a sweat. If I were CroaDaddy I'd be... well, I wouldn't be scared right now because he's as perceptive as a rock, but if I were myself playing the role in the narrative that CroaDaddy is taking up I'd be worried at the very least. Nathan, meanwhile, is charging up the steps like the world's most adorable and underpowered Disney prince. Yes, I said underpowered, I mean look at him, he's the least powerful person in the armory right now. But he's also unexpected, which throws CroaShatner off his game, and he's Audrey's center and stability and heart, which ups </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">her</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> game, so really that's as powerful as he needs to be. We have a touching reunion with a side of fuck you CroaDaddy, I'm not even kidding, that's exactly the look he's giving him. And with a shitpile of aether hanging over their heads, Audrey, you might want to get on that before CroaDaddy does something more hostile and permanent to Nathan? I mean, they have the second or three where CroaDaddy's gaping at them all like What Is Love ++ Earworm Error ++ Please Reboot Shatner but then, oh then he's pissed and he's got the aforementioned shitton (metric) of aether with which to express it. Apparently as an aether spear that he just fucking flings at them and impales Nathan on it? Oh now Audrey's </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">pissed.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sadly, her being pissed does not come with great vengeance and furious anger, but it does come with some well-deserved look you asshole I love him, he loves me, you say you're my father and that should fucking be enough for you, why do you fail so hard at family. This is a truly epic speech here, calling him out on acting for his ego and his sense of pride and his idea of what he wants their family to be. We've mentioned this before, both here and in other recaps and discussions but it's worth repeating, one of the most common depictions of bad parents both on purpose and inadvertently is the parent who treats their child as an extension of their self and resists the idea that the child has an identity and desires and a set of choices to make of in this case her own. And Audrey is fed the fuck up with that, and if she's going to live out her potential as an aether-wielder or what the hell ever else, it's going to be here, with her people and her family and her Nathan, and fuck you and your agenda, Croa</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Daddy</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. I also have to say, I do enjoy that the love being described and defined here isn't a specialized, specific type of love, not a lover or a friend or a relative, but one person loving another in general. Loving the person, not the idea of the person as we've mentioned earlier in this recap. Nathan would do anything for her, would give his life for her, but would CroaDaddy do the same? This is treated as an equivalence. Or, well, a potential equivalence, one which Croatoan fails at by his silence. And he knows, it, too. By freezing Audrey with that Trouble (right as she's about to rip his throat out, even, Audrey is </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">so pissed</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and I love it) he's admitting that he's failed her as a father, as someone who loves her, and this might be the one moment of emotional understanding he's shown yet. As with Charlotte's conversion but in some ways even more so, this feels rushed as far as a conversion against several hundred years of habit and madness goes, but within the scope of the episode(s) it's in about the right place for it. There's a moment of him struggling with what he's become, looking at Audrey, looking down at Nathan, and then finally okay, yes. Fuckit. Healing him, tired, sad, he looks like he's about to cry or is crying, god knows Audrey is. And he's unfreezing her with a loving touch that is somewhat less creepy for the fact that it is more ... yes, it's self-serving because it's stealing a moment of intimacy that he doesn't expect her to grant him after this, but he's also turning away to give her the moment of Nathan recovering, so at least it's self-serving reflex followed by a concerted effort at awareness of what he's doing, become, something like that. (Nathan doesn't trust this conversion one bit and I don't blame him.) </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I'm a little surprised that he admits it out loud, which is part of why the conversion seems forced, but eh. Again, it's the proper moment in episode pacing for it, the small speech about how no, he won't die for her (like Nathan, that's an important caveat, he might martyr himself for her if it was public and served some outside purpose, but he won't do it here and now in the dark where no one will ever know or see), but he will leave for her. This could easily be manipulative but I don't think it is, certainly there's nothing he's demonstrated attachment to here so that part is true, and given how he's talked about their original world I will entirely buy that he doesn't have any attachment there. The one positive note to that is him saying that indicates he's giving up the mua ha ha I'll show you all crusade, because he could probably just as easily go back and do that. But no, not without his baby girl to be Child of Vader at his side. Or maybe Vader to his Emperor. Whichever. He's agreeing to power the barn, is the upshot of it, because by that noble-righteous-determined face, it's the one thing he can focus on and do that gives him the sense of fulfillment he was groping around for earlier in all of his emotionally-stunted idiocy. At least, that's my best guess of the root of his motivation for I'll show you all, some need for fulfillment and justification for all the terrible things he did and losses he caused. And instead of justifying it with revenge, he'll make up for it with atonement? See also: rushed conversion. But Shatner, I have to say, sells it really damn well, enough that it only bugs me because I'm sitting here nitpicking over every word choice and music choice and blocking choice. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Tying off loose ends takes us to Dwight and Duke and Duke taking him to watch Lizzie play with Shawn Piller's dog. At least I think that's his dog, last seen in 3x02 Stay? Yes? Dwight has a moment of tired/resigned/sad because he's expecting that she'll disappear like Audrey, but according to Duke she can in fact stick around in a very Clap Your Hands If You Believe way. You bastards gave up a golden opportunity for Adam Copeland to be clapping his hands like the world's most overgrown Peter Pan, damn you all. There's an underneath, more poignant layer to this, if I can stop laughing long enough to explicate it too. (Look, you picture Adam Copeland in green tights and that damn hat and try to stop laughing.) Dwight asking how does he believe she's alive, believe it hard enough to have her come back, even apart from the fact that as time passes from a loved one's death so too does life move on, and you begin to reshape yourself having closed off that person's presence in your life, as a set of fixed points. Even apart from that, he's been grieving her for years, getting used to the pain of her death and he doesn't entirely know how to think or who to be with the hope or presence of her, there, again. Especially now that he's basically been given permission to be that person again, that she's not going to go away or turn into an aether hellbeast (or Heckle or Jekyll, go on, picture that). And adding onto all that, the layer of fear and worry that whatever he does feel or believe, it's not going to be enough, and she will disappear not because of Croatoan or hellbeast or anything, but because he failed her. Again. So, yes, this is a pretty damn heavy moment for Dwight. Which we will now interrupt with nothing so extreme as okay I'll stop being over the top ridiculous, but for a much more gentler moment of Dwight giving Duke shit because what am manly men talking about feelings. And Duke flipping him off as he disappears, because same reason. Well, less manly men and more scoundrels who don't give a damn honest. Yeah, you two love each other, you know it. Dwight's smile knows it. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Less happy things, like the aether coming down even harder. According to CroaShatner this is because the void has "smelled" their world (your world, there's again a certain poignancy to the fact that he's using 'your' world as in Audrey and Nathan's, another sign that he's letting go) and it wants in. Still creepifying! Though also even in that brief glimpse of the void's alleged personality (the void as genius locus for your nightmaring pleasure) it says something about how CroaDaddy was corrupted. Not quite avarice, but maybe appetite would be better, in the void's case a general appetite for Nathan and Audrey's world, and in the case of CroaDaddy manifesting as an appetite for power, prestige, and revenge. Maybe that's how the void corrupts, it takes your desires and widens them till you're nothing but a gaping emotional hole. Ew. Moving on. CroaShatner expresses the hope that by going into the barn willingly, to pull the aether out of this world and the Troubles out of the people, that this will show Audrey who he was (who she no longer has memory of, let's note, too). Audrey has some ideas, or at least has some emotional responses to this, more relieved and tentatively accepting of this overture of fathership because let's not forget, she's spent the whole series in search of identity and family. And can't have been best pleased to find out that they were both of her parents kind of callous to psychopathic. So. Time to get Vince out here! Vince will throw a damper on the whole proceedings by being fidgety and nervous about the whole thing. Vince stop being such a wet blanket, dammit. No, but he has a point, though, sadly, even though CroaDaddy doesn't see it immediately. And Vince is doing an imprecise job of explaining, or at least a circuitous one. Aether, controller, and a living form for activation. No, what Vince is actually saying is that there needs to be a balancing force, I think he means to balance out the aether. At which point I pause the playback and fall off the couch because this goes along with the void as hunger, appetite, and emptiness, and for all those of you who have read Madeleine L'Engle think of the void as the Echthroi. And what do you do with the Echthroi? You name and love them. The Auditors from Discworld are another, and they're fought off by the power of sheer humanity, and humanity's belief in ideas, which also works. There's all kinds of other metaphors in other mediums for it, we picked these two because they're the ones we're familiar with, but basically, yes, if the void and the aether is appetite and emptiness, then love and unstinting openness fills it? Balances it. And CroaDaddy, for all his recent conversion, isn't capable of that yet. But Audrey is. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Let's have a flyover as they think about and discuss this. Which amounts to the same discussion as they had at the end of season three, only with much less shooting of the barnvatar. Her going into the barn can end the Troubles, this time forever, etc. And it hurts, but it's the best way and it'll save so many people. We do have a slight problem with this, given that this was nowhere stated in the initial manual when Charlotte was talking about creating the new barn? On the other hand, given her behavior at the time and after it's entirely possible that </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">she</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> thought she would have been the loving catalyst against/to balance the aether, although whether or not that would have worked is an open question. Oh to have been a fly on the wall for THAT conversation with Howard. Not to mention the conversation with Dwight if it HAD worked, though Dwight and his protector complex would've understood far more immediately. Nathan cracks a weak joke about how he was just getting used to this chaos of Troubles. Are his eyes red-rimmed still or again. Doesn't matter. No, Nathan, what you were getting used to was having a partner, but spoilers, sweetie. Though it has to hurt extra bad for losing Duke a few hours ago. (Yes, a few hours, it </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">really</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> hasn't been that long.) He's just resigned now. Sad and hurting and resigned, they both are, but this is how they best fix everything. They're always going to want more time, but we are grateful for the time we have been given, Nathan points out. (If that particular phrasing gets stuck in your head too I'm so sorry, it's from The Village. Yes, the M Night Shyamalan movie.) And continues his arc of growth by acknowledging that he spent at least the past couple seasons/several months trying to keep her here and maybe that wasn't the best thing! Audrey responds to his effusions of love with trying to make him promise to move on, find someone, be happy, fall in love again. Which is a nice sentiment in the future but right now it's going to bounce off the Force Shield of Stubborn. And, okay. I appreciate the sentiment of this speech, but it is repetitious in the extreme and though there's imagery to accompany it (Troubles leaving people, families putting back together accompanies the Glendower men coming back [HEY THE GLENDOWERS GET TO COME OUT OF THE WATER! NOT AFTER THE ETERNITY WE EXPECTED! HUZZAH!], people out in the world is Chris Brody and Haven returning to the world is, aww, Seth watching Haven reappear on the map! he can go talk to someone about his merpeople thing!) it doesn't entirely mitigate the endless. litany. of exactly the emotional beats you expect. I'm not sure what it is if it's the delivery, or the phrasing, or something. Or, for that matter, the placement right after a minute and a half or so of I love you I love this town I sacrifice out of love dialogue. There's a reason we occasionally break this up with comedy or a different kind of drama. At any rate. The upshot of Nathan's speech is you will always be with me I will always love you, so let's skip through that to Dwight looking sad and stricken as he watches his daughter flicker in front of him. Dammit, you guys. Chris Brody, on the other hand, looks absolutely ecstatic at someone slapping him for being a jerk. Which is fucking funny. See? Comedy! Audrey, CroaDaddy, and Vincevatar stand together in the room of white light, the building shakes, light pours out of it, and... poof. So, um. Does that mean that the police station would also have gone poof despite what Howard said? Or was this just a consequence of there being so much aether that needed taking out of play? Inquiring fans of Laverne would like to know.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Fade to black.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Come back in on the police station, Stan is in uniform reading off a list of truly petty crimes going from stolen clam bake to driving a golf cart while high, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">all</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> of these names are writer names. I giggled. Nathan's apparently enjoying this too, as much as he's enjoying anything in his still somewhat evident grief, but he's also clearly functional, so that's about as much as anyone can expect. And he's getting a phone call from Dwight, who is apparently retired now? and fishing. With his daughter, who in a seasonally appropriate turn of events did </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">not</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> die or fade away making her, what, Tiny Tina? and with McHugh, who is indeed hopeless. Though I'm laughing more at Dwight not being able to touch </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">worms</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> than McHugh's tangle of line. McHugh snarks back about enjoying having everybody shoot him, aww, you guys are adorable. Also shades of the new Vince and Dave, if you look at it right. So, okay, yeah, sure, why not. Nathan's going to go fishing, Stan's got the cats in trees, as Nathan put it. Stan would like one last bit of advice on what to tell the State Historic Society about why the old armory collapsed. It has, apparently, been a month and nobody's given them an answer. A month, or 27 days? I'm just saying, because I will bet you ANYTHING. The facial expressions on "gas leak?" are fucking priceless. That is going to be a joke that persists long into when they have to explain it to the next generation who are convinced their elders are insane. And Nathan does miss Vince and Dave, but no, they probably would not have known what happened. They would have "known" what happened, and it would have been a damn gas leak. Nathan radios Laverne to just send the easy calls to Stan today, and she's not picking up but HOLY SHIT IT'S ACTUAL LAVERNE IN THE FLESH. HI LAVERNE. AKA Supervising Producer Stefani Deoul, aww. And yes, she's out and about, that's what happens when you spend some time as a building. (Oh god, does that mean Holloway's ... no, he blew up. Thank god.) And Gloria wants to see him about the Troubles. And this, I think, is the point at which I say how glad I am that everyone got to keep their memories of everything that happened and cope with the actuality of it, instead of an overlay that no doubt would fragment at traumatic times and leave everyone even </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">more</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> confused and hurting. At least this way the Troubles are gone, they can process the damage and slowly move on with their lives without worrying about the fucking Haven stuff happening again. It also makes Dwight outing everyone to the town an even better idea, because at that point even the non-Troubled can understand what's happened in the town in a more complete and comprehensive light. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Gloria would like Nathan to know that she's run all the labwork and the DNA marker for the Troubles is completely gone. As in no, it really is gone, it's not going to come back in 27 years, science sez. Nathan is on the one hand relieved and on the other hand a little saddened because it means Audrey's not going to come back in 27 years, either, it's one more dig in that she's really gone, too. And because Gloria is Gloria and therefore amazing, yeah, she gets it. Vicki has a little something that might help, she made a sketch of Audrey! Because hey, now her drawings aren't awful sympathetic magic tokens, she loves drawing again. Vicki fades back to keep an eye on the baby, and Gloria picks up with remembering Audrey also by thinking of what Audrey would do in a situation, and doing that. And says she does that with Duke, thereby confirming that these two were in fact thick as thieves and I use that phrase very deliberately. Brats. (It also goes with the atmosphere of this bar being very much like the Gull. Did they perhaps rebuild it after the great sea monster incident? Probably not, it hasn't been enough time, but it would amuse me.) At any rate. All right, Nathan accepts this "if you want to talk to Duke, talk to me" with good humor even though it doesn't take into account the special love-hate relationship the two men had (let us sing the song of our people one last time: No One Ships Nuke Like Eric Balfour Ships Nuke) and declare that he is going to go do what Audrey would want him to do right now: he's going to go fishing with Dwight.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">No he's not. Because out by the side of the road there's a car in the dirt stalled out or broke down or something. Hazards on, a voice coming from the car not like someone in distress but maybe someone on a phone or keeping a passenger calm. We know that voice, don't we? Oh yes we do. Nathan knocks on the door, rolls down the windows, she looks up, and he actually doesn't even look surprised. Though </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> wouldn't be surprised if on several levels he wasn't half expecting this, even knowing that that's not what they had arranged when she left. NotAudrey hears "Parker" for Park-her, i.e. the car, and goes on about how she broke the car oops and can he help? Which works right up until he moves enough to give her a look at his sidearm, at which point she does jump. Does </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">not</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> pull a gun of her own and reacts more with fear than anything, so whoever she is now she's not law enforcement. No, it's okay, he's a cop. He's a Nathan. He's also not entirely coherent, poor man. So, Officer Nathan, can you help a Broke-Down Paige, because she's got a hungry baby James in the back seat. Yes. Yes, that is James Cogan, everyone, the writers confirmed it. (I can't wait for </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">that</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> DNA test to come back and the explanations to begin there, because if the Troubles have a genetic marker that stuck around, I will bet you a box of deathtruffles that that baby is genetically James Cogan, i.e. the son of Nathan and AudSarLu. AudSarLuPa? Whatever.) Hello baby James! Your daddy is utterly gobsmacked to see you. Enough so that he's got to take a second. Several seconds, it takes him a bit to come up with pop the hood, and then it takes him a bit of leaning into the car and hyperventilating while she can't see him and having many emotions where it won't scare the amnesiac notAudreyanymore. Going by the way she looks for the hood release it's probably also a rental. Symmetry, dontchaknow. It's unclear whether Nathan even does anything in there, doesn't look or sound like it, but it doesn't turn over this time either. It does start playing Love Will Keep Us Together! Because symmetry. Which symmetry also means Paige slamming the car door shut on Nathan's fingers, which he can actually feel this time around, ouch. He's having feelings even about getting his hand smashed in a car door. Well, this requires she buy him an apology breakfast. Pancakes, of course. </span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRdWM6bzubP3_44hAdtyfvPVWYrH00DDmHKxH5i6H_0TgZMnPvJTvQnKEF5Gyj7cBrcGQjDCRaLXu7UpzV1jH4jeJBsh__Vd5Y47_m6YBfthdfFbL7gcj6KQaHRvc51HO9ddgUVH6Hwe0/s1600/haven526cc05.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRdWM6bzubP3_44hAdtyfvPVWYrH00DDmHKxH5i6H_0TgZMnPvJTvQnKEF5Gyj7cBrcGQjDCRaLXu7UpzV1jH4jeJBsh__Vd5Y47_m6YBfthdfFbL7gcj6KQaHRvc51HO9ddgUVH6Hwe0/s320/haven526cc05.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We're not done yet, we have to have CroaShatner (whose name we </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">still</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> don't have, I'm leaning towards Randy Flagg) and Vince playing Statler and Waldorf in the barn and discussing whether or not she could have gone back as Audrey. Aww, I think CroaShatner was starting to like Audrey! But it's okay, Vince says, she knew that if she went back she and Nathan would fall in love all over again. And, honestly, having lived through three incarnations Vince would probably know. The Blue Bronco is literally riding off into the sunset. Aww you guys.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So! That's Haven. We have about… three things left to address, and the first you all saw coming from the first half of the recapalypse, and that's Duke. While okay yes they telegraphed the hell out of this, it's no secret we haven't liked his plotline at MINIMUM since he came back to Haven in the back half of this season. Arguably before that, but that was the point at which there really wasn't any other way to write him and have it be tonally consistent, and frankly we're not fond of sacrificing one of the trio and calling that a happy ending. Hell, Duke had enough aether in him there's NO reason he couldn't have been put in the new barn and potentially healed by it. There was the aforementioned possibility of Audrey claiming her power as an aether wielder and taking the Troubles before Croatoan could get to them, that would have rushed the confrontation a bit but made her somewhat more of an active participant instead of a passive yes all right I will go into the barn one last time. I mean yes, there was agency in her decision, but it was more the agency of acceding to the fact that there were no other good choices. Duke, well, back in season four we addressed the issue of Duke kept attempting to escape his destiny only to be punched in the face repeatedly with the you-can't-fight-fate stick, and if we thought it was bad then </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">wow</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> that didn't hold a candle to what we saw here. Basically, the way things fell out with Duke's plotline, he was there to have a plotstick jammed up his ass so he could be a puppet and bob along to the tune. We are not fans. And finally, we are also not fans of the aspect of Duke's death where he was never allowed the chance to heal out of his trauma and various degrees of self-harm to outright suicide attempts. It's one thing for Audrey or even Nathan, I suppose, to agree to a course of action that leads to death/death of personality, given that they've never experienced (or been shown to have, I suppose) that kind of all-encompassing despair and depression. Even Nathan after he shot the barnvatar was at </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">most </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">passively suicidal, though he did go through an incredibly rough patch. It was still out of his choices rather than out of being controlled by a vast evil being, and an addiction Duke outright said was worse than heroin. It is quite another for Duke's suicidal impulses to be encouraged and carried out by his friends, contradicting the up till now impression that these are the two friends who would understand him or seek to understand him and help him, and work with him for the best possible Duke in whatever circumstances. And while some of that was addressed with Audrey acknowledging and apologizing for how she used him, it by no means made up for Duke's struggles being completely ignored or even exacerbated by the two people who should have supported him best. It reflected poorly on Nathan and Audrey, hamstrung a lot of the development of their friendship and made Duke's death massively unsatisfying to the point where at least as far as the beginning of season five if not back in season four, I'm not sure there was a way to make it satisfying. It did not come across as the happy ending for Duke the writers intended it to be, particularly when we never had any explicit and barely any implicit indication that Duke's death did anything productive. Croatoan clearly had enough Troubles and aether control to be a threat to the whole damn world without Duke's additional powers, so, again, why did he have to die? Say what you want about deaths sometimes not making sense, this show in particular has deliberately sold itself as Everything Has Meaning. Unsatisfying. In the extreme. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The second is the speed of Croatoan's reversal/conversion to good, which is sold purely on Shatner's acting and not at all on the writing, frankly. A lot of that is just that the pacing in the 26-ep season was off from the minute they started, they did NOT know what to do with or have time to figure out the best way to deal with this much room to play and no time to course-correct the way a normal TV show and season would. Yes, they've always had 13-ep seasons written and filmed before they ever started airing (in that respect they're a bit more like the precursor to Netflix/Amazon seasons dropping all in one go, but you still only get to watch one a week), but as it aired they always had that feedback to determine how the NEXT season should go. And they didn't get that this time, and it visibly hurt their ability to plan plot and character beats. To say nothing of having to film all the eps in 9 months when they normally get to take 6 months for 13. That's exactly the kind of thing that results in a rushed, confused mess of a season, unfortunately, and it shows. That SAID, here's an interpretation I'll go with for the sake of my brain: Croatoan only had to make the choice once, and like SO MANY other choices made under duress on this show, he may have regretted it once he made it, but he didn't get to undo it either. We also don't see whether or not he regretted it, or will come to regret it, we only got one post-show glimpse of him talking with Vince outside of any in-show context. And unlike the Troubles cycles, this was a one-off and now you're done. So he gets to make his peace with that however he can. Also, have a slightly disturbing thought that given that Croatoan was riding Dave for a while and possibly had access to his memories, this is the closest Vince will ever come to being reunited with Dave. I know. You're welcome.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Finally, we have Audrey getting personality-wiped and going back as Paige, which is… actually the one we're MOST okay with for a variety of reasons, and seems to be the one fandom as a whole is frothing about? (</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A: </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Don't look at me I'm avoiding the tumblr tag.) (</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">K: </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I have an insatiable curiosity, what can I say.) There's what seems to be a strong contingent who say this isn't the Audrey-Nathan pancakes happy ending they signed up for, or at least were led to expect. And as far as I see most of this is an attachment to Audrey as she is/was, rather than to the overall AudSarLu shared elements (that, as far as I can tell, were a </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">lot</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> more shared elements than the three of them, now four or five of them depending on how we count Lexie? shared with Mara). All things considered this is entirely predictable, understandable, and valid. Especially given how often the repetition of Audrey as dominant personality was played out in the course of the series, even up to overwriting the original personality with Audrey. We've been led for quite a while to believe that Audrey/Nathan has been the endgame here, and it turns out we've been Obi-Wan'd. So, yes, I entirely understand that sense of betrayal. Here's why I don't share it. We've been hammering on choice and the suckass consequences being consequences the characters choose (or at least consequences of their own fuckups) rather than ones other people chose for them for, oh, most of the series, I think? Audrey chose the barn knowing her personality would be wiped and overwritten once already. And she chose the barn again, not knowing she would be returned but quite likely thinking of that as a possible consequence if it turned out not to be forever but for 27 years again. We didn't have the explicit dialogue because we had to have Nathan's love speech of interminable voiceover instead, but I'd strongly bet she at least thought of it. And Nathan accepted her going into the barn knowing both what would happen and what had happened. Not just with both of them knowing what they expected and what had happened with Audrey and the barn and the wiping and the personality overlay, but also knowing what had happened in the past, even in the immediate past, as Audrey slowly came to discover who she was, with Nathan. And this time, not only does Paige have no Troubles to have to deal with, when people react strangely to her or when she sees her photograph on the wall of the Herald or in the police station, when she sees Nathan's sketch, she has an entire town and a bunch of friends much more informed, at least a couple of whom have done this before and can gently, over time, with no urgent problems to solve now, explain to her who she is and has been. And let her reclaim that part of herself how she chooses, and incorporate it into who she wants to be. And to an extent Audrey had that too, but it was over a short period of time, full of urgency and fraught with I must understand this or people will die. Remember what we said about Nathan and Audrey maybe not knowing how to behave as a couple without a crisis to solve? Nathan and Paige won't have that problem. Well, not outside of the normal everyday crises of sick baby or police emergency. Cats in trees, as Nathan said. </span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOWSs3KCbi2iKC_6rmFdPKJ_HQvcaS0zbpsk3WPvT_XH8UzZqdY_DJzKXk2EzhsFT9oxfHmNdgNRGRvT5sE_6yql38cYnzlQ2MRUpSKTf2fPg3tJmqKZYYUsmvk07p3lncd9TKxIqzEtk/s1600/haven526cc06.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOWSs3KCbi2iKC_6rmFdPKJ_HQvcaS0zbpsk3WPvT_XH8UzZqdY_DJzKXk2EzhsFT9oxfHmNdgNRGRvT5sE_6yql38cYnzlQ2MRUpSKTf2fPg3tJmqKZYYUsmvk07p3lncd9TKxIqzEtk/s320/haven526cc06.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So. That's our three major problems. We do have some </span><a href="http://www.tv.com/m/shows/the-xfiles/humbug-534/trivia/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">unexplained potatoes</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (yes we're finally explaining the potatoes), the State Fair Prize for Unexplained Potato going to Walter, who, what the fuck. Seriously. Is he an aether creature? If so, left by who? Is he a dead Troubled Guy? If so, what on unearthly fuck was his Trouble? Did it have something to do with the tree and the blood? Which is my pet theory, because that also explains the Duke ghost. Maybe he was Walter from End-World or where the hell ever. Maybe </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">he</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> was Flagg. Shudder. Other unexplained potatoes: the Crocker box, its meaning, or rather its deliberate meaning as to the placement because we did yes ultimately decipher the Omnia Vincit Amor, but in that case how the damn Crocker (FitzWilliam, or someone before him who told him?) found out about it. The immortal saga of Howard and Charlotte and Mara and William is FULL of unexplained potatoes. The alien abductee Trouble is kind of an unexplained potato, albeit one that could only have been explained by part of that end montage. I'm pretty sure we're growing unexplained potatoes out here in the Blue Ridge, although the potatoes in Roanoke received... kind of an explanation. I'll accept testing ground as an explanation that implies further internal logic. I'm sure there are more unexplained potatoes lurking around, but we're leaving out the ones that seem to be caused by retcons and their subsequent internal inconsistencies. See also: almost everything to do with Vince and Dave, the Guard, the temporal clusterfuck of 1983, etc. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And that's a wrap on Haven, and along with it a wrap on us ever doing this kind of blogging to airtime+24 deadline again. We'll put out a post over the holidays sometime explaining why, and what we'll be doing with the blog henceforth because yes, we do have plans to continue. And we'll probably miss it. Sometime. Give us a year to not have to deal with any of this shit and we might get crazy enough to think it's a good idea again. In which case feel free to tell us we're being dumb and/or crazy. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to go see a guy about a barn.</span></div>
<br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjloX_EvYiI" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">[exeunt, pursued by a barnvatar]</span></a>Kitty Chandlerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05524808952260453841noreply@blogger.com21tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4271373189216022547.post-30873817911205450082015-12-18T10:08:00.000-08:002015-12-18T10:08:07.081-08:00Simon Says Haven S2E12 Sins of the Fathers<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Previously: Audrey found the original Lucy Ripley, who has not gone to the barn and had her memories erased! And… Simon Crocker was looking for AudSarLu when she was Lucy. Oh GOODIE. We will be reminded yet again of how Duke is at the center of everything going on in Haven, and lost Evi as a result. And oh look, part of that involves the Crocker boxes, now with the big version, hi Dwight you're </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">like </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">a big version, and killing AudSarLu. Gee. I wonder what the Rev's plans were for Duke! Let's find out on a moonlit night in Haven. We open with the Trouble, not the town's tarnished trio, which just means the Trouble's going to be inherent to them all as we learn what it is and how it works. Some Dude is asleep when Some Other Dude appears and wakes him insisting he go save a woman named Sheila who's in danger from a guy with a gun! This cannot possibly end badly! First Dude looks like he's about to tell the other guy that he's dead or something, oh </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">yay </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">just what we need. Yes, the guy with a gun is going to be you, honey. Arlo is meanwhile across the street with Sheila telling her to be quiet and careful and he'll keep her safe until Bill gets here. Of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">course </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">you will. Vindictive ghostly bastard. This translates to mock-strangling her and Bill shooting her through the ghost. As you do. Evidently this was, as one might expect, payback for sleeping with Sheila, who was Arlo's wife. I assume he was hoping for a murder-suicide but will take one out of two.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Next morning, Duke and his truck are headed downtown at the same time as Audrey and… that looks like still a rental? Audrey when are you going to give in and buy a used cheap car. She's headed for the Herald, Duke is headed for her, it looks like after the ulp-ing at the end of last ep they haven't talked since and now things have an extra helping of Awkward. Duke's going to confront this head-on! Honey. Audrey's off to confront other people head-on, she's not upset with you, go hold her flower while she kicks the Teagues' ass. I would pay such good money for that alt-version of this scene. Alas, no, he's determined to explain that he is REALLY not going to kill her, he doesn't take assassination requests from dead as well as deadbeat dads. Audrey please stop being quite so emotionally repressed, you're going to sprain something. She does realize after the bad joke that she needs to take him a little more seriously than that, but the words "I believe you" would help here. A lot. And not leave Duke sighing at the heavens while Audrey storms into the Herald.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrF8pAdm0ksr65qPs8RNLVZMpGBs4gAi2ASiGG4iMHjghajZLvdLEkqYL15kPGm1q42cBCllSWBNZQAKCzCBcQGjtkFqByxlQhdKXv2dwk7kdfOGNzeHtDVfvqumQdYsRbfb1QezrfjHA/s1600/haven212cc01.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrF8pAdm0ksr65qPs8RNLVZMpGBs4gAi2ASiGG4iMHjghajZLvdLEkqYL15kPGm1q42cBCllSWBNZQAKCzCBcQGjtkFqByxlQhdKXv2dwk7kdfOGNzeHtDVfvqumQdYsRbfb1QezrfjHA/s320/haven212cc01.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It is a very loud storm, too. Dave, she is not in the mood for cheery greetings and stop calling her kitten that's creepy. One photo comparison later and Vince knows the jig's up, Dave is trying hard to still lie though honestly I'm not sure WHY. We know that Sarah (Mara?) is his greatest fear, as of Fear & Loathing, but we have exactly zero background on the details of that even now, since the flashbacks showed him pretty friendly with her, as does the photo. All that control Audrey was using out on the street is now </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">gone </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">and she will be smashing the cup out of Dave's hand and yelling at them now. I mean, at least when Vince starts telling her stuff he starts with an apology and moves on to give her at least some information. They keep back the part about the barn, which at this point I can't entirely blame them for: oh by the way you go away and probably get your memory wiped by this thing but then the Troubles stop is not conducive to goodwill either. Just like oh by the way you're a construct designed to help the Troubles doesn't go over well! By the time we've hit s5 I understand their reasons for NOT telling Audrey all the things they don't, not least of which is the sheer amount of overwhelm that infodumping at her would cause when they do need her functional to help stop the Troubles. I just don't have to LIKE it, and on a Doylist level it irritates the fuck out of me because neither of them seems to ever learn from their mistakes. While this is believable, I like competence porn and characters actually growing! And it feels like there's never a great balance between reasonably sized reveals versus not locking the writers' room into things they can't go back and change. Grumble. They give her bits and pieces now: she was Lucy, then Sarah, then they weren't around so they don't know (Veronica, I believe?), she goes away but comes back with a new personality, she always helps the Troubled, they don't know the details of why or how. Which is true so far as it goes. And no, they don't know who the fuck Agent Howard/the barnvatar is. Given Dave's reaction to the adoption papers in s5 I actually buy that: they may know he's tied to AudSarLu somehow or another, but the nature of those ties never got made clear. Hell, it's not even really clear NOW, and never will be, thanks so much, Nathan. Vince gets up to give her Sarah's ring, which of ALL the things turns out to be magically significant? Seriously? It looks like an engagement ring, honestly, of the too poor to buy a giant rock but can afford a nice small three-stone setting, and Audrey reacts to it as such. Yeah, Vince, nobody's exactly buying the "friends" line here. Unfortunately, further revelations will have to wait because Nathan needs her on a case, so she puts a pin in it, which is arguably the worst thing she could have done because it gives the Teagues time to clam up and throw up defensive walls again. Which they are very, very good at. Once she's gone, Dave questions how much Vince told her, Vince claims she needs his help (and that of the Guard, presumably) and that Dave's not getting in his way this time. SOMEONE COUGH UP WHAT HAPPENED WITH LUCY FFS. I'm pretty sure that's what they're flailing about, not Sarah, though not positive; the fact that Dave had a blackout moment with Lucy and the Colorado Kid and the being transported to the beach (and the mysterious invisible squid and the thinny? we all remember this coming out last season, yes?) would suggest it's Lucy. Also Vince put the teeth away and give them back to Flagg augh.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZQRWkj0AC9P7ZEi4p50XZJ0_PETOhXdj-Z5ZV_RaEku7UhgUZdsS64N6yU7Vqi2Ri9Clowo85dyax6IccSjh9CMhqSGOXbUxF5gOLYx_H_UplVnHec_AWZFCxEFoVnlR_NGj8-KOvWS8/s1600/haven212cc02.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZQRWkj0AC9P7ZEi4p50XZJ0_PETOhXdj-Z5ZV_RaEku7UhgUZdsS64N6yU7Vqi2Ri9Clowo85dyax6IccSjh9CMhqSGOXbUxF5gOLYx_H_UplVnHec_AWZFCxEFoVnlR_NGj8-KOvWS8/s320/haven212cc02.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Meanwhile on the Cape Rouge, some gratuitous Duke in nothing but low-slung sweats. I am so okay with this. Less okay with Simon Crocker showing up in the middle of the living area cheerfully establishing that this is his territory while appearing to deliver compliments. No. Shut it, you. Duke's immediate response is "Dad? You're </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">dead</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">," which is not, he realizes, an actual problem in Haven, but he would like to file a complaint with someone I'm sure. Aaand roll credits.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When we come back it is not, alas, to answering the mysteries onboard the Cape Rouge. Instead it's the crime scene Nathan called Audrey to! He scolds her mildly for being late and asks where she was and of course instead of answering she gets right to business. AUDREY. The Teagues are an object lesson, not a role model, we were just over this. Sigh. The upshot is that Bill from the opening scene is in shock and keeps saying that Arlo made him do it. Oh honey. Better yet, the neighbors saw Arlo leave the house, so despite Audrey's first thought of a weak insanity defense, no, something more is going on here. Maybe Arlo faked his death! In which case there should be a paper trail and this should be pretty easy to solve. It also tells us something about the way this Trouble works, sort of, in that either the ghosts have to travel by normal human means or they think they do, which is probably residual body memory more than anything else. Both of them seem to know this might be a Trouble, but they have to rule out the mundane causes first, because good cops. And it's not like this would be an unusual thing, if it were a onetime event. Nathan will now move on to asking Audrey out on a date rather than nudging her for information more directly; she responds by admitting they should talk about everything. Lucy! Their relationship! The Teagues! SO MUCH STUFF. Of course this means they'll never get a chance to talk. She offers to make pancakes, in an adorable callback to their first meeting, setting up some of the most incredibly adorable awkward shy flirting I think I have ever seen two grown people do onscreen. We talking dinner or breakfast inDEED. There will be no answer, just Significant Flirty Looks and then Nathan looking after Audrey with an expression that says "this woman is gonna be the death of me" for him. Potentially accurate, Nathan, just not in the way you expect.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Okay now we can have some answers out of Simon and Duke, but they're all terrible answers. Duke would love for his father to be a hallucination from special brownies, which he may or may not have even eaten, this has the flavor of Duke Crocker babbling in order to get a good head of steam and defenses built up back there. He is also going to have a nice stiff drink. Good plan. Simon can't have any, he's too incorporeal. I'm not even a little sorry about that. We get an unsurprising cite on Simon being dead for 27 years, or since the end of the last cycle of Troubles. Nice confirmation, but by now that's all it is. And a lot of snarling from Duke over what Simon's doing back here, how he's going to disappear, come back beat to shit, and expect his son (who at the TIME was like seven or eight, let's not forget) to take the place of the hospital he should've been at. Gee. I can't imagine why he's still upset, or that he's been saving that up to say for the last couple decades minimum. Simon makes halfassed… not even apologies so much as statements of fact. Well, at least he's being honest now! Also given that we know the rush of killing people on the Crocker Trouble is equivalent to heroin, there's a chance Simon is less addicted at this point, since he's got no body to experience the effects of addiction with. (Ah, the mind-body relationship: always so complex when you have to deal with noncorporeal sentient beings!) Duke keeps protesting that he's asleep, he's dreaming, this isn't real, while Simon continues to take in the surroundings and go OH HEY MY MURDER BOX. (</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">K:</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> I want a murder box.) (</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A: </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">No, dear. The current murder box is William's and you DON'T want it.) Stop sounding hopeful when you ask if he's killed anyone yet, you absolute creep. Simon proceeds to explain to Duke a thing about the Crocker Trouble. Ah, the good old days, when Duke firmly believed he would never do that for any reason and that his father was always wrong and that things could be that black and white. Though I honestly don't think he thinks that, down deep where he doesn't let other people see, and he's terrified of what he could become - has the example standing in front of him - but since Simon is advocating firmly for "go out and kill Troubled people" he needs to take a hardline approach for his own sanity. Such as it is. Poor love.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Meanwhile at the… graveyard? Oh. The paper trail dead-ended, so now they're going to ask the gravedigger to dig up Arlo and be sure </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">his </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">end is dead. Ahem. Kyle Hopkins, gravedigger, is also smoking a joint while a couple people leave flowers graveside, and turns out to be one of the Rev's people. Oh goodie. This can't possibly go badly! And it does! Seriously, dude, don't mouth off to the cops when you're on probation and breaking the law, they </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">will </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">throw their weight around. One blackmailing in response to being growled at for killing the Rev and being Troubled later, we have a grave dug up and a very, very dead guy in a coffin. Audrey starts throwing out semi-joking possibilities when Nathan gets a call with another homicide! This time a dead girl told her brother to do it. Looks like you have confirmation that it's a Trouble, then. Back at the station, said brother evidently… beat his sister's rapist to death, by the blood all over his arms. Probably with a blunt weapon of some kind, judging by spatter and insufficient defensive wounds. I'm going to go with, his sister probably did tell the truth to her parents? a teacher? friends? and nobody believed her so she eventually committed suicide. That, or the relevant social circles are so toxic she knew she couldn't say anything to start with. Ouch. Cue the Teagues wandering in and sharing information in the form of gossip: specifically, what killed Arlo was that he got told his wife was cheating on him with the neighbor across the street and keeled over dead of a heart attack, aneurysm, whatever. One of those quick shocking deaths. I have mild eyebrows for that, given the dead are coming back with Matrix-style residual self-image, and Arlo didn't look that old, but sure, we'll go with it. The upshot here is, the dead are coming back to settle old scores, whether by direct manipulation of the living or by simply telling the truth. Great! It's not like Audrey's immune to the Troubles and recently killed any… one… who might have it out for her and other Haven… oh wait YES IT IS. Hi Rev, standing over Kyle Hopkins while he finishes putting Arlo McMartin's grave back together! You're a bastard for using "God has sent me" when you know fucking well that it's Kyle's Trouble that's doing this. Even if you believe it. Maybe especially if.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It's the Creepy Field of Lavender And Exposition! Yaaaay. I can only assume that Simon citing 26 years ago is actor or writer error, since we're pretty sure Lucy didn't stay that much longer than she was supposed to before going back into the barn. Hard to say, since we still have NO FUCKING PAYOFF for Lucy's era. Or almost none. Probably 28 would've been more accurate, since this is the story of How Simon Decided Killing People Was Okay, and if Lucy ended up killing him after the addiction took full hold (as seems likely) then this was probably earlier. Anyway. A huge chunk of a grade-school class died (Mrs. Holloway! she of the married to the creepy bastard who became his house, we believe) when the teacher told a scary enough story that a little girl's Trouble kicked in and killed sixteen people, most of them kids. Whenever this happened, it was at a point where Simon was at least semi-openly known as the person who could kill you and take your Trouble out of your family line, though given that the Crocker Trouble seems to be an open secret in Haven, who the fuck knows. He was definitely active at the time, is the point. We heard the story of how his Trouble was activated from Vince more recently, remember that? Remember also how long Vince said it took for him to devolve, because we do! And in this particular instance he didn't kill Jennie Meers' grandfather the week before when he had the chance, but did after her grandfather begged him to. Okay, Simon, you seem to be missing this aspect of free will here? Which is important? In favor of hammering on Duke's destiny and responsibility, two words he is perhaps less allergic to than he pretends but still not what I'd use as a first attack here. It's Duke. Not that Simon ever bothered to get to know his son, probably not either of them. And then he tries for the kill with you could've saved whoever died of the Troubles if you'd been willing to kill, which in Evi's case is actually untrue, unless by that Simon means becoming the Rev's personal assassin. Duke can only even make the choice to tell you all to fuck the fuck off (as he does here) if you people TELL HIM ABOUT THIS SHIT. I'm just saying.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Audrey and Nathan are on their usual "find the commonalities between the two instances of Trouble outbreaks" hunt, and coming up with a whole shitload of nothing. Plus some UST. The one thing they've got is that both the ghostly dead people (as opposed to recently dead) were buried at Eastside Cemetery, which tells us there's at least two cemeteries in town. Guys this is perhaps not the time to be within a couple inches of making out on the desk? Which they realize and, um, extract themselves from the situation with adorable awkward. Over on a random street with different but similarly colored purple flowers around the porch railings, we have Driscoll, Hopkins, and at least one other dude from the Rev's congregation. My that is a long list of known Troubled residents. And it's not even close to complete, though I suppose there's a chance that the Rev decided not to include those too dangerous for people to kidnap and kill. For one thing, you know Hopkins is on that list and Driscoll should know it. Sigh. I wonder if we need to update our list of Troubled people from this list, though, maybe that'll happen in between eps this next season.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We don't know why Duke left or if there was a sour note other than the bits from high school previously mentioned, but once Audrey and Nathan go back out to the graveyard they… appear to have been talking in the car about what she recently learned? Would be my guess. And here Nathan will tell his story of how Duke used him again as a cover for a smuggling operation, and that betrayal is what led to Nathan's Trouble returning while they beat on each other for a couple hours. Nathan do you mean had hatesex? Because an hour of actual fighting is, um, a little unbelievable. I think Duke probably was trying to kill two birds with one stone, get a friendship back and also get some smuggling taken care of, because first off that's very like Duke and second off he's about as allergic as Nathan to being openly friendly with the other. Not to mention emotionally honest in general, though Duke's marginally better at it than Nathan. It's just that when Duke tries to </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">be </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">that at Nathan, Nathan usually thinks he's being mocked and gets even snarlier, and it's just a bad, bad spiral. So maybe Duke did care! I think it's a lot likelier than the alternative, considering how much he gets up in Nathan's business still. Audrey can only offer the hope that Duke's changed, because she's way too tired of dealing with all these revelations and way too close to everyone involved to have the distance to smack Nathan with a frying pan and lock him and Duke in a broom closet until they stop being idiots.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Plus they have more immediate concerns. Like checking Annie's grave and confirming it's untouched, just like Arlo's, so it's not like anyone's been digging these people up and in so doing digging up their spirits. Kind of the other way around, though it's a good first guess! The other immediate concern is all the dead people walking out of their graves. Which is just a great inversion of the Sixth Sense, I have to say, because Audrey's immune… so of course she can't see the dead people. Good twenty, couple dozen of them, while Nathan twitches, Audrey looks Concerned, and they figure out the reason why she's not seeing anything pretty quick. And they all show up, form a circle of what appears to be surly menace, say nothing, and walk away. That's so helpful! What does it mean? WHO KNOWS. Maybe just that they wanted a look at the supposed savior of Haven. Audrey is just thrilled that they've found an instance where her immunity is a hindrance rather than a help. THRILLED. Let her tell you. It does mean that they're completely screwed if all those dead people are off to cause another twenty-odd revenge murders; they don't have the manpower for that. A wild Duke appears, burying his past on top of his father's grave! After the ad break, he finishes up explaining his Trouble and presumably his miserable morning to Audrey and Nathan with confirmation that yes, that is the Crocker Murder Box, no, he doesn't want it anymore. Nathan yes please let's not forget that Duke is many things, and will kill in self-defense, but that's a long ways away from hunting and killing, or even offering to let people line up outside his door and commit suicide by Crocker, or any number of other awful ways this could go. (Does go, in the end, hi Wade.) Audrey is apparently aware of where Simon Crocker was buried, which given last ep surprises me not at all but it's a blink and you'll miss why she knows that sort of shit reference. Yes but Seaside Cemetery is eroding, as you might've guessed from the name, so they moved him over here! AHA A CONNECTION. Obviously they've explained what the Trouble is to Duke so he thinks he's a little less hallucinating and a lot more haunted.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Nathan goes off to do police work so Duke and Audrey can have a heart to heart moment about the big philosophical questions. The point of existence, why she's there, why Duke's there, if it gets to Audrey that despite claiming as her identity "to help the Troubled," nothing ever stays fixed. Well, what other option does she have? Except she frames it as, she </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">doesn't </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">have another option. Oh Duke honey. You're offering yourself up to Audrey as a tool to use in helping defeat the Troubles? Sweetie. Please don't. Audrey seems to think please don't is a good response too, because she would rather not have that responsibility on top of all her other ones, although we note that she did pretty quickly decide to take it when the organ-eating asshole decided having a bunch of kids as organ donors was a great way around his Trouble, yes? Yes. Not that I think they had any easy decisions there, but it would've been more honest to say, I don't want to hold this power over you but there may be times when that </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">is </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">our only option and we'll talk about it when we get there. Or something along those lines. And now Nathan will come back and inform us that yes, indeed, Kyle Hopkins is the Troubled guy let's go find him oh wait hi Garland what the hell. What the hell, indeed, since Garland doesn't seem to be back to avenge any wrongdoings. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Nobody knows how he got here, either: we saw him buried. Nathan and Duke buried the pieces in the cooler on a hillside themselves. We know this! We saw it onscreen! Doylistically, of course, we have the episode title to go on, plus if Duke's getting his father showing up (and this is sad, too, because it proves that Duke never got a more emotionally close father figure than Simon, whereas Nathan gets Garland who raised him rather than Max whose DNA he shares), then for balance reasons we should get Nathan's dad too. Watsonianly, we eventually find out we get to blame Vince. Vince, EVERYTHING is your fault. For fuckssake. Audrey, meanwhile, gets no father on top of being immune to seeing the ghosts, which is probably one part commentary on her existence and one part commentary on Mara. Anyway. Go fucking talk to your father, Nathan, says Audrey. Be fucking careful, says Duke. I think I'm on Duke's side on this one, and I haven't been drinking. I love that Garland's slightly more comic in death than he ever was in life, that he's, heh, had the opportunity to loosen up. I'd bet he's a lot more like the dad Nathan obviously worshiped at some point in his younger years, as opposed to Da Chief of stringent rules and regs. All your parts are there, Garland? YOU'RE INCORPOREAL. You goof. Nathan has no idea how to take this, not least because </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">dad how are you here</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, and indeed Garland would like to have words with him about wasting a perfectly good cooler for burying him in. Well what the hell was he supposed to use to pick up the pieces, Garland, and would YOU have reused that cooler? Because I wouldn't've. Just saying. And yes, Nathan is jumping down his throat over quips like I miss the rain, but he makes the point that ghosts have been coming back to settle old scores and he doesn't know what his dad might have in mind, but (and this stays unspoken) given who Garland was in the town I seriously doubt any revenge murder would do less than shake the power structure.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">No, he's pretty sure he's here to see Nathan. Aww! Sort of. He may be a lot lighter than he was in life, while trying not to send cracks through Haven and destroying the town, but that doesn't mean their relationship has suddenly been mended. As we will witness now! Garland pokes Nathan for a status report, more in the manner of a father than in the manner of Da Chief, which is nice to see, but both things are intertwined with them and always will be. Nathan tries to reach for a joke, except now Garland's going to push about what are you hiding. Both of them seem at least moderately aware of how little time they have: whenever this Trouble gets solved, they'll probably never see each other again. And so! Well, Driscoll's dead, Audrey shot him, which absolutely delights Garland. We knew they weren't exactly the best of friends, but DAMN, dude. I'll be over here laughing a little. And then the reveal of, Nathan you love Audrey? You can't do that. (</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">K: </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Considering what Nathan loving Audrey brings to the town I am so very sympathetic to Garland on this point.) Which is part and parcel of the thing Garland points out, same as the Teagues circle around, that it's very very hard to explain to your savior-construct with no memory of this town that you know her every 27 years. At least not if you want her to treat you as an ally. Here, I'm pretty sure Garland has a clue about the barn, or at least that AudSarLu disappears and with her so do the Troubles (given his close relationship with the Teagues, and that he knew and talked with Agent Fuck You), and as such he's trying to save his son from heartbreak. Remember, he </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">knows </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Nathan. He knows that Nathan will devote his entire life to trying to figure out what loving Audrey means, and letting her go is never going to be on that list. He might cede his place if she tells him she doesn't want him (anymore), but now that they've started something Nathan doesn't know how to do half-measures. So it's very much too late on that score, and Garland looks terribly resigned when he realizes that if this is all he gets to say, it was probably useless. Possibly worse than useless, because the thing he doesn't quite grasp about Nathan, his blind spot, is that telling his son not to do a thing is as good as shoving him in the opposite direction with a boulder. So it's possible that Garland's dire warnings about Audrey being too important to the town to risk a relationship with are among the things in Nathan's head when he shoots Agent Fuck You in an attempt to get her back. We'll probably never know for sure.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Meanwhile, Duke and Audrey are off looking for Hopkins so that he can stop raising the dead. Please stop that. Duke gets to be her eyes since she's immune to seeing dead people. He's so happy! Let him explain how thrilled that makes him! Particularly if he ends up playing interpreter as well. I have a question: where the fuck has Simon fucked off to during all this? Last we saw him he was standing in the Field of Creepy Wildflowers proclaiming about destinies, and now he's given up and let Duke go wander around without trying to nag him into murder some more? Somehow that doesn't seem right. Simon, are you off plotting with the Rev? You are, aren't you. At any rate, Audrey stops in front of the same house we saw earlier, or at least a very similar one on a similar street, oh look there's a red X in a circle spraypainted on the pavement. That's never a good sign. Literally. Never ever. Several signs of struggle later and Duke goes absolutely dead still and pale. Duke, looking like you're going to vomit makes you a terrible liar, I'm just saying. Even if I understand the impulse with a very dead Reverend Driscoll coming up the other side of the porch. Duke has decided to declare his loyalties in favor of getting Audrey out of the way and don't you dare hurt her. Audrey, meanwhile, is more focused on being a good cop and what she can't see than on what's making Duke blanch. Some bantering please fuck off and stay dead type quips later, the Rev delivers his ultimatum: come with me and see what I have in store for you or I'll get someone to kill Audrey for me. Well, that's an easy choice for Duke to make! Also the Rev implies that he hasn't met up with Simon yet, which I dunno if I buy. We all know the Rev is a lying liar who lies.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Nathan has to ride to her rescue so Audrey doesn't have to walk the whole way through the town to the Hopkins residence, and he is mortally offended that Duke left her there. Yes that's nice and also an obvious subject change, Audrey will kick (okay, more likely kiss) him until he coughs up what his father said to him. I would raise objections to her prying at him like this, except that it </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">is </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">a part of their relationship by now and presumably she tried for casual and Nathan clammed up like only a Wuornos can. No more time for prying, anyway, they're here to pry at the woman coming out of the Hopkins house. Luckily they're not wearing their guns or badges, I don't know why, but it conveniently allows them to portray a lost couple looking for someone else's house when Audrey spots the red paint on her hand. Which is over a very pregnant belly. I can't imagine this being significant later or anything! Audrey's spidey-sense is tingling. It says, if dead people are walking around, then there are probably some pretty huge problems with the Rev's people coming up, and one of them's the person raising the ghosts. Okay, it might not say that so blatantly, but it definitely says red Xs and creepy gravedigger Trouble are connected somehow so let's follow Mrs. Hopkins and see if she leads us anywhere good. As it turns out, yes! Down a remote wooded trail oh my god could you two at least be QUIET when you close your car doors? For fuck's sake. Into a clearing, where a bunch of men are dragging a bunch of people out of the backs of vans and trucks and loading them into a shed. Oh, and there's gasoline or something else Distinctly Flammable. And the people are being chloroformed, which is gonna suuuuck for them later and possibly for everyone else if they have the kinds of Troubles that are really bad to set off with fear and pain and disorientation. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">They get as far as, okay, the people in the shed are Troubled, they're going to burn the building, and then the Rev shows up, making it Nathan's turn to blanch. Followed closely by a Duke who's arguing with him, followed immediately by guns pointed at their heads. SERIOUSLY YOU GUYS SUCK AT STEALTH. You should've taken Dwight. After the ad break, the Rev takes longer than it really should take Duke to catch up to what's going on. No, they're not going to burn them alive, they're going to burn them dead after you kill them and take their Troubles, Duke, honestly, what did you think, that they weren't horrible people? Or not this horrible? Sorry, but no, they totally are. Right down to trying to shove the knife into Duke's hand! There's some nice back-and-forth editing going on, where we see things from Audrey's POV without the ghosts, and then from everyone else's, mostly centered on Duke, with them. I say ghosts even though nobody significant's shown up but the Rev. So far. When Audrey and Nathan are shoved on into the clearing, Duke still has the knife, but throws it down when it's even suggested he might be working with the Rev. No. No he is not. Hell no. Fuck no. Cold day, etc. Kyle and the other guy are prepared to put them into the shed for Duke to kill, as though that's not going to bring the wrath of Crocker down on the entire gathering. Seriously. You are all very dumb. Not least because Duke's only child is a woman and (as far as we know) the Crocker Trouble is sex-linked, and also she probably got her poor mama's Trouble of turning into a succubus. So if Duke dies, what the fuck is your solution here? Do they even know about Wade? Etc. (I don't think we ever found out if </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Wade </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">has kids, but given the fuckery of killing him and then of Audrey re-Troubling Duke, I would guess they're probably no longer carrying the Crocker Trouble if he did. Along with the other brother(s) Duke mentioned in 2x01 with the whole firstborn son curse.) </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Any</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">way. Nathan would like them to stop taking orders from a dead man. Audrey would like Kyle to know this is ALL HIS FAULT. Of course he fights the truth, a majority of his identity is predicated on being Not One Of Them. Despite all the proof Audrey throws at him. Simon comes up to deliver color commentary and oh how I wish Duke could punch you in your smug face. Poor Marissa Hopkins looks terrified and I think she's (one of?) the only women here, aside from Audrey and any Troubled women in the shed. She is so not going to have the right words to save her husband from the creepy cult. Especially not against the Rev arguing that Duke can save him! NO. NO HE DOES NOT WANT TO. NO HE HATES YOU ALL. The same guy who gave Duke the knife in the first place picks it up and shoves it into his hand again while he's arguing with dead men, which, okay, I can't entirely blame him for not throwing it down again. Partly because he's debating the merits of this, and partly because he's surrounded by a bunch of people who are ALL ARMED and two of them have guns on his best friends in the world. I'd want a weapon too. Kyle will now beg him to end it! Simon and the Rev will impugn Audrey's good name, first by calling her a liar and then by telling/reminding him that Sarah killed Roy and Lucy killed Simon. We note that Audrey can only hear and see Duke's half of this conversation, and whether or not either he or Nathan ever tell her what happened is an open question. So what she sees is "no, she's my friend," and a lot of hesitation and looking shocked at thin air, and then turning away as if to drop the knife when she tells him to.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Too late! Kyle has decided to commit suicide by Crocker. Son, when you do that, aim for the goddamn heart, not a gut-slice. Cue blood, silver eyes, and a group of people falling around Kyle trying to save him or at least say goodbye to him, in Marissa's case. Nathan is creeped out by the eyes. So say we all! While Kyle dies, we'll have a last conversation between the ghosts, because Garland's going to come up for the farewell ceremonies. Seriously where were all of you fuckers hanging out when you weren't haunting your respective people? Simon claims he knows Garland helped Lucy kill him, and he says no she just beat him to it. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">would like to beat some goddamn </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">answers </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">out of the lot of you cryptic fucks about what happened in Lucy's day. This is one of the few loose ends from this episode still dangling, along with basically everything else from the 1983 Troubles. It makes me all of the grumpy. We know a great deal (by now) about what everyone else did, but just about nothing of what Lucy or James Cogan did, what kind of people they were, etc. And Garland is also something of a mystery still, from that time period. Simon and the Rev snarl at Garland over how Duke has a taste of what he's capable of, he can't be stopped, blah blah blah usual rhetoric that, actually, did kinda turn out to be true. Although I think that was as much or more Mara's fault than Duke's or Audrey's. Garland lays claim to Nathan as a damn good son who'll "take care of our girl," which gives me </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">all the eyebrows</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Every time I think we know who Lucy's maybe-love-interest was, they go and change shit around on us. Or at least her close friends. Though I'd bet she and Garland really were close, and that's some of his attitude problem at the outset with Audrey. Similar-and-not to set off all his hackles and grief. Poor everyone. Duke and Nathan stand there frozen in shock, grief, some combination of the two, a little bit like if they move they'll break the spell of their parents talking about useful, interesting data. I can understand that! </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Then Kyle's really dead and the ghosts shimmer out of existence, with a last half-scared half-longing look from both Duke and Nathan, who know they can't stay but they were COUGHING UP ANSWERS and at least in Nathan's case, wholly justified grief and missing his dad. Duke's a little more dubious on whether or not he </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">should </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">miss his father, but I'm sure there's a little boy in there somewhere who misses the father he never had. It's okay, Duke, he and John Winchester can go off to the afterlife contest for Worst Dad Ever. Audrey is the first to react, grabbing up her gun and ordering everyone else to put theirs the fuck down. Which they do, considering they just witnessed a series of events of who the fuck even knows what and maybe it's not a good idea to make a guy like Duke kill all those people? NO. YOU THINK. She's going to arrest all of them while the boys stare at each other still in shock. Okay, at some point you should snap out of it and help, guys, I know it's been a shit day, but at the very least could you maybe not impede her progress?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">An answer! Sort of an answer! Dave proceeds to chew on Vince for having Kyle dig Garland up three weeks ago. (Take a drink.) Why? Because they need him this time around. No they don't yes they do feel free to filk your own Anything You Can Do (I Can Do Better) here, because the Teagues basically ask for that all the fucking time. O-kay, and this never gets followed up on either: are you saying you can put Humpty Dumpty back together again? Please, enlighten us. But they don't, and I don't remember but I don't think we ever get an answer as to how do you solve a problem like the chief. Instead, we move on over to Audrey's apartment above the Gull, with soft jazz piano and candles and romantic lingerie and wine and Audrey how many dishes did you dirty making the pancakes? Or are you just not a very good housekeeper, which wouldn't be surprising given she spends 90% of her time out solving Troubles. Thaaat's not Nathan at the door, Audrey, that's your daughter-in-law wearing Grady's skin. (Sorry, I don't have enough of Sweeney Todd memorized to find you the right reference there.) With a taser.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Nathan shows up on time, not early, in jeans and a dress shirt and tie and sportcoat that is ADORABLE. You are both the cutest. I have to assume the signs of a struggle are put here on purpose by Arla, because we saw Audrey get knocked straight out by the taser. The nice part about a studio apartment like this is there's not a lot of places to hide, so he puts his gun away pretty fast in favor of examining the scene, and what's this? Is it the necklace Duke was in the middle of putting on when Simon's ghost surprised him at the beginning of the episode, presumably left out onboard the Cape Rouge for Arla to steal and plant? WHY YES. YES IT IS. Duke, get better boat security, please. Nathan leaps to the obvious conclusions - well, not obvious if you think about what Duke's like around Audrey? But obvious for the amount and type of emotional stress of the day, and knowing that Duke can be impulsive in all the wrong ways sometimes. So rather than close it out there, we go over to the Rouge, where Duke is drinking his feelings from the bottom of a bottle of whiskey. Nathan is not hearing reason. Nathan is also flinging the necklace at Duke's face, and he </span><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">must </span><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">be kinda drunk, because instead of offering up anything to defuse the situation he blanches and steps back, which to Nathan is as good as a confession. Sigh. Both of you, sigh. One scuffle later and Duke's in position to grab one of his many guns from underneath the table, Nathan's done counting, and oh yeah, he also has a brand-new Guard tattoo. Excuse Duke while that sobers him the fuck up right quick. And then a pan to the exterior and a gunshot! Which, as we now know, doesn't hit either of them, but at the time it was KIND OF unnerving.</span>Anna Hammetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10095633218958433882noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4271373189216022547.post-37600889920598879412015-12-17T17:05:00.000-08:002015-12-17T17:05:38.873-08:00In the Blood Haven S2E11 Business as Usual<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Previously! Lucy Ripley, Audrey belonging to Haven, Nathan courting Audrey, Duke and the tattoo and his complete lack of answers. Evi working with the Rev and then dying! The Rev being in the middle of all of this. And then dying too! Well, I'm glad about one of those things.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We open with a panover and a few people running to a tune that the Haven soundtrack informs me is called Duke on the Dock. Aww. There's a guy named Reggie running the marathon and who appears to be suffering from extreme thirst? heatstroke? Heatstroke might account for the redness of his face but I'd call it Havenstroke as an explanation for why he suddenly mummified and fell over. Yeah, if I were the race assistant? I'd freak out too. Enter Nathan and Audrey, CSI Haven! Nathan still can't feel the heat but his body sure can sweat despite the lack of nerve sensation, apparently. Which Audrey will now point out thanks ever so. His nerves thank you ever so. They identify the body based on his race number and a list of participants, while Audrey muses over which of her past lives might have run a 10k. Oh Audrey sweetie. Nathan is calling her out on using dealing with her weird history of being other people to escape dealing with the fact that she shot and killed the Rev. Which may have been cleared legally but that doesn't mean it was cleared in the eyes of the small town, and he's got a very good point. Especially given the demonstrated lengths to which the people in said small town will go to to, I guess, defend their side against the other side? Might be the best way to put this. Enter Dwight to clean up Reggie. He knows Reggie, too, apparently, enough to know that he was Troubled but not enough to know what it was. And it turns out they ran in the same circles close enough to know that there was going to be a meeting tomorrow night between Troubled people about how to deal with the backlash from the Rev's shooting. (Hi the Guard?) Nathan is so not about this. Nathan, if only you knew what was in store for you in terms of Troubled people banding together for solidarity. Audrey, on the other hand, is all about this and thinks Nathan should go. I'm trying not to perspective this from the current state of things but it's so hard, there's irony laying around all over the place. (</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A: </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What have I told you about using God to press your shirts.) </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There's also screaming. No, shouting. There's a guy shouting at another guy, the shouter being named Patrick Grolsch and the shout-ee being named Stu, for the sake of designations. Nathan tries to get Patrick to calm down and stop yelling at people and basically accusing a guy of murder possibly with the intent to direct a riot or a mob in poor Stu's direction. It redirects exactly 0% of Patrick's wrath, but it does at least distract him enough for Stu to get away. At which point Patrick blames Nathan and Audrey for everything that's pissing him off in his life at the moment and says that the next time they screw up etc. Oh this is going to go so well. Roll credits!</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Nathan is talking on the phone with someone about a name match and it has to be more, and since we're looking at him through the blinds this is something Very Sekrit And Conspiratorial. Will we get payoff on it this ep? (Actually we will, thankfully.) Meanwhile Audrey is coming up with the autopsy report, which reads, hysterically, dehydration inconsistent with exercise. See, this is why I like Gloria, her official reports might read like that but if she were giving the report in person it'd probably be accompanied by mummy jokes. At the very least. It could be a Trouble but if it's a Trouble it had to have been caused by something other than the race. Well, not had to, but most likely. Ooh, ooh, I have a likely source! It starts with Patrick and ends with Grolsch, and there's a few scurrilous phrases in the middle. No, they're not going there just yet, but Audrey is going WTF over the fact that this isn't their usual coroner. No, Nathan had Dwight use a guy over in Cleves Mills (drink for the It's a Stephen King World After All bit) because he wants to let things die down from the Rev's death. Given the display of public accusation and ire earlier I can entirely see his point, not even so much that someone was shouting in public, but that he feels he has enough support behind him to make threats at the police with impunity. That's never a good sign. In the meantime, they have a second mummy to deal with. Yay. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It's a mummy faceplanted into a tractor. Ew. It turns out the guy had actually warned his wife that something could happen, albeit probably not something like this given that it's most probably someone else's Trouble, and it sounds like he was trying to warn her about </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">his</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Trouble. And who else knew he was Troubled? Well, Stu Pierce for one thing, and the laws of character conservation tells us that this is the Stu who was being shouted at earlier. Stu Pierce was also Troubled, had convinced Barry to go to that meeting for the Troubled that we heard about earlier. All things considered that's a good reason to be stressed and have your Trouble set off, debating whether or not to expose your identity to the world. Especially if, as we learn in the next scene, there's a list of Troubled people! Nathan's theory is that Stu might hate himself so much he hates and is killing everyone like him. Okay, while I buy that whatever stressor caused the Trouble to appear in someone might also be a stressor to a murderous break, not to mention the Trouble appearing nonetheless, the Stu we saw and the guy Annie (mummy #2's wife) described did not seem like the type who hated himself quite that much. That kind of pathology tends to be distinctive enough in television that it gets commented on almost immediately, as soon as the character's described on screen by anyone else. On the other hand, again, the existence of a list or a roster of Troubled people, okay, to go with the more modern analogy I can think of (this goes back to the days of, oh, labor organizations, religious organizations, civil rights organizations, just within my living memory) we all know how dangerous it was for Harry Potter to have compiled a </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">written down list</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> of Dumbledore's army, yes? Yes. Only in this case there's a whole town of Umbridges just </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">waiting</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> to find out who the troublemakers, pun totally intended, are. And anyone who writes their name down on that list will know that. Anyway. They're at Stu's place, and it doesn't look good. In fact it looks tossed. And the second they get in there's the sound of someone struggling against a gag. Fortunately for her she's also right there in the dining room and Audrey and Nathan get to her quickly enough, get the gag off, she manages to pull herself together enough to say that Stu's been kidnapped. And they took the list with them. Audrey sums it up nicely by referring to it as a hit list. Because it is.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Out on the Cape Rouge Duke is talking to Evi's Mom, getting very little in the way of sympathy from her by the sound of his voice and his end of the phone conversation. Something about inventorying her stuff before he sends it back? I'm not sure what that's about, but it sounds awfully distant and clinical for someone who's likely just that day or maybe only marginally earlier been told her daughter died. As Duke packs up her stuff, though, he finds the smaller Crocker box. Ah-hah! With a note inside, no less. One wonders how much she paid for the box, or if she just stole it back. Irrelevant to the gesture, but it would amuse me. The note tells him that in case things go bad, he should have this, which says actually quite a bit about her expectations of making it out of Haven alive, not that that mitigates her stupidity and recklessness. If anything it makes it worse, considering she would have known that she was in real and lethal danger and... did nothing? Ran out into a street open to sniper fire? Dammit, Evil. On the other hand at least she is sharing the information for him to look at the box under the iguana lamp, which gives us the Crocker name, which considering this box was made before the advent of electricity makes no fucking sense and continues to have no explanation. I mean, if it were inlaid with </span><a href="http://geology.com/articles/fluorescent-minerals/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">some kind of mineral</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> in a mosaic or something that spelled out Crocker in glowing rocks, I'd even buy that before I'd stop gnawing on this as a what the hell. So many glowing rocks there are. So many. But no, instead it's been painted or finished or something? With some sort of paint that glows under an electrically powered light, a hundred and fifty-two hundred years before electricity became a thing. Still unexplained! Meh. It's impressive, though, and Duke stares at his family name with a suitably impressed WTF face. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Audrey is taking Colleen's victim statement back in Stu's living room, getting an attacker description. She doesn't have much to go on but she does remember a tattoo or a mark on his leg. Nathan immediately goes to the Guard tattoo, but it was numbers instead. And Audrey immediately connects this to race numbers, Patrick Grolsch. I mean so would I, but I'd also give the poor woman a picture of Patrick Grolsch maybe in a lineup before I do anything like bring him in for questioning, because he sounded belligerent and "a three and an eight" are not at all probative. </span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRJRHJVxF78bjqTB4xxZG3d7ORR3QNXGbReH7RPE7Tc5j7y9cIBA106fYXvRBym8WObrQNzMG6crOe5eJWYxsSvFY3oli8fCSNwnp3SWP8OE21XYcBQ0j9x3fxeIBqWLjvQO_E2DFobk8/s1600/haven211cc02.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRJRHJVxF78bjqTB4xxZG3d7ORR3QNXGbReH7RPE7Tc5j7y9cIBA106fYXvRBym8WObrQNzMG6crOe5eJWYxsSvFY3oli8fCSNwnp3SWP8OE21XYcBQ0j9x3fxeIBqWLjvQO_E2DFobk8/s320/haven211cc02.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Audrey, apparently, is not me. Because the very next scene is Audrey with Patrick Grolsch in interrogation. Telling him that they saw his race number, they saw him arguing with Stu at the race, and she all but flat out says they can prove he kidnapped Stu. He, on the other hand, has the entirely reasonable argument that why would he kidnap someone who can dessicate people with a thought/look/touch/we don't know yet. Well, he could have used his own Trouble. He doesn't, as one might expect, take violent offense to the insinuation that he's Troubled, but he does point out in the next breath that pretty much all they have is half a number on a leg, no description, no anything. He is also a lawyer. Whether or not he's a relevant lawyer is up for grabs considering nothing he says is anything that one can't get off of watching crime TV. It's enough for Nathan at least, who is playing it safe and releasing him as soon as the guy threatens a public lawsuit. Much to Audrey's fury, she wants to know why Nathan abruptly divested himself of his spine. Because, whether she likes it or not, he is trying to protect her from people who view her killing of the Rev as less about protecting a little girl and more about protecting Troubled people and yeah, especially right now this ought to sound incredibly familiar to everyone, yes? Yes. In this case the Troubled people are the designated Untouchables, Undesirables, the ones who it's okay to victimize. Audrey, on the other hand, stopped the Rev from victimizing the one girl, stopped him from taking another undesirable person (who, let's not forget, also may have killed and eaten a serial killer, I'm not even sure what part of that sentence would have gotten where with whom) out of the consideration of the town. Which Nathan points out! Both the cannibal girl and the fact that the Rev was one of those nebulous creatures known as a Pillar of the Community. I tell you, the kind of community he looked like he was building with the guns and the fire and the brimstone didn't look all that welcoming, but, Pillar of the Community he was. Audrey continues to be pissed, and we might be getting another look under her angry spikey defenses when she points out that Nathan hasn't said what he thinks of her shooting, either. Does he think she did the right thing? Since we've already established in previous episodes that his opinion matters to her this carries somewhat more weight than they've emphasized in this particular episode alone, but even a person just picking up now should be able to tell this is a cause of some consternation for her. Yes. He thinks she did the right thing, he knows she did what she had to do. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">BUT</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, and it's a huge but folks, but that doesn't mean that the town isn't after them, it doesn't mean they can push on and violate procedure, and it doesn't mean he wants to be under indictment right now for violating rights or whatever Grolsch would have him brought up on. Let's also not forget that Nathan was relieved of duty until very very recently, replaced with a Rev puppet. He certainly hasn't forgotten! So, okay. These are all very good arguments, not that Audrey likes it any better by her abrupt and snappish departure. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Over on the street Duke is accosting the Teagues as they deliver the papers on their tandem bicycle? It's hard to tell when it's behind them and the newspaper stand. Anyway, Duke would like to show them something and get their opinion. On the Crocker box. Which definitely causes some oh shit reactions that neither of them is apparently capable of hiding, dude, Vince, no. You have failed your bluff check, give it up. Dave is somewhat less inclined to hide things, or he's just hiding behind a veneer of interest and willingness to cooperate? I wouldn't be surprised by either, at this point. Duke pushes their ability to sell ignorance of what's going on with the box by running a light over the top and showing the Crocker logo. Vince pushes everyone's credulity of his ignorance. I'll hit pause on things here to say that while I wonder if the Teagues didn't have some historical knowledge of what was going on, especially with Vince's nervousness, it's also entirely possible that Vince knows the boxes from his friendship with Simon and that's what's making him squirm and rub his hands. At any rate. Dave looks it over, pronounces it familiar and from one of the town's early silversmiths, and promises to look into it overtop of Vince's protestations that they're too busy to take on another project. And </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">then</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> they will add further pushing of the credulity by covering up Vince's reluctance and their parting of ways on the box research by claiming bad shellfish? Yeah, I don't know what even they think they're doing here. Well, I know what the show thinks it's doing, it's pointing out that the Teagues have many things to hide and that they're constitutionally incapable of it, but I have no idea what the Teagues themselves, in character, think they're doing. And yes, Duke will hold onto the box thank you very much, because if he lets them have it he will in all likelihood never see it again, and he knows it. Dave promises to get back to him with the information, though. And he might even follow it through. Vince does look like he's swallowed some bad shellfish as he tells Dave he will stop him, and Dave just makes some comment about this town facing its realities. Given recent events in the last season </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">oh dear god.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> And Vince is calling for someone to come see him about a job. That's not ominous at all! I hate you both. Still. Again. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It's night. Duke is coming home to the Cape Rouge. There's a light on? A flashlight? moving around inside his ship. So he does what any enterprising and considerably illicit young man would do, he gets a weapon from one of his secret hideyholes! We can only tell it's a gun by the light glinting off of it in one angle because everything about this sequence is filmed dark, including the combat that results. However, just going by sheer size as compared to Duke I think we can be pretty sure who it is before Duke turns on the light and yelps "Sasquatch?" (How much do I miss that nickname? ALL OF THE MUCH. Oh Duke.) Not that Dwight's saying anything, he's going for the box. Duke is also going for the box! The fight will now proceed to devolve into farce when the box breaks apart, revealing a key. Not that they can tell what it is at first until they go diving. Duke ends up on the side with the key, Dwight with the box, so Duke grabs a boat hook and Dwight grabs a... sword. Yeah, I'm not sure where this is going at this point, other than me going straight to the kitchen to laugh my ass off in relative privacy. I'm also reasonably sure by everyone's expressions and the staging of this that this is meant to devolve into something more and more absurd until, as Duke does, they look at each other and go to the talking. Dwight isn't giving up the box. Duke isn't giving up the key! Dwight isn't giving up who hired him or pointed him or told him, but Duke pretty much knows that this is Vince, that Vince and Dave are fighting, and that whatever's got them fighting has got to be pretty damn interesting. And given that his bloodline, his father, and his family are all tied up in this, he would like to know what the fuck. Dwight has no actual dog in this race, but yes, he is somewhat curious. It actually ends up being Duke who puts the boat hook down first and reaches for the alcohol. That is not nearly enough alcohol, Duke. He then lays out the situation for Dwight (who is standing there slowly regaining his breath and still looking deeply wary. with his long hair. that is still very trippy and also very surfer dude, which actually goes well with Balfour): namely that Vince and Dave have all the answers, somehow the answers are causing them to fight over the Crocker Box of questions, and either Duke and Dwight can go another few rounds till they're both pounded and bleeding and not know why, or they can get the damn answers themselves. He seals this proposal with an offer of a drink. I were Dwight, I'd at least take the drink. The Teagues make my head hurt. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Audrey is not enjoying this stakeout, not by that look on her face as she's drinking coffee. Nathan isn't enjoying this either, he's not enjoying being in the position of having to stop Audrey from doing what she wants, almost needs to do, helping Troubled people. He's probably also not enjoying being in the position of knowing this guy's bad or dirty somehow and not being able to do anything about it, and having to make sure Audrey sticks absolutely to the book, which she's chafing at. Sure, she put an APB out on Grolsch's car, that's paperwork, that's a paper trail he can then use to get her run up on charges of police harassment, etc. Which Nathan is keenly aware of, and Audrey is too angry to give a shit right now. Nathan, given that he now has to wrestle with Audrey as well as the anti-Trouble brigade, is feeling like he's being made out as the bad guy. Audrey doesn't really apologize, but does explain that she's clinging to helping Troubled people as the thing that comes from neither Audrey nor Lucy, but just comes from her. From over at the point of view of season five we have all of the hysterical laughter for what we know now as opposed to then. Ahem. In the moment, well, she's not wrong. A touch compulsive, in dire need of extra coping mechanisms to deal with her non-standard human identity issues, but not wrong. Nathan, meanwhile, will point out that she's tripping merrily down the path of suspension, firing, arrest. None of which is productive. Audrey will proceed to not listen and, the second Patrick emerges from the building she's going to go arrest him for jaywalking. Nathan has so much eyeroll let him show you it.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0MNlT1B1kXEuLiEoKn6YNzBfwzz-3a7aB_jiArATTlOhXlrVxxptbzHQDgr5wr75z4o7Aw0zxGSO3C0i9yaDvvRrGmYdMv8sDFssPkYx9X6IWORL0Ln0Qzgc_q9HkKV6-AD3_nBdoSs8/s1600/haven211cc03.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0MNlT1B1kXEuLiEoKn6YNzBfwzz-3a7aB_jiArATTlOhXlrVxxptbzHQDgr5wr75z4o7Aw0zxGSO3C0i9yaDvvRrGmYdMv8sDFssPkYx9X6IWORL0Ln0Qzgc_q9HkKV6-AD3_nBdoSs8/s320/haven211cc03.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Dave is on the phone with Duke giving him and us the information that the box was commissioned by FitzWilliam Crocker in 1786 and designed as a set, the one Duke has being the smaller of the two. No word on what they were used for, though. So! Duke somehow manages to relay that information to Dwight, standing right there, I think we're meant to infer that Dwight can hear him or can interpret the other side of the conversation well enough. In any case, he definitely interpreted that Duke is in fact a very practiced liar and con artist and this isn't really conducive to him trusting Duke or judging that he's doing the right thing. Duke has a shrug for that. And a wary look for Dwight smiling when he says that if it turns out not to be the right thing, he can always change his mind. That's the nicest threat I think I've heard in a while. Duke moves quickly on from there to the key, it probably goes in the larger box, and no, he didn't hear anything about it from his father who confined their conversations to hey get me some smokes and beer. Considering how young Duke was when his father died? Remember, he was holding Lucy Ripley's hand in that photo which was taken around the time his father died so, what, seven? ish? Who the fuck in Haven is selling a seven year old beer, because it had damn well better be someone who knows it's going to his father, and that's only marginally better because then whoever it is is basically aiding and abetting a drunk and most likely very negligent parent. Good job, mysterious liquor store owner. We have a glimmer of bonding here when Dwight comments that he knows how that goes, and then refuses to elaborate. Right, then, Duke's got other ideas than sharing bad dad stories, if they find his Dad's old boat they might be able to find the box! It's as good a theory as any. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Nathan and Audrey are fighting. Which is extra funny because they're both ignoring Grolsch being cuffed to a post. It stops being funny when Nathan points out that this is by the book harassment and she must want to get fired because this is fucking ridiculous. They get as far as arguing about whether or not she'll be okay, then he'll be okay, if she gets fired, which leads to a very awkward confession of feelings. With a handcuffed dude behind them. You guys have the weirdest fucking timing. Before she can deal with that in any aloud, spoken way the fire alarm goes off. Which, if we're assuming Stu's mummification touch is his Trouble, that means the fire has another cause. Audrey, naturally, looks to Grolsch for that answer even though at the moment with him cuffed to a post she has no reason to. So I kind of question how justified she is in all of this? At the same time, it's true that Grolsch was awfully panicky about his yelling about harassment when he was so calm earlier in the police station. Now he's yelling about how Audrey should go up and check on Stu. Well, fine, maybe she'll just do that! Which she is perfectly confident in doing because what the hey, immunity. Not that Grolsch knows that, and we will all snicker because of this. Nathan still, possibly, hasn't had quite enough time to fully internalize her immunity, and in any case the fact that Grolsch is so encouraging of her going up there is making him very edgy. And shouty. Audrey is not having with this, and besides there's Patrick Grolsch to deal with. Who, well, let's face it, if she's able to get Stu's testimony he'll be going away for kidnapping for a good while. As long as Audrey can get Stu out! Which given the quantity of smoke and the flames already lighting up the floor when she kicks the door in, that could be in question.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When we come back from commercial break the fire is pouring out of the top of the building but thankfully doesn't seem to have damaged the interior structural integrity any. At least, she's able to cross the room and get Stu untied without difficulty. Not what he expected, he's a good guy, he shouts a warning at her about not touching the sweat on his body, but she's immune, so it's fine. Somewhat less fine or at least less reassuring is the way he gasps and talks about "you're Audrey Parker" like she's some sort of magic saint come down to rescue him. Ulp. Some sort of reverence, not quite to the point of divinity but definitely set apart from other people in some profound way. Fortunately Audrey doesn't have time for that either, and it'd be easy to pass it off as his relief at being rescued by the one person who can quickly and efficiently help him. Especially with burning limbs coming down behind them. I'd give him another two, five minutes tops before the smoke inhalation or a burning falling beam got him or both. Five minutes if he was lucky.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Meanwhile Duke is cleaning out a bilge? Sump? Something damp and nasty in someone else's boat and no, there's nothing there. Dwight even makes comment on who the hell would go fishing around down there if they didn't have to, and asks if he's sure this was Simon's boat. Yep, Duke's sure, he even remembers who his father sold it to (which may not necessarily be the current owner, given time elapsed, but as it turns out it is). And Dwight would like to know if it's so valuable, how come Simon didn't tell his son about it? Well, Dwight, when a father screws up very, very much... Duke's own answer is worse than that, he claims not to know that his father liked him very much, and he's sure his father didn't trust him. Oh honey. Not that Simon ends up being father of the year when we do finally get a glimpse of him and in fact he won't give us a sense of contradicting either of these notions. And, oh Duke. Sweetie. Dwight doesn't have it much better, he ventures a guess that Duke's father was bad at telling him things, and he does it in such a way that Duke (with a very 'oh really/why are you telling me this' look) gently pushes to inquire what </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">is</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Dwight's Trouble, and by silent extension why is this a big thing? It's Haven, there are so </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">many</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> reasons why a father not telling his kid of the family Trouble could be a mess. Well, it turns out Dwight's Trouble, the bullet magnet thing, first kicked in in Afghanistan. And his father didn't tell him even though he knew Dwight was going to enlist, because of this demented need not to admit that his family line is Troubled. Yep. Father of the year, that one, too. Saving us from even more awkward confessions is Sal, the guy Simon sold his boat to, coming down the stairs wondering what the hell you two. Not even in a get off my boat sense, in a why the hell are you poking around the ass end of the boat. Duke tries to calm the guy down, explains that he's looking around on the last boat Simon Crocker owned, though not why, and Sal contradicts him that this was the second last. It turns out he sold this one to Sal when he bought this other boat that turned out to be the Cape Rouge! Which he then gave to the guy Duke won it off of in poker, a Ray Fiegler up in Castle Rock. We're going to pause here for a second while we twitch uncontrollably at an unseen offscreen person with the initials RF, from Castle Rock, having been in linchpin position in Haven. All those of you who have read enough Stephen King know exactly why. Ahem. But yes, Duke, essentially your father gave you your boat. I think at this point it's not even a question whether or not he left RF (*twitch*) instructions to get it to Duke somehow, lose it in a poker game or trade it for a favor or what have you. It's the kind of indirect, backhanded thing he would do because he doesn't know how to fucking talk to another human being at this point. Poor Duke. He doesn't look like he knows how to handle the idea that his father gave him basically his home and his livelihood, because that's what the Cape Rouge is to him. Along with the whole Jack Sparrow a boat is freedom speech.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Over at Stu and Colleen's place, they're getting the full statement of what happened. And apparently it was as simple as they were talking, both men were getting nervous about the meeting with one wanting to back out and the other simply getting nervous, Stu grabbed his friend's arm and that was when he realized what had happened. He got scared, ran home, didn't have time to warn his friend before Barry touched him. Which is entirely plausible given how fast we've seen that Trouble work. Oh everyone. Nathan's quick on the stick with needing to get him out of town, which is true. It's not just Patrick Grolsch, who will definitely be going away for a good long time, kidnapping? Attempted murder? With a couple of cops in the building? Yeah. But there's also a lot of people who are still highly anti-Trouble and motivated to do something about it, and at this point Audrey's shot and killed the Rev and got another person arrested who, we don't know how highly placed Grolsch was in their organization? But it's still only going to piss people off more. Stu, with a Trouble that does need to be closely managed in ways that would make him stand out, would be better out of town. Fine, says Colleen, then I'm going with you. And no, she doesn't care that they'll have to stay away until the Troubles are over, and she doesn't care that he can't touch her, she's with him for better or for worse. We have a lovely closeup on their hands on the couch, not touching but clearly intimate, and then a closeup of Nathan and Audrey in almost identical posture not looking at the intimacy. Which compares the two of them well, and also compares Colleen's reaction to Barry's wife Anne's, in a nicely subtle way. The acceptance of the Troubles and the risks they bring with the rejection of them and the pain they've caused. Not that either woman is portrayed as being wrong or reckless or stupid, but they're both powerful reactions that the townsfolk have to deal with in themselves and in each other. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Outside as the somewhat beleaguered couple is packing up to leave, Stu expresses somewhat clumsy gratitude that Nathan took the invite list off of Grolsch, I say somewhat clumsy because it </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">is</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> an awkward turn of phrase to explain where the list went so that we didn't have that plot thread dangling, but at least it's a line reference. Rather than take it off into the wild unknown (or burn it, which is what I would have done) he presses it upon Nathan, and they have a brief conversation over whether or not people are already irreparably divided. I think we're meant to see that it echoes his conversation with Audrey, going by the glances they exchange over the next thirty seconds or so, and in some ways it does. On the other hand, this conversation is about divisions in the population and whether or not they can be healed, which is a whole other argument when you get into who can pass and who can hide and who can't do either, because of temperament or Trouble or both. Whereas Audrey's argument was more that the Troubled are people who have a right to exist and be happy, or as happy as anyone can be, regardless, and didn't address the overall social dynamics of the town. And all of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">that</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> is obviously a much more complicated issue the show has touched on over time. And for a more extensive discussion of the subject, one could look at any of the essays about the X-Men comic book series-es, most likely numbering in the dozens by now. It's a very old topic of discussion that spans several social quandaries.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And now that I've thoroughly digressed, Nathan is writing something down while Audrey walks up, and it's nothing to do with the list. Nathan's got this little not quite self-satisfied, maybe more like life-satisfied smile on his face and expresses quite a bit of optimism and empathy regarding the now-departed couple's situation. Aww. He asks if Audrey's thinking (presumably cued by her pensive/worried/sad expression) about what he said about Haven not being safe for the Troubled anymore, and she's come around to questioning whether or not she should have killed the Rev. To his credit, Nathan tells her that she did what she thought was right, what she felt she had to do, by implication. And no, that doesn't necessarily mean she didn't make things worse because she totally did, but she didn't have a whole lot of options at the time, either. But more than that, she's having an existential crisis, taking the form of how is she supposed to know right from wrong if she doesn't even know who she is. Nathan totally knows who she is, in one of the more adorable non-explicit I-love-yous of the series. I'm not kidding, that's pretty much what he's saying. And doing, in an expression of love as a performative act, love as a verb, he's tracked down Lucy Ripley for her, Lucy Ripley the original version. Audrey is, mm, gobsmacked seems like a good word to use, we'll go with gobsmacked, and first asks him how he did this and then hugs him in mid explanation, which for a man who hasn't felt another person's touch in a few years is quite a gesture. Not that she knows it because he stopped himself from admitting it a minute or so ago. And the answer to her question is both banal and touching, the banality comes from legwork, analysis (*waves!*) putting together clues and casefiles, photographs, and hiring a PI from Portland. Maine, not Oregon, there will be no Grimm crossover as amusing as that might be. The touching part is that it had to require a considerable amount of attention and work outside of work for pretty much handing her the information in case she might want to do something about it. But then from the look she gives him she is very much aware of and touched by this. Even more so when he talks about her going and talking to original Lucy like he's not sure she's going to come back, of course she's going to come back, silly. And even if she can't say the words (look, we all know what she means by you're not just my partner either) she can at least give him some ideas. Also this might be the one time waving around our trollfaces and screaming has ever worked. Oh Nathan. You so gone.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So. Lucy. She's got a nice little cottage on the water in wherever, and having listened to the soundtrack way too much I have to note that she has the Colorado Kid theme playing over the scene where they meet. She's fishing over the water behind her house, and seems startled but not surprised to see Audrey. And it turns out Audrey, that is to say Laudrey, told her she'd be coming? She'd be back? 27 years ago. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Well</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> now. After the break they're sitting in some rather nice blue chairs on the edge of the water (no symbolism there, of course not, nothing about sitting still watching everything flow by in the visuals. actually possibly not, it might just be a picturesque house they found to film at, but the symbolism is appreciated nonetheless) and talking about how Audrey as she is now doesn't remember anything, and that must mean they got her. Um? Who got her? Lucy doesn't know, but when Laudrey showed up she was on the run, she had Lucy's memories, and she was scared. Sadly, Lucy doesn't know who she is, but she knows Laudrey was from Haven and she knows Laudrey had been helping people with "strange Troubles." Though by the way she talks about it probably not the nature of these Troubles. She says that someone had died, and Laudrey had discovered a terrible secret, how all these Troubles had started and how she could finally stop them. And the people chasing her were trying to erase her, and they would erase original Lucy too if she told anyone, ever, except her, if she came back. So apparently Laudrey anticipated her amnesiac self returning, at least! And that she'd need to know. And sadly that's probably all she knows, except then she says something that causes Audrey to push. It turns out Simon Crocker came looking for her after, said there were people coming after her and he could help. But she didn't tell him anything, she didn't trust him. Given that it's Simon Crocker, as well she might not!</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifnOjqSM3WTnL4eUaJxCOdybf-VhRHgSTja5KzXDC-VPTrBP1dfMSQLRV6fzkFmUhRorNjYzCgwrjT-kOGK-CvF4iGfkhuVVmG7M9b8pI2bjV-ygC0olGaenEt3YMt6pSTuxEkqGYoKUU/s1600/haven211cc05.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifnOjqSM3WTnL4eUaJxCOdybf-VhRHgSTja5KzXDC-VPTrBP1dfMSQLRV6fzkFmUhRorNjYzCgwrjT-kOGK-CvF4iGfkhuVVmG7M9b8pI2bjV-ygC0olGaenEt3YMt6pSTuxEkqGYoKUU/s320/haven211cc05.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Simon Crocker also didn't trust anyone, including his own son. Since Duke's been smuggling on the Cape Rouge for the last, oh, call it ten-plus years, assuming he started when he got the boat? He's having to clamber around in some really unpleasant, unused, manky areas of the boat to try and find what the fuck his father left him. Dwight is not helping so much as summarizing for the audience and looking vaguely amused and sympathetic, offering up the very faint wisp of a hope that Simon had good intentions for his son and his little toy surprise, wherever he put it. I'm not entirely sure Dwight believes what he's saying either, but it's the best he has to offer. Where it turns out to be is in </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">between </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">the walls, halfway down the hatch, in a sealed barrel, and they'll skip the difficulties of prying up the wall and getting a rope around the damn thing, which is probably for the best. Even if it amuses me to picture Duke swearing like a sailor and Dwight swearing like a Ranger. Because really. Dwight handing over the crowbar to pry it open is accompanied by a musical cue and a camera focus on the crowbar that reminds us that could as easily have been a threat as assistance, and will shortly become the former. But hey! There's the giant matching Crocker box of murder to go along with the matching expressions of satisfaction and curiosity. Dwight looks actually kind of puppyish-hopeful, which is… almost adorable considering he MUST have known what the Crocker Trouble is, given his position with the Guard. At least one would THINK. And on the other hand that would assume that they had that part of the town and its interactions all laid out at this point, which as we'll go into in a sec isn't necessarily a safe assumption. All of this is, okay: brass knuckles, throwing stars, derringer, and some kind of … spear head from the Templars? I'm not joking, that's what it looks like, except maybe it got attached to a dagger hilt at some point, unclear. And then there's a dagger with a jeweled hilt, jeweled sheath, the Very Important Journal, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">more </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">guns and knives, some tied-together papers… honestly the only thing missing to make this a real murder kit is the body disposal supplies. And since he gave him a boat as well as a murder box the body disposal supplies, you might say, already came with! Nothing says permanent body disappearance like dumping it into the Marianas.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Now </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Dwight looks concerned, except here comes Audrey to announce that they need to talk, which means Duke's leaving his dad's murder box alone (with a very intrigued looking Dwight, no less, with that expression I hope he has a mini camera) to go find out what those ominous words portend. More Simon! Is the answer. Though he starts off with I need to tell you some shit, and Audrey trades him with okay cool story but I found Lucy Ripley and BY THE WAY I think your father was looking for me and found the original instead and I Have Concerns. This is exactly the distraction Dwight was looking for to close up the box and take it away! And while I'm all for Duke not having to learn all this shit the hard way, that's not exactly establishing trust. I don't think Duke believes the line he's feeding Dwight, maybe a little bit hurt, but he had to expect this. Personally I'm going with that's why he kept the one knife out, particularly with the exchange about how he said he might change his mind. Yep. Dwight gets the first sucker punch in, because despite his lack of stealth on the boat he </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">is </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">still a Ranger thanks, except apparently he's forgotten about fighting lefties. Never expose your right side like that! Aaand that'd be a bicep slice, Duke acting really fucking weird, and Dwight going hoshit. This first time, the blood absorption and silver eyes take quite awhile, I'm not sure that's entirely for dramatic effect, and I really have to wonder just HOW long Duke's had his Trouble activated in potentia without touching Troubled blood, as it were. Since Audrey shot the Rev? Since he found out his father was lying about everything? Since fighting with Dwight this ep? One of our readers suggested since Evi got shot, which would be an appropriately traumatizing stressor. Dwight tries to start another fight, or more accurately tries to keep Duke from going all crazy-silver-eyed murder-monster, since that probably IS what he knows of the Crocker Trouble, and no. Rejected. No crowbar for you, dude, have a very long shove into the water. Honestly the only reason that doesn't kill Dwight is probably Because Narrative, because that much force should totally have broken ribs and probably sternum and possibly punctured a lung and/or heart. It's possible we're meant to believe, since we know about the bullet magnet Trouble already, that he's got a vest under there? But he doesn't, going by the set of his clothing. That's cloth and body and muscle and sensitive organs under there that took the brunt of that hit. Which I think Duke knows, though he's trying for dismissive about whether or not Dwight's okay. I don't entirely buy it, on account of he's way too shaky in all other respects? But he's not wrong about the Ranger part. If Dwight's not dead he'll probably find a way to be okay. Audrey would like to know what the fuck with the murder box now. I would, idly, like to know if the top of it glows too and what it might say, but we don't find that out ever. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Later that evening, there's a handful of people in the Herald for the meeting of Troubled people that is totally not the Guard no of course not that would be Silly. Maybe potential recruits, though? I don't recognize any of the extras offhand. Vince has all of the objections to having the meeting here, presumably because he'd rather not cross the streams, as such, and I have all the questions over how "we are not Troubled." Um. The magical moving tattoo on your arm from s3 begs to differ, Vince. Dave I can at least buy as not Troubled, just a halfling adoptee. But still and nonetheless. Vince thinks Dave is starting a war, which he'll have no part of, no seriously this little exchange makes almost no fucking sense given Vince as leader of the Guard in s3. And all the stuff between him and Max Hansen and the Rev's people and Vince you may not WANT a war but you've been preparing for one for AGES. At least 27 years, to be precise. Unless he thinks the Guard isn't ready, or the town isn't so desperate that they need to know about the Guard yet? Not to mention if Vince is the one chiefly involved with the Guard, apart from starting a war what on earth is it that he thinks Dave's doing? Anyway. Dwight walks in to update Vince on the situation, which is, to borrow the proper military terminology, fubar. So very fubar. Vince makes the point that if he'd given Dwight full intel going in, he'd've been scared and - he says or, but I claim and - would've just killed Duke. Rather than risking activating him LIKE HE JUST DID. Well fuck. Yeah, having an active Crocker running around town is a long, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">private </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">conversation to have later. Not in front of, say, Nathan. Who is not here to shut them down, as Dwight needles him to start, but here to participate and declare a side, such as he's willing to even admit out loud that there </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">are </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">sides here. Vince isn't quite pointing that out to Nathan such that he's telling him to pick a side, but he's damn well implying it with very heavy handed looks and anvils. Nathan''s on the side that involves not treating the Troubled as second-class citizens, and he's willing to take the risk of people looking at him very much askance for that, since thanks ever so he </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">is </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Troubled. Also that whole bit about he's got to do what he thinks is right has a bit of a look to him reminiscent of when he was talking to Audrey earlier, gee I wonder whose words he's echoing. In a fit of Doylist irony, he claims that sometimes risks pay off. And sometimes, says that look Vince and Dwight exchange, they just fuck everything up more! Honestly where I land with this whole meeting subplot is that they needed to spell out the Guard a lot earlier, and firm that potential plotline up, because while Vince and Dwight's relationship makes sense after the Guard is a thing in s3, it does NOT work with this meeting and the tone this meeting sets of civilian scrappy pull-together hopeful group, versus the almost survivalist militia tone of the guard later.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Over on the Cape Rouge it's also nightfall, which suggests that either it was closer to sunset than the scene where Duke learned he was a Troubled-blood-sponge implied, or they took some time out to calm down, grab food, and then tackle the piles and piles of data. Because Audrey seems to be going through the firearms for proper maintenance and safety first, then diving for the Crocker journal, while Duke's trying to bend the crowbar. No, no matter how frustrated you get that's not happening, sorry Duke. Actually not sorry, come to think of it. Audrey calls out cause and effect of cutting Dwight, superstrength and creepy eyes. Though she doesn't mention the eyes part directly, probably for the best. How about the ledger? That's like helping, yes? Yes, there's names and dates going back hundreds of years, it's a Crocker family kill list. Also history, I suppose, but definitely kill list. The last pages are of course in Simon's writing, indicating that he did not so much die in an accident, and he's somehow got hold of a picture of Dave and Sarah, and another of Lucy, and he's left instructions for Duke to kill AudSarLu because that's his life's work. Um, say Audrey and Duke. All of the um. And the what the fuck. I think you guys need more booze to start poking this hedgehog.</span></div>
<br />Kitty Chandlerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05524808952260453841noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4271373189216022547.post-29924056187499450552015-12-12T16:27:00.000-08:002015-12-12T16:27:01.924-08:00Wings of a Dove Haven S5E24 The Widening Gyre<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Wings of a Dove Haven S5E24 The Widening Gyre</span></div>
<b id="docs-internal-guid-5f3d09d5-989b-2f65-87b0-a2e0d161947c" style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Any ep title they can play on-the-nose with we can do better? Ahem. (For those of you who've noticed, Cash covered this one.) (</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A: </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Though my FIRST thought was Lonesome Dove, because even MORE on the nose.) Look, anytime anyone invokes Yeats' Second Coming for TV we are </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">going </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">to at minimum tease and possibly mock. Do you know how many times that poem has been overused? There's an </span><a href="http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/TheSecondComing" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">entire TV Tropes page</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> about it. (Suffer with us!) However, if we start in earnest now we'll never stop, so: previously, on Haven! Dave took out Croatoan's ability to wipe memories and erase time, and died in the doing, breaking Vince. Dwight is cracking at the edges to the tune of Not Losing Anyone Else, Audrey flails at the barn and acquires a Howard, however briefly due to Duke fucking with the aether core and going full evil. Whether that's possession or his choice is still severely questionable! Enjoy trying to figure it out! Fuck knows we're not sure.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMPELA0eBtau5Li_IIWx7OUXUjk7oSd7kyvBahBt8HwlOuMtAFOlzQ_0xoCqxwhuOCxpjdGGzTRHOTCXiwxJ0JJfYO8Dw6VVn5Hk0N611ThTntFEicbArGsrT_sEv8Lr_q2URt_91cQUI/s1600/haven524cc01.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMPELA0eBtau5Li_IIWx7OUXUjk7oSd7kyvBahBt8HwlOuMtAFOlzQ_0xoCqxwhuOCxpjdGGzTRHOTCXiwxJ0JJfYO8Dw6VVn5Hk0N611ThTntFEicbArGsrT_sEv8Lr_q2URt_91cQUI/s320/haven524cc01.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Other things we're not sure of: how Audrey got from augh fuck it's Croatoan no NOT hi-Dad to lying on this bed having nightmares/flashbacks. Did someone whammy her with a Trouble? Did she get knocked unconscious? Is this a mindscape where Croatoan's setting her up in a child's room to get the upper hand as Audrey, I'm Your Father? We have no idea to start with! Though the mindscape one held some water for awhile. Also she's lost her jacket and will leave it off through this episode, for maximum White Shirt Purity. Will she get blood on it? Maybe not yet, but I'm just waiting for that one. Certainly there's some gore! And yes, as it turns out, Audrey's locked into this room, which, let's take a look at it, shall we? The bed is maybe a double, old wood and light colored linens, floral wallpaper (white and red and pink over yellow/cream, I have no idea if that's on purpose but The Yellow Wallpaper is one of those Stories They Make You Read In School by Charlotte Perkins Gilman [yes, I twitched too] about a woman slowly going crazy and fixating on the yellow wallpaper), a white teddy bear sitting in a wicker rocking chair, sideboard table with lamp and maybe jewelry box and other stuff that looks like it belongs more adolescent girl than child. Ceiling sloped so it looks like an attic, dormer windows, glass chandelier, full breakfast set out on the desk, old-style pitcher and washbasin on another sideboard, small dresser by the door with a bird under glass. That's not going to get sinister real quick or anything, with the symbolism incoming. Lovely rug that's at least intended to evoke Persian-style whether or not it's the real article. Dress dummy, for inexplicable purpose given that nothing else in the rest of the room looks like crafting is going on here. And I should know, given the state of my craft room. The whole room and what we can see of the hall outside (thank you whoever picked a painting for behind Shatner that looks like a variation on the theme of woman being ravished by deity) is designed to evoke wealth, old money that doesn't have to show off, it just is. Knowing later that this is a Teagues hideout originally makes that part make sense, but what is in fact incredibly creepy is that Croadaddy stuck Audrey in the room that looks very much like a little girl's room, with touches that range from grown adult to teenager, just in case we needed to be reminded that he's an asshole. Here: have some emotional manipulation putting Audrey in the inferior position! That's not subtle at all. After a few seconds of pounding and shouting to be let out, CroaShatDaddy walks in and calls her "dove." AUGH. AUGH AUGH FUCK YOU AUGH. Since we know that was Charlotte's nickname for her as well. Audrey's face seems to also say FUCK YOU AUGH. Croatoan is also perfectly in control of the situation allow him to demonstrate by leaving the door open behind him; Audrey's little eyedart there indicates she's aware that if he's being this casual about it he almost assuredly </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">can </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">make her stay put in less pleasant ways. Here, Audrey, eat the creepy manipulative fairy food! That won't go badly at all! CroaShat continues to disturb us mightily by claiming responsibility for the nickname dove, presumably as a dual nod to the fact that Mara </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">wasn't </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">peaceful and because he saw her potential? Maybe? I have so many issues with this </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">starting </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">with the fact that apparently their world has the same associations with doves as ours. Blah blah blah paternalistic bullshit, blah blah no she's not going to call you Daddy in any sense, ew, oh my god ew, although I think the hint of regret is genuine. Then again, as noted previously, a lot of the abuse in this show tends to be under the premise of "I love you and have your best interests/your morals in mind therefore nothing I do harms you." Ahahaha. No. They have catching up to do, CroaShat will demonstrate his power by telekinesis-ing the door shut, Audrey is frankly scared out of her mind. Which is probably as it should be, if not exactly good for coherent thought.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Over at an old church, some of the Guard members are going over a map with Nathan that has nearly 20 red Xs and around ten names on it, suggesting in tandem with the dialogue that they've devoted a lot of manpower to combing the shores for Audrey. Well, if they're going along the waterfront, at least they haven't turned up a body? Dwight and McHugh show up about then to announce that the latest attempt to get a Troubled person whose Trouble could help find Audrey has in fact turned up a body! But not the specific body they started looking for. Making four people Duke's murdered in the last twelve hours, give or take a few hours. So now he's collecting Troubles for Croatoan and also, let's not forget, REALLY HIGH on Troubled blood. At this point the question of free will may very well be moot, on account of that level of addiction may be Duke's event horizon. As it were. I also question why the FUCK Dwight doesn't know the plan until he walks in, since he is still nominally head of the Guard and I would think that everyone has a good deal invested in making that </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">not </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">a revolving-door title. The plan is, Nathan collects Troubled people who are willing to be bait and sticks them all in one place that is not the police station. Why not the police station, I'm not sure, aside from that way he doesn't have to argue with Laverne about his methods, maybe? Human bait for a killer seems like the kind of method you might have to argue over. And Nathan's about to try talking Dwight around to no but we need Audrey and that's a we not a me, or at least not JUST a Nathan, but Dwight's already made that logical leap thank you. Anyone else notice that he's much better at rational thought when McHugh's there being his 2IC? Just saying. Further discussion of how they need Audrey to build the barn and end the Troubles will have to wait, because Duke's just appeared in the doorway with a murderous look and a knife. Duke can you please STOP slicing up your hand? It makes me wince every time no matter how evil the person is. Although bleeding on the floor will have to wait for credits to roll.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">After credits, the Guardsmen will be idiot redshirts, pun intended, and rush Duke. At least only one of them gets sliced up before everyone realizes this was a bad idea. Nathan already realized it, but his 'don't get too close' is lost in the idiot rush. Yes, guys, even without an opponent who gets superpowers from slicing you open and absorbing your blood, MAYBE you should hesitate to rush the guy with the knife. Also WHY do you fucking have fucking guns around the fucking bullet magnet? Seriously. Whose genius idea was that so I know who to point the crossbow at. Unless it's a tranq gun, but that's not in the least bit clear, just, rifle with a scope. Duke will now go for Throttling Nathan, who really has to be getting sick of that shit by now. If you're going to strangle him at least make there be proper breathplay safeguards in place. Begging Duke to stop gets still-black eyes but also a gasped-out Nathan, this is not helping the shipping, but no he's not stopping the strangulation. In a move that's </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">totally </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">a nod to Edge-and-Christian, and also one of the dumber fucking moves for Dwight-and-McHugh to decide to do in this situation, they will now break a chair over Duke's back. Though it's not worse than doing nothing, so I'll allow it, it just severely throws me out of the narrative for a bit especially since as a Ranger and then a Guardsman and </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">then</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> a Chief of Police, Dwight at the very least should really be up on his unarmed combat. More so than "find furniture break over person." And it doesn't help that there were closer items of furniture to hand. Ah well, it's a good nod if nothing else. Turns out the rest of Nathan's plan was "and then chloroform Duke." Oh my god seriously? Okay fine, that's a start, Dwight also has "oh my god seriously" all over his face. Dwight is apparently taking point on audience identification member for the moment, since the next obvious question is… really? Chain him up? He's got Hayley's Trouble, he can phase through them, how is this containing him? Well apparently somewhere between last ep and this one, or maybe more likely between the 1983 ep and this one, Nathan dug up these old chains from three generations back (so… around Sarah's day or the cycle before it, I think that was Veronica the lesbian/bisexual of the 1920s?) which are specifically designed to prevent the Coulton Trouble from working. I have… all of the questions again, up to and including did these chains require the use of a Trouble? What the fuck are they? Never mind, they're the deus ex machina to "control" Duke for the ep while he's not actually secured at all, especially since they already know he has the acid dripping Trouble and I'm going to stop poking holes in Nathan's plans now. Let's move on.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Back in the teenage girl's room of incredibly disturbing, Audrey's putting as much space between her and Croatoan as possible. REASONABLE. Better if she had a weapon, but reasonable, definitely, and nervous is not the first descriptor I would go for. Scared would be the most neutral, minimum-level word I can think of. Hello, minimizing rational fears! Croatoan continues to disregard all of Audrey's demands and questions about Duke, let her go, what have you done what are you doing, all very valid concerns, in favor of reminiscing and playing the consummate host. Uh. Dude this really is abuser 101, could you not? According to him, little Mara loved coffee, music, and dogs, and while I don't remember the latter as a significant part of Sarah, or Lucy's personalities, the first two are accurate to Audrey and the third we saw a glimpse of in Stay (3x02). We all remember the bit in S2 when she learned she could play piano, yes? (2x03 Love Machine, for the record). The coffee is just all over the freaking place, so the citation will have to be the entire series. She still likes all these things, therefore she is the same person therefore she is his daughter and should behave like it, runs the logic. Yeah Audrey's not having any of this bullshit. Even though yes, she does want to know all about who she/Mara used to be, since CroaDaddy's dangling out in front of her like bait. At least Charlotte did her the decency of, having picked her over Mara, treating her like her own individual by the end. CroaDaddy isn't doing anything even close, he's trying to manipulate and abuse her into being his good little daddy's girl again, and the hell of it is that given time it might even </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">work</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. It's not, in fact, a badly DONE round of villainning, either in writing or in acting (and it's very disturbing to have Shatner actually acting, as opposed to the self-parody he's been known for in most of our formative years barring Star Trek reruns), it's just very transparent to anyone who's put effort into understanding how this shit works. CroaDaddy declares that their world is awesome and they're going home where they belong, it's much better except for "a few wars." Uh-huh and how many of those did you start, asshole? Or facilitate? Or continue rather than engage in peace talks? He will continue to infantilize and demean Audrey by calling her pet names particularly when she asserts herself by reminding him he doesn't know a damn thing about her, and insisting that he knows things about her like, oh, this is just like the room she grew up in! See, he knows things! Audrey continues working on asserting her right to individuality by reminding him that Mara's dead, which results in the very creepy change in emphasis that </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mara's </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">dead. But Audrey's alive and by his lights she's still, what, blood of his blood and his in all the ways that matter and he's going to get her back? No, more accurately, he wants her back, in this unsettlingly avaricious/grasping tone and performance from Shatner. I am so disturbed. Not just about what he's saying but about the things he's not saying, the reasons why, the things he's hiding. Up to and including his real name: Charlotte gave hers, but CroaShatDaddy has only the name of the great evil monster in the void and Dad to go by, and Audrey isn't interested in the latter.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlfNkcVZfX8788De3uoiUJarL48hN7oSTI0e9DHg765-K9tYrYtKAsJVY6JQWQXP4JsL9l5CUJ60Sv7v_tPGMakC6rDvy10iwk1GA_IvvtsyVXmV-LWKRF-NQlpTRKhH_ZK98iUhV1SGE/s1600/haven524cc02.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlfNkcVZfX8788De3uoiUJarL48hN7oSTI0e9DHg765-K9tYrYtKAsJVY6JQWQXP4JsL9l5CUJ60Sv7v_tPGMakC6rDvy10iwk1GA_IvvtsyVXmV-LWKRF-NQlpTRKhH_ZK98iUhV1SGE/s320/haven524cc02.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Over at the Herald, Vince has the controller crystal and is asking Howard to please tell him his brother died for a cause. Oh honey. Specifically, he wants confirmation that the new barn would destroy Croatoan too, which Howard confirms: basically we're doing sympathetic magic with the aether core to draw all the aether out of everyone and send it back to the void. I… have concerns; would this really kill CroaShat? He was partly extradimensional-whatever-humanoid before this, would he go back to being evil humanoid DaddyShat? Would he die? Would he be less evil without Croathingy's influence or would he just be less erratic, or a different kind of erratic considering there's no likely way to go through all that without suffering some kind of damage. Would he just get sucked into the void non-aether-bits and all? Would he end up in the barn in the same position Mara was in for five centuries? (That last one seems like it might be where they're pointing, actually.) So many questions! So few answers. Howard explains that he's the ship's captain of the barn, or the IT guy at the computer, or pick your metaphor here. Though given his chosen metaphor I have all of the FOR FUCK'S SAKE over that poor doomed lighthouse. Actually also given his chosen metaphor I'm going to go laugh hysterically in the kitchen for a bit over the concept of captain of his ship. These are the voyages of the starship That Darn Barn. Anyway, once the core is repaired they're good to go buuuut one tiny detail: Howard can't be the controller anymore. Whatever happened at the station "compromised" him, which sounds incredibly bad, and he can't do the thing anymore. Well… fuck. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Also well fuck: Duke all flat-affect in interrogation. Hell, I will also Well Fuck over the fact that they've got him chained up in a chair in interrogation when he has god knows whose powers rattling around in there. Then again, we've already established that no one in this show is that good at securing super-powered prisoners. Dwight's got his security crossbow, which is about all the good that's going to do if he gets loose, I promise. Not least because I don't believe either Nathan or Dwight is capable of shooting to kill this particular person, and anything less won't stop Duke at this point. Who may, in fact, be going for exactly those results! Remember that he tried to commit suicide and was prevented not long ago, and got about halfway to a very passive suicide with the asshole garage owner before his protective instincts kicked in with Hayley. Nathan's decided that there will be just as much stubborn faith in Duke as he's got in Audrey, oh </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">honey</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Down to the explicit parallels between this and Mara up at the cabin when Duke bought him time to try and draw Audrey out. Sadly there will be no true love's kiss to solve this problem, we're beyond that, and furthermore Duke's further gone than Audrey was, because he's got a lot less hope, and a lot less certainty that this </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">isn't him</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Dwight is giving Nathan these really funny Oh You Sweet Summer Child looks and attempting to point out gently that regardless of if they can get Duke to stop acting on behalf of Croatoan (possession/free will question aside), Duke will never be the same after what he's done and had done to him. He is met with Mt. Wuornos The Stubborn. Selfsame Stubborn is met by wary curiosity. For the brief glimpse we get in interrogation at this point Duke looks exhausted when he's not looking feral and homicidal. Nathan just looks rather like a hopeful puppy. Oh everyone.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Creepy house on creepy hill on the outskirts of town has progressed to Audrey sitting on the bed as stiffly as possible while CroaDaddy sits at the desk and tries to get her to eat like an errant child refusing dinner. Which in his world is probably what she is. Oh, and family isn't a choice. Excuse me I have a steaming pile of FUCK YOU to serve over top of that bacon and eggs. Audrey wants to know how he can talk about (read: pretend) family as though the concept means anything to him, makes the point that he killed his wife, although I would point out that Charlotte was a choice. Actually so was Mara, come to that. CroaShat goes still and quiet in the way I recognize from previous Shatner roles, the way that combines Srs Business with sadness with longing for the past. Possibly with a side dose of mad cow. This does not do anything to convince me he's right, but it does reinforce that he </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">thinks</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> he's right and suffering and noble for doing all this for his daughter, etc. Now as far as family, I will admit that from a parental perspective, once you bring a child into this world and commit to raising it, you </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">don't </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">get a choice about whether or not you do the best job possible, you either make the choice or the choice makes itself from your inaction. And it's very, very clear to me that Charlotte and CroaDaddy's ideas of good parenting are NOT MINE and arguably extremely harmful. But that's about the only point where I agree: you had a child, you decided to raise her yourself rather than adopting or fostering her out, then you owe it to her to do a good job of raising her because you are making a small person and that's enormous responsibility that you don't get to give up except when, see adopt/fosterage. HOWEVER. Your kid gets to decide how good a job you did. See also: a </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">separate</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> person. Audrey hammers some on the personal connections by repeating, wife, mother, and CroaShat responds by accusing Charlotte of having been manipulated and swayed by simpler, more afraid minds. Actually he uses the word "contaminated," which is ten kinds of interesting but we don't get much in the way of information to hang it on. He says it broke his heart, he looks like he believes this, this is not making me any more comfortable here. Not that it's meant to. Also looking for a cure could be disastrous to both of them oh REALLY. (And which both? Given later revelations I'm going with Audrey and CroaDaddy.) I will admit that that doesn't look like a </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">happy </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">flashback to killing Charlotte. Audrey will now point out that, okay, you claim me for your daughter and want to help but you KILLED MY SON, your grandson, which brings on the argument of "that's how much I love you." with a fair bit of anger? Vehemence? Uh-huh. Apparently so much you refuse to let her make her own choices! Because with James comes Lucy's willingness to kill him to end the Troubles, comes everyone dying, comes all Mara or whoever's work being undone which is apparently worse than Lucy having to live with having killed her own son? Because that is an argument I would buy not as being more valid since it wasn't James' death but the circumstances of it that were important, but I would buy that he is at least capable of understanding and faking empathic emotional interaction. But no, it's work being undone and Audrey (or Lucy, at the time) dying or being sent away by the barn and he would have lost her forever. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">He</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> would have lost. Let's all note how much his outlook is framed on what </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">he</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> knows, what </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">he's</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> done for her, what </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">he</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> lost. Blah blah he has no regrets everything has been for his daughter as he straightens up all proud and tall. Yeah, you keep trying to convince her. Jackass. Blah blah still not good at asking permission here, asshole. Does she understand that she's everything to him? No, I think she understands that your ego and inability to let go are everything to you, framed around what she represents in that context. But she's not saying that. She </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">is </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">indicating that she understands this degree of target fixation means her options are acquiesce, pretend to acquiesce, or fight back. Audrey being Audrey, she goes for stalling and then fighting back. I would just point out that given Croatoan was possessing Dave for quite awhile, there's absolutely no reason that taking her coffee black is a shared trait with Mara. It could just as easily be CroaDaddy having rifled through all of Dave's memories of Audrey (and probably Lucy and Sarah as well) in order to use all the info against her. But he's still going to use it for a moment of cheer that's definitely layered over some very scary determination that shows up as the pretend goofy smile drops away. At any rate: he leaves and closes the door behind him, no sign of whether it locks or not, Audrey goes to get a shank of wood out of the headboard that'll be hidden by the pillows and also under her leg.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The funny thing is, no, Duke doesn't entirely look like Duke Crocker, and this is what makes me think he's possessed more than anything. His mannerisms, his behavior, they're nothing like Duke angry, Duke sad, it's more like Eric Balfour's playing someone else playing Duke. It's a little bit reminiscent of the layers of Mara and Audrey and Maraudrey that we got back in s4. I'm not sure Nathan's aware enough of the nuances of Duke, or maybe I mean aware that he's aware, at least enough to know what's going on. But he does draw a distinction between Duke as he is now and the Duke he grew up with. Which. Urk. That could be as much the things that have happened to Duke in the last year or so as possession, so that's not the best choice of phrase. He cites the fact that his eyes have gone back to normal as proof that Croatoan's influence is wearing off, I cite how Dave appeared normal until the very end as indication that you guys have no fucking clue how this works and Dwight was totally correct in Oh You Sweet Summer Child-ing you. Duke will prove my point by blackening his eyes </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">on purpose</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (which also makes me feel like this may have happened when he was in the shipping container, but maybe not? definitely shortly after Hayley's death) and claiming this is who he is, he is the person who took Audrey Parker. Which still isn't a Duke phrasing. In fact, most of this interrogation scene isn't Duke's speech patterns or body language as we've come to know it, and not easily accounted for by accumulated stress and trauma, so I'm back at the whole possession and/or pretending to be possessed thing. Nathan points out that he didn't just now kill him when he had the chance, because he remembered who he really is. Or because he has a different use for him! But the explanation he's said is the one Nathan wants to be true, so that's the one he's focusing on. Even better, he's focusing on Audrey, and how much she means to Duke, which prompts a whole thing about how much does he mean to her and maybe they'll go all the way and again with the focusing on her sexuality, as last episode when he called her frigid. Nathan's right there with him, bringing up Colorado specifically and what happened there and that it meant something to both of them, and Duke should remember that. I'm excited and deeply amused that Nathan doesn't seem in the least bit bothered that Audrey and Duke had a Moment of some kind of sexual tension, he just wants Duke to remember his connection to Audrey and come back for her, tell him where she is. Duke's amusement is more normal sounding right up until he starts mocking the idea that he (whoever he is right now) could feel anything for Audrey, the idea that love will have any effect on anything, that Nathan keeps clinging to love. This is who Duke is, and he's happy about that. (The mocking of love, now that actually sounds like Mara, which brings up the question of is he possessed or is he reacting in a manner more similar to being </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">programmed.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">) Nathan doesn't believe it, he believes he'll get Duke back the same as he believed for Audrey. Still not helping the shipping. Duke will now digress into something a bit curious, firstly how Croatoan was hiding inside of Dave which </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">also</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> does not discourage the possession idea, and secondly how you remember Dave, old and bald and knew every inch of this town. And as much as I'm wary of deciding Duke Is Possessed Because He Could Never Be This Evil (dude do you know how much pressure he's been under?) this very much does sound like Duke trying to get a message out to Nathan under some kind of coercion. I'm not sure it is? But it sounds like it, especially the way Balfour's moving his head like he's trying to convey being distracted by something. And on the other </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">other</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> hand, maybe that </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">is</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> exactly what Duke, CroaDuke, or whoever he is now wants Nathan to think, because you can </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">see</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Nathan seizing on the 'that's Duke in there he's reaching out to me.' I just don't know. Bonus points on the conniving, though, for the consequences of this little talk. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Vince is having a small freakout over at the Herald. I'm having images of a maybe twenty years older Tony having a small freakout at Jarvis. The fact that Howard points out Vince is, by his own logic, insulting a computer or an even simpler machine is </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">not helping.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Vince would like to know why he can't be more damn helpful with this completely unprecedented event. Well, his previous helpfulness was in service to his primary function, which is now no longer applicable. And no, you can't just turn him off and back on again, he's not actually a computer program though he does seem to love talking in metaphors that indicate as much. I do have to say though, I'm a little appalled that Vince is so surprised that Howard was a person once. Given everything he now knows about Audrey, Charlotte, Dave, beings from other worlds, etc. The controller. The aether crystal. This is what you choose to balk at? If only for a moment. It turns out that one of our pet speculations from back when we realized he was the barnvatar however many seasons ago was correct, he was involved in the original barn design process by volunteering to be its warden, keeper, avatar. Barnvatar. The part we didn't specifically predict for lack of specifics was the need to feel a particular impetus for Mara's judgment, in this case the suffering of a young boy with a dire Trouble and the relation of that to his own family. It also turns out that what was damaged in the police station was his memory of and connection to that, and so he can't serve as the barn's director or controller. That's a bit archaic, but certainly works as well for magical theory purposes, as well as for purposes of Vince's understanding. It also gives us kind of a toss-up for who gets to be the new barnvatar, Dwight or Vince! Since both of them have recently hit a fairly sizable and painful wall. (You may now make the they ARE the very sizable and painful wall jokes. Vince and Dwight ARE the brute squad.)</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgb0qCqP8NiAwTqDmDrTdhwTPkYSnPaHnvYAeppaQ2GmF3vaVOrFNnQFtGiUKg2NJuI0SGP99JkK1HHKBB88f1Zeq1VetkI-LokIBY3-rUsLBZ1qbn9Vdz9pnqxBaSPdLAHA3hTe5lVNCU/s1600/haven524cc03.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgb0qCqP8NiAwTqDmDrTdhwTPkYSnPaHnvYAeppaQ2GmF3vaVOrFNnQFtGiUKg2NJuI0SGP99JkK1HHKBB88f1Zeq1VetkI-LokIBY3-rUsLBZ1qbn9Vdz9pnqxBaSPdLAHA3hTe5lVNCU/s320/haven524cc03.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Back at the police station Dwight's Sweet Summer Child look has died down to an Ouch And Also Ouch look. And a comment, too. No, Nathan is not okay (which is one of the few times we've EVER heard him admit that out loud), but at least they have some indication of a direction to go charging off in, and someone should go talk to Vince about where his brother would stash something. So many places, Nathan. So many goddamn places. We not being the only ones who can pick up on nuanced sentences Dwight double checks to make sure that someone really didn't mean Nathan, which, no, he wants to stay here and hammer on the wall of Duke some more. So I guess we see which breaks first, the immovable object or the unstoppable force. Dwight will go, then, and McHugh's on his way in and can back Nathan up. And we know because McHugh is a named extra we've grown just attached enough to to kill, and Dwight is a main and male character who at least stands a higher chance of not dying even if this is the series end, that this is going to turn out </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">so so badly.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Nathan tries to apologize or at least explain? account for? compensate for his fixation on saving Duke to the exclusion of everything else, but Dwight is not going to die on Mt Wuornos the Stubborn today, and besides if anyone can get through to him it probably is Nathan. And maybe talking to him is working, maybe this is a message. McHugh comes in as Nathan goes back in to bash his head against Duke's aether-drunkenness for a while, asks Dwight for his marching orders. Which are to stay put, guard Nathan, don't kill Duke because Nathan might be getting through to Duke. I'm a little amused at how quickly McHugh goes to want me to put him down. Also amused and very much Oh-Dwight at the whole no one left behind thing. You can take the Ranger out of Afghanistan... While I'm noting things that amuse me, you can also see the progress Adam Copeland has made in adjusting down from wrestling's You Must See Me Emote From At Least 50 Feet Away, if for no other reason than by comparison against Christian. Heh. Not that he's bad! He's not at all, it's just a visible difference going on here. We will be interested to check in on both of them in a few years. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Dysfunctional Family Hill continues, now with coffee hour. The Troubles are Mara and Daddy Dearest's work! Life's work, sounds like, and a job, and other things that Audrey severely questions. Like his sanity. It's okay, Audrey, he left his sanity behind awhile ago. I keep waiting for the over-the-top mad scientist cackle and it keeps not happening, but every single fucking part of the usual spiel happens besides it! See, the Troubles are scary when all you see are the risks! There's so much MORE to them! Going right along with the theme of people using them this season, which has been hammered on quite extensively, as noted, but the really very relevant question is, where is the line? Forced human experimentation is a pretty big neon Do Not Do This line, frankly, and it still sounds like at a </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">minimum </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">William and Mara did that, probably them and CroaDaddy. My sympathy for the but I'm just trying to make us/the world/everyone better speech is very very limited. So is Audrey's! Hers comes at the point of a… well, a stake. I'm impressed by several things here! One, her aim, which is fairly directed pointed at the overlap of carotid and jugular; two, that CroaShat shows very little traditional pain signals (dropping the coffee could be surprise as much as pain); three, that despite Audrey's aim he doesn't even start to bleed out. Though on the last count I'm pretty sure that he kept the stake in his throat on purpose to control the flow of platelets (does he have platelets?) and aether to the wound for most rapid healing. Audrey is freaked the fuck out, as well she might be. Audrey you should've broken off a couple stakes so that you could stab him again while he was healing from the first one. And now it's time for the you hurt me so I'll hurt you and demonstrate my nifty healing abilities round of villainning! For all that it's incredibly telegraphed it's also not badly done. My one quibble is, okay, if you're going to go for the child abuse implications to outright statements here, a spiral fracture would've been more in keeping with that. (Spiral fractures are commonly caused by abusive parents holding onto their kids who are trying to get away from them. For many reasons, all of which are awful and beyond the scope of this post.) This, however, is a compound fracture, splitting skin and at least hitting the radius if not both it and the ulna. Hard to say for certain since the gore </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">is </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">pretty quick. And painful. Audrey would like us to know that it hurts like fuck.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Although it is </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">one </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">scream, and then an attempt to back away from CroaDaddy when he tries reaching for her again because fuck you stop hurting your daughter, asshole. Oh I think you're trying to teach her the don't try and kill your father it's impossible and he'll torture you lesson TOO. Can I tear out his eyes yet? But what he wants her to learn in the most painful, visceral way possible is that he can use the Troubles to heal her. Complete with creepy as fuck fatherly kiss the boo-boo better. Okay, fine, let's stop picking at the creepy, it's not exactly new by now, let's poke at the information he's giving up. Such as it is. Duke is out harvesting Troubles, specifically the ones that Croatoan needs to protect himself. From what? Why? O-kay, and yes he can use the Troubles and the aether and he survived in the void for centuries. Presumably </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">on </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">nothing but aether. CroaDaddy isn't even going to dance around the notion of whose hands are the right hands for these Troubles he calls gifts to be held in. His! Of course! Oh and by the way he drops so casually even though his face has come over all scary intense, when Mara was a little girl he saved her life using aether. Um. Uh-huh. We should note, because it's one of the more pervasive and subtle forms of gaslighting manipulation he's doing, that CroaDaddy continues to insist on referring to Audrey and Mara as the same person. He seems to be being careful to call her Audrey when he's addressing her directly, but he's not drawing any distinction between what Audrey's experienced and done and what Mara has. Now it's time for his side of the story! Audrey's still holding onto her recently-broken arm like it still hurts, which it probably </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">does</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> even if it's psychosomatic pain. I really wish Charlotte were around so that we could get a good idea of family dynamics and who's lying more. Because everyone's lying! It's just a question of in what direction. I am so disturbed that, aside from the arm-holding, they look like a courtly father-and-daughter pair. So disturbed.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Whatever Nathan was doing with Duke in there, it was neither consummating the relationship (look we have a limited number of eps to get more Nuke jokes in CHALLENGE ACCEPTED, okay) nor successful in getting Duke to stop spouting scenery-munching villainy. Nathan looks equal parts exasperated and determined, which is about par for the course with him, and goes off to check in with McHugh. (Christian manages to bring some of his emoting down even further when put up against Nathan the stoic woodblock, too, which makes us even MORE interested for those few years down the road if he keeps up the acting.) McHugh suggests changing tactics, yes thank you let's divert Mt. Wuornos the Stubborn to a new path, this one being the one of let's use the Troubles to force Duke to talk! Nathan points out that this is torture, which may or may not be accurate depending on the specific nature of the Troubles McHugh's thinking of. Coercion definitely, torture in the sense of physical or mental pain I'm not sure about. (If nothing else, I'm not sure what they can do to put Duke in more mental pain than he already is. My tongue is fairly firmly planted in my cheek on that one, but still.) McHugh isn't wrong that the older Troubles will be ones Duke's not immune to, so with that in mind Nathan suggests that he go get the Trouble census and they look for a Trouble that could bring Duke back. That's… adorable, especially since we know that all the anti-possession Troubles are already taken, either by CroaShat or by Duke. Dwight did you not share the intel? Dwight, Vince, share your fucking intel. I mean, Vince is ossified in his habit of keeping his fool mouth shut and also severely compromised in the emotions right now but Dwight you at least should be equipped to handle better. Goddammit. And Nathan, stop sending people off for one of your biggest weapons to put next to the second-most dangerous person in the whole fucking town. Will people please stop putting all the really powerful shit in the same place at the same time with minimal security! But no, of course not, he's going to go back in there and keep digging for the real Duke because that blinding optimism is going to get them all killed. Dammit, Nathan.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Back at the Herald of doom, Dwight's checking in with Vince and Howard for where Dave might've wanted to stash a prisoner and Vince of course knows immediately about the abandoned farmhouse on Route 19. Honestly that number doesn't even merit the fucking jar, just a resigned OH YOU AGAIN at the writers with Stephen King's mythos engraved in 20 foot neon letters. And numbers. Out west of West Haven, by that little map Vince draws him, it's where they would've hid out if they'd disappeared when everything went to shit. Not that they managed that one, nor I think would they ever have gone unless one of them were incapacitated and the other couldn't do anything to help either his brother or the town. And getting them to the point of admitting that was always a non-starter. Oh Teagues. I have so many questions about how far outskirts is outskirts, and how far does the shroud extend, and can we have a fucking detailed map with explicit boundaries drawn please and thank you? No, but we can have Vince grieving some more and Howard being a manipulative fuck at him. The thing is, at this point I can't even argue that it's malicious manipulation so much as what he's done for centuries on end. He starts with pointing out that Vince would've given his life for Haven if he had the chance, and Vince takes it the rest of the way by asking if, well, the new barn needs a controller. And the controller needs to have an emotional connection. So how's about you make Vince the new controller? It's not like he has anything </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">else </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">to live for. Oh </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Vince</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. The thing is, if it lets Vince be useful in perpetuity and maybe allows Howard to die peacefully, then it's not entirely a bad thing, though it doesn't allow room for either of them to recover from their grief. Also, Vince you jerk, how the fuck do you think Gloria's going to feel when she finds out about this? </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Over in the deserted farmhouse that, you know, now that I think about it there are a </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">lot</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> of Stephen King stories about the creepy shit that goes down in quiet little farmhouses. Anyway. Over in the deserted farmhouse where we can't stop because it's King country, DaddyToan is doing the full Walter Bishop. Never do the full Walter Bishop, dude. First of all he's so clever and smart and knowledgeable that the work he was doing was far ahead of his contemporaries and light-years ahead of what this world has dreamed up (Shatner himself called out the light-years line reference so we don't have to!) and eventually his colleagues were envious of him and afraid of progress. No, honey, they were afraid of your batshit crazy ambition. I will go so far as to allow that some portions of this and what Charlotte said about proving things to her superiors might even be true, but given that the only things we know about the scientists in this other world have been told to us by a profound liar (Charlotte) and a definite megalomaniac (CroaShatner) we really have no way of knowing. And we're leaning on the side of Dude No Get Help. Audrey is also leaning on the side of Dude No Get Help, based on what her mother told her about him getting carried away, getting reckless, getting vanished because of experimenting with aether from the void. It turns out this experimentation was because when she was a little girl she was very sick, no cure, no treatment, no hope of survival, etc. (See? Walter Bishop!) And of course he couldn't let her go, and in this one instance I will believe, or rather I will allow him the benefit of the doubt that it might have been genuine paternal terror rather than this freaky possessiveness he's displaying right now. We don't, after all, have any indication for or against him always being this off the rails. At any rate, he introduced aether into her immune system, which just sounds like a generally poor idea, and it saved her life. On a scale of hooked your loved one's corpse up to electrodes and zapped the body till it lived again to ripped a hole in spacetime and grabbed your loved one's duplicate from another dimension, how fucked up is this?? However fucked up the initial act was, CroaShat's little victory dance of yeah your mother gave birth to you whatever I created you mua ha ha ha ha, that's </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">profoundly </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">warped. Ew. In addition to which I could have done without the giggling. Yes, there was giggling. You see Audrey's face of Dude No Get Help, that's where I'm at. Only I'm sure there's no help for this guy. And I'm having The Gunslinger flashbacks to the man in black tittering as he resurrected the one dead guy in his introduction moment. I don't think anyone wants to remember that. (I also don't think it's a deliberate reference, call it an underscoring of how giggling in the right moment is evil and creepy.)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So, we're going to take a second here as we go over to round three (drink! heavily. you bet your sweet ass I am.) of this isn't who you are no this is exactly who I am, and wonder if the reason Duke's speech patterns are going all weird and fucked is because Duke is sounding quite a bit like Mara. Physically, of all people he seems to almost be acting more like Wade, but in speech he sounds like Mara. Particularly the love part, the calling Audrey frigid. And then there's the part where he says he is what he was always meant to be. Well, to a certain extent that's true, given that Walter (AND WHO THE FUCK IS WALTER, ANYWAY. ARE WE GOING TO GET AN ANSWER TO THAT NEXT EPISODE I'm not holding my breath) revealed that Croatoan created the Crocker line as a Trouble collector, also known as an aether bucket. This is paralleled to CroaShat talking to Audrey about how he made her special, he infused her with aether and made her special. Arguably, neither Duke nor Mara as she was then handled the change to having aether in the blood terribly well, and this alternating of scenes highlights how they both got more brutal, more violent. Only the Crockers, possibly being human as they are, got the addiction and the need for more blood/aether, but I don't think it's a stretch to theorize that what Mara's father did to her informed what Croatoan, or Croashatner, or whatever it was at that point did to the originating Crocker. Now, what that means for the future, we have other guesses, but since we're going to find out next weekend we'll get back to the recapping and scream at each other in private. Okay, you get one guess, if we're heading for a full-on Dark Tower ending then we might as well get everyone but either Duke or CroaShatner dying and the one who survives being the next one locked in the cycle of Troubles, though maybe this time with knowledge of what they've done and why they're being sent out to atone. Circumscribed powers until they begin to set things right? Something like that. In the meantime, Nathan will be drawn in by Duke having a resurgence of sounding like his former self. It may or may not be his genuine former self. It might be whatever Duke is now fucking with Nathan's head. I wouldn't put it past him. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Audrey's falling into the trap of calling herself Mara, or at least his daughter, which she pauses to correct. Good. That's a crucial correction to make, at least as much for her sake as she struggles not to give into the manipulation as it is to hammer away at Daddytoan's insistence that she's his. She's not wrong that it took courage and a hefty dose of recklessness to try that method of saving Mara in the first place! She is also not wrong that in NO WAY does it excuse the terrible shit he did to everyone in this dimension. Unfortunately what Audrey has next is suggestions that maybe the void corrupted him, cuing CroaShat to declare that he's only been made stronger and everything has been for his daughter and by the way did we mention your target fixation is a problem? I don't think we've said it in so many words, but it is a severe and dangerous problem. (Nathan, this is what you had to look forward to before you turned outward and started trying to make amends.) And now he'll insist in the face of Audrey claiming the father he describes would hate the man he is now, oh no, he's just the same. Lie to convince yourself a little harder, dude, I don't think you've quite ruined this world by the force of your denial yet. Unfortunately, Audrey, with someone this deep in his own delusions, arguing the same tack you've already taken just means he's had time to come up with new and exciting counter-arguments. In this case that he created her by virtue of introducing the aether to her immune system, and this body is the same, and that makes her still his and still special. Special? Oh REALLY. Says us and Audrey, who is rapidly coming to the conclusion that delusions aside, CroaDaddy would just take what he wanted if he could get it from her that way, no, he needs her and he needs her willing participation in this. He's not best-pleased about her having guessed that, though I think he's not as dismayed as he's pretending to be, either.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Vince is about to make terrible decisions, or at least decisions out of a terribly unstable emotional state, which is pretty much normal for him. And definitely normal for what the controller of the barn has been, since apparently it requires significant emotional investment in order to make it work for you. That seems like a bug, not a feature, you guys. Then again all of this blather about how Love Conquers All and Emotion Is The Conduit To Ultimate Truth kind of fucking grates, because no, you need both passion and reason, thanks ever so. As a portrait of a large group of severely and interminably traumatized people, though, seems legit. Howard has a very valid point that since the only controller(s?) that he knows of were of his species, there's no saying that Vince would even be capable of doing it. Dave might've, as a halfling! Vince certainly has aether in his bloodline (though we STILL don't know what the Teagues Trouble entails precisely there are so many unexplained potatoes in this fucking show you guys) (</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A: </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">would you like fries with your inexplicable potatoes?) (</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">K: </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Someday I will find that clip from Humbug so everyone else gets that joke.) so at least he's got Not Baseline Human going for him. Whether or not that's a plus or a minus is kind of an open question, especially since they're trying to create a barn that'll draw the aether out of everyone without killing them. Really could go either way! Vince uses Impassioned Statements About His Dedication To Haven! It's Super Effective! He does admit to </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">making </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">the Guard in the first place, just to confirm what we've established, lists off the coverups and the loss everyone including him has suffered, so now he'll sacrifice this because it's all he's got left. If you're imagining us facepalming forever over No, Vince, Vince No, you would be right. I hope Gloria punches you for being fine with dying to become the controller, dude. At least Howard's being reasonably upfront with him about what this entails, though it's pretty obvious that he knows Vince considers dying a feature of this sacrifice. Vince you… do realize that if it succeeds, you have to feel all the feelings in order to run the barn, right? And you're not very good at that? Vince? Sigh.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Audrey continues to press the advantage she thinks she has by asking what the fuck why does CroaShat need her. Alarm bells start going off in our head when he finally refers to Mara as a separate individual from Audrey. All the alarm bells. That's ceding a LOT of ground from where he was, Audrey, be REALLY CAUTIOUS PLS. According to CroaDaddy, what he did to save Mara's life also changed her and gave her a unique bond with the aether. Oh hey more alarm bells: you think that's maybe why she "went bad"? I do! I have many issues with the writing of aether as the Ultimate Corrupting Agent or whatthefuckever they're going for here, but that's definitely what it's shaping up to be, from the physical appearance of the deathtruffles to the influence it has on people both directly and less so. Particularly given it sounds like Mara was </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">quite </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">young when she got sick, so it's more than likely difficult to separate nature from nurture from aether here. At any rate, Mara has the greatest edge in manipulating aether CroaShatDaddy's ever seen, even more than him, and I would even go so far as to guess that whatever effort he has to put into it, it's substantially less than Mara. I would also point out, while we're here, that with the various plotlines going on it is </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">entirely </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">understandable that CroaDaddy doesn't want the new barn built, given what Howard's said about how it would work. If it pulls the aether out of everyone, theoretically without killing them, then it would at a minimum cause Audrey to reacquire Mara's childhood illness and die from that, and at maximum, given how the aether's bonded to her cellular structure, simply rip her apart. Plus, if CroaShat's had something of the same happen to him over centuries in the void, he has a lot to lose, which we've previously noted. With his target fixation on Audrey, though, that makes sense even if he deserves all the stabbings for failing to ask what </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">she </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">wants done. I don't think this downside has even occurred to her yet, or if it has she's hiding it very well under that overall "holy shit infodump, DAD." So. She moves on to the obligatory declaration that no I'm not going to work for you making Troubles, asshat, why would I, and he counters with but you did it for Duke! Yeah, she did, because people were dying and their options were kill a baby or re-Trouble Duke and kill a grown man who asked that he be killed so his son could live. Still a terrible choice to have to make! But it takes people's free will into account to a greater degree than "and now I shall run experiments on you lesser mortal guinea pigs" does. I'm not thrilled about what happened with Duke, but I think that's one of the few times he was willing to admit the necessity of his Trouble as the lesser of two evils. Audrey does not make any of these arguments, instead going for the one about doing what she had to do so clearly that makes her just like daddy dearest. Yeahno. Why is a good question! Why Troubles! CroaDaddy will now proceed to go on the Vader-iest speech since Empire Strikes Back and frankly I don't buy that's his real reason at ALL. You do know this is a Star </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Trek </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">reference ep, not Star Wars, right? Blah blah create the Troubles they need to go back to their home dimension and take over and SHOW THEM ALL MUAHAHAHAHAHAHA MINE IS AN EVIL LAUGH. Seriously, that's the gist of the speech. About the only part of this that makes me believe there's some truth to it is it shares elements with the "proving a point" Mara mentioned, so at least at some point either Mara wanted to ust that or she and her void-bound father actually agreed to this all this. It's so textbook I have to wonder how much of it's misdirection and what he's really aiming for. Along with admitting that he wants to rip open a tear in between the worlds and flood this world with aether, which is presumably the vision Duke saw, turning it into his personal laboratory. How about no? And also fuck no? No, apparently he'll try and hammer on taking her hope away some more by telling her it's too late to save Haven and the people in it, and everything's already begun. I'm guessing that means the shroud. I dislike the look of staring up at the ceiling like he's listening to something far away, how about you?</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivFFnFInxWL6xaUeQp7pwZ0kiPNhpCfiLDdSXpDTSUCO36c8LLx1Hh4tKFizZdaVj7_byx16rwG3IojKAPrTIZne04koEzAoZgGaueNSWOFiUnpEELEm3Ttz7WB0kpr0bb0GPI9lPAgXs/s1600/haven524cc05.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivFFnFInxWL6xaUeQp7pwZ0kiPNhpCfiLDdSXpDTSUCO36c8LLx1Hh4tKFizZdaVj7_byx16rwG3IojKAPrTIZne04koEzAoZgGaueNSWOFiUnpEELEm3Ttz7WB0kpr0bb0GPI9lPAgXs/s320/haven524cc05.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Oh yes, let's have even more reason to dislike it! And more facepalm. STOP BRINGING ALL THE POWERFUL THINGS TOGETHER. No, McHugh, NOT a gold mine. Plutonium mine. Get it right. Things he's suggesting just off the top of his head: psychic communication and puppetmaster Troubles, neither of which are anything I'd recommend for a starting point with Duke but hey, it's worth considering the nuances of how they work, I guess. Technically there are two puppetmaster type Troubles, the one the writers are thinking of according to the Haven website is the one from 5x04 The New Girl, the guy who bodysurfed his way into Duke. And then killed himself while in Duke's body, thereby ending that Trouble only temporarily, as it turned out, but still. But another Trouble potentially falling under that description would be Ginger of the commanding voice from 3x10 Burned. Anyway. So now Nathan will pick their Trouble and try it on Duke! Who is looking through the one-way glass like he can hear them. Why yes. Yes he can hear them. Thanks, Duke, now we have to go back and figure out all the things evil you knows; fortunately most of it is Dwight was going to go talk to Vince and there's a real live boy still in there no really. His eyes don't even go black when he rips the manacles off with brute strength. Guys, this was a fucking terrible idea. Have I mentioned that in the last three sentences? Just checking. Remember what we said about Nathan not being prepared to shoot Duke? Well, he's fumbling at his gun and barely even gets it up in time for Duke to smack it away, when we know he's more competent than that, so really. I still wonder what McHugh's Trouble even is, and what Duke's doing to him, since he shows up in the promo pics for next week's eps but definitely was incapacitated right here. (Also your random thought for the day: what if McHugh's Horatio?) Yes, Nathan, Duke's been waiting for the Trouble census so he could have a menu. He also continues to sound eerily like Mara. I dislike everything about this. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In the eeriest little farm house ever, CroaShat is basically outlining what's been happening, Duke teasing Nathan with the promise of maybe if he works </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">really hard</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> he can get his friend back, not indicating why he wants Nathan to keep Duke close, of course. And we're back to maybe Duke is being controlled by CroaShatner? At the very least there's likely some kind of element of messages being passed back and forth so that he's aware of what Duke is doing in the station. Either that or he really is that much of an arrogant sonofabitch, let's not forget the arrogance he's exuded the whole episode. Audrey is understandably rattled. And we're back at the police station, since it's the end of the episode and we're going to do rapid cuts between both active scenes to ramp up the urgency and the parallels at the same time. Duke wants to know in possibly a more than academic sense if Nathan will defend the census with his life; come to that, I want to know if Duke will go that far to get it, too. I'm less sure that he won't than I was an episode or so ago, that's for sure! Laverne makes threatening haunted house gestures, but that's as much as she can do. Duke's 'stay out of this' has more a tone of irritation than any sense of alarm. Nathan, brain still not catching up with everything, wants to know how he got free. Well, Nathan, when a Trouble-addicted Crocker goes on a rampage... I mean, we already covered the acid Trouble as an alternate way to get out of the manacles than phasing, how about the two people we've seen so far who can destroy things with a touch? We could go back as far as season one for Marion Caldwell for the freezing the joints approach. There are a </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">lot</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> of ways to get out of chains when you've got access to weird abilities, phasing through is only one, and none of you have any sense of security. Yes. Duke used super strength. Yes, Croatoan planned this. Yes, he wants the census, only Duke's response is so quick it makes me think that is not the only reason. Insert usual joke about being vast and containing multitudes here, particularly given Duke containing who knows how many Troubles and CroaShatner technically? Perhaps? Containing two beings? At least as far as we know. Anyway, yes, the census, give to Duke. Duke just punches him and Nathan sinking down the wall is at least as much shock and sadness as it is from the punch, I'm almost positive. The interesting thing about the census page we do get is there's at least three different types of handwriting in there (I'm not going to discount that someone is switching from cursive to print and back again) but almost all of those are season one Troubles. That we can see entirely. Then there's something about microwaves and something about pressure, those might be from the last season or so? Hey, there's Marion Caldwell! The one that isn't a first season Trouble is marked new, something about hyperintelligence in someone named Justin. Duke gives the line about now they can pick and choose their favorite Troubles, oh goodie. And then leans in close to Nathan for morebetter impact, to remind him of all the times he (read: Audrey but let's not pretend Nathan wasn't complicit in at least a couple of those) pushed him to kill, look what he turned him into. Angry Duke is angry. I can't say his anger isn't well founded, just like I can't say that the alternatives to ending that particular Trouble by the only albeit dangerous method they had weren't a lot worse. In both cases, the alternative was a lot more people dying with no real way to stop it, in the case of the organ legger at least the people in the hospital already would have died, assuming none of them escaped, and in the case of the baby, well, I guess they could have mutilated the poor kid. Assuming that would have worked. But at the same time, them pushing Duke into it was not at all well done. There are no clear answers there. And Duke's anger is not only justified, but also very much </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">his</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> as opposed to the creepy behavior he was showing earlier reminiscent of Mara or anyone else.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Audrey will beg for Nathan's life. Audrey has already proven she will totally beg for the lives of the people she loves, she will even call him Dad, which we can tell is out of a need to keep her friends and her Nathan alive and not at all out of any sense of bonding. Not that this matters to CroaShat, who looks intrigued more than gratified or touched, another danger sign of this man has no healthy emotional connections and may not be capable of forming them anymore run the hell away. In the police station Nathan somehow manages to gurgle out through bloody lips that Duke should remember this, it isn't him. Remember what he did? Remember that it isn't him? More probably the latter, but ugh ambiguity. Duke pulls back, but not, as we see, because of his words, more because he seems to be listening to something. So yes, odds are good they can communicate, because he drops/pushes Nathan away again as though disgusted and walks out with the census. And Nathan slumps to the floor, unconscious-looking. Wonderful. This is not giving me warm fuzzies about whether or not the aether itself is sentient, or if Croatoan can split him? it? self off into multiple humanoids, or what the fuck is going on here. Since we don't have any good indication if the aether and Croatoan were ever two separate things, if they started calling ShatDaddy Croatoan after he got cast into the void (in which case REALLY, CHARLOTTE? you MISSED THAT? talk about denial), what the aether even fucking is beyond a corrupting influence… I'm getting dizzy from juggling all the potatoes.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When we come back from commercial, because we had to have the tension spun out a bit there, Audrey is still begging and CroaDaddy is still calling her by the pet name eew. He's </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">decided</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> to let Nathan live. Just in case we or she was unclear on where the power is. Thanks for that. He looks so cheerful when he says it, too. He's decided to let Nathan live because that's what she wanted, because he is magnanimous and generous and only loves his baby girl and if you believe that I have several bridges and a tower to sell you. The tower's going real cheap. Audrey is very angry to tell him that it doesn't change the fact that she won't help him, and she's very angry. Oh yes she will. And he never expected to talk her into helping him, here is where it gets not so much more creepy, it was always creepy, but here is where it gets blatant about what he wants and how he intends to get it, today wasn't about talking her into helping him, it was about finding out what she really cares about. Gee, thanks, Dad. We see how much you love your daughter. Also, more relevantly and less with the sarcasm, how much he thinks he's in a position of power now to be able to admit this. He's not even making a caring face. He's making, and I can't believe I'm saying this, a stern captain leader of men face. Only without Kirk's genuine heart. Yes, he's found out that she cares about Nathan and the people of this town and no, don't be silly, he's not going to hurt them, he's going to give her and them what they want, he's going to make them happy. That... coming from a guy who barely shows any sign of understanding emotional connections, that does not fill me with the warm fuzzies. It does not fill Audrey with warm fuzzies either, she wants to know what that means for Duke, is that what he did to him? CroaDaddy doesn't seem concerned with how his "gift" to Duke turned out, though this entire exchange does seem to confirm that </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">something</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> was done to Duke somewhere, and by CroaDaddy as well as Mara. Poor, poor Duke. He does not get a break from people treating him as a lab experiment slash useful tool, does he. Apparently that's his identity in life, at least that's what CroaDaddy seems to be implying. Before Audrey can point out that that's a shitty identity and not the one Duke wanted at all, at least I'd hope she'd point that out, he's teke-ing open the door and telling her she's free to go. Implying she wasn't before. Father of the year, you are. He wants her to go, be with her friends, my imagination adds in something about before they die horribly but of course that's not what he's saying out loud, see all the things he can offer them and all the things she'll be ripping away from them if she continues to refuse to join him. Well that's not loaded language or anything at all. Thanks, Dad.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">One flyover of Haven later, Dwight's getting out of his battlewagon at the yellow house of evil and I have no idea why there's an ash and dirt heap to the left of the screen but it looks like a giant pile of dead hopes and dreams to me. Okay, more practically it looks like either the rubble that results from the firefighter's Trouble, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">possible</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> some ashy looking aether although I think that's a stretch, and either way it does not fill me with confidence. There's pools of what look like marsh around the house, there's... is that a cross on the lawn? Why is there a cross on the lawn? I'm going to make one so Daddy Dearest can go hang himself over it and let it go. And going by the size of Dwight and the size of the door he's kicking open (seriously Dwight? are we just discarding stealth okay given the potential enemy maybe we are) those ceilings might be as tall as mine. (Ten feet.) However he clears the rest of the house, he ends up upstairs in the yellow attic room of slowly going insane, and that's definitely not Audrey on the bed. It's a girl playing with or just looking at a teddy bear, but when Dwight comes in she turns around and it's her daddy! She's happy to see her daddy! He's going to drop the crossbow so she can dive into his arms, which is good and at least less likely to go off and shoot someone for being dropped pointing at the wall. Dwight's expression seems somewhere between stunned relief, shock so total he can't think around it, and oh fuck me where's the trap. There's </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">definitely</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> an element of oh fuck me now what going on here. He is not, however, telling her "sorry, honey, but you're supposed to have been dead for years" though. Because whether or not she is his daughter or even a little girl, he doesn't know she isn't and you don't tell little girls they're supposed to be dead. Not when they know you as Daddy Who Loves Me And Makes Everything Better. I can only assume that this is why Dwight, and not McHugh or Nathan or anyone else, is discovering the first of CroaDaddy's "gifts," is because we now get the juxtaposition of an </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">actual</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> loving father-daughter relationship, cruelly broken, with the twisted one we saw earlier. I kind of hope it isn't a trap, because Dwight will never recover from this if it is.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8_cyO3Lrjuc7swT-KNSpPeWIlwvrDahYu3ELE8zzpHtxoGXAaSO132YkzM44I8jZHbJxA1xGRDVwN0JbYAJzE_bCFu_0CU6vB6UZoge9kYift9gUAyH-1rO9vRObdDg9HIs34Jlvv5ao/s1600/haven524cc06.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8_cyO3Lrjuc7swT-KNSpPeWIlwvrDahYu3ELE8zzpHtxoGXAaSO132YkzM44I8jZHbJxA1xGRDVwN0JbYAJzE_bCFu_0CU6vB6UZoge9kYift9gUAyH-1rO9vRObdDg9HIs34Jlvv5ao/s320/haven524cc06.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Oh, hey, Nathan's over at the Herald of doom, which seems a particularly appropriate place to end this, looking for Vince. And calling up Howard to help him find Vince, only, funny that. As predicted, Vince doesn't look entirely stable For that matter he doesn't sound entirely stable, and Nathan's "my god Vince what did you do" puts him in the blogger's identification chair for the moment because </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">fucking hell Vince what did you do</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Apart from the stupid, suicidal thing. Possibly also, as we touched on earlier with Duke, the best of a bunch of bad options, but still. Vince did what he had to do, is his take on it. And now he knows exactly how to send Croatoan screaming back to hell. Did I mention the not entirely stable? Because hooo boy.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Next week on Haven, apparently A upgrading her phone means the sneak peeks on Syfy's site no longer work, because I can't get them to load on the web either. (Seriously that is the ONLY way we've been able to get them. Ask us how much we want to throttle whatever incompetent idiot coded THAT one.) It does summarize Duke as acquiring a psychic future-seeing Trouble of some kind! Because that never ends poorly. The person who has the Trouble is named Kirby, which may or may not be the food delivery guy from Mortality (5x10) who was also the red herring. However, SpoilerTV's promo photos work, and it combines photos from both eps of the doubleheader finale! So that's nice. Nathan meets his… father-in-law? And looks remarkably calm about it. CroaShat is seen on the docks, possibly around where James Cogan was murdered. Dwight's on his cell talking to someone and Vince is around, which probably means the controller crystal is around, it looks like they're in the downstairs of the creepyass farmhouse. With Lizzie. Or not!Lizzie. I have no idea anymore. McHugh's got some Guardsmen with guns out on a road with what might be a standoff, unclear if the next pic of Dwight coming around the corner of a squad car is related or deliberately misleading. More Dwight leaning in the doorway of the little girl's room where he found Lizzie, more Audrey and Nathan in winter clothes looking worried and grim, and one of what looks to be Nathan's ass lying on the floor while Audrey crouches next to him. I dislike ALL of this.</span></div>
Kitty Chandlerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05524808952260453841noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4271373189216022547.post-2293812452192835412015-12-11T10:07:00.000-08:002015-12-11T10:07:15.976-08:00To Serve Man Haven S2E10 Who What Where Wendigo?<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Previouslies tell us that Dwight is a bullet magnet, the poor bastard. Dwight just so you know, you can't actually protect people if you're dead or in hospital recovering from bullet wounds and/or cracked ribs. (Kevlar only goes so far.) I tease about the urges under his Trouble because of one part sympathy and two parts ow. Evi was working for the Rev! She swears it was because she wanted to help Duke find out about his past and/or protect him from the Rev, which shows a staggering degree of naivete considering her usual line of work. Also a significant attachment to Duke despite how they clash on a regular basis. And she also severely overestimates her importance to the Rev and his men, getting herself shot and killed when she assumes she's not expendable. Oh honey. You were definitely not used to people playing games this rough. Hell, Duke's not, not entirely, though he's more so than Evi was, as witness his swallowing back grief and rage to pretend like he's going to be a good little follower and find out his answers. Anyone who knows Duke, knows that revenge is probably worth more to him than answers, and that he'll take both if he can get both, but I'd say it's clear the Rev is playing all the odds. We have a last shot from last ep of the Rev versus Dwight-Audrey-Nathan, which is an interesting cluster and certainly not at all representative of Dwight standing in for Vince.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The ep proper opens with… none of Our Heroes! So we have a Trouble that's not what it seems and they're flinging us data as well as red herrings. Yay! Instead, a newscast over the radio, a trucker flossing in his rearview mirror while we hear about a brutal murder of a dental hygienist, really you guys? And oh look they've decided it's a serial killer with so far seven bodies that they know about. They even have a description! I suspect this is because the murders all happened in different jurisdictions and looked like crimes of passion; these are the kinds of things where you file all the forensics and then hope for a break in the detective footwork. Our trucker is halfway posited as the killer as he goes about his business, since he also leers and ogles all over the girl working the gas station who comes out on break. But no! Then a guy fitting the description right down to the rose tattoo walks out and is bashed into by some teenaged boy, who spills his coffee, apologizes, and runs faster. Our trucker seems to think he can go be a big damn hero with the handgun he keeps in the truck for protection. Dude. You don't even keep the fucking thing in the glovebox? It's just hanging out there? Your safety precautions suck and you should feel bad. GET YOUR FINGER OFF THE TRIGGER OH MY GOD. Well, at least we KNOW he's supposed to be a moron. Rounding the corner brings a whole lot of animal-tearing-something-to-shreds noises from the shed out back, and then we get monster-shaky-cam footage as the trucker gets shoved hard out the door by whatever was making those noises. DUN DUN DUNN.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrE8ud-8rd80lCWm8eUjQPtKTShVh4pnsFSkATU60eIsx_1j2K1nIECXAE3nOpjhE83wVSPvm46oyTyAt2tJlOoEXknUH4NVG9Io7kFrjZn8FtNnbSyT8oVVoNEy-LvccVHlX_4ZSNc6c/s1600/haven210cc01.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrE8ud-8rd80lCWm8eUjQPtKTShVh4pnsFSkATU60eIsx_1j2K1nIECXAE3nOpjhE83wVSPvm46oyTyAt2tJlOoEXknUH4NVG9Io7kFrjZn8FtNnbSyT8oVVoNEy-LvccVHlX_4ZSNc6c/s320/haven210cc01.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Now we get to find out what's up with Our Heroes. Audrey is on her third cup of coffee, Nathan informs us, and about as jittery and twitchy as you'd expect from that. He tries to nudge her into talking about it, she takes a page from the Book of Nathan and refuses to discuss it, citing the laundry list of shit </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">he's </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">just dealt with, to which he out-stoics her and repeats that he didn't go through a breakup. Oh EVERYONE. No, no you did not, Nathan, and Audrey is tired and would like to sleep like a normal person again. I feel that. Audrey will walk away to take witness/victim statements now bye Nathan! The trucker is now insisting that whatever he saw it wasn't normal, and the guy he saw, serial killer or no, didn't look like he had the strength to do that, etc etc. I question his assessment of people's strength, the guy looked pretty wiry-strong to me, but again, we do KNOW he's a moron. Dwight will happily take advantage of both this and his disorientation due to mild concussion, and inform him it was totally a black bear and he's lucky not to have been eviscerated. No. Black bear. For serious. Nothing to see here, sir, move on. Audrey cracks wise about Dwight looking like a Viking, but she's not wrong: a man that size, people tend to defer to him out of a sense that he </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">could </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">punch them but instead he's just arguing with them.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Meanwhile, the cops will take out after the blood trail from the shed. They're assuming the blood is one Rory Campbell's, whose father has already been called down, and it leads straight into the woods. Oh </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">yay</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> a woods search just what everyone wants. And a leather bracelet with the inscription "forever" on it, because that's not creepy and disturbing. Nathan advocates for said group search, call in backup, etc, because that's protocol and in this case it is SMART protocol, given the number of things that can fuck you up in the woods. Audrey is taking the traumatized tack of we can't trust anyone it's us against the world no calling anyone else in, for which I can't entirely blame her, but isolating them further is probably not the answer. And have you forgotten so fast that Duke and Dwight really do seem to be on your side? Apparently yes! Dammit, Audrey, says us and Nathan's face, and roll credits.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We take a couple minutes now to get to know Rory's father a little; no, he doesn't know about the stamp on the bracelet, where the hell are the Staties and hounds to help find the serial killer and his son who he is going to refuse to admit might be dead. Which, frankly, given that he doesn't show any signs of knowing about the wendigo girls, is pure stubborn denial at this point. Campbell will proceed to be gruff, angry, and otherwise demonstrate that Goddammit He Is A Man And Doing Something About This, even if it's probably futile. (Semi-hilariously, I'm working on this ep the week the #MasculinitySoFragile hashtag made its way around Twitter, so I'm extra-attuned to these things.) He also knows about the Troubles, his family's longterm Havenites, though the way he speaks if he's not one of the Rev's people, he's not that far removed from them. Although it's hard to determine how much of his vitriol is directed at the serial killer for being a serial killer, and how much for maybe being Troubled. "Twisted freak" is a phrase that could well apply to either. Regardless, Campbell senior is damn well coming and he was a Marine and you can't run this with only two people. He's not wrong! He's just, uh, what we might call emotionally compromised. Dwight, so are you, with your insisting that you come along because a kid is missing. You could be more obvious about it, but you'd need a neon sign the size of you saying Lost A Child Once. Nathan's not wrong about the risk, though, or about Dwight's deathwish. Looking back from the perspective of the last five seasons, I would like to know if anyone in this fucking town DOESN'T have a deathwish. (Kitty suggests Dave; I will allow that his is at most subconscious and he seems to enjoy living!)</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Duke is not the answer to that question. Duke is even </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">now </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">not the answer to that question, being that he just lost Evi and is pretty much running on rage, revenge, and the desire for answers. Duke is also not the answer to the question of hey, would you like to come chase a serial killer with us? Audrey you ask your friends on the weirdest outings. He turns her down once, then again more firmly when she suggests it might be a worthwhile distraction and offers some sympathy. Not very well said sympathy, mind you. Yeah no thanks, and with that tone and facial expression it seems pretty clear to the audience that Duke's "plans" are going to sync up sooner rather than later with Audrey and Nathan's manhunt. Wendigohunt. Whatever. Instead, Nathan got the Teagues in! Oh goodie, does this mean I can threaten them with a serial killer and/or wendigo until they cough up answers? Although this time Vince and Dave are arguing (again) and Dave is on the side of telling people things. Vince is not. Vince is never on the side of telling anyone anything. I'm pretty sure if he could somehow not-tell himself things he'd do that. Whatever the fight was about, we don't get to hear in detail because Campbell starts to hare off into the woods by himself, like an impatient overprotective parent. Shocking, I know, that you have to handle this! Nathan grumps at him and splits them into teams: Campbell and Audrey, Dave and Nathan, Dwight and Vince. Well that's not significant or anything! It also, to be fair, does put a cop and Trouble-immune person with the complete unknown aside from overly impulsive person, and splits the older two up so that someone younger and more fit is there to watch their backs, and gets the benefit of their woods-knowledge. I specify because this is the Teagues we're talking about, after all. Vince points at Dave all command-warning-like as they go, a silent reminder not to fucking tell Nathan things. Dammit, Vince. He will now proceed to call Dwight out a helluva lot harder than Nathan did on the deathwish, indicating a significantly deeper relationship than we've seen between the two as yet. Asks if it's because he went to see Lizzie, or more accurately her grave, recently, and no he hasn't, but when pressed he finally coughs up that yesterday would've been her ninth birthday. Oh honey. I mean, you KNOW you're doing the deathwish thing, and why, but could you work on not actually doing it in the first place? No? Alas.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We shall be interrupted from Vince trying to talk sense into Dwight's PTSD by creepy screams in the treetops! Vince I don't know what the fuck you think unslinging that rifle's going to do when you know you have a bullet magnet next to you, but okay. Maybe you're trusting to his Ranger unarmed combat to tackle the whatever it is and hold it so it can be shot. Let's go visit Audrey and Campbell instead, where she's grumpy about creepy-and-invisible as a combination, not that I can blame her, and he's questioning her competence. In a fit of incredibly perfect timing, rather than directly answer his question about how well she can track in the woods, she will make him stop macho posturing at her by telling him to stop fucking standing on the blood-and-gore trail. I shouldn't laugh AND YET. This trail leads at first to a dead, disemboweled raccoon, which is a minor casualty to the serial killer impaled up on a tree branch. Also disemboweled and possibly chewed. Yech. Put your macho comments away, dude, and let Dwight deal with the crime scene. Audrey suggests maybe Rory did it, as the last known person seen with the serial killer, which is only good cop protocol, and daddy dearest counters with "but he was almost valedictorian!" Okay, dude, I get that you're upset and all, but you do know that's not an actual argument against your son having killed someone in horrible ways? Right? No, he'll just ignore that. Dave relates the story of the wendigo for those of us who don't actually know it, which turns into what is I think the first mention of the Mi'kmaq and also informs us that this is a state park. Campbell dismisses this as nonsense. I continue to lower my opinion of his intelligence, did you or did you not just SAY that you know about the Troubles? Is that such a fucking stretch? My god. Dwight will now inform us that he's sure those are toothmarks, which gives me all of the eyebrows. Dwight how do you already know what that looks like. What in god's name did you get up to in Afghanistan. I mean, I'm sure I don't actually want to know, but seriously. Vince and Dave argue over telling people about the wendigo some more, Audrey makes Campbell assert even more firmly that no, there's no history on either side of the family of the Troubles, this is someone else and it's still hunting his son now stop asking stupid questions, lady. About that condescending, too. I admire her for not having punched him yet, grieving and scared or no. Further argument will be cut off once again by the scream of what everyone's pretty sure now is a wendigo! Yay.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Our final pair, now everyone's split back into their teams, gets to talk about wendigos! Thank you, Dave, for any kind of actual information ever. Nathan says he saw the sneaker prints but they were about eight feet apart, which, okay, I just got up and did a few probably very weird tests that concerned the cat, but even given a long loping stride I can get up to about three feet, and I'm 5'6", so not only are we talking twice as fast as normal human, Dave, we're talking about Dwight's size or taller. Which, once we find the teenage girl wendigos in question, gives me a lot of Um. By twice do you mean like three times? At any rate, Dave claims never to have seen one, but he certainly believes in the Troubles, and the ending to that might even be that he believes that a Trouble might exist to make people behave like wendigos, or to have originally propagated the myth. Except no, we now have suspicious crunching in the underbrush.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgc9zcAhIW-m4fTolRF5ZgxPWVfNbqUDy3gtFHPQKvlJu3_dhNjQuQnsEOEvW9uj3CFefgv8eqrI-3YE37Jd1CcFYryopL6KTe14_weA-mGGfhA01Xd5EVl7hoQ17Bm3MTe_3xatB3hG7s/s1600/haven210cc03.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgc9zcAhIW-m4fTolRF5ZgxPWVfNbqUDy3gtFHPQKvlJu3_dhNjQuQnsEOEvW9uj3CFefgv8eqrI-3YE37Jd1CcFYryopL6KTe14_weA-mGGfhA01Xd5EVl7hoQ17Bm3MTe_3xatB3hG7s/s320/haven210cc03.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Surprise! Not a wendigo! A wild Duke appears! He uses shotgun pointed at Nathan's face! It's surprisingly not effective. For one, Nathan also has a gun; for two, it's Duke, so all he gets is narrowed eyes and the Nathan equivalent of "what the everloving fuck." Well, it turns out the Rev and three of his goons are what the everloving fuck, and he wants Nathan to put the gun down because the goons are all aiming at Nathan. Just in case we needed more demonstration of what an arrogant fucking asshole the Rev is. Correctly identifying the main threat, Nathan turns to point his gun at the Rev, up until Audrey wanders in with </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">her </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">gun up and pointing at Driscoll, which combined with nobody standing down on her "three" is reason enough for Nathan to go back to aiming at Duke. I mean, it's decent tactics: you've got a known good shot and the leader of the pack, you start there and hope the unknowns are slower than they look with those rifles. All of which have, let's note, scopes attached. I feel kinda sorry for Audrey by now, not only is she paranoid and twitchy and inclined to shoot all y'all assholes, she's getting a heftier dose than usual of the "we're all manly men here and know things you don't and are better than you so why should we listen" style of sexism, which is definitely not helping with the paranoid and twitchy. Nathan points out that assaulting a police officer is a felony, which it is, add deadly weapon onto that, and the Rev comes back with the asinine "just protecting our own." Uh… huh. Nobody believes that. Audrey doesn't want to believe that Duke's gone over to the Rev's side of things, and challenges him on it openly. Not the smartest move, since all he can really do is parrot the concerned citizens line and let the Rev take it from there. They're out to help hunt the serial killer and save the boy! That's… sweet. Helpful. By which I mean you are totally </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">hoping </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">this is a Trouble, Edmund Driscoll, and that you get to shoot someone or have Duke shoot them and activate </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">his </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Trouble. Also you're an asshole. Unfortunately, Campbell is either not familiar with the Rev's machinations or sides with him more than he does the cops, or he's just a straight-up pragmatist, because he's still not wrong when he says they need the numbers. Nathan would like a more up close and personal "what the fuck" with Duke, who says no, he's insane for expecting results out of the same thing over and over, and Evi's dead. Basically, he can't change what is, he might be able to change what will be if Nathan will stop getting in his way, and </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">technically </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">none of what he says is actually lying to either of them. He hasn't made a date with the Rev, he's using the Rev and hoping it pays off faster than the Rev using him. At least that's the strong implication. Audrey is too upset and fucked up to get that message, by the worry and rather hectic color to her face.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And she'll prove it as they go along their merry, having swapped out partners somewhat. It looks like Campbell's gone with the Rev and his men, maybe hoping to be leading a squad-shape of people? He seems like the kind of guy who takes issue with not getting to be at least a squad leader, insert eyerolling here. Nathan and Audrey are paired back up, leaving Duke and Dwight paired and, presumably, the Teagues together once again. I'm not sure how I feel about that last. I mean, less damage to everyone else, but fewer chances to pry intel out of them. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Any</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">way. Audrey thinks Duke's entirely lost it, which isn't entirely inaccurate. He's certainly lost a lot of his usual inhibitions, and considering how counter to normal society they run, it shows more than it otherwise might. Nathan continues to be the voice of reason, pointing out this is within the range of normal responses to loss, though Audrey also has a point in that pointing a gun at someone who's at least an ally if not a friend… not so much with the normal. Whether by Duke standards or everyone else standards. Nathan hopes he's bluffing. Everyone hopes he's bluffing! Audrey is sure the Rev's men were not bluffing, and expresses some general willingness to, if not shoot them in the face, at least be prepared for that eventuality before one of them gets shot in the back. This is so not the way to win friends, influence people, or avoid bloodshed. I'm just saying.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Over to Dwight and Duke, where Duke is still mildly caretaking as he reminds Dwight to do up his laces. Awww. And then snarks at him in the seconds after over if he's going to a Renaissance Faire. And how </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">exactly </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">do you know what a Ren Faire is, Duke? Are there photos? Were you running a con with Evi? PLEASE SAY THERE ARE PHOTOS. Ahem. Feel free to picture Duke with your favorite Faire performers now, lord knows I am. On a more somber note, Dwight appears to be hallucinating his daughter in ballet outfit. Dwight. Please go get that PTSD with dissociative features checked out and medicated. Please? At least this seems to be common enough that he knows looking away will break it, and turns out Duke's vanished on down the way, just in time for another creepy scream. Because every scream means a scene change, we move back to Nathan and Audrey, with a fairly adorable bit between them about the singleton squirrel chattering and yelling means it's scared shitless, not talking to another squirrel. Apparently Nathan read a lot of gun and hunting magazines as a bored kid in rural Maine. Aww. Wait, what's this? Is it a green girl's bloodstained sweatshirt? IT IS. Audrey wonders how many people this thing needs to eat, assuming it's even a wendigo to start with, and then we get multiple bloodcurdling screams. Yes. You are surrounded by wendigo. ENJOY. They don't have time for that, though, because Rory comes pelting out of the underbrush to be caught by his father, we don't know where the hell he turned up from, and Rory would evidently like very much not to be near other people right now. Well that's suspicious as fuck. Even more suspicious is him trying to get away from his father who is, while overbearing, to all appearances a decent enough dad, and immediately taking the blame for the serial killer's death, in one of the most unconvincing displays of "I'm taking the blame for someone else" I have ever seen on any show. It doesn't seem like anyone's buying this line of bullshit for an instant, with Nathan taking point on yeah, so, give us specifics? What'd you do exactly? Only they will now be sidelined by one of the Rev's men staggering out to the beach with a bitten leg shouting about being bitten by a very fast human-shaped thing. Sure, he claims it's human, but we all know what trauma can do to memory, so let's just go with humanoid for now. Rory takes advantage of this distraction to go dashing back </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">into </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">the woods, much to his father's dismay, and Audrey and Nathan conclude that it's not after him but the wendigo </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">are </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">after them. </span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhx_DZE2D2Qe2ccy9MLfCmY9yMvwdIkcp6RDBWKpnR9zOUgrw_DSfEhfUcGp41SaTDpgfVLiZtaoRmemf9K2NNMeTCN4Fxt4Qdw3FUxMXo4wdaOhqEjyAR64S2zfyIkGSLcbucYAK5Bf7c/s1600/haven210cc04.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhx_DZE2D2Qe2ccy9MLfCmY9yMvwdIkcp6RDBWKpnR9zOUgrw_DSfEhfUcGp41SaTDpgfVLiZtaoRmemf9K2NNMeTCN4Fxt4Qdw3FUxMXo4wdaOhqEjyAR64S2zfyIkGSLcbucYAK5Bf7c/s320/haven210cc04.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We cut after the ad break to a long shot of the group going out to the lakeshore and starting to make camp. However much they may not </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">want </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">to be a cohesive group right now, nobody wants to get eaten, so sticking together until they know more is probably a good idea, yes. And then it's night, and the Rev and his men don't have a fire started though there's the beginnings of one set up. Dwight, go Ranger at them until they buy a clue. Nathan looks to be walking over to offer to help, or something, it's not clear, but it gets Duke and Audrey alone by her </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">lit </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">fire, no symbolism here at ALL that's just the footrest I turned the anvil into. We will now have a </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">massive </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">clash of communication styles: Duke is coming over to ask for firestarting tips as a peace offering, and Audrey sees him asking her for help after lying to and threatening her and hers. Neither of them is wrong, they're just approaching everything the wrong way for the other, which results in a hissed screaming match over whether or not Duke's trustworthy, knows what he's doing, etc. Eventually Duke calms down, sits down, and explains that yes of course it matters that Evi's dead and one of the men over there killed her, that it's ultimately the Rev's fault. But he's getting answers dangled in front of his nose and he can tell they're to an enormous puzzle, and he doesn't need to tell Audrey outright how much that matters to him, and that she knows what it's like. Meanwhile she goes quiet and rueful because she's in the awkward position of having to admit even tacitly that she believed the worst of Duke, only really being able to say welcome to the club. Yeah, it's a shitty club, you don't even get t-shirts. And now she'll meet Duke on his terms and tell him that dried grass and animal dung burns forever, which finally gives them the opening to talk about a) Audrey's self-doubt and lack of self-image and b) that Duke believes in her, no really he does. It's glossed over with gentle teasing, but that's what it amounts to. She will now offer him the reminder that some answers you don't get to unlearn and you might really fucking wish you had, and Duke has some kind of a reply for her, probably on the order of yeah but not knowing is killing him, except it's wendigo time again.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I'm going to be over here laughing that in the entire couple minutes they've been talking, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">nobody </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">has gotten the Rev's fire started. On some level I'm sure that's for the symbolism, on another level I love the gender commentary, and on the purely Watsonian level I wonder if Dwight was just hanging out all "I've stayed rougher places overnight without a fire you can all suck it I don't like any of you that much." Because you know he knows how to light a fire from nothing, it's square in Ranger training's wheelhouse. At any rate: wendigos! Form a perimeter and watch the idiot ex-Marine go charging into the darkness to "take the fight to the enemy." Oh my god dude you are so lucky you're plot-vital and don't get killed you are everything wrong with the military. The Rev will back him because of course he will, Duke's "amen" is so fake-hearty I can't believe he fools anyone, and Nathan will go charging after him because he doesn't want Duke to get himself killed. Aww honey. I have no idea what Dwight thinks he's doing other than trying to protect the idiot civilians, but we leave the Teagues standing on the shore with a very OH GOD WHY US pair of looks on. Well, you guys, when you insisted on keeping info from everyone…</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">See, this is what happens when you charge into the woods in the middle of the fucking night: you trip and fall. In Nathan's case, all but facefirst into a dead and disemboweled deer. Yeah, I'd freak out and grab up my gun too if I heard someone approaching. Except it turns out to be a teenage girl, who identifies Nathan by name and begs him for help, then proceeds to order the growling little sister "no." Don't eat the nice cop, Sophie. Nathan wants to know no </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">what</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, in tones that suggest he already knows and would really like not to have it confirmed. Sorry, Nathan, the oh-shit is intensifying, Sophie's hungry.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Audrey will now look for Nathan. WHY DID YOU ALL SPLIT THE PARTY. YOU ARE ALL BEING DUMB. Has nobody ever seen a horror movie? Honestly. Plus you know damn well there are multiple potential hostiles out there, you're being even dumber. Reverend Driscoll, you should also know better, though I suppose you think your faith will keep you safe as well as warm at night. Sigh. Certainly his self-righteousness is strong enough to do </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">something </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">by, though I'm not sure the something is printable. They have a nice little talk about how Driscoll put everyone at risk when he let them all go play action hero and by the way where's Nathan? He doesn't know. But he's gonna kill all the Troubled and fix Haven's problems, and I'm quite certain he's talking to Lucy and maybe Sarah as well when he says she's been coddling them for too long and getting people killed. Not that Audrey knows that, though by now she might suspect. She is very visibly considering shooting the bastard as he walks away, not that I blame her, because anyone who says shit like yeah but we'll kill the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">right </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">people is definitely suspect and probably going to hurt someone innocent (again) sooner rather than later. Instead she demands to know where Nathan is once more, getting nothing but the Rev turning his back and walking away on her, like he knows she'll never shoot him. LITTLE DOES HE KNOW. Not in cold blood, anyway.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Nathan finds her instead! Nathan I honestly do not fucking know WHAT your thinking was when you tackled her from behind and covered her mouth with the hand still bloody from falling over the deer carcass. You're goddamn lucky she didn't manage to shoot you and was too surprised to put her hand-to-hand to use right away. Lectures can wait until later, though, right now he has two little girls in trouble (and Trouble) for her to help. The older is named Frankie, presumably for Francesca, and we enter creepy children and exposition land! Some fumbling around for explanations later, not that I blame the poor kids, Nathan takes over and explains that their parents dying in a plane crash set off their Trouble, they can survive on any raw flesh but hunger for human, and moving out to the middle of nowhere helps them control their Trouble so they don't have to smell people and think prey. Oh honeys. Okay, then what about the body? Apparently middle sister Amelia has, um, control issues, and possibly issues with wanting to control it, and Frankie won't say it outright but yes, she thinks Rory could've lured the serial killer into the woods for his girlfriend to eat. "Way too intense" is code for </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">something </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">unpleasant, without knowing the details of the girls' idiolect I won't hazard a guess as to specifics, and we don't get any more exposition because first off, Sophie's starving and having literal stomach pains as a result, poor kid, and second of all the Rev's men are coming out again. Fucking seriously? You couldn't go back to the camp and stay put like normal people? For fuck's sake. Frankie gives them a couple locations, one where she and Sophie will hide out and the ranger's station where she thinks Rory and Amelia might be, we get our first glimpse of wendigo movement as a sign of their trust in Audrey and Nathan, and Audrey is now not going to let the Rev kill these girls. Aww Audrey. This is a really shitty Trouble, too, my god, who did what to Mara or William to get that one and can I have a time machine to give them a nice lively bear to eat?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Morning dawns with some kind of Native-sounding? music, which gives me all of the eyebrows since I don't know enough to know if they did their research and picked something non-appropriative and also appropri</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">ate</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, or if this is kind of godawful. I'm also somewhere between amused and facepalming over Audrey's face superimposed over the landscape of Haven's natural beauty, which could possibly scream "this woman is an integral part of this area" louder but again, neon signs would be needed. Anyway. Campbell is tromping around with the Rev's men, and Amelia and Rory are at the ranger's station. Now that I look at that I have EVEN MORE eyebrows because yes, actually, the Amy-and-Rory Doctor Who run had started by the time this season was in production, so this really seems like some kind of a nod. (You want too intense, Frankie? Try hanging out waiting for your beloved for a thousand years.) Rory brings her water in the morning and </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">wow </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">does she look like shit. Apparently this is because one or both of them had the bright idea to treat the obligate-carnivore part of being a wendigo as though it's a drug addiction that can be cured by waiting it out. Um. You guys are impressively dumb. Amelia I have sympathy for because lord knows she's got a bad case of middle sibling syndrome and just wants to be special without being ostracized. Rory is an idiot and should be punched. This bit is a bit disorganized and unclear, too, we don't know when they decided this. Was it after she ate the serial killer? And one or both of them was shocked, disgusted, horrified, some combination of all three by it? Can a wendigo go that quickly from one feed to ravenous to the point of loss of control? We don't know! And we've only seen one person, one deer, and one raccoon ripped open as food sources, so honestly what the fuck. With bonus what the fuck for are none of you pragmatic enough to look at your needs and actually eat the entire goddamn carcass of whatever it is? Rory proceeds to get up close and personal. Rory do not act like you're going to make out with the starving apex predator have you lost your tiny mind? Both of them? Honestly this ep can be summed up as UGH TEENAGE BOYS WHY. Because as soon as she shoves him away he decides that she can't actually hold out and this isn't like addiction and she needs food! If I didn't need to type, my hands would be glued to my face.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7QqfVZZaeqnWpHTaOkGd2bLdco_0q5UYQ3EFcJI8Ai5vdX-eIBNQlhepbsjKoLBHIw9kVrr1WQrnOJXF2ob6WwAbCx2OXNJyEFRe-gty_BbUSU92XFwiw4BIcEbcCCiFd8XFYAiSOM3I/s1600/haven210cc05.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7QqfVZZaeqnWpHTaOkGd2bLdco_0q5UYQ3EFcJI8Ai5vdX-eIBNQlhepbsjKoLBHIw9kVrr1WQrnOJXF2ob6WwAbCx2OXNJyEFRe-gty_BbUSU92XFwiw4BIcEbcCCiFd8XFYAiSOM3I/s320/haven210cc05.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Somehow or another they've managed to split into two groups of five, with Our Heroes being in the group that should hopefully reach the cabin first: Audrey, Nathan, Dwight, and the Teagues. Then we've got the Rev, Duke, Campbell, and I only counted two goons this time around, maybe they sent wosshisface who got bit back home. The point of this, however, is Duke and the Rev having a brief little conversation - well, lecture - about how important moral certitude is and blah blah blah could you sound a little MORE like a cult leader, Driscoll? God he's creepy. Duke thinks so too, but he's doing a decent enough job of hiding it, and more importantly he's letting the very genuine interest in having a conversation with the Rev about his father and his supposed destiny to save Haven show through. Which is the bait the Rev's dangling in front of him, because while he's very very bad at people in some ways, Driscoll does know how to dangle bait and lead people just a little further down the garden path than they think they're going to go. This is how he's been a successful cult leader for any number of years! He's definitely been around, by the sound of things, since Lucy, although I think he'd only know of Sarah and women prior by oral history because he seems to be of a generation with Garland, or maybe in between Garland and the Teagues, making him a child to adolescent in Sarah's day. (The actor himself would've been seven or eight, as it turns out.) And we all know that the Rev's idea of saving Haven is to have a Crocker kill all the Troubled people and then presumably kill himself and rid Haven of all Troubles forever and aye, yes? Yes. C'mere, Driscoll, I need to punch you - oh okay, sure, a rock to the head works too. Really, Rory?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Yes really. And not only that but he's gotten Amelia from the ranger's station as everyone comes up on it, Nathan first scooping up the cup of water and no, no fires, no nothing that would indicate how long it's been. I would suggest that maybe if someone else had picked it up, they could see if someone had been holding it a long time by residual body heat? But alas. Fire would've been their best clue, though, and there is none, and oh by the way Duke would like to announce that the Rev's gone and no he didn't hear anything. How much that was willful not hearing anything because fuck the Rev and how much that's Duke flailing around going BUT I SHOULD BE BETTER THAN THIS, who knows. Another goon would like us to know that it's "that thing" and yes indeed wossface went to the hospital. As you do, for bites. No wonder they didn't get much searching done after that yesterday. Dwight will track them! Campbell confirms! Honey, Dwight is a better tracker than you ever fucking were, quit it. (There's an argument to be made for them as mirror images in this ep, honestly, though I don't believe we know about Dwight and his Ranger training yet.) Audrey calls a halt and a that's nice boys but you're just tracking whatever's in front of you, how about we use the knowledge Frankie gave us? Yes. That is a good idea and you should feel good for having it, Audrey. The Teagues will stay behind in case of extra wendigos and it occurs to me that I have a question: how in seven hells did they manage to get everyone updated on the exact nature of the situation in this environment? Was it just after they separated into groups for the morning, or what? Dwight and Nathan and Audrey will book it for Frankie's corner of the park to get her to be a good big sister and help them talk Amelia down, assuming that's necessary. Or control her physically.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Except when they get to Frankie and Sophie, Sophie is incredibly sick and needs to eat. Real food. Preferably people food. Oh </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">yay</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Well, Dwight's paternal senses are tingling so he's taking this one and Nathan and Audrey can go with Frankie to deal with the genuinely problematic Troubled person. To be fair, this is a pretty easy cost-benefit from his perspective: worst case scenario, sure, he gets eaten, but the person immune to the Troubles and her partner the chief of police are still alive. Plus a little girl who can't really be blamed for her Trouble is alive. I mean, it assumes that Dwight's life is expendable, but you know he got that one ground in </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">really </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">thoroughly in Ranger training, so we basically can't work on any other assumption, at least not until he gets to be the chief of police himself. (And even then it's only a different degree of expendable.) It also has the bonus effect of taking him away from all the people with guns while doing something necessary and useful: it's still dangerous, sure, but he can potentially outwit Sophie's Trouble and the dangers of the woods. Not so much the bullets. So! He scoops her up, he is not taking her to a hospital with all the people and blood around, good Dwight, and Audrey is basically asking Frankie to track her own sister by scent. Oh everyone. Sucks, but would suck more if she got shot by the Rev or his people. SPEAKING OF WHICH. Rory is encouraging Amelia to eat the Rev because he was going to kill her. Rory you are taking all the wrong lessons from your dad, since this one seems to be "do unto others before they can do unto you." Amelia is not exactly happy about this but she's not exactly in control, either. Oh, and the others are coming so he should presumably go the fuck away. Not that he will immediately.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And now for some incredibly adorable paternal Dwight with Sophie, talking about the Nutcracker and who she wants to dance in it someday. The prince! I love you Sophie never change. She's far enough out of it not to hear the past tense in "my daughter loved ballet," which means she asks for her name, and Dwight gets hit in the mildly distracted due to gutpunching and oh look that's a bear trap. Well. This should be fun. If by fun you understand I mean painful and I'm going to wince every time we have to see his leg. Like this is the part where it gets really clear just how far his training extends, because normal people, even extraordinary ordinary people, do not have these kinds of OW FUCK okay assess the situation reflexes that he does. Meanwhile Rory is pulling everyone away from Amelia and the Rev by running off and calling for help. Sound a little less convincing, kid. Amelia please get better taste in boyfriends. One with some brains he's not keeping in his dick would be a great start. Duke and the Rev's goons go haring off toward the sound, lacking anything else to go on and needing to back up Campbell as he chases the sound of his son. Frankie, however, would like them to know they're being tricked and there's blood in the opposite direction. Point of order: are you sure that's the Rev's blood and not Dwight's you're smelling? I mean narrative convenience says yes, she's right, but I'm just saying, if her senses are that good it's a valid concern. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And that is in fact a lot of blood, though mostly it's hidden by soaking into his dark pants and/or being trapped under skin and muscle by the trap. Dwight tries Feat of Strength! It is not effective. He tries Tug The Trap Stake! Still not effective. Fucking fine, says Dwight, c'mere and eat me, kid. Starting with the arm, so he's not actually trying to </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">die </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">right away. Just get maimed a little. He can live without an arm, and she can't live without food, and he is food, QED. No and also hell no, says Sophie, you're gonna save me! And then she proceeds to basically be a lion lying down like a lamb. Oh kid. See, Dwight, this is what happens when you bond with people, they don't want to hurt you. Especially little orphan girls in need of parental figures </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">which you willingly provided</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Dork. A lot more pulling at the stake later, which must be incredibly painful (but not as bad as it's going to be!), he proves her right by getting it out of the ground, getting Sophie back into his arms, and walking off with the bear trap still dug in. Have I mentioned his terrifying fucking training in the last two paragraphs? I think I should again.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Apparently eating a serial killer is fair game, pun intended, but eating the Rev isn't? O-kay. I am 100% sure that Rory deliberately enticed the serial killer into getting eaten, although we don't know if Amelia was too hungry to resist or took part intentionally. Either way I have all of the UM for this: I know the psychology at work here, I even know it's legit and not the writers pulling things out of their collective ass, I just want to sigh at the monkeys now. She flails around a bit with blood-licking before cutting him loose and telling him to run, a thing we know damn well he won't do. Because of course he won't, he needs to cleanse Haven of its sins. I hate you so much, Driscoll. Cue a speech about how evil will always out, you have to cut it off where it lives, BLAH BLAH FUCKING BLAH. I mean, I loathe him and all he stands for, but we should note that he's also profiling himself when he says this shit. He really does hate humanity, which includes himself, and thinks he's the most pure which isn't saying much, and he knows how bad he is therefore everyone else should be killed. Ew. Ew ew ew. But I'm pretty sure it's what's going on in his head all the time, to say nothing of as he's about to kill the girl who just spared his life against all her instincts and needs. Nathan and Frankie come up just as he's about to stab Amelia, and while I believe the wendigo could've taken care of the problem, Audrey seems to've done a flanking action. For lo, there is a gunshot, the girls comforting each other, and a very startled dead Reverend Driscoll. That was an actual straight to the heart bullet, too, proper center of mass and everything. Textbook, as opposed to TV. Behind him, Audrey is equal parts terrified that she was nearly too late, terrified about everything this means for the future, and, I think, scared that she took some satisfaction in killing him. That is very thousand-yard-stare by the time she's lowering her gun.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">After the ad break, Nathan's finishing up what I can only imagine is a cursory examination of the scene and comes over to where Audrey's stare has gone more sad and resigned than horrified. Nathan, if she had been aiming for his shoulder she would've broken all the LEO training that her reflexes have, regardless of how she got them implanted. She doesn't have time to come up with an answer, let alone that complex of an answer, before everyone else comes running up to the sound of the gunshot. Frankie and Campbell are on the same page for at least a few moments: both of you fucking stay away from each other you are bad for people. I kind of wonder if the writers were trying for a modern Romeo and Juliet thing, because if they were they failed to hit the actual points and made the trope of love at first sight very hackneyed and teen-infatuation, but that's a rant for another time. I will say they kept the part where all the adults are fucking up in! Because they are, and Duke is getting the most fucked over, arguably. Certainly he'd argue it! One of the goons tries to claim she's a monstrous freak and the Rev was a man of god, which is exactly the kind of logic I'd expect from a brainwashed cult follower: some people are worth saving and others should be killed! Yay! Sigh. Nathan declares it a clean kill per police protocol before anyone can try to put Audrey on trial or shoot her in the middle of the woods for killing their Rev, which is probably for the best because I don't even want to know what Duke would've ended up doing with that. By the look on his face, he doesn't know either.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4O5fQg9aq5zAMvIIXMnUhCcU7kA4BdfE4T9A1zBVYs2IrFUCDnSHjQp4Hiozs80N6UjGn4i9YUtJGSSC4X1u8LnLLKKnHAF9eSsGbB_gFqThHHxAfMbQSgAqUrbnOe7sPKkiSx9wBo4A/s1600/haven210cc06.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4O5fQg9aq5zAMvIIXMnUhCcU7kA4BdfE4T9A1zBVYs2IrFUCDnSHjQp4Hiozs80N6UjGn4i9YUtJGSSC4X1u8LnLLKKnHAF9eSsGbB_gFqThHHxAfMbQSgAqUrbnOe7sPKkiSx9wBo4A/s320/haven210cc06.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Cleanup and aftermath time! Sophie's okay, she's getting morphine to stabilize her and then the girls will all be driven off. Nathan, while I agree with your concern, I think Dwight's field triage skills are in fact still better than yours. (By s5 I'm not sure! But now, yeah.) Rory and Amelia say a tearful and still incoherent goodbye, seriously, their relationship is the least explicable part of this ep. I understand teenagers do dumb and/or weird shit as they're figuring out how to be adults, but we just don't get a lot of explanation for </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">why </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">or who instigated or anything else. Though I continue to suspect Rory of being an asshole like his dad. Amelia says now she knows she's strong enough to "get through this," and all I can think is what, were you a vegetarian for ethical reasons before now? Or considering it? Give me SOMETHING to hang a hat on here that's not just "horror at eating raw meat." Oh well. Dwight drives off with a significant pause and panover of the photos of Lizzie he keeps behind his sun visor. Along with his keys. Dwight. You are not security measures for your truck when you're not in it. Sophie takes note of the pictures, and I think Frankie does as well; Amelia will be off in semi-oblivious land because she's had a hard few days. Nathan exposits for us, after putting some pressure on the Teagues about yes he </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">does </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">want to know quit hiding shit from him not cool, that the girls are going to live out by the slaughterhouse until the Troubles are over. That's actually kind of sweet, and should definitely fix the majority of their issues. Would that everyone's were so easily solved. Socialization is another problem, but hopefully Dwight has some ideas on that score.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Vince would like to know what the hell happened out there, I'm pretty sure if this were HBO he'd've said fuck, not hell. Audrey's watching all of this go down while she leans on the hood of Nathan's truck like it's the only thing keeping her upright and anchored to reality. And now Duke comes over to talk. She offers up that there'll be an inquiry and she'll have to justify not aiming for the Rev's leg, which I continue to think is bullshit. No, in the real world it's not always that clear, but in this situation it was very clear that the Rev was going to kill Amelia if he wasn't immediately stopped, and law enforcement training is VERY firm about aim for center of mass. Whether or not that training is a good thing is a whole other kettle of fish, but by protocol, Audrey did exactly right. Duke does not want to think about that. Duke would like to know what the fuck why does he not get to know all of the secrets the Rev was dangling in front of him and it's her fault and so on and so forth. Actually it's Driscoll's fault for being a narcissistic murdering abusive fuckwad, but he's not there to blame and Duke's not exactly rational right now. Neither is Audrey, who would like to know if Duke would've stopped the Rev from killing that little girl. It's a fair question, the way he's acting, not that I think Duke thinks so. He claims not to know. I'm pretty sure we do know, and he's responding that way out of being hurt that Audrey thinks so little of him. And then again, he did essentially just say that Audrey should've prioritized letting him learn secrets about his past over saving someone's life, sooooo there's blame enough to go around on both sides here. When challenged, Audrey stiffens up and refuses to back down from "I did what I had to do," after a list of responses that are kinda worrying in how much they sound like the Rev. Fighting a war? Who is? Without the Rev as their leader, what exactly do you think is going on here, Audrey? And she looks about as fragile and careworn as we've yet seen her as she walks away and back over to Nathan. Just in case we didn't know whose side she'd picked.</span>Anna Hammetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10095633218958433882noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4271373189216022547.post-19489529694344165632015-12-05T13:49:00.001-08:002015-12-05T13:49:24.823-08:00For The Reckless Ones Haven S5E23 Blind Spot<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 14.6667px; line-height: 1.38; white-space: pre-wrap;">Previously on Haven: I miss William. How the fuck did that happen. Is this some magical Colin Ferguson shit? 'cause it kinda seems like it. Croatoan is going to kill and eat everyone, William sez, but then he disappears off into the void and possibly for home because he's… tired of murder? Sleepy kitten done thinking of nothing but murder all day? At any rate, Nathan came back with the crystal, Dave went into his mind palace to try and defeat Croatoan and succeeded in (we think and hope) getting rid of the timey-wimey bullshit memory wiping (DONNA NOBLE FOREVER FUCK YOU ahem oops did that slip out? That was my outside voice, wasn't it.), and also died, wrecking Vince. Croatoan is now out of Dave's body but whether or not he's genuinely lost this ability AND why he's still hanging out being a creepyass mist rather than taking a form asap we do not (yet) know. Suspect lots of things! Don't know. Also Dave used his internal IMing system to inform Vince and Dwight that Croatoan's coming for Audrey. I am sure that's not the only thing he's dropped by for.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We reopen down at the station. I still want to know everything there is to know about how daily life is in Haven, given that the Guard's in town, they HAVE to still be rationing, we just heard about that a couple eps ago, there is NO WAY that it looks that clean and neat. I recognize this is the problem with filming in a real town, but I'm still going to grump about it. Not least because how long have they been cut off from the outside world? At least a couple months by now? They should be running low on at least SOME supplies. There should be more fishing boats out to get fresh meat into the town. Speaking of which, how does the shroud work in the ocean? We know the bay is still accessible, we see it in the panover every ep! Is the water stagnant or is it free-flowing through the barrier, like the air that has to be flowing around by now or people would have suffocated. Speaking of air, the barrier doesn't seem to go all the way around the town since there's still things like sunlight, so what about the airspace over it? Yes, I am </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>way</i> overthinking this. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Inquiring damn minds want your apocalypse to be more grounded in the physical realities okay. Speaking of which, the Guard is all geared up doing a bunch of work on the station, turning it into some kind of a fortress, they're putting in security cameras to protect them from Croatoan if at all possible. I'd argue that it's a police station it should already have good surveillance, but a) cops apparently aren't big on being surveilled and b) this is both a small town PD and an old as shit building, I'm not exactly surprised they haven't rewired yet. (Okay, a little surprised they didn't after Lockdown. Hey, timing!) I'd also argue that really what are security cameras going to do against Croatoan, but that's a whole other barrel of monkeys. Nathan's supervising inside, Audrey is not sleeping and being FINE in true Italian Job style. (Fucked up, Insecure, Neurotic, and Emotional. Not that anyone can blame her.) She is dammit going to figure this out! Admittedly hoping the crystal and core being put in the same place was going to yield sudden magical results and/or epiphanies was a little much, but it's also what they had to go on. So now it's down to trial and error and being her mother's daughter. Go science the shit out of it, Audrey. Laverne, meanwhile, is cranky as fuck and hates working with the Guard. I realize that a lot of this is because her Trouble's been activated, maybe been activated? That's another thing that's unclear, which seems to be a weakness this season in general is there's no clear delineation of some things that would improve our understanding of the episode. Other things I'm fine with having obfuscated! When and how Dave was possessed up until the very end, for example, that builds suspense. The part about when Laverne got her Trouble doesn't necessarily need to be addressed either, except for the fact that what, she can talk now, but as a building she doesn't have access to the walkies or the laptop speakers? While I'm picking at nits, the writers have amply demonstrated that the Guard is made up of very blue-collar people. And that means they should have blue-collar skills, including hanging drywall, fixing electric, A/V wiring, and so on. I would buy this more if someone were out there grumbling about being a plumber not an electrician, or about how the station's old as dirt and a pain in the ass to boot (</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">K:</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> As the owner of a building that was built before electricity, that definitely can contribute.), or even if there's someone's Trouble or avoiding the trigger for someone's Trouble making things difficult here or there, but they're not, they're just working. And just… look, if you're going to make them blue collar, make them believable, okay? This isn't their fault. Nathan tries to convince Laverne to ease up, then goes to poke around for the Trouble census and get people to use their Troubles to seal up the station, giving us Karl's name as an example. Audrey vents a little more and, well, coffee. Coffee will help a little! After a perimeter check.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Cue Duke showing up with a bagful of grenades and being adorable at Nathan. He's also making the headache face, which does not make us feel better about his being all Croatoan-possessed all the time this ep. He </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">claims </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">the grenades are Dwight's plan B, though I question if that would hit Dwight with his Trouble or not. Hard to tell, they're not exactly projectile weapons but they definitely </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">create </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">projectiles. Duke-a-toan is thoroughly dismal about their prospects for finding Croatoan since they don't know what he looks like, if he's a mist, if he's possessing someone, all of this is stuff that it's Duke's job to think of AND ALSO a good way to ramp up paranoia and tension on Croatoan's part. I dislike all of this so much. Especially because I really want the boys to be this fucking adorable when Duke's NOT possessed and/or gone to the dark side. We know they're capable of it! Sadly it is not to be, I think. It's hard to tell, given that we can't be sure if Croatoan knows everything Duke does, or if he's just hot-reading Nathan using Duke's body, but regardless, he cracks jokes about the Gull being ruined by sea-monsters. (Fucking Glendowers I swear.) And then Nathan brings up their childhood, how they thought their dads were using the Troubles like a bogeyman in the closet and it turned out they were the town's wardrobe full of skeletons that did not lead anywhere so nice as Narnia. Maybe the Wood Between The Worlds after Jadis got done with it. (</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">K:</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> The Wood Between The Worlds that goes to Halloweentown? This metaphor may have run away with itself.) Duke I dislike all your destiny and fate talk. A LOT. It makes me wonder about how much is possession and how much is Duke giving into despair and Crocker psychosis. I want aaaanswers. Nathan points out he's not just like Garland but he finally got his father's respect, Duke cracks a Simpsons joke because he is uncomfortable let us not talk about our emotions pls. No sorry, now they're going to talk about some petty crook named Nick McGuinness (really? REALLY, PARKER AND MCGUINNESS? we see you very well) and while Duke doesn't volunteer anything incriminating about his activities with McGuinness or about whether or not he handed him over to Nathan so Nathan would stay on the force and not lose faith in humanity, he does volunteer enough details that I'm reasonably certain he's not JUST possessed. (If he is, and we sincerely hope he's not that possessed or controlled, Croatoan has strong access to his memory.) This does not, however, change my NOW KISS YOU BASTARDS face. TRUE LOVE'S KISS COME ON NOW. Nathan, looking at him like you look at Audrey is not. helping. Not to mention talking at him like trying to cheer up Audrey. Oh wait a text. Duke please stop making phone calls to interdimensional mass murderers. See also: Arla Cogan. Mara? (I really, REALLY hope that this is a deliberate callback, and if he's in control of his actions he's also playing Croatoan. Please please please.) Nathan assigns Duke secure the grenades duty, which I'm sure is in no way going to go incredibly wrong.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Speaking of, oh looking a breaking noise. That can't be good. Oh, it's Vince's shreds of sanity. Poor Vince. Well, poor Vince with his survivor's guilt and belief that he should've done something and transferring that onto everyone else 'cause it's easier than confronting his guilt… right up until he starts waving a knife around. Well, a box cutter. Less range or depth than a knife but those fuckers are still sharp. Then I'm all for what they do about it, which is get a bunch of guys to restrain him (he's not struggling very hard) and let Gloria stick him with a sedative. Vince at the point where you're trying to commit suicide by your own Guard members, I'm calling that one a really GOOD idea on everyone else's part. Sympathy! But also no, you don't get to threaten everyone, because he could in fact kill or hurt someone pretty badly before someone put a bullet in him. Assuming that Dwight's out of range so that it would even be effective. I'm pleased that despite the guns all over the place, everyone seems WAY more restrained than that, at least, and given Dwight was walking the external perimeter I suspect he's going to go run the far, far external side of that and act as an early-warning scout for Croatoan, if possible. Or I'd bet on that being the plan, so they can shoot the fucker with extreme and indiscriminate prejudice. Audrey looks self-protective and horrified that someone she previously thought of as bedrock solid is completely falling apart like this (and even if she intellectually knows why that doesn't make it any less unnerving) and is so not in shape to deal with Vince's pleas for her mercy. Besides which she's really not where he should be looking, though given his emotional attachment to her and Sarah and Lucy I understand why he goes there. No, Gloria has more practical experience with this, she'll stay with him. Aww, you guys.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A louder crash! This one's a light falling out of the ceiling and narrowly missing Alex Senna, remember him? Apparently he will be playing the role of Chekhov's Troubled Guy for this evening. He has words for Duke, none of them polite, and Duke snarks him back because defense mechanism, or so we assume at the time. Stop snarking, there's blood, and a trail, and it leads straight to Karl with the acid Trouble who was supposed to be melting locks and turning the place into a fortress with very specific entrances and exits. Which of course only works when you don't have the guy with the phasing Trouble hanging out and working for Croatoan, not that, I'll grant, they know that at this time. Slit throat, for maximum blood sponging, so not the way Croatoan kills his victims. Actually arguably more disturbing to most people is the slit throat, both for the smell and for the visual. (This raises a whole host of questions, like, when Croatoan kills via Trouble-sucking, does it come with the usual messy human death of voiding the bladder and bowels? Or is it more like being magically petrified to death, including waste? It's entirely possible the body just shuts down, released of cardiac? or all electrical current, but I'm not sure what that would do to the relevant muscles. Or a more horrifying thought, if it shuts down the central and then peripheral nervous systems, although in both cases the muscles would probably still relax before death/rigor sets in... Look, these are the kinds of things I think about, you're welcome.) Audrey and Nathan flail about the cameras not being online, which is of course the cue for us to get a red dot on one of them and start flipping between normal camera view and security camera view! HMM GEE I WONDER. Nathan eventually orders everyone to go back to their posts, double up on door duty possibly so that if one person's possessed the other can at least raise an alarm before gurgling to death, and quit fucking freaking out more than is already called for. At least essentially. I'm just glad that given the throat cutting they didn't go after the guy who was related to the Croatoan possessee and waving a knife around. Meanwhile Audrey is… getting chased into what might be the dispatcher's office, might be just where people sit to watch interrogation? Hard to say for sure though I think the former, especially given the picture-drop later. Also it would be a "safe place." Audrey is getting chased by a chair. And the door isn't opening for either of them. Gee, does this sound familiar? How the fuck did the Holloway Trouble make it to Laverne? WE'LL FIND OUT. Roll, at LONG last, credits. Seriously I can't remember the last time it took nearly a quarter of the ep to get to credits.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhw1iXH1iZrinhK4acF7oqGw40c64ikBJs9DRLwrv6SdUrqhWY_C-ZncDksguby9_O-Q7TvIEOUadb4YExEUWPpST7jDCGPoPcG19JsgqIj1fMa24hyphenhyphenmLqHiZSf-8ZWc0P5aKJajjY8ZT0/s1600/haven523cc03.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhw1iXH1iZrinhK4acF7oqGw40c64ikBJs9DRLwrv6SdUrqhWY_C-ZncDksguby9_O-Q7TvIEOUadb4YExEUWPpST7jDCGPoPcG19JsgqIj1fMa24hyphenhyphenmLqHiZSf-8ZWc0P5aKJajjY8ZT0/s320/haven523cc03.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We come back to confirm that those noir shots from the cameras earlier weren't any kind of accident and in fact this is going to be about as noir as this show's ever gotten. Okay then! I blame Shatner. On the other hand we have timestamps to tell us that they've been battering at this for thirty minutes. We get confirmation that it's the dispatch office, in which case I'm surprised it took them even this long to get to the point of yes hi that's Laverne trying to protect Audrey. Possibly from Duke? I'm not sure. It's hard to ascribe proper motivations to a woman-turned-building who's only figured out how to communicate in yes-no phone rings. (Still don't understand why she's not talking through the radios or the laptop speakers since she can clearly control most other aspects of the laptops.)</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> It's locked, Audrey can't make it unlock, the boys are not happy and Nathan least of all. Nathan stop trying to be a battering ram at the door, it's not working. It is, once again, hard to say whether Duke's comment about stop breaking your bones you fucking moron is that much sharper because he's possessed or because he's been on edge for a long fucking time. That's okay, Audrey will shoot the lock! Not the glass, because it's bulletproof, as Nathan points out when the light drops on her and Duke goes to throw a chair at the door instead. Yeahno. Phasing Trouble? No Duke can only use a Trouble once. ERM, say we, that doesn't seem to be true AT ALL, I'm pretty sure we have evidence to the contrary, hem hem we have a suspicious. Audrey is too busy figuring out what the fuck to be suspicious. And what the fuck in this case is no, that's not a Croatoan, that's a security cam that's on, and now hers is out and the boys' is on. And hers is on again! Yes that's an excellent thinking look with the Dutch angle, thank you. (This must have been fascinating to block and edit.) The phone call is coming from inside the station! No, further inside the station than that. Audrey even tries picking it up only to get an earful of static, which is likely poor Laverne trying to talk with the station. Which doesn't necessarily preclude that she wasn't ranting about the Guard earlier and hadn't noticed she'd accidentally a police station, but ...eh. It's a partial explanation? It's just also irritatingly unclear. And then Duke has a Realization. About his goddamn brother, and that looks like both a genuine emotional reaction and there's no real reason for him to lie here about Wade killing the Holloway niece and taking the family Trouble. And indeed we did have several unidentified bodies at the bottom of the bay. (Still suspect that's a Dexter reference, though also a logical jump.) Meaning hi! Laverne! Even if we question why she can't use the phone properly, I mean, she was DISPATCH (best guess is a Doylist reason, actually, either appropriate credentials for this much voice acting or timing or both), they do now have a setup of one ring for yes, two for no. I'm assuming that can apply to some other things, like overhead lights or maybe the red camera blinkendots if all else fails. So that's good! Also good is that she's maintaining enough of a sense of humor to thwack Duke with her door over talk to Karl about hurting them, and not a vicious enough turn to do him any real damage. But she didn't kill him, not even accidentally. Well, guys, generally speaking someone who JUST got turned into a building and is figuring out how to adjust to her new body is… not going to be able to slice a throat that neatly. Certainly not on purpose. I'm just saying. Duke suggests Croatoan! Duke, shut up. Nathan looks up and directly at the camera and this is the noirest parody of The Office I've ever seen. Not that either of us has watched The Office, but we've both seen a lot of parodies!</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Hilariously, at about 15.16 on the timestamp it's about 15.16 on our timestamp, with hours and minutes shifted over one. So, Nathan is now telling Audrey to tell Laverne to let her out of there right now, as though he weren't fully capable of telling Laverne himself given that she clearly heard Duke well enough to thwack him with a door. Sadly, no, she didn't see who killed Karl. But she did alert them to the body, so that's good! Audrey is in full on talk to the person get them calmed down mode, reassuring her that as soon as they can they'll get her out of the building. Noooo Laverne doesn't want out of the building. Hell, given the impression we have of her and the general consequences of getting old, I'm not sure I'd want to stop being a building either. Buildings are much easier to repair than bodies. Ask me how I know. Nathan still wants Parker out of there and Audrey, much to our deep amusement, shushes him because she's talking here. We love Audrey when she's actually BEING her best self. And Laverne. Does this count as passing the Bechdel test if the person you're talking to is a female building? Audrey pulls up a chair to better and more comfortably converse with Laverne while Nathan surls and sends Duke to the armory because he doesn't like this at all. Given that his last experience with the Holloway trouble was, well, a narcissistic haunted house with serious control issues I can see why, but dude, this is Laverne. Maybe calm down some? Nathan will not calm down, Nathan wants his Audrey and he is going to blow the door off his hinges to get to her. Audrey's agreement with go on let him in (and specifically not the blowing the door part) is very much in the way of a sighhh. So is that door opening. Laverne, bap him with the door on his way in. Now, Nathan trying to get her out of the station because Croatoan's there, that's much more justified! But Audrey thinks that they can find him (it?) via Laverne flipping through the cameras like someone flipping through a rolodex or tabbing through computer windows. They do briefly address the how do cameras when no hookups issue, and the answer is because Trouble. Which, given that Roland Holloway was able to make doors and things disappear and appear out of nothing, is an entirely valid answer! They bring that up too. Laverne would LOVE to disappear and appear doors and windows, and they'll get to that. In the meantime, figuring out what the fuck is going on, apparently in Dwight's office where they keep their stuff. And by stuff we mean the crystal and the aether core. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The series of flickering camera feeds, as far as we can establish them: the station's kitchenette/break room area, another view from further back with a small meeting table and hanging clipboards, a hallway that I think is down from interrogation, the corner above the door of Laverne's office, an exterior shot overlooking the parking lot and a bench outside, not the main entrance. Then one angle of Dwight's office, then the far back of the courtroom, then the bullpen outside, and </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">then </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">the angle she wants for Dwight's office. Which says some interesting things about maybe a lack of fine control over which cameras she's flipping between? Definitely she seems to hit up the places she'd know best first, and then gets to the areas we're more familiar with. It also serves to give us a general idea of the shape of bits of the station we haven't seen before, on the grounds that It Might Be Important Later. Especially with the lockdown. So! They'll pull the security feeds through to a laptop with a larger group of people immediately available to yell at that there is a thing, go do the thing with the stuff. Whatever else Audrey was planning once they got there, probably talking Laverne through more of the fine control and Holloway tricks of the Trouble, gets derailed by Nathan handing her the Quest Objects of What The Fuck Do We Do Now. He's not wrong: if Croatoan </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">is </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">in the building, or is still coming for Audrey, they don't exactly have much time. Apparently what it took was a combination of being able to solve ONE problem and some time away from the other problem? Because it looks like Audrey focuses her will pretty much the way she did when she and Charlotte gathered up the aether core and then the damn crystal goes glowy and HI HOWARD. HI AGENT HOWARD. Laverne would like to know what the fuck, and I do love whoever made it clear that this is a person who has control of the cameras, because even without her speaking we get a LOT of very clear emotional reactions. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Presumably because they have the crystal, they're getting a lot more of anything that looks like fucking answers out of Howard than we EVER have before. He coughs up that he's the controller for the barn, which he specifically calls the correctional facility intended to rehabilitate Mara. I'm going to take a second and wonder if the choice of definite over indefinite article indicates the-as-one-of-many rather than a-as-a-thing-made-up-on-the-fly. Not that we're going to get an answer to this ever, but I'm going to wonder anyway. And a fine fucking mess you all made of THAT, now didn't you, which Howard points out. His tone on "when you shot me" is distinctly peeved. Peeved is a good word that should be used more often. Speaking of emotional responses, as Laverne also gives us a nice through-the-blinds conspiracy shot, Audrey is responding instinctively to him as though he were a friend, a boss, someone she at least knows and wants to have the respect of. Which is interesting, and she's holding out the aether core like a supplicant, even. Well, he can! Technically speaking this is a thing he can do, he can build a barn wherever (and after that first pedantic and somewhat pissy clarification he goes back to calling it a barn because dear god that's a mouthful and a half), but he's not GOING to. Why? Because he needs proper authorization, and an "overlay" personality can't give it to him, and Nathan shot him. He says. And disappears. Oh my god I love both Howard and Maurice Dean Wint that was EPIC fucking delivery. Okay, well, if they had a Mara or a Charlotte this would be easier. ...maybe not if they had a Mara. Regardless! It would be easier to establish authorization, but they kinda really need him. Laverne kind of seems to be expressing "what the fuck are you guys talking about" with her zooming in and out, which creates hilarious effects. Aaand now all the power will go out!</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">For just shy of two hours, it looks like, by that timestamp. Somewhat adorably, Laverne takes us through all the external cameras and I… think that's the courtroom again? Only cluttered with boxes this time, and no chairs, but it's the right big open space. I have concerns as well as confusion. So, she's checking the cameras that she has any reasonable sight on to be sure nothing's coming, oh, and an external stairwell. I love you Laverne. It's not at ALL clear what anyone's been doing for the last hour and forty-five, maybe the voiceovers are designed to demonstrate passage of time and what's up? Audrey's telling her to find a camera and a way to communicate because she's still the building and can do that shit. Well, she's not wrong. And they're assuming Croatoan's responsible for cutting the power grid. It's unclear if it extends past the station, is the thing, so if it doesn't… well, that's a very directed attack and probably needs someone on-site. (Which Nathan is already assuming, mind you, but still.) Nathan gets shoved off by Duke to go protect Audrey, hahahahaha you just want Alex alone so you can eat him. Dammit, Duke. He also sounds like he's trying to provoke Alex to the point where he can plausibly claim self-defense. Not that I buy it, I'm just saying, if we're very lucky there's enough of Duke's moral sense still in there that he's looking for ways to justify this shit. Okay, fine. Nathan will take charge of ordering the Guard to make the place more defensible and, as ever, use their Troubles if necessary. I feel like this whole anvilicious theme is going to come to a very thundering end in the finale, though what I'm not sure. Another fifteen minutes elapse before our next scene, for those of you keeping track at home!</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSQjVJk0HT4KRbys3s_zGsVDp4CgKeElf_ZFXMkWRk2d4e9reRgcx9FHj2yg5H99rPfprZE2EujzWoDQ2gYsO0OVrDun3nExLlF3XUb9EpHhks5KBXI4QGPqixc0b-P0214mR12Rt_FY0/s1600/haven523cc04.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSQjVJk0HT4KRbys3s_zGsVDp4CgKeElf_ZFXMkWRk2d4e9reRgcx9FHj2yg5H99rPfprZE2EujzWoDQ2gYsO0OVrDun3nExLlF3XUb9EpHhks5KBXI4QGPqixc0b-P0214mR12Rt_FY0/s320/haven523cc04.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Back over in another room Laverne seems mildly concerned about Vince. Well, so say we all. Gloria's taking his vitals inasmuch as she can with the power out, which is probably all the functions a portable kit can take. She is also taking him down a peg or two not from arrogance, the way the phrase usually implies, but from panic and by the sound of it repression. Tells him to stop playing silly buggers. I take somewhat issue with the idea that there's a proper way to grieve anyone, but certainly brandishing a knife is outside the bounds of propriety for just about anything. (I'm also a little amused that the FUNCTIONAL ALCOHOLIC has better coping mechanisms. Not surprised. But definitely amused.) Vince says she sounds like Dave, but at this point I think anything even in the same state as something he'd say would sound like Dave to him. Her old coots comment smacks of things I said earlier about the old guard, and then we get into discussions of grief, guilt, different coping mechanisms. Again, no one way to grieve, but certainly Vince's way isn't helpful for him or anyone right now, and if he is keeping it all squashed inside that's going to continue to unhelp. And her talk does seem to shake something loose for him, or maybe it just gives him permission to feel hurt even with everything going on right now. This is really not lessening our sad sense of the old guard vanishing, dying, being killed off, which they'll comment upon later. And now that they've had that little chat it's time for Guard Redshirt to come in and summon them to the bullpen for a Nathan meeting. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Back in Dwight's office Laverne has no idea how but she's back in contact with the power grid at least! Audrey has half an idea, being that the house of Holloway's responded to his instincts and emotional needs, and so Laverne's police station is responding to her need to protect the people she cares about. This is a much more benign, agency-respecting way of protecting people, I think. Shoving Audrey into a room with a chair aside. They call up Duke now that the power is on enough at least for that, ask him if he got things working but he describes things down there by the generator as 'gutted.' So, so much for that plan, back to trying to talk Laverne through her newfound abilities. I'm suddenly flashing back to Firefly and my sister the incorporeally possessing a spaceship. Regardless, it seems to be working, and she powers up the other laptops. Audrey keeps talking her through feeling the building like it's her own body, healing the various bits and pulling on others to get the video feed from Duke's phone. Given that Roland was able to disrupt cell signals I see no reason why this shouldn't be possible! Apart from the giggles we're getting out of Laverne and the twosome's attitude of practicality towards the Trouble, it also speaks to the ways Roland Holloway </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">could</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> have used his Trouble if, you know, he weren't a narcissistic uber-controlling jackass. The flip of the axis, from, oh, we'll call it Lawful Evil to Chaotic Good, is fascinating to watch develop and definitely one of the high points of the episode. Which is good because we're about to hit one of the low as Duke takes us around the basement and then... falls? There's a surprised shout and the camera goes wild and stays still facing nothing at all helpful. No, Laverne has no idea what happened.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">No, Laverne can only see what she has cameras for, and even then with the power outage she's limited to what those cameras can make out. Probably nobody thought an infrared setting was necessary. Plus if she's mostly using the feed from Duke's cell camera then upending it is a great way to disable her vision. So hop into Audrey's phone and she'll carry you along! Oh my god this is not helping the River-Serenity jokes and it is so fucking adorable. Laverne flips us through a few of the places she's been most recently before we get a remarkably still but appropriately fuzzy phonecam view of the basement, followed by oh well shit, the main power thingie got flipped, which makes it deliberate sabotage. Also Duke's phone is on the floor with the little flashlight shining to show them the way, and when the power comes back on they get to see RATHER a lot of blood. Okay, not actually that much, that's a survivable amount of blood given it's just pooled and doesn't appear to be spattered everywhere, but regardless it's not a FUN amount to lose. Audrey will take the Leaping To Conclusions title from Nathan by assuming Croatoan has Duke! Yes but… why the blood? WHY DOES NOBODY EVER THINK ABOUT THE BLOOD PRAGMATICALLY. (</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">K: </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Or rhetorically.)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Nathan sets Laverne to scanning the old footage for, well, he'd like it to be who flipped the breakers but there's no cameras in the basement, so he'll settle for everyone who was going into or coming out of there. And it turns out she can do that in the background while she monitors the cameras now! Best Laverne. Audrey also sets Laverne to finding Duke. And we can have a moment of Audrey and Nathan taking turns at assuming the worst and then telling each other not in so few words to shut up. Seeing as this is unproductive, let's bang our heads against a different wall. Or floor, in our case, as we all fall off our respective watching seats at the fact that "Howard get your ass out here" actually WORKS. Nathan mutters something about enjoying that, I can only assume that refers to him popping up behind people, and Audrey would like Howard to make a fucking barn right the fuck now. Unfortunately he can't. At this juncture and without appropriate authorization he can only dispense a new overlay. We have so many questions about Howard, since he seems to potentially be an actual person? Or have been an actual person. Among our random possibilities is, was he Agent Heimdall? Responsible for maintaining the passageways and barriers between worlds, failed in his duty, chose this as atonement? Or some other form of responsible for Mara and/or William and failed in that duty. What I'm saying is, it seems like where Mara was supposedly being rehabilitated, Howard seems like he's atoning for something. Audrey is not okay with the dispense a new overlay bullshit, she likes this her, she wants to keep on being it, and anyway the "proper authorization" turns out to be Charlotte which is a TOTAL nonstarter. On the other hand, mentioning Croatoan's name works! That seems like a passphrase to allow him to bypass the programming and arguably behave like he has free will. Laverne appears to be somewhere between OOH I GET TO KNOW ALL THE THINGS and HOLY SHIT about all of this. We hear you, Laverne. Howard then prods at Audrey by telling her that Charlotte wasn't her mother, which leads to explanation of Charlotte choosing Audrey the daughter she wanted over Mara the daughter she couldn't save. At least Audrey is palpably uncomfortable with that. It's also extremely telling that Howard outright SAYS the overlays were supposed to be temporary, which suggests that a) there really is a core personality and b) at some point each overlay's grip on her being a fully formed person WOULD have slipped. Nathan will help explain things when Audrey's words fail her, and now we have Howard's Well Shit face. It's also an I'm Not Telling You What I Think face, but it's very much well shit, Croatoan's here, if I believe these people (and presumably he has some extrasensory abilities that let him determine the truth of some of these statements), the person who programmed me is dead, what the fuck. Laverne will be nervous. Howard will go ahead and declare Audrey Charlotte's daughter, and apparently he also has instructions to protect her, once she's placed in that category, which is FASCINATING. Do tell us more, Agent Fuck You. This may or may not negate Audrey's willingness to die for Haven, too, since it further includes "all those under her protection."</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Okay then! Have an aether core, Howard, let's see what you do with it. Audrey makes him wait a second, because Laverne is currently the building they're standing in and it IS in fact a valid question of, will this hurt her? Apparently it will not. Also there's sort of a light and then what seems like a … sizzling noise, almost? As he holds it, which I wonder if that's the bindings on the core failing. Or just static in the speakers. Well, no, the new barn will look like the station without being the station, don't think about the metaphysics involved TOO hard lest your head explode. Let's make a barn! Or… not? Is Agent Howard-Heimdall-Fuck-You supposed to go all flickery like that? Answers point to no. And also to the center of the bullpen, presumably as the heart of the station. Where everyone is staring at this strange man who's just appeared in her midst, except for Vince, who sounds more like "Oh god this again." Howard continues to flicker, managing to say that the core has been cracked, a corrosive element. Which doesn't necessarily mean acid, but definitely points that way doesn't it, knowing what we do. Audrey, afraid of the answer, asks if it damaged him. Which it has. Nooooo Howard we were really starting to like you and all your cryptic sass. Croatoan didn't do it, though, apparently. And the last thing he manages is to say that Croatoan isn't in the station, which, if not him, then who. Laverne knows! Even as she seems shocked and horrified as everyone else. She then shows us the footage from earlier when Duke had to make a call, and apparently what he meant by that was he had to go walk into a hallway where he wouldn't be seen, twitch and dissolve into light a bit like Howard did, and then poof into mist. And, um. What the hell? We are so with you on this Gloria, what the hell. Because this isn't like anything we've seen </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">except</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> out of the controller and in some ways out of Dave, except when Croatoan demisted out of him Dave's entire body didn't disappear. Plus the controller said that Croatoan wasn't in the station, and he seems like he'd know. So again I say, what the hell, dude. Of course then we see Duke phase right through the wall behind Karl, so we know </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">that's </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">a lie, good to have that confirmation. We go through some rapid conclusions, one with no real basis but fear, that Croatoan's controlling Duke, when we've already had some uncharacteristic behavior and talk out of him now we're very much scared that he's crossed the despair event horizon and is just fucking around on Croatoan's side. Please no, please be playing him. Or trying to. And one or two that make sense, the aether core was damaged by something corrosive. Karl's throat was slit so Duke could get the blood to absorb his powers, I guess we're not saying aloud that his throat was also slit so he wouldn't scream when he died. I have to giggle wearily because Nathan's using the aether core as a goddamn stress squeezy ball as he recites the litany of what Duke's powers are, just that we know of. Phasing, acid. And now Alex's freezing Trouble, given the quantity of blood and now that we know Duke's ill intention, yeah, Alex is probably dead. Poor Senna family. </span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZe99rB-qZMq1HEpWGY90nCUoUGRTAtO72ScTzkKuNOP9Fip-lT9gKrqN7sTAdL5RJP2scwCylcVEBK_nLAQhh0f5Ah0fbww8iUMEgYcxLtfqdzLFmc0XSBv8J0RMjvt0h_s1_UFqU_Rg/s1600/haven523cc05.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZe99rB-qZMq1HEpWGY90nCUoUGRTAtO72ScTzkKuNOP9Fip-lT9gKrqN7sTAdL5RJP2scwCylcVEBK_nLAQhh0f5Ah0fbww8iUMEgYcxLtfqdzLFmc0XSBv8J0RMjvt0h_s1_UFqU_Rg/s320/haven523cc05.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Of course just as Nathan makes that dramatic pronouncement Duke comes walking through the doors. He really doesn't look happy, but on the other hand he doesn't look </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">un</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">happy? Grim, and determined, and blank almost. And he cuts himself, so apparently that's what he needs to do in order to activate his powers. And the very next thing he does, of course is to freeze everyone. But not before Nathan and Laverne exchange a look, and that's the only thing I can call it because there's a split second before he shoves Audrey into the room where he's looking straight into the camera that's focusing on his face. You know, how weird must it be to go from normal human vision to at least fifty-odd cameras. Which isn't even fly vision with multiple eyes, even flies only have one limited field of vision at any one time, she has </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">multiple</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> areas. How weird must that be? All that input. Anyway. Nathan shoving Audrey into the Chief's office, Dwight's office. Laverne closing the door behind her, and I swear if she could disappear doors and create solid walls by now she totally would. Audrey is not getting out of that room, no matter how much Duke chants and is creepy and traditional stalking psychopath at everyone. We still don't have an answer as to whether the frozen people can see and hear while they're frozen, although the implication is not, which is probably good for Nathan's sanity. Duke will now cast aspersions on Audrey's character and decisions, to absolutely no one's surprise. It is startling, though, to remember that Duke actually slept with Mara. Eek? Ew? I'm torn between reactions here. Definitely eek when Duke drops/flings one of the frozen guys to the floor, with the same results as when the car hit. Did he really drop him that hard? And that's why I say fling as well as drop, in which case it's definitely deliberate and malicious murder rather than murder by indifference. If he's not possessed there really will be no coming back from this, I don't see how there can be. So in a way the audience not only has to mourn Duke we knew, but also the relationship of the threesome. So much whining and whimpering. So much. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Audrey does manage to convince Laverne to let her out by telling her neither of them would be able to live with themselves if he killed more people while she hid. She might be right. In any case, it does get Laverne to open the door and let her out, and the first thing Audrey confronts him with of course is that he can use his Trouble more than once. Why yes. Yes he can. Why would it be otherwise? He also does confess to breaking (he calls it fixing, I'm not entirely sure what he did, if it was deliberately breaking it as much as possible or if he was trying to do something and failed or what) the aether core, and then goes off on a standard villain rant of doing what he was made to do. This is the part that might be most convincing as to whether or not Duke's possessed or just gave up, which is where Audrey tries to remind him that he fought this so hard and for long months and a year or so, and, no, that's not working. He gives a stock answer rather than a real one so we're not sure what exactly made him give up or when this transformation (or possession) occurred, and responds scornfully and by dodging the point when Audrey tries to remind him that he came back to save Haven. And, well, maybe he did? But one of the points where he could have been turned is definitely when he touched Hayley's blood the first time and went black-eyed and homicidal for an indefinite length of time, and we have no idea what happened to him then. Audrey tries to invoke Jennifer then, which works not at all well, although here's some more evidence leaning towards either possession or a really really dark variant on playing Croatoan to save Haven. You know, the people in Haven he hasn't killed already, which is why I'm not sure I buy that one. But possession, we know the relationship Duke had with Jennifer wasn't like that. So. Duke murders again, this time one of the few black men we've seen in Haven, thanks for that show, and when Audrey draws her gun he freezes her too, because she's not immune to the Troubles anymore. Not his anyway. We'll have a Did you really think, and then a moment of hope? Maybe? When it sounds like Duke's talking to someone we can't see. Given the camera reactions and what he says about keeping the rest of them, though, I think that means he's talking to Laverne. Damn. And then he leaves, phasing through the wall, and everyone unfreezes and Nathan goes into his usual Audrey's in trouble panic. It's worth noting that there's about a 35-minute gap in the recording jump here, suggesting that the freezing Trouble's effect takes awhile to wear off, or possibly that Duke can control it with a much greater degree of precision than Alex Senna could. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">After the ad break we pick up with external cams again, and it's only a few minutes later by the timestamps but the bullpen is empty except for Nathan, Vince, and Gloria staring around at the shattered bodies that don't even look like bodies anymore. Nathan's got his empty lost but I want my Audrey back look on, though I'm glad he's got enough of himself back these days to be able to make sad noises at Laverne and then make her promises about getting her out. Promises that she doesn't WANT, mind you, given what she told Audrey before, but if she changes her mind later it's not a bad promise to make. Plus Nathan's a little tunnel-visioned right now, not that anyone can blame him, even Laverne doesn't seem to be trying to talk him out of either getting Audrey back or getting her back into human form instead of building form. The best I can interpret these camera movements is about the same as Gloria's "oh KID" at Duke: caring, concerned, somewhat maternal. Anyway. Gloria and Vince will clean up the bodies, Nathan should go get his frantic energy out elsewhere and stop being jittery at them. She SAYS go get Audrey, and I'm sure that's what Nathan intends, but really: stop jittering at the grieving broken man, Nathan, you're NOT helping here. Let's not forget that he probably knew those Guardsmen by reputation if not personally. Vince also looks like he's about one or two more Bad Shit Happening events away from having a heart attack, max, the poor guy. I'm still going to mutter about Croatoan wouldn't have </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">always </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">been ten steps ahead if you'd thought about knowledge containment when it became obvious he was possessing Dave. He's not wrong about the others, though! I am even MORE suspicious of Walter and that whole vision sidetrip bullshit in North Carolina, too, given that Duke's babble about destiny and fate sounds drawn from that as much as some of the poison Mara poured into his head last season. That would ALSO be a good point for someone to fuck with our Duke Crocker to the point where he'd end up, well, like that. We have a really rather touching moment of how they've lost so many, very many of the younger generation, they don't know if they'll ever get Audrey or Duke back, Gloria would like to insist that is NOT HER DUKE. Nor ours, Gloria. Nor ours. It's certainly not the Duke who very reluctantly killed a grown man (in accordance with his wishes, no less) in order to save a baby and damn well didn't enjoy the necessity. Vince will now cling to her hand and break down, declaring that she better not go and die on him because dammit he has to have SOMEONE left. Oh DARLINGS. I didn't really ship it before, but I could now, goddamn. So adorable. Gloria had better make it to the end of the show unless EVERYONE is dying, is all I have to say about this. Vince I pretty much expect to find a way to go out in a blaze of sacrificial glory, pun not intended, unless he turns out to be the lesson about how you have to find something to live for rather than die for.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Hey, finally some color this ep again! Not much, though, since it's dark out and all the colors are washed out as a result. Except for this one lonely house with all its windows lit up in a warm yellow glow. Excuse me while I find that incredibly suspicious and not at all cheery. Audrey's in an armchair but not tied up, which says a lot about how they want to present themselves: both in control and maybe not as evil as she thinks. Do you see this face? This is the dubious face. I stole it from Arla. Audrey would like a fucking gun, which Duke </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">has </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">taken off her because he's not a total moron, and apparently we will now be going for creepy possessiveness with respect to both gun and Audrey herself. To the point of scenery-munching, honestly. Audrey offers to fix this! Yeaaaah he's still all black-eyed and evil or at least pretending very hard to be, though once again thinking of Hayley I don't think he's very in control of his actions. Blah blah perfect killer blah blah choosing his destiny blah blah taking orders from Croatoan and generally looking a LOT like Wade when he went off the deep end. Except more dangerous because Duke's retained more of his thinking and planning and being an outside the box kind of person. Which fits well with Croatoan's goals, insofar as we can tell that he has any, so he's taking orders there. Then again, I find it completely fucking laughable that Duke might take orders from </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">anyone </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">without putting his own spin on it, which is another point toward possession and maybe that's a glimmer of the real Duke trying to pound on the doors of his mind to be let out/tell Audrey this isn't him? I can't tell. It's annoying. And then in what might be the most noir shot of the whole very noir ep, CroaShatner swings open the door and is IN A FUCKING TRENCHCOAT AND FEDORA. Also he's looking very kindly and paternal and wants her to call him Dad. How about no. How about get the fuck out of here instead.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Next week on Haven! Our sneak peek has Croashat pouring Audrey tea or coffee and there's a full continental breakfast type thing. Some stereotypical mad scientist villain blather about how she's his daughter and he doesn't want to hurt her and poison, not his style, how the Troubles have so much potential and okay sure there are risks but she's just not looking at them right! It doesn't have to be this way! That's distressingly close to the theme of this chunk of the season with people like Laverne and Hayley using their Troubles as tools, and less significantly but no less importantly, the mirrorball lady and the glowing guy. More than I think we've seen in any previous season ever. And… then the hand that's been hiding a stake? really? since when is this Buffy? comes out of the covers and stabbinates Croashat in the neck, which of course he pulls out and heals in seconds. Immediately after, he then COMPOUND FRACTURES Audrey's arm oh my god augh, we're seeing this on camera, I'm just going to leave that here as a gore warning for all and sundry. I'm betting it's one part punishment/retaliation and one part trying to "teach" her to heal herself like he does, scare quotes used entirely deliberately. I am also betting that there will be a line about I'm sorry you made me hurt you like that, because EVERYTHING I'm getting off this fucker says he's exactly that kind of abusive bastard. Well. This'll be… fun. And by fun I mean wanting to rip the villain's throat out with my teeth! So another day that ends in y. </span>Anna Hammetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10095633218958433882noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4271373189216022547.post-61532085610215901122015-12-04T19:17:00.000-08:002015-12-04T19:17:23.422-08:00Toxic Masculinity S2E09 Lockdown<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; line-height: 1.38; white-space: pre-wrap;">Previously on Haven! Nathan's getting ousted by the Rev, Audrey's getting courted by Chris Brody, and Duke's getting manipulated by Evi. So at least someone's getting made happier by the machinations in everyone's life! </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We open with, aww, a boat race, and the banner for it at the Tuwiowok Bluffs, and Nathan bringing coffee to the station while an officer is bringing Dwight to the station. In cuffs. For allegedly breaking and entering, although by that tone and expression I'm going with he wasn't so much caught as someone stumbled over him. Possibly literally, there's a lot of him to stumble over. Dwight being Dwight, it's unlikely he would resist a police officer just doing his job, and by the next comment he clearly expected to be turned loose once Nathan got ahold of the case. Sadly, Nathan is no longer chief of police. So no more "special rules for special people." Let the penis waggling commence! Dwight's winning, but it's a funny stare-down, especially since the guy clearly knows Dwight can break him in half if he wants. Or expects that Dwight can break him in half with whatever Trouble he supposedly has, since Officer Smalldick doesn't seem to realize he's armed with something that could kill Dwight by pointing it at the ground. Excuse me, Officer Paul. Yes, I have my prejudices. Anyway, Nathan would now like to know what's going on please and thank you. Apparently Dwight was doing some cleanup at the meat-packing plant. Yes, with a cross-bow. I actually have no idea if this is foreshadowing to next episode, but I'm going to pretend it is because it amuses me. And given this writer's room, it might well be true. All right, all right, Nathan can take it from here, thanks. So evidently there is special treatment for special people, it's just the old fashioned nepotism rather than the Troubled. Nathan has to remind passive aggressive Paul (who is inexplicably wearing black gloves, hmm, could it be this will be expliqued later?) to take the cuffs off. Cue wrist rubbing and a brief discussion of the whole suckiness of Nathan not being Chief anymore. Actually, I can believe those cuffs were tight on Dwight's wrist, the man is pretty huge. The discussion gives us a few facts on the new Chief, his name is Merrill and he's a "reformer" whatever that means from Brunswick, and yes, he probably is clueless about the Troubles. Or if he was informed by the selectmen, the odds are good he doesn't believe them. Well. Dwight has been a good cleaner! Can has donut. With sprinkles, even.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Oh, hey, the gloves are going to be explained sooner rather than later, because in the next scene we have Paul taking them off and staring at his blackened hands. And I'm not talking Name of the Rose licked his finger and turned an inky page black, we're talking putrefaction, tied a rope around his hands and now his hands are dead and falling off type black. Interesting things are going on under this man's skin. Also in the way of, we pan the camera around behind him and in those two seconds or less it takes us to get back to him in the mirror, the rot has crawled up his neck and over his face. He has just enough time to ask "what the hell?" before he dies. Poor bastard, he was a jerk but he didn't deserve that.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So whatever it is that's going on is being ominous in the general direction of the police station, as we pan through and have a good spying-through-blinds view of Nathan dropping off someone's coffee and donuts before he comes into the office. Ooh, Audrey's putting on makeup! And making sure he's good with taking her graveyard shift. He's fine, it'll be quiet, he's not in charge, go, go on your date. But it's not a date! Audrey insists, blatantly trying to convince herself, which Nathan totally calls her out on. We get some backstory on this, in that it's been a month since Chris Brody left for London and maybe he met someone new and and and. Laverne breaks the awkwardness of the conversation about the likelihood of Chris Brody meeting someone knew who genuinely likes him, as opposed to just being whammied. Visitor! For Nathan, not Audrey, despite her leaping to the call. It's Duke! Oh </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">goodie</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Yes, Duke, Nathan knows how you hate to go to the police. Little tinpot dictators on Jupiter know how you hate to go to the police. Duke also hates that Nathan was the Chief, or at least that's what he insists, but he also comes bearing information allegedly for free by the sound of it, about why Nathan's not the Chief anymore. Because Evi! And because she's passing along information to the Rev, and so on. Nathan knew the Rev was behind it, but see also little tinpot dictators on Jupiter and what they know, the interesting part is Evi's involvement. Duke is royally pissed about that part, he's leading the charge to get her for that, though whether that's get revenge or get whatever information she has from the Rev or what, it's hard to say at this point. Nathan is at least attempting to be by the book about this. Or he was until he and Duke spotted Paul's slime trail leaking out from under the door of the bathroom he died in. Any other town that would be a busted sewage line, but in Haven...</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In happier news, semi happier, Chris is walking in on Audrey (who's assuming it's Nathan and asking about Duke's parking tickets, which apparently he does have!) and sweeping her up in a definitely showing off kiss. Great job supporting her in the workplace, dude, those cops are so going to never let her hear the end of it. Or they wouldn't, if this wasn't Haven and so on. Chris's concession to workplace is to close the door, which just leaves it up to their imaginations now that they know something's going on in there. That's not helping, Chris. Audrey will just get her stuff and they can go to the boat races! Chris doesn't want to go to the boat races he wants private sexy time of some form or another. While I can sympathize with him not wanting to be around people with his Trouble, don't you guys think this was something you should have discussed earlier? Saved by Nathan beeping to summon Audrey to the case of the black goo detective. Chris might even be telling the truth about how he loves that she doesn't listen to him, even if he's still frustrated by the whole police business cancels dates thing. I'd put this down to Chris being an asshole, I'm more than willing to because he kind of is one this episode, but the truth is law enforcement jobs are hard on relationships with or without the Troubles, and I can only imagine that the Troubles and her immunity make it even more so. Alas.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So, okay, over with Officer Black Goo, I'm suddenly remembering that X-Files reference they had back in season one and wishing there was another one here. Yes, Officer Paul Stark is dead, he's really most sincerely dead. Roll those credits! And come back to the police station, where Nathan's saying how he just saw him and he looked pale and sweaty but not, well, full of black goo. Oh god, it's the new Chief. No, Chief, that's just a dead guy who dressed up in a police uniform and collapsed of black rot on the floor of your station for kicks. Yes it's one of your officers! Fuckhead. I know the Rev wants a puppet but unless he's going to STAND BEHIND THE CHIEF'S CHAIR waving marionette strings around he should've picked someone with brains instead of sand. The question about who Duke is is more reasonable, and Duke gives it some thought and a willpower check to not say anything that will get him in trouble before he runs off. Probably a good plan, there. There's some wondering what could cause something like this, a chemical weapon, okay, yes, in the sense that human beings are made of chemicals and some of them in this town have Troubles that can be used as weapons, sure. That's convoluted but I can roll with it. No, assuming that the Chief as he seems to indicate in his next few statements thinks that the Troubled are "fanatics" who want to target the Haven PD, but who aren't cursed or gifted with extraordinary anything (and going by the fact that he's the Rev's chewtoy he also thinks they aren't targeted by the rest of the citizens either), assuming all that, chemical weapon is a reasonable assumption to make. Chemical, bio chem, one of those. And in either case, the Chief would like Audrey and Nathan to investigate it. That might be the only smart thing he does all episode. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So, they're processing evidence while Audrey bitches that this isn't chemical warfare and Nathan tells her that the Rev is the one who had him ousted. She sounds more indignant than surprised, but I don't know why anyone is surprised by any of this, really. So it could be the Rev trying to cause further trouble, they don't take it to the conclusion of false flag operation but that's where I would. Or it could be someone trying to attack the new Chief, someone as Audrey says pro-Troubled. With know-how, technical ability, access to Paul. Nathan mentions that Dwight was arrested by Paul when he walked up, so, hey, it's time to call the mysterious cleaner! Who knows nothing, it wasn't him, you really should start trusting him more, click, and he's hauling trash bags. The hilarious thing is by the weight and reaction of those plastic bags they might be half-full of paper or leaves or something, but we're clearly meant to assume it's, I don't know, dead body parts. Something sinister. Not the way he's throwing it around, even Adam Copeland isn't strong enough to heave body parts with that kind of abandon, nor do they fly quite that lightly through the air with the greatest of ease, that daring young corpse okay I'll stop now.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Back at the police station, Duke is marching Evi up to Nathan, but not for the reasons Nathan's thinking. Apparently Evi has something to tell them! Or rather show them, and we're back to the not actually poisoned ink on a manuscript blackened fingers and thumbs. Nathan clearly isn't pleased by this, well, okay, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">no one</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> is pleased by this but Nathan looks actively scared for someone who isn't putrifying before their very eyes. Actually Evi looks less vulnerable than he does, possibly because her response to being in danger, in real physical danger, is more belligerent than afraid. Also possibly because Nathan at this point had more empathy to spare for Haven and its citizenry and fewer layers of shock and trauma with no time to recover in between, so there's more energy to spare for worry and caring. You know who has no empathy? The new interim police chief! Duke's a bit defensive, given that there's only a touch of rudeness to Chief Puppet's question and the substance of it is valid. Asking if Nathan and Parker have found the chemical is less valid but only because he's behaving as if the Troubles don't exist. Because he's an idiot and an ass. And we're back to a brief touch of logic when he asks about any contact with Officer Stark, because Troubles do work that way, before he's off in we're being attacked mode. That may well be the mindset he's in, the mindset the Rev encouraged him to be in, that there are two kinds of people in Haven and one kind hates him and wants him and the rest of the so-called normals dead. Though why he goes from that to biological airborne agent and not mystical weird super-power Trouble I do not know. Majestic powers of denial. Duke is still protective, wanting to get Evi to a hospital which I can't really blame him for, medical science has at least been proven to assist or alleviate Troubles and Trouble related symptoms. And then again, with Troubles behaving in ways that respond to medical science, I can't say the Chief is wrong for putting the place on lockdown either. He's just being kind of an ass about not also going and finding and helping the Troubled person, too. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When we come back from commercial the Chief is talking to someone about waiting for instructions, the building is on lockdown, etc. Somehow, I don't think he was on the phone to the state police, despite the fact that Nathan is pretending? that that's who he was on the phone to. Or had been on the phone to, it's possible that was his first phone call. He does have confirmation that the contagion hasn't spread beyond the police station. Judging by the pose and lighting, though, I'm reasonably convinced we're meant to infer that he's talking to the Rev. It's not like we don't all know he's in his pocket. Nathan gives the update on the lockdown census, there's a doctor who's going to take a look at the body, treat the sick, so that's good. Less good are the new Chief's instructions, which are to cut off all communications to the outside, have the officers watch everyone, even going so far as to lock the internal doors? and prevent people from moving, what, from room to room? It's possible he means the external doors, that's never cleared. Oh, there he goes, now he wants everyone to surrender their weapons, fine, place all weapons in the gun locker, fine, under his personal access code, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">um?</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Exsqueeze me? Unless all the officers have his personal access code I fail to see how that's going to help anyone accomplish anything, and I'm not entirely sure it's legal. Nathan doesn't argue this much, putting down his gun and, no, not his badge, although the gesture sure looks it, enough so that I had to rewind a couple of times. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Audrey is not surrendering her gun, no way in hell. Audrey is conniving to get it locked up as evidence where only Stan the Man and the desk sergeant can get at it. And given that that's a manila envelope evidence bag and not a clear plastic one, you go Audrey. It's a better plan than Chris Brody's, anyway, which is to charm his way out of there. And I realize he's probably come to rely on that to get his grants and schmooze his way through academia and it probably does work well for that, but for specific, narrow-purpose and directed uses that is not the Trouble I would choose. There's far, far too much room for error or unpredictability in there. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgb5EMER1T1R0eoITLrAcpSh6E0l0HdCusbkFELjUzyHRPtw1SDsD7WexJ3hafJIsK97kr636nL4mFExewW2fr2x8ffVvu8yW9sc3wMF-OJzwggfXRR_eovWbN-E3hTj_A4i1fP-x_NVjM/s1600/haven209cc03.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgb5EMER1T1R0eoITLrAcpSh6E0l0HdCusbkFELjUzyHRPtw1SDsD7WexJ3hafJIsK97kr636nL4mFExewW2fr2x8ffVvu8yW9sc3wMF-OJzwggfXRR_eovWbN-E3hTj_A4i1fP-x_NVjM/s320/haven209cc03.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Over to the late Officer Stark, where AUGH SHIT CELLUCCI. Ahem. Dylan Neal is playing the good Dr. Hugh Underwood as I giggle with memories of Blood Ties (for those of you who want to go further back he was a member of the Babylon 5 Rangers), and the good doctor is stumped. It matches nothing in the known medical records. Audrey snarks about Haven not being in the known medical records after he leaves, yeah, it's definitely a Trouble. And yes, the person probably is still in the station, spreading their Trouble. The escalation timeline isn't looking good for anyone, and in the interests of getting actual help going on, Nathan will now purloin the dead officer's radio and use it to try to contact Dwight. Who is, in fact, outside in a public works truck. Are those radios even on the same frequency? Upon further inspection it looks like Dwight's also purloined a police radio, which would fit with his character at this point, so never mind, I withdraw the question. It turns out the State Police and the CDC (and I pause here to fall off the couch laughing) got phone calls saying that any call out of Haven was a prank, and to disregard. Well, clearly someone doesn't want the authorities riding to the rescue, although given the response to the CDC threat in season four it's even odds at this point whether it's someone like Vince and Dave trying to keep Haven a secret, or the Rev trying to create a closed environment so everyone he doesn't like can die off by Trouble and not bother him anymore. Either way, it's a lockdown at a greater radius, a lockdown in layers as it were, like being trapped in an onion. Also doesn't bode well! I'd agree with Dwight that someone planned this except even the Rev's not quite the type to use someone's Trouble. Not yet.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Nathan comes out from the bathroom to the news that Evi's getting worse and there's a new victim. He'll trade Audrey bad news for bad news and tell her about Haven being cut off while they speculate what the new Chief has to do with this. Is he the Troubled person? It's </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">possible</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> if he didn't know he was Troubled and the stress and/or general ambiance of friction and hostility triggered his Trouble, but at the same time it's too easy and it doesn't fit with first or last person met is the Troubled. Still. They do have to talk to the Chief about the lockdown so they can fold reasoning with him and talking him down if he is Troubled into that! Or not. In fact, the talk only results in the revelation that he has men of indeterminate origin or authority outside waiting to shoot whoever takes a step out of the building, and they will only stand down on his order. Okay, that's extreme. Not only is that extreme, the Chief looks like he's on the verge of a complete meltdown, possibly literally. Sweating, bug-eyed, and at this point indirectly homicidal. Possibly directly homicidal as Audrey all but accuses him of being the source of this Trouble and he reacts with disgust, rage. More sweating, bleeding black from the nose. Accusing the Troubled of creating a mess he has to clean up. Black veins, bleeding, hemorrhaging, and eventually death. If we're taking this as roughly happening in real time from finding Officer Stark in the bathroom to now, that's a hell of a quick incubation time, and theoretically Evi should be dead. We've seen, what, three cases so far? One took a middling time to incubate given that his symptoms seemed to progress at least as far as visibility went, somewhat more slowly than the Chief's, one is still incubating, and one seemed to go from zero to dead in five minutes. So far the uniting factor between the two dead ones and their quick incubation times seems to be anger, possibly hatred. Evi doesn't hate anyone in particular and she's somewhat angry, maybe more upset and frustrated than that, and she's still alive. Will this be significant later? </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">HMMMM.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (Yes. Yes it will.)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">They put him in the bathroom with Paul (heh, Audrey calls him Paul because of course she does, because she respects and cares about people as people even if they don't necessarily return the feeling) which, hey, it's as good a receptacle as any given that the morgue is not on the premises. And speculate some more about the Chief being the source of the Trouble which, no. Not likely. Dwight will radio in to confirm armed men are in fact lurking outside the building waiting to shoot anyone who leaves without authorization. Which is not going to be forthcoming now that the person who gives it is dead. Crap. He sends Dwight over to the sheriff's department for backup, no one's wondering why a public works truck is lurking around at this hour of the night? Because I know I would, unless there were the kind of warning signs and things like there was a gas leak going on. Heyyyyy....</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">(The heyyyy is because Haven's favorite cover story is gas leak. For those of you who didn't know.)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Audrey sums it up for all of us: we can't risk letting it out there, it kills within hours, she's probably immune, let's start the interviews and find the Troubled person. Nathan will take Evi, presumably because she's the one who turned him over to the Rev. And yes, in fact, once we get into it (and after she's fake-fainted at him, slipping something out of his pocket, nice) that is what he wants to talk to her about. Yes, Duke ... ratted on her isn't the right term, Duke went to Nathan with what he found out, I guess, and finding that out is greatly increasing his distrust of you, Evi, good job there. I'm still wondering how the hell she did get in too deep, what on earth happened? That's one thing that never gets made clear in this arc, the processes that get Evi into Haven, that get her in contact with Duke and the Rev, especially since she seems to be already in contact with the Rev by the time we get to her in Haven so what we know of her, what she says, already has an element of suspicion to it. In too deep, it'd be easy to get in too deep with the Rev's people considering how quickly they go from zero to frothing extremism, but why? To what end, at first? What did they have over Duke that convinced her, is she really </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">that</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> bad a judge of character that she just flat out took their word for it that he might be in trouble without talking to him first? And if so, how the hell is she a good con artist? I have </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">so many questions</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> about Evi and her entire damn plotline. Sadly, maybe one or two of them get resolved. </span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkjlypaDaNeR19Kx06eSL80Dbhq8ykVUyK4gBCYKjqj2yCRobCpw6vS3B47xOrQOFu4tl5HfM4O5-kBRQ6pZwJ0TvltEpqQVSGd_i0h-up_n73k9hcSaz7OPnSQKCVYpmWJoyDSYg4Ryo/s1600/haven209cc04.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkjlypaDaNeR19Kx06eSL80Dbhq8ykVUyK4gBCYKjqj2yCRobCpw6vS3B47xOrQOFu4tl5HfM4O5-kBRQ6pZwJ0TvltEpqQVSGd_i0h-up_n73k9hcSaz7OPnSQKCVYpmWJoyDSYg4Ryo/s320/haven209cc04.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Duke has questions too! She has the same answers, and parrotting the things they're saying about he's important and he needs to learn things, and Nathan needs to be out of the way because he'd be a problem for Duke. How, though. HOW, and how is she not verifying this with her own eyes, how is she trusting absolute (and clearly biased) strangers this much, and how does a competent con artist get this fucking dumb? How does someone Duke allegedly worked with for years get this dumb? Duke is wondering the same thing, which makes me laugh not entirely in the good way. The screaming at her is a bit much, although of all the people who are flying off the handle in this episode I buy his anger more than most, given there's a betrayal and some depth of emotion going on here. Particularly the part about everything that's happened between them is controlled by them, given that he seemed to be falling for her again. Still no definite answers, or at least none from her, no proof that they showed her, no evidence (pun not really intended but there it is) she can cite. And ... that's pretty much it. It's a round robin of Duke's important, how, she doesn't know, they never told her. And Duke points out the situation they're in, how they could all die in here, and she's still not telling him the truth. Or can't. Or won't. More like won't, from his point of view. The door slams behind him, and then we do get to see what she took from Nathan's pocket: an ID card with magstrip. Well, that'll probably get her in and out of the building, or it would if she weren't scared of those couple of guys in the pickup truck outside. Who wants to be they're the Rev's men? Any takers? Yeah, I didn't think so either. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The first person we see (not the first person but the first person we see) Audrey talking to is Nicky? Nikki? Coleman, who's here on behalf of her boss about filing some building permits. She did talk to the officers, but she talked to a lot of people about filing some forms. She also is nervous about something, picking at her cup, but we don't get any clues as to what that is yet. Which actually is a nice bit of foreshadowing/hinting, it's very obvious on rewatch for the tenth or twelfth time but on initial watch it's not at all bad. Chris Brody would like to interrupt briefly because he am feel uncomfortable when we are not about me and also he's very antsy, and he might be the one person able to walk out of here safely. At least he certainly thinks so! Audrey is not having any of it, both because special treatment and because quarantine, possibly contagious Trouble, no, no one is fucking leaving, are you high? (No, but he is suffering a rather more insidious phenomenon where he's regurgitating all the abuse he's digested over the years of his father having the same Trouble, thanks ever so, everyone. Seriously, that's one of the more insidious Trouble downsides.) We thankfully interrupt this interruption with Nathan asking after Evi, Duke hasn't seen her in a bit and he's worried. A valid worry, I feel, when everyone is confined to a small building! And Nathan's keycard is missing. So, yes, Evi probably stole it and oh look. There she goes. Dropping it in the doorway for no reason I can discern (well, a perfectly good Doylist reason but we'll get to that in a second) and then storming out because she's </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">entirely</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> taken leave of her senses and shouting that she's going to get Duke his answers and she's not scared anymore. Really? Because I think guys on the rooftops nearby with sniper rifles is a very good reason to be scared! Maybe that's just me, and maybe there's a good dose of her feeling reckless because she thinks she's dying, that could very well be at play here, as much as we complain about Evi's intermittent common sense. She's currently suffering from an as yet not well understood Trouble and both people who've been seen to die from it have died quickly. She might feel it's her last chance to make things up to Duke. It definitely is once Duke comes storming out after her just as she's in the middle of saying "you're going to tell him what he wants to know or..." Well. Or nothing, because they won't give her the chance. (The previouslies for the next couple episodes include a different take where she finishes that with "or I will.") And thus we set an arguably dangerous and definitely irritating pair of precedents with interesting, distinctive women being killed off on Haven, and Duke's love interests dying in increasingly inexplicable/personal ways. Woo. Of course, the Rev's men aren't interested in shooting Duke, so he gets to live and carry her back inside.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">She doesn't die immediately either. She lives long enough to say she's so sorry and </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">then</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> die, for maximum angst. Leaving aside all my vigorous complaining at the overall implications of her being shot to complete a somewhat ridiculous and egregiously obfuscated plotline of mysteries (did I say leaving the complaining aside? I meant sneaking some in while I said I was leaving it aside) it is interesting to note that both the blood from her gunshot wound appears to be black and possibly putrefied, and also that the disease has progressed significantly slower in her than it did in the other two. It could be because she was less violent and aggressive than the others? It could be that it progressed this slowly in Officer Stark and we only saw the sudden acceleration at the end. It could be that it was about to progress quickly in her and we didn't get to see it. Something to note, anyway! Duke continues to be violently pissed at everything going on in his life, and who could blame him, but now he really is ready to charge right out into, once again, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">a field full of snipers.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> He's also ready to punch Nathan for the privilege. That's okay, Nathan's going to punch him right back, and knock him out, too. Much to Audrey's... I hesitate to call it shock, exactly, certainly there's shock at the abruptness of it all. Possibly also some </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">what the hell are you two doing and why are you doing it at a time like this.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> I'm going to take a second and giggle over the "be careful: work safely" sign behind Nathan's butt.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Audrey is continuing to attempt to work the case and in doing so, presumably run across Nicky Coleman's name in the files which is then conveyed by her glancing over and remembering the cup-shredding from the interview. The files part comes in when we see her meet with Nicky a moment later, telling her and us that she knows Officer Stark was called out to her home, and she spoke with Chief Merrill. So, she's definitely a likely suspect for the contagion vector. After a slightly suspicious comment about how Nicky can't be seen talking to her we'll go three for three (take a drink!) when Chris Brody interrupts to bother Audrey, this time about something more serious, his fingertips are turning black. Nicky, of course, is insta-smitten by his Trouble, which is also how we get the fact that they talked earlier in the day. So, that's enough confirmation for Audrey, which Chris Brody then picks up on and ... I'll go with browbeat rather than bully because there's more fear than malicious intent there. Browbeats Nicky to try and get her to reverse it. Which is going to be a problem because she has no idea she's doing it and Audrey hasn't even had a chance to tell her, since she just found out </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">a second ago.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Chris. You were there for Roots, you were there for Sparks and Recreation, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">how do you not know how this works.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Argh. Slightly less meta-argh because Audrey will now comment on how he's changed, presumably for the worse by the implication of her tone, and no, he can't go out there, his Trouble is not in fact faster than a speeding bullet. And she will help fix him if he will just leave her alone for five fucking minutes and let her do her job. Chris Brody will then proceed to put his foot straight into his mouth and swallow up to the knee by wishing his Trouble worked on her. GOOD JOB CHRIS. Says the slamming door.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Behind the slammed door Audrey explains that Troubles are usually caused by a traumatic event, and tries to gently pry hers out of her. It's somewhat lacking in specifics, but I think "he's back" and "he'll hurt me if I say anything" are pretty good indicators of a traumatic event! I can't tell if she means to insinuate without openly saying anything she'll get in trouble for or if she's just not watching her words, either is possible. But yes, the traumatic event is the most likely partner abuse, which we then get. To a fair degree of ouch, this is some pretty hardcore stalking she's describing even in shorthand for time purposes. </span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitG_P1zzFd8LTHRcUcNCpf4c9JTTHUCcXOR1M9gd7o-3aqYwtGtSte6xA8UDP_IaVEEnyQyLegNnKWhdJA34IFsNfVzAlKaCa7_eGmIs-Q35pRHNGODy5yfbySWQ62-H9jP6yu7TIf1Tk/s1600/haven209cc05.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitG_P1zzFd8LTHRcUcNCpf4c9JTTHUCcXOR1M9gd7o-3aqYwtGtSte6xA8UDP_IaVEEnyQyLegNnKWhdJA34IFsNfVzAlKaCa7_eGmIs-Q35pRHNGODy5yfbySWQ62-H9jP6yu7TIf1Tk/s320/haven209cc05.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Speaking of shorthand, by now conservation of characters I think we can all agree that Doc Hugh is the stalker, yes? Yes. Not that this is apparent immediately because he runs into Chris Brody and is instantly hit by whammy. Ooh, now there's a downside to Chris Brody's power that isn't immediately apparent because the dynamics are, due to various factors, less obvious when it's a man who's the victim. What happens when an unstable person is magically ensorcelled into being obsessed with you? Probably a situation a lot like the one Nicky was describing a moment ago. Ick. Anyway, Chris Brody is considerably bitter about being afflicted by black finger plague, and even under the influence of whammy Hugh is focused on what's going on in the office with the detective and the focus of his obsession. Chris Brody is focused on the fact that Audrey won't let him leave! My god, you two. Hugh offers to cure Chris Brody, without any specific details as to how or why or even whether or not he knows what's wrong, because he's not actually interested in fixing anyone, he's more interested in getting a gun. Possibly not even so they can get out of there! Because psycho stalker. Ooh, but Chris knows where they can get a gun, excuse him while he whammies Stan into getting that gun Audrey stored in evidence for later. Oh this isn't going to end well at all. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Audrey's theory of the Trouble of the Week is that Nicky spent so much time swallowing this poison that her abuser was putting out, that it spilled out, infected, and killed other people. Which goes also with my theory that the most aggressive die quickest, but we don't get a confirmation on that and it's only a side theory anyway. Nicky continues to terrifiedly explain how they can't stop him or stop the abuse, because he knows they're talking, which takes Audrey to the abuse is coming from inside the police station. Enter Hugh! Kicking down the door. Hi, jackass. Wife, of course his wife, at least in his mind. I'm not sure what laws Maine has on the books regarding divorce, some states I believe you can divorce a person on the grounds of abuse or other dangerous circumstance without the other person required to participate.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A few minutes and a commercial break later Hugh has everyone in the station rounded up and Nicky and soon Audrey on their knees, with Audrey making the usual pacifying noises that at least buy some time. Enough time for her to direct a </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">look what you did</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> stare at Chris Brody, who at least looks like he knows what he did. Apparently we've run up against the limits of his Trouble: obsessive narcissism and psychosis. Hugh doesn't seem at all inclined to do anything Chris Brody says by the way he's cowering on the ground with the other. Audrey continues to try to talk Hugh down, though I suspect she's doing it more in the hopes of averting a complete shooting meltdown rather than out of any hope of bringing him around. Hugh's side of it is mostly boilerplate abuser it's all her fault why you make me hurt you, in the most uncomfortable sense. Though he does give Audrey an idea when he gloats over how Nicky gave everyone else the disease except him. Aheh. Oh god, Chris, sit down. You don't want to add to this. Neither do you, Audrey, especially when Chris Brody's Trouble turns around to causing Hugh to ally with him in his own twisted sense, by seeing Audrey as a woman in need of "discipline" or "lessons" too. Hugh, not </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">EVERY</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> guy is like you, not even most guys. You dysenteric sack of piss. Extra double plus unfortunate because the proximity allows Hugh to notice that Audrey isn't sick either. Whooops.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Nathan's solution to Duke's hot-headedness is to throw him in jail! That's actually a reasonable solution, there's a limited amount of harm he can do to himself or anyone else in there, and they're still talking </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">and</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> they're away from the asshole with the gun. Duke swears he's not going to do anything. Nathan believes him about as much as I do. For more bad news, because that's all this night needed, the sheriff is coming in from the local county? Thereby causing the Rev's goons outside to realize from the bootleg scanner they've no doubt got that they've only got a few minutes before legitimate people with guns are there asking them why they're holding guns on a police station. So they're making their move now. Of course. Dwight, though, has him covered. From the perspective of several seasons later this is an aww of course he does, but at that point it's a bit startling, keeping in mind that we know very little about him except big burly mountain man looking cleaner. Thus with the not knowing, Nathan's going to go help him out. And not let Duke join him because Duke, you are so emotionally compromised right now it's not funny.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Back to the asshole with the gun, he's about to shoot Audrey because he can't let her live because she'll keep him away from his etc etc. Chris Brody, I don't know if he's doing this on purpose but I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt and say he is, talking to Hugh to draw his attention while Audrey talks to Nicky, encouraging her to take control and fight back. It even works, too, possibly because of the extreme situation and possibly because of realizing she's Troubled, some combination of everything. Particularly given the personal nature of the Trouble and how it's worked and tied into her abuse, and given what Audrey's been saying to her? The dialogue is a bit abbreviated because it's television and we need the climactic scene, but hells to the yeah confronting the abuser and drawing a line and saying no more. Of course because this is Haven, drawing a line and telling her abuser to rot in hell results in Nicky's Trouble hitting Hugh big time and, whoops, dead. Thank god. Really grossly dead, too. And everyone else now free of the contagion! Yay! </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Not so yay. Audrey catches Nathan as he's passing and tells him the Trouble is over, and he tells her that the guys outside are coming in. So they've still got little-t Troubles. As usual, because if it's not supernatural it's people being jerks. Audrey doesn't even argue, just hands him the gun, tells him she'll try to find more guns, and lets him go. (Chris Brody has a moment of looking somewhat appalled, but at which part of the night it's anyone's guess. Maybe his behavior? Maybe he's realized that he's been acting like a jerk, and given Audrey's commentary if it wasn't a thing that happened to him while in London, maybe it was an effect of the Troubled abuse ick contagion thing. I would not actually put it past that Trouble to both accelerate based on the aggression of the afflicted and to cause increased aggression in the afflicted. Digression over! Because in the long scheme of things the Chris Brody arc is really not that interesting.)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Dwight's idea of helping or covering the assault is, um. To charge the building with a vest on and take all the bullets? I'm not entirely sure what's going on here, either. Or why they abruptly flee after firing eight? shots through the door. I counted eight visible bullet holes anyway. And this is how we find out about Dwight's bullet magnet power! So, actually, assuming they only had that fragment of time to assault the place before the legitimate police show up, that does make a certain amount of sense. Wander around the front of the building, wait for them to pick their point of assault, soak up the bullets into your vest, break a few ribs, and then they run off. It's just not quite the plan I'd've chosen. On the other hand, it's not like he had much time to come up with a better plan. At any rate, Dwight is a bullet magnet. Nathan has the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">holy shit dude that is a suckier Trouble than I have</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I didn't think that was possible without killing people</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> face on. It is a very sucky Trouble. Though I appreciate the continuity of Dwight wearing a vest </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">almost</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> the whole time he's been on the show! Except certain situations where of course not so much. Nathan goes on and admits that he might need Dwight now more than ever. Oh sweetie, you have </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">no</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> idea. And given what happens I'm not sure the writers have a full idea, but they're definitely getting there.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Everyone totters out of the police station. Or is wheeled out, in certain cases. Duke has a quiet moment to say goodbye, interrupted by the Rev, who I don't believe is sorry in the least. Duke doesn't believe it either. In fact, by that expression Duke is placing the blame for her death squarely on his shoulders. The Rev attempts some sympathy by calling her one of the many innocent victims of the Troubled, and that he lost his wife to them. Um. Okay, for a certain definition of lost that has nothing to do with death, as in Evi's case, and everything to do with you, sir, are a colossal dick who wouldn't let his wife get the divorce or annulment she so desperately wanted. Ahem. Duke is a bit lost, and the Rev offers to help him only after he proves to him that he's worthy. Of... what? That's both asinine and manipulative. Whether or not Duke accepts it fully or is in the throes of grief and easily led is unclear at this point in time, but he does thank the Rev for his thoughts and prayers, as the Rev says to that, which at least indicates a willingness to continue civil interaction. It's possible our response to the Rev challenging Duke to prove he's worthy would be less hostile if he hadn't been waving guns around at worried parents and so on earlier in the season, but as a general rule withholding explanations from a grieving man until he proves himself without a damn good reason given is a dick move. And the Rev has thus far been shown to be comprised of very little other than dick moves. So.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Audrey wants Dwight to try to cover up Evi's death, suicide or accident or whatever, but she needs to investigate it in a Haven way, not an official way, and she can't do that with the state ME looking over her shoulder. Nathan has slight objections to this based on that was an actual homicide, that one, not death by Trouble, which lasts until some combination of Dwight saying it's not a problem and the Rev talking quietly to a police officer about if he's going to do something then I can't tell because it cuts away. Gee, that doesn't look suspicious at all. And what rank do you hold in the Haven PD, Rev? Though, heeeeh. There's also an element of hypocrisy here given that the PD is later on run by Guard-affiliated people. But yes, Chief Merrill called the Rev several times, phone logs say. Let's have a brief walk by that's almost shot like a western flick of the Rev and Audrey staring at each other waiting for the showdown. Whistle! Whipcrack! Not really.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Out on the docks Audrey is coming to talk to Chris Brody, presumably about the whole thing with the ... everything this episode. She starts to apologize for being late and getting caught up at work, and he interrupts her to apologize for wishing she wasn't immune, which he says isn't true and I do believe him. To apologize for giving in to [the effects and emotional side effects of] his Trouble and almost getting everyone killed and, yes, as it turns out. For basically the whole thing of everything in this episode to this point. He tells her he doesn't want her to be immune, that he needs her, at which point she also points out that wanting her and needing her are two different things. Oh sweeties. Both of you, really. She doesn't want to be in a relationship because she's keeping him steady, she wants to be in a relationship for herself, with a person who wants her for herself. And eventually, yes, he might come to resent her for it. Or, neither of them are guessing this but it's possible, he might come to depend on her too much for it, or she might come to resent him for it. He needs to find his own balance. Which, to him, means being in a place where he can be alone, work alone, and someday the Troubles will end. That's not what she means, but maybe that is the solution for him, even if it's not the one she hopes for, for him. He still, in the end and at least for now, wants to be someone she loves, but half-surprisingly and half as we've come to expect for this show, right now they're doing the mature adult thing and deciding that their wants and needs, complicated by the Troubles, aren't compatible right now. Poor loves. It is for the best, but it still hurts. It's also a nice and welcome contrast to the other relationship we saw in this episode: as opposed to the abusive relationship of never I will never let you go, these are two mature adults who agreed that they care about each other, but it's not working. And thus concludes the Chris Brody arc, the only objection to which I have is that it was fairly blatantly a distraction from the Audrey-Nathan arc, an obstacle. And I think a romantic relationship deserves at least slightly more respect than that. Chris Brody at his best and, what seemed to me at least, most natural was mostly just irascible. Chris Brody the Obstacle To The Eternal Love Of Audrey and Nathan, however, was an unnecessary dick. An up and down plotline, I feel. On the other hand, it did end well.</span></div>
Kitty Chandlerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05524808952260453841noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4271373189216022547.post-9921508904352342542015-11-28T15:40:00.000-08:002015-11-28T15:40:31.401-08:00I Must Live While Others Die Haven S5E22 A Matter Of Time<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Everyone stop for awhile to groan over the double pun in the ep title with us, while we go over the previouslies. Yes? Yes. Previously, Hayley or Hayley's Trouble are the key to saving Haven by way of making a thinny whee. Vince was a complete fucking idiot who thought the best plan was to discuss plans for saving Dave from Croatoan IN FRONT OF HIM WHEN HE KNEW DAVE WAS POSSESSED. I'm pretty sure that one never got fully erased from his memory, is what I'm saying, and even if it did, the body on the floor should be a big fucking clue. Nathan coming back from the void is crucial, which will be fun since William's there too and Hayley refuses to use her power for the purposes of eventually getting rid of it. Kid. Have you seriously never read Harry Potter? Splinching is a thing. You don't want that thing.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Nathan does not want this boulder or this void air or whatever in the void is making him sick, but there's a lot of shit Nathan doesn't want and bulls his way through despite that. Because Nathan. Also I question the wisdom of sending in the guy who can't feel things to a place that's that toxic to humans. While it may lengthen the time he can stand being in there, if there's any kind of nerve irritation/pain that goes along with it, it means that he doesn't notice how bad it is until, say, shortness of breath and blurry vision come into play. William shall taunt him a second time! Free me and I'll help you, yadda yadda, nobody believes you, William. Though he's not wrong about Nathan doing poorly. William babbling about all the terrible things Mara's going to do is definitely like provocation! A lot of provocation, since Nathan starts shouting about how Mara's not coming back and ALSO no seriously NOT COMING BACK SHE'S DEAD YOU MORON. DECEASED. KICKED THE BUCKET. SHE IS AN EX-MARA. Ahem. I will allow as how this is enough passion and Nathan is fucked up enough that it definitely registers as true. Or Nathan believing it's true hard enough that he's got some kind of alternate proof, even if William looks utterly stricken by that idea. He's not wrong, either, there's not really anything he knows of that could do that. That's in Haven. So now they have new and interesting information to exchange and negotiate from. Such as negotiation can happen when the only thing William was living for (as far as he's ever said) is now gone. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Speaking of hope being gone! At least they named her Hayley, not Hope. Audrey will now freak out at Duke about how did this happen why does she think her Trouble is awesome. Audrey. Because she's a fucking teenager with a teenager's notion of invincibility and a Trouble that backs her up on it. Even though Duke did try to tell her about the downsides of it, at length, it </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">has </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">been extraordinarily useful to her in a very short span of time. Plus, you know, she's gotten fucked up plenty in the past few weeks, between Trouble activation and people trying to kill her and then Duke going all Terminator on her. And then Audrey totally fucked up the motivational speeches, so yes, this is totally your fault, Audrey, and you should feel bad about stranding your boyfriend in the void. Oh, about that downside, that would be a girl's voice in a looot of pain. And that would be Hayley splinched in a metal gate or fence of some kind, at least one of those bars is running through an artery, and I think the one through her back is probably paralyzing at least her lower extremities. Wow that sucks. Also I don't know how the fuck she thinks they're going to help her, unless Duke has an iron-melting Trouble we don't know about.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">After the credits we come back to the group of total fucking idiots in the cabin (in the woods, one of these days A may get over her wary and watch that) with Dave still chained up. Vince and Dwight have brought in a hypnotist that I'm sure we would've seen before in this half of the season if there were time in these eps and also, y'know, if Croatoan weren't mind-fucking everyone for shits and giggles. (5x04 Much Ado About Mara is the ep where she last hypnotized Dave, if you'll recall back that far.) Goddammit, Croatoan. At least that implies that they keep getting close to something he very much does NOT want them knowing? Thank you Dave for attempting to warn them that Croatoan's watching and maybe talking about separating him or him getting to kill Croatoan is maybe not the BEST plan you've ever come up with. Dwight will be the only halfway smart person and call an end to the debate in favor of maybe hopefully catching Croatoan off-guard. Pun totally intended. The hypnotist, whose name we don't get, explains the gist of a mind palace to everyone who didn't already know it </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">and </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">didn't watch BBC Sherlock, The Mentalist, or any of these other shows. (No, I don't know why it's suddenly in vogue either.) Well what's Dave supposed to do when he's back there supposedly confronting the big bad? Kill him, get information, they're not picky. Yeah this is a great idea. Send Dave to the back of his own mind so that Croatoan can pop out! This can't POSSIBLY end badly. Dwight you at least I expect better from, for fuck's sake, and once again I wish we knew exactly how much his and Vince's memories of the past half-day resemble Swiss cheese. Also, dear hypnotist, telling Dave that he has no control over what he takes with him is a) bullshit and b) really NOT HELPFUL. Dave jokes around a bit as a defense mechanism. Vince don't take your brother's defense mechanisms he has a reason to want them. See also how his voice trembles when he declares it time to get this over with. Are you facepalming? I'm facedesking.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The facedesking does not let up. Yes, Hayley, you wore yourself out opening portals and now you're too tired to focus on using your Trouble properly and no, you're fucked. As those looks between Audrey and Duke suggest. You're not getting out of here, kiddo, and heart and lungs are not the only vital organs or things that can get you killed, I think she actually does know that and is lashing out in panic and fear. Not that I can entirely blame her, she's very obviously desperate for parental figures and neither Duke nor Audrey actually </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">wants </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">to adopt a stray teenager, they have bigger problems. So, no, they can't even try moving her, if those bars aren't piercing her arteries they will as soon as she gets shifted. Her right brachial artery looks okay? I don't think it runs that low, but I'm guessing her femoral artery is only being kept from spurting blood by that bar running through her thigh. Her left brachial artery is more dubious and removing the bar running near to in her spine is liable to make her quadriplegic IF it doesn't outright kill her. Besides which, it's not as though either of them has a phasing Trouble to conveniently get her out of there. Oh honey. Audrey may have sucked at dealing with you and your Trouble, but under these circumstances she doesn't </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">need </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">to try and trick you. She does, however, need to discuss Extremely Upsetting Things with Duke out of earshot. What could be more upsetting than sorry kid you're going to die? Oh, getting used again as a portal-opener and nothing else. I can't imagine this isn't hitting all of Duke's buttons over Jennifer, too, which is part of why he volunteers to talk to her. The other part is responsibility for Hayley personally and the fact that Audrey </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">did </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">fuck it up the first time so let's just… not do that. I somewhat question the wisdom of that, in that if Audrey could be persuaded to admit she fucked up </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">to Hayley</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, some, uh, fences might be mended. But alas, no.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I have to say it's probably a good thing for Maddie that Croatoan yoinked her memory of the first time she hypnotized Dave, because she was so completely freaked out when she called Vince that I don't know if he could've persuaded her to come back with her memory intact. That looks more like an EMDR light than a hypnosis light, but sure, we'll go with it. The strength of Dave's mind palace turns out to be the Herald, which doesn't merit the jar but is kinda cute, and it looks like there's a … tree? growing in the middle of the office. Between that and the creepy tree of deathtruffles life on William's box of balls, I have concerns. I have even more concerns about how the entire area outside the Herald looks just like the void. That suggests quite a lot of power already gathered from Croatoan, and Dave looking like he has a headache is not doing anything to counter the idea. Dave. You're saying hello to the boogeyman in your head? That's… okay kind of hilarious, actually. Back in the really real world, Dwight and Vince are crouched over Dave all okay well what are our chances oh shit Maddie's dead? Maddie's dead. Must've been Troubled, either previously or recently by Duke's Troublesplosion. Which means you guys are COMPLETELY FUCKED. Yes, Croa-Dave broke the chains, yes, you lost ten minutes, yes, in conclusion, this was a terrible idea what the fuck is wrong with you. At the VERY LEAST it would've been a good idea to send Maddie away for fewer civvie casualties, probably also a good idea to go outside of the cabin while Dave's hypnotized so that you have half a chance to react if Croatoan meatpuppets him outside to try and fuck with you and wipe your memories. Honestly, you guys, these are basic tactics. This is also the ONE time where I would accept that a glass cage might be useful, assuming line of sight doesn't work and you can make it strong enough that Croatoan can't break it, so the smoke monster can't get you. ONE TIME.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Meanwhile back in the cave of trapped and bickering, William has entered not so much denial as the stage where he's tried to logic his way into Nathan making sense and failed to figure out how Audrey and Mara could be separated and Mara killed. There's no barn! This does not compute! Literally. Nathan stop giving away the homeworld. While I appreciate that getting one over on William feels great in the moment, I just don't see how giving him more information is a good plan oh ever. Though sure, let's break his psyche into a few more pieces, that'll go well. Reveal Charlotte, reveal the split of bodies and personalities, well at least William's giving up a little bit of information too. Sort of. We did know that Mara wanted to make Troubles that could affect her own kind, in a very be-careful-what-you-wish-for way she got it, and presumably she wanted to drop them on the heads of everyone who doubted her back in their world all MWAHAHAHA NOW YOU'LL SEE YOU'LL ALL SEE. And other such mad scientist cacklings. I mean, she already flat out said it was to prove a point! Apparently this little storytime hits William hard, not just because Charlotte chose Audrey over Mara but because he has half a clue how that's even possible, so I… guess that's good? I'd still like to know how it IS possible and the mechanics thereof, but at least it rings true enough that William has to assimilate this new data before he has any other prodding to do. Evidently he's both scared of Charlotte and not surprised that she favored Audrey over Mara, which makes one wonder what he knew of Mara's parents and just how long Charlotte's been a controlling, rigid-thinking to the point of abusive mother. Not that William is anywhere close to being a decent person either, but there's a clear pattern of fear, analysis and apprehension, grief, anger, and then thinking. Lots of eye-darting and thinking as he what I can only assume from that face, he's calculating something. He can do that, Nathan's going to use a fallen stalactite as a lever to move that boulder while William watches with an intensity I don't at all like, which of course the stalactite breaks because they're not the most sturdy of rock formations. That would be his cue to get fed the fuck up and fling it across the cave, gouging out a dent and leaving him wheezing and William disgusted with their situation. Oh, hey, the controller crystal, that's something. If you can ever get out of here. And that is a fucking LOT of aether dripping down the gouge. I am so not fond of those eyedarts, William, the fuck are you planning. You creepy motherfucker. Seriously creepy, that's the kind of thing we've been accused of doing when we do our own situational analyses. Though I'm not surprised the cave bleeds aether. I'm sure you could practically condense it from the air in the void, if you knew what you were doing, though if that's so it begs the question why William hasn't bothered yet. Unless he plans to just watch Nathan die! Questions for later.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Speaking of eyes, Hayley's losing focus by the minute. She wants to know why it doesn't hurt more, well, there's these things called nerve connections, and probably a lot of them got severed when you splinched yourself into the bars. See also BAR IN HER SPINE. Seriously, it looks like it's coming out just at the base of her skull, the bars might be the only things holding her upright at this point. Duke takes the less gory route of telling her her body's going into shock, which is probably also true. (Someone get her a blanket.) (That's not entirely a poorly timed joke, it's going to take her a while to die in there, and she is going to get cold and weak and basically unless someone gives her mercy this is going to suck.) She is upset, she doesn't want to die. She may or may not be telling an emotional truth when she says she finally had one good thing, it's not like she's exactly thinking clearly now, but by her behavior when Duke met her the first time she didn't have much in the way of hope for a decent future there, either. So, yeah. In some ways it's not really a surprise that she took this new ability and ran with it. The surprise is that the adult who knew her (Duke) and more importantly the adult who's supposed to be empathic and understanding and talk people into a better, more hopeful place (AUDREY) so completely fell down on the job. Mostly Audrey. Duke is tired and doesn't necessarily know older Hayley all that well. As proven by the fact that he's appealing to her more generous nature (really?) and asking her to use her dying breaths to pull Nathan out of the void. Sorry, no. Putting Nathan in the void is what exhausted her to this point in the first place, and then holding it open to get him out, and basically she is not doing the people who begged her to use her powers for their benefit, thus exhausting herself, thus killing her, any new favors. Also Duke did kind of try to kill her. Albeit he was under the influence at the time. We will now have some blather about destiny and saving Haven, which I think is less about how he thinks about destiny and more how everyone and everything in his life since he was all of seven and dialing it up to eleven in the past year has basically been herding, shoving, or outright forcing him to this place. And he doesn't like it, but at this point if he can find meaning and purpose out of it that's better than thinking all that suffering was for no damn reason. Hayley isn't quite at that point, even dying. So he can take his destiny and shove it.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Dave is still looking for Croatoan in his mindscape. Personally I'd be conjuring some weapons and armor, but my mindscape is quite a bit tidier than Dave's. I take it back, it's not tidier, but it is clearer and less fuzzy and far more familiar and well used. Dave doesn't seem to have cracked open any books on meditation theory or anything in his life, which you'd think he would, being a citizen of Fucking Haven. Anyway. Croatoan is not in the Tut box. Nor is he riding the tiny version of the bicycle for two, does anyone yet remember that? All the way back in the pilot, how we met the brothers Teagues? It's a nice if ominous callback, since we usually only go to the pilot for characters who are about to die. Also because them being introduced on that bike as twinnish people was, wait for it. Creepy. No, Dave, I promise, it's not just you in there. Magazines and file boxes go clattering, oh thanks, Dave, I really needed you to go looking in your porn stash for Croatoan. I will say, I do believe that is also some internal continuity with the porn mags, and that is all I want to focus on for that. And then, yes, there's the smoke billowing out of, heh, the Tut coffin box and things rattling, clocks ticking like they're in a Pink Floyd video, and a typewriter typing! (Nice bit of foreshadowing there; the SECOND - pun intended - Dave gets a look at those clocks, Croatoan decides to make contact all HI HI LOOK OVER HERE HI IT'S A SQUIRREL.) Everyone who has seen Fringe OR at this point Agent Carter is now twitching violently. Typewriters typing on their own have never done anyone any good. The typewriter says Hello Dave. The typewriter answers his "who's there" (REALLY DAVE WHO DO YOU THINK IS IN HERE) with Croatoan. The typewriter sadly does not tell Dave he's sorry, he can't let him do that, or any variation thereof on that theme. A and I were rooting for that one. Dave freaks out, as you do when you're being addressed by the deranged serial killer in your head. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And then, well, not everyone wakes up but we come out of Dave's head into Bizarro world where Dwight has Vince by the shirtfront and his arm back to punch him and is saying something about how they can't take that chance? What chance? Does it matter? They've been taking chances ever since they found out Dave was possessed by Croatoan. REALLY STUPID ONES. Over a sequence of dialogue pretty much only there to lay it out for the members of the audience they decide they were arguing, don't remember what it was about because they lost time. Again. Dwight at least glances briefly at Dave-a-toan to make sure he's still-again chained up. Yep, chained. And Maddie's body got moved out of the room at some point. Whereupon he will freak out, and rightfully so, about the gun on the floor. Vince, you lost time, not (more) brain cells, you wouldn't have been defending yourself with a gun because you know that you CAN'T defend yourself with a gun in Dwight's presence, the bullets won't hit anyone but Dwight. Which the aforementioned bullet-magnet is quick to point out. I will grant that given that Dwight looked like he was about to slug Vince, he might have been moving to defend himself </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">from</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Dwight, but still. That's an awfully lethal defense. Especially given that Vince is the one person who might be able to go toe to toe with Dwight and have a chance of coming out on top, without powers. With powers, of course, all bets are off. Anyway. Vince makes a racket putting the gun the hell away and would like to know what the fuck, which Dwight decides is because Dave found something out that Croatoan doesn't want them to know. Reasonable assumption! Now what the hell was it. Vince offers that Croatoan is trying to get them to kill Dave, which I also question, see above for the futility of trying to kill someone by shooting them with a bullet magnet in the room. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Back in the Cave of Manipulative Bastards, William is smugging it the hell up. Nathan has to have him point out the aether leak, thank you Haven for giving me all of the X-Files flashbacks ever, and confirms that it's the element of the Void. In its purest form, he says. This is a confirmation so we're not going to immediately assume he's lying. The part about how Mara and him used to come to places like this to collect it, well, no reason to believe he's lying there, either. And the snark about how he has to get some on his hands is just the truth as far as we know it. Sadly, Nathan's not that desperate yet. Maybe not sadly. No one trusts William. For good reason because his idea of helping is to use that aether to give Nathan a new Trouble so they can get out of there. I, um. Yeah. No. Not going to happen. William's pretty sure it's going to happen once Nathan gets desperate enough. Still not going to happen. Now it might be Nathan's blur-o-vision, but I feel like there should be a hint somewhere here between what he's actually planning to do and what he says he's planning to do. Because then what happens is the follow through seems to be disconnected to the setup, although the follow through does also hint at something else and I can't really talk about this until we get there so I'm going to leave it at that.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We do have a nice transition from we're both going to die here to Hayley's going to die. Or rather, Hayley's dying and no, she still won't help you Audrey, stop sounding so goddamn indignant when you were the one who made her think you wanted to take the only thing she had away from her. Jesus fuck. Audrey is usually far more compassionate or at least understanding and empathic than that, even in the middle of the crisis. Audrey, are you a Skrull? That would actually make sense. Anyway, Duke promises to get Hayley to help them. Duke sounds desperate to believe that to me. And yes, it's possible he could talk her into it, but they are running out of time. On the other hand then Audrey pretends that they're both thinking hey Duke, why don't you use your Trouble and kill her and take her Trouble and do it yourself? Um, because he wasn't thinking that? Because he doesn't like using his Trouble? Granted, she's only ever asked him to do it in some fairly extreme situations, but also granted that doing shit like that is what STARTED Duke on this dark path of god I suck and my destiny sucks and everything sucks, peace out. Not to mention wasn't it just last episode that Duke was bitching about how Audrey only needs him, not Duke-him, but his Trouble and his this and his that and one aspect of him, not the whole package? I do believe it was. She's trying to sell him on his destiny is to save Haven and that's not flying either, that is when he tells her about Croatoan creating the Crocker family curse. though of course not anything about "... in order to collect Troubles" which I find a strange thing to leave out, but sure fine whatever. Also I find strange is what the hell Omnia Vincit Amor has to do with anything, but I'm going to keep bitching about that until the end of time. Duke does have a point that taking yet another Trouble is exactly what Croatoan would want Duke to do, since, again, not that he told Audrey this, but that's why his bloodline was created. And then Audrey's back on the what if we don't have any other choice, and it's not that what she's saying is contradicting itself at all, but wow the mood whiplash of her sales pitch. I think it's this, this moment, on top of all the other moments, that convinces me this has to be about something other than her exhaustion making her act so off. At least I hope there's a payoff, because otherwise this is going to end with Audrey sitting firmly in the middle between old Audrey and Mara and I have no idea what to do with that. Duke is making a different choice. Duke is choosing to let Hayley die on her own, and to convince her to help them before that happens. You go, Duke. You do you.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And William will do William, which is to say he will be a sarcastic, arrogant little snot and whine about how Nathan won't let him shove any more aether into him. And it's definitely whining. With a bit of a laughter undertone. I don't even think he thinks Nathan will let him ever, I don't even know if he really wants Nathan to let him, he's just poking him. The only problem with this is that it takes him into the what would you do for Audrey because I would do anything for Mara and she would do the same for me territory. Meaning to imply that, among the many other ways Nathan is a lesser being, he's less in his love for Audrey except this is where Nathan points out what we were jumping around and saying seasons ago. Mara was only using William for various things, most recently for his stash of aether. William chooses to ignore that and focus on the fact that Nathan is dying and will he just let him fucking give him a Trouble so they can get out of here already.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Over in Dave's head Dave is trying to smash the typewriter so it will stop telling him things he doesn't want to know, and instead of Hal we get Jareth echoing out of the air with "I wouldn't do that if I were you." Yes, I just superimposed David Bowie over William Shatner, you're welcome. No, seriously, the intonation is a bit the same, but the point is Croatoan is so getting a kick out of Dave's suffering. We also get the always useful to know bit of information that what he does here will affect his body in the real world, that's good to have confirmed. I mean, it's usually true, but then you get movies like Inception where you can do all kinds of crazy shit and nothing happens. Anyway, Croatoan then gloats about Dave being the one who's really in danger and how he knows everything Dave knows. And then he asks the very good question, why SHOULDN'T he kill him right here and now? A very good question, CroaShatner, and one we're all wondering, why HAVEN'T you killed Dave. Dave tries to claim Croatoan owes him an explanation which, yeah, but how the hell are you going to force him to collect? But he's an ego-driven creature and yes, it turns out that Dave being a halfling, or a changeling or whatever, that made him the perfect host for the fog monster. *raises hand* So, I have a question, does that mean Mara's father was a halfling too, or was that a whole different process? One would think Charlotte would have mentioned if he was, and it's not like we don't have enough sense of Mara's father the Mad Scientist to guess that he might have fucked things up in some other way that allowed Croatoan access, especially since they were both banished to the void at the time. Or maybe once the merge has completed a changeling host </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">at that point</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> is the only viable host for a blended creature. WHO KNOWS. NOT US. And blah blah yes all this time that was Croatoan pulling you towards the thinnies, blah blah Croatoan entered through the hole in his leg. Dave is not so quietly having a much delayed meltdown and, heh, Croatoan even refers to the death of people as a 'side effect.' Just like we predicted! And he's been absorbing Troubles and growing strong enough to leave his body and enter Dave's world on his own... as a smoke monster? That part's unclear. Dave attempts to threaten Croatoan by pointing out that this is his body and his mind and he can hurt him. That's nice, Dave, except see the part where you haven't exactly been practicing the skills of the mind, oh, ever? And we have no idea what Croatoan's abilities in that respect are. Croatoan basically gives him the you're nice, I like you, you loaned me your body to ride like a meat puppet, I'll spare you/kill you last. (He really means kill you last, obv.) But his condition is that Dave has to leave RIGHT NOW. So, a) what doesn't he want Dave to find if he stays in there and b) dude, do you really expect Dave or anyone to believe you? Nobody believes you, Croatoan. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When we come out of Dave's head Vince is pointing a gun at it and saying it's the only way, and what were we saying about the efficacy of guns? Although at that close range it might not matter, and the bullet would be travelling slow enough through Dave's skull I'm not even going to finish that, ew. Also Vince is telling Dwight to go, so clearly he doesn't intend to shoot Dave while he's there. Actually he's telling him go now, before I shoot you too, and that's when they wake up. So to speak. So, yes, they lost time again, Vince flings the gun down again and closes it in a trunk, Vince, weren't you JUST SAYING that if it came down to killing Dave you'd be the one to do it? Which clearly somewhere in the intervening time we're not seeing, it has. This is another bit of clunkiness that's probably a result of time compression: the jumps from oh god what the fuck happened to pointing guns and imminent death of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">someone</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, if not necessarily the intended someone, is very very choppy and not in the disorienting way I suspect it's meant to be? Each piece by itself is very clear. But there's no progression, and not enough play in each piece to emotionally bond to it or feel like there's stakes happening apart from the ones we already know about, so no escalation of danger. It's just Dave, Vince, and Dwight getting yanked around by Croatoan again. The same way Dave and Vince have been getting yanked around since the start of S5, so, no progression, no escalation, no real sense. And then, the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: line-through; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">doorbell</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> phone rang! DWIGHT you are best Dwight and I love you. It turns out Dwight recorded at least a fragment of the conversation before they woke up. And if it had been slightly more than a fragment we might have some cohesion (not continuity, I understand there's supposed to be some chop here, but there's chop and then there's scatter) between the scene and the jump, but oh well. The point is, Dave is trying to convince Vince to kill him, and that seems to be the trigger point for Croatoan to wipe their memories. And here's where Dwight butchers it, because he's assuming that Croatoan wants them to kill Dave. And if that were the case, though, why not just let it play? Why stop them, presumably twice, as they were about to? I'm not sure who's jumping in what direction here, it's also possible Croatoan's trying to get them to almost kill Dave just to fuck with them some more, really. I'd buy it. And they can't know what's going on in Dave's head, but Dwight has a very good point that eventually, someone's going to die. And lo, someone does. Not yet though.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">After the ad break, I can only assume that Dwight has his phone on record this entire time. I hope! I also hope he's got both battery and storage space to record the whole thing. (By the way, shit like that would be exactly how to make having a cell phone in this day and age a tension-builder. Not that I think anyone here needs telling, but every so often we still run across people complaining about how horror movies used to rely on phone lines being cut blah blah blah.) And he and Vince are attempting to be all braced for Croatoan to show up and try to convince them of some more bullshit, which of course means it's not! When asked to prove it's really him, Dave coughs up the same key word as when Duke came back after being absconded by the barn: Oprah Winfrey! I somewhat question this, as Croatoan's totally been in there long enough to pick it up as a passphrase, but it </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">is </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">highly specific and we don't know how tidy Croatoan has been about running through all pieces of useful data. Certainly Dave hasn't been very tidy about how he keeps his mind palace, that place is a wreck. (Is this one of the downsides to keeping a tidy mind? Should I dirty mine up a bit? Shut up.) So as acceptable levels of paranoia go, they're finally starting to catch up to us. Vince updates Dave on the shit they're in, I'm severely distracted by Dave's glasses being permanently askew (it's a good shorthand for his discombobulation! it's also distracting no I do not have symmetry fixation why do you ask, and also it makes it difficult to see if his eyes are Cro-occluded.), and oh hey Croatoan's manipulating people in two different directions, what a shock. This is our shocked face. Yes, Dave, losing time, if he were less rattled he'd probably have caught onto time plus clocks that don't belong to his mind palace sooner, but knowing that Croatoan wants them to kill him is pretty rattling. Especially with the emotional gutpunch of knowing it's likely Vince who'd end up doing it. Dave, Croatoan is entirely composed of terrible things, so far as we know, so that's not very descriptive. Although okay leaving Dave alive and escaping to either smoke monster or physical form, that's pretty terrible. He likes you as a pet, Dave. At best. We'll spend some time facedesking over yes Dave you can do things to him in your mind palace and yes, Dave, there are things there that are not YOURS, so you can hurt him! Personally I'd be taking an ax in with me to hack at the tree, not even that there was a tree on William's box of deathtruffles but that it's a very consistent symbol of life, life-force, might also symbolize Croatoan's connection to Dave, and setting up a giant fan to disperse the mist is trickier and might make things worse. But an ax? You can hit both tree and clocks with that shit. Dave isn't thinking that big or that clearly, though I'll admit that destroying Croatoan's ability to take memories would be the most USEFUL thing ever if you assume that killing him outright is impossible to do without either killing yourself or that killing the tree might accidentally release him. At least the clocks are a pretty blatant symbol! So. Well, we know what happens next now.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Which means of course going over to the dying Hayley. We should note here that it seems pretty clear that they conflated emotions with Dave's death over Hayley's death, and scenes likewise, to give the whole thing more emotional heft. Dave's death has been likely ever since we were sure he was being possessed and the possession was only getting worse because he was ostriching over it, and Hayley's death has been telegraphed pretty much since she got her powers. (And poor Maddie the hypnotist gets just… left in the dust and ignored. Haven, have I mentioned your killing women problem? TWO IN ONE EP?) It's not a bad way to garner more sympathy for the people who might be going oh my god, you annoying bratty kid, do you ever think about anyone other than yourself, but frankly we already had a lot of sympathy for her. Yes, she's immensely frustrating, but she's also A KID, who got raised in a family of petty criminals, who sees nothing good or special about her, in her life, and she's probably been fucked over by every adult she's ever trusted. Then here comes Duke, and she starts to maybe sort of trust him and he tries to kill her because creepy supernatural shit, and she gets back to Haven, remembers how shit her upbringing WAS, and proceeds to get used AGAIN by adults. It's not really a wonder she's going "fuck you and the Troubles you rode in on." The other problem here is that Hayley is by now so lacking in energy and focus that even if she were inclined to help, I don't think she could. She doesn't bother telling Duke no again, regardless, she goes on to a discussion of destiny and Duke warned her about this shit, and yes, yes he did. Out of all the adults she's known Duke is probably the least awful. Which says some pretty depressing things. I dislike all of this talk about destiny, it seems pretty forced specifically to wedge another crack in Duke's I DON'T LIKE THIS DESTINY ANOTHER facade. The runs in the family joke is at least kinda funny! And then she's gasping in pain and honestly, I can make a really good argument for this being a mercy killing. God knows someone should be hugging her and trying to keep her warm and not alone during her last moments, and it's not really a surprise that Duke waits until the last possible minute to go ahead and kill her and take her Trouble. Complete with something that I think is supposed to serve as warning? letting her ask him not to end it, leaving that option open? Instead she closes her eyes in resignation, possibly relief, for which I cannot blame her, yet again. Also neck-cracking is an… interesting choice, in that it allows for a death that </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">looks </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">almost gentle, but frankly requires him to amp up on Troubled blood in order to do it with so little movement. (It's actually really hard to do for a normal and TRAINED human.) Duke does look in substantially more control of his new, exciting iteration of the Crocker Trouble this time; his eyes still go black for long enough that Audrey sees and steps back more in surprise than fear, admittedly, that's more of a 'oh holy shit he wasn't kidding' gasp than a fear gasp. Audrey go hug him. Though at least her apology seems sincere. I wonder if it's also for Mara, who's not really here but who used that body to do this to Duke. Allow Duke to have a terribly nihilist miserable speech about destiny and how this was always going to happen and he has to embrace what he is to save Haven. Oh Duke. At least from him it's believable, after this long of people dragging him kicking and screaming through his Trouble and making him use it in ways he doesn't want even a little.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Speaking of kicking and screaming, William's trying to drag Nathan to the realization that he has to choose </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">something </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">other than dying here alone if he wants to save Haven. Honestly this looks a lot like various kinds of poisoned-air deaths: slow oxygen deprivation, carbon monoxide poisoning, stuff like that. Which implies some interesting things about the void without actually telling us anything useful! Yay! Eventually, though, the will to live overrides even Nathan's stubborn fuck-you-William. William shut up, if you keep needling him he might not do it. This seems like it was meant to be a test of Nathan's love for Audrey, and maybe so, but if that's the case it wasn't entirely made clear. I completely do not believe William's promise to take the controller crystal back to Audrey so she can fix everything in Haven and fight Croatoan, and I don't think Nathan does either, but he's out of any better options. I also wonder if William maybe didn't expect quite THAT much aether? Because Nathan could just as easily have picked up a single droplet of goo, and instead that concentrated aether turns into a significant portion of what we've seen William manipulated before. Well. At least he wasn't lying about it being strong stuff! So instead of a Trouble for Nathan, we get Heckyll. Not Jekyll, sadly. Looking over the entire sequence we can notice there's never a moment of changing his mind, there's definitely a smirk in Nathan's direction as he braces for Trouble impact, but there's never any sign that William's changing his mind, no moment of decision in his face. He just pulls up the deathtruffles and his big burly servant. Nice physical acting touch with Nathan very carefully NOT touching William if he can help it when he passes it over, too. (There's a moment when the side of his thumb brushes his palm, but otherwise.) So! Boulder removed from William, who doesn't appear to have a broken arm so much as a badly bruised and bloodflow compromised arm. Well, that would've probably killed even him eventually, I don't know if the extradimensional aliens get gangrene from a limb dying but I can't imagine the results would be pretty regardless. And there we have the reason, I realized upon third watching or so, that William never intended to Trouble Nathan. Because while a Trouble for Nathan would have cleared the exit, who's to say it would have gotten the boulder off William? William would totally have acceded to being Troubled again and then left his enemy pinned under the boulder and waltzed on out of there. Nathan, probably </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">not</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">? But there's no way for him to be certain and we do tend to judge others based on what we can comprehend ourselves doing. So, Heckyll picks up Nathan by the throat, as you do when you're the size of a tree and your purpose is to intimidate people. Apparently the question in William's mind as far as break vs kill Nathan is what would Mara do. Aww, it's LIKE what would Jesus do! (You can't tell me that wasn't on purpose.) I bet the vague allusion to marry-fuck-kill was at least subconscious if not deliberate, too. Nathan has one card left to play as far as getting out of this! Since William's all about killing him and getting to the thinny and going back to fuck up Haven some more. I don't even want to think about all the creepy ploys he'd use to get Audrey to attach to him in her grief over losing Nathan. Let's just take that as read, the AU that didn't happen (yet) and move on! Nathan uses By The Way Mara Slept With Duke When You Weren't Around To Be Useful! It's reasonably effective! He pairs it with You're Just Like This Deathtruffle Servant You Stupid Asshole, which makes it way more effective. Certainly William's thinking now about whether or not it's worth bothering to kill Nathan now that Mara's gone and he's got reasonable proof that Nathan's telling the truth about all of what she did to and with Duke. He also doesn't look in the least surprised about what Nathan's saying about Mara. Maybe that she'd sleep with a human in her full aware self, but other than that, and that's explained with the blackhanding comment. So for all his posturing about him and Mara = Nathan and Audrey, he is at least aware of what we were saying back in S4, that Mara cared about him in the way one does a particularly useful tool or pet. Heh. Sadly, Nathan might be in a position to bear the consequences of that. </span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoUF8grpbAfHZDB9EX6I0s0V0895DiGsGaqNJ_jLjuYZYicma2I3op5xzhjnnUHIMoAt7TjWE-mJQgtUmulstbZXQ9gk-A2eOEmDgoS1Rdki0K56G7sQvh4K1B-BtPpRBj5cOPpz3s1wA/s1600/haven522cc04.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoUF8grpbAfHZDB9EX6I0s0V0895DiGsGaqNJ_jLjuYZYicma2I3op5xzhjnnUHIMoAt7TjWE-mJQgtUmulstbZXQ9gk-A2eOEmDgoS1Rdki0K56G7sQvh4K1B-BtPpRBj5cOPpz3s1wA/s320/haven522cc04.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We'll leave Nathan dangling - literally - and return to the other side of reality, where Duke's about to open a thinny and would like Audrey to promise not to run into the void if Nathan's lost there. Ahahahaha. Did you really think that'd work, Duke? Or were you just hoping that you could guilt her about how bad Haven would get if they were both lost? I'd be pissed at him for the guilt-trip except that Audrey's been ever so much more blatantly and forcefully doing this (and Nathan to a somewhat lesser extent) since he decided to come back. So really. Also for once I'm not going to yell about palm-cutting for the sake of bleeding, because in this very specific case it is SO CLEARLY Duke self-harming out of a combination of depression and guilt and PTSD: if he's going to do things like kill people to take their Troubles, and do it consciously, he's going to make sure he bears a reminder of it. I want to hug him and give him all the therapy! But it's very, very in-character at this point. It's also incredibly fucking impressive that it only takes him a few seconds of wibbly-wobbly thinny-thingie to get it to firm up: yes, he knows how the Coulton Trouble works, yes, he's seen it in action both as a phasing Trouble and as a thinny-creator, but still. It takes force of will, which Duke has in abundance. In the void, William isn't going to bother getting more aether to make another servant, he'll just let Heckyll put Nathan down to remove the boulder so they can get to the thinny. Well, that'll give Nathan more breath to argue for his life! Not that he takes it, because William's apparently already made up his mind, however temporarily, that he's going to do whatever Mara </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">wouldn't </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">have wanted and let Nathan go. I think my suspension of disbelief here is only supported by the amazing acting Lucas Bryant and especially Colin Ferguson are doing. Never tell anyone he's letting you go! It might ruin his reputation as a profoundly nasty person. No, I'm serious, that's the tone he's using. Not, don't tell anyone I'm here or that I helped you, don't tell anyone I'm a nice guy. Don't worry, William, I think your rep will remain intact. In response to which Nathan pulls out the magic ring and starts talking about how this is a ring that lets your kind go home, right? So here take it and go home and stop wandering the void lost. Which is actually a very Nathan response to this kind of abrupt kindness, here I cannot be in your debt have a thing that fixes it, but William's not used to that. William is getting punched in the feels he didn't think he had anymore, first with the first sight of one of those rings he's had in at least 500 years ish? I'm going to bring that up in a second, but, so first there's the ring which clearly meant a lot and has left massive scars, and then there's William getting punched in the you get to go home now this human is telling you to go home. With the end result that William kinda looks like he wants to kiss Nathan. This is not the boykiss we wanted! Although they're doing their level best to sell us on the hatesex, I'm just saying. William trying to tell Nathan not to go he'll die, with maybe an implicit come home with me and be my pet human, is NOT HELPING. So weird. So un-prepared for and not noticeably grounded. Well, the William turning into a briefly decent guy isn't noticeably grounded or at least not noticeably based in revenge against Mara, which I would have believed, the hatelust I'm presuming is more of an in the moment director choice or Colin Ferguson deciding to amp up the unsettling or both. Nathan, of course, is all no YOU go home and deal with the clusterfuck you're going to find there. HE'S going to go back to his Audrey and collapse on her. Taking a brief few lines out to further contemplate William's feels, let's go over some ring facts again: Mara took her father's ring, gave one (her father's probably but either would do) to William, they wander around the multiverse doing mayhem. At some point Charlotte shows up, puts the barn-whammy on Mara, we don't know what happens to William except that he turns up in the barn somehow 500 years later. We also know that AudSarLu had </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">two</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> rings. If we assume Charlotte would have, finding it on William, taken her husband's ring back with her, that means Mara took the ring from William, maybe even promising to give it back, but still, she took his way home. And having just been reminded that Mara didn't love him as much as he loved her, let's all contemplate how much William is getting punched straight in the soft bits of his psyche right now by Mara's replacement incarnation's ... replacement of him, I guess, going by his repeated comparison. The answer is ALL OF THE FEELS PUNCHING. I didn't think anyone could make me feel sorry for William, but damned if this scene and Colin Ferguson's fucking face isn't doing it.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Duke has the presence of mind to close up the thinny before William can decide he's going to go fuck up Haven instead. So that's good! We do not need a fucked up William taking out his many many issues on Haven. There's some really adorable reunion dialogue, up to and including the boys' flip-flop of yay you came back from just LAST ep. And oh. Hayley's not here. Nathan has concerns. Yes Nathan do go hug Duke. Everyone go hug Duke. Stop dragging him away, Audrey. The blocking of Duke stepping up with one arm swinging like he was offering a hug did not help in the slightest. Would someone please give the man a hug?</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Dave has decided that he's going to go take out at least SOME portion of Croatoan's abilities now while there's still time, since he's been informed that he's being abandoned as a meatpuppet pretty soon, if he's smart Dave isn't trusting the whole I'll let you live bit (god knows I wouldn't) and they have who knows how much time. Especially given Croatoan keeps stealing it. He's gonna go stop that now. Vince would like that not to happen because he doesn't want to lose his brother, which is understandable if not exactly fair of him, leading to Dwight stepping in all AHEM DAVE'S WISHES MATTER HERE HE HASN'T GOTTEN A FAIR SAY IN A LONG TIME. (With a very military tone there. Dwight, leader of men.) Yes Dave would like a moment to hammer on his brother's thick fucking skull with a cluebat, thanks. Without Dwight present. And hell, Dave's first words are "I'm doing this," so mad points and brass balls there. Vince thinks this is a terrible plan and he should know because the terrible mind palace plan is what got them into this situation in the first place. I can't argue that it's not a terrible plan, mainly because no one in the room was very skilled at guided meditation or mental fighting or all the things that come with both of those, but trusting to Croatoan to come out of Dave without harming him is even more terrible. This is a creature who may not have predicted that taking Troubles from people killed them and, when it did, referred to tens and maybe hundreds of deaths as a side effect. What makes you think Croatoan coming out of Dave won't result in a similar side effect, hm? Particularly since, if what Dave says </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">is</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> true about Croatoan being the one causing Dwight and Vince to almost murder him, it looks like it might be easier for Croatoan to escape if Dave's dead. So, again in a parallel to Hayley's death, why not go out in a meaningful way that does some good? Like by ruining Croatoan's time-skip ability. We can add Donat and Dunsworth to the list of names of people who are being patently unfair to our feels, because for all we don't think much of this plot, they are </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">really</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> selling the pain of deliberately and imminently losing the brother you've spent your entire very long life with. Seriously, at this point I don't think Vince is going to make it out of this alive either. At any rate. Vince agrees, ordering Dave to come back as his big brother which gives us all the WTF because although that </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">is</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> how they behave most of the time, that's not what was said back in the Chameleon ep (1x09). Meh, never mind. Dave's going under with the flashy thingie now.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Back under, Dave has quite a bit of bravado now! It's amazing what you can do when you've accepted your own imminent mortality and have decided to fuck shit up on your way out. Basically he's calling Croatoan a very rude monster, finding a golf club from somewhere (did he bring that with him? is he finally learning how to manipulate the dreamscape? is it present in the Herald office as a general rule anyway? I'd believe any of these!) and smashing the shit out of those clocks, all the while shouting about the rudeness of Croatoan for taking his body without asking! Monsters these days! Oh </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Dave</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Croatoan has some bravado too, saying destroying the clocks won't hurt him. And offering him a last chance to leave, to warn people, doesn't he want to wake up now? It might have worked if he hadn't gone for the oversell. Dave does grab a notepad and write on it, to what effect we'll have to find out shortly, but when Croatoan starts losing it Dave knows he's on the right track. Dave smash! Smash puny clocks! Sadly, Croatoan was not kidding about the tearing his mind apart. As it fades to white (which in and of itself is a common telegraph for death) we get one last glimpse of poor Vince begging his brother to wake up, knowing it's in vain but he can't exactly help it. And Dwight's there, at least, for all the comfort that hand on his shoulder gives. Aw boys. If you really want to be terrified, now contemplate how in many ways Vince, Dave, and Dwight has mirrored Nathan, Duke, and Audrey as the working saviors of Haven. And now, then, guess which one of them's going to die next! Unless we're replacing the old guard with the new, or not mirroring anything at all. Just figured I'd put that out there though. </span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyiXW1lUVbtBUU4nrXTKj3UXcgEarCKKsP7KS818HuBIKkJKiNUHb5wHBwNOpcEeT-Rk2lK0WEjup0GwjdLvezfrEo11-cHOvNEBfWIbZkRwXTsLqMULh-1wOUGvhNaD1VgHsIHo-JJLg/s1600/haven522cc05.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyiXW1lUVbtBUU4nrXTKj3UXcgEarCKKsP7KS818HuBIKkJKiNUHb5wHBwNOpcEeT-Rk2lK0WEjup0GwjdLvezfrEo11-cHOvNEBfWIbZkRwXTsLqMULh-1wOUGvhNaD1VgHsIHo-JJLg/s320/haven522cc05.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Hey, speaking of the other trio, here they come now! I'm not fond of the blocking that puts Duke so far away from the other two, but it makes sense given the characters and where they're at right now. I just want my threesome, basically. Or, more realistically, someone give Duke a damn hug already. Audrey will go for the next best thing since she's still understandably clinging to Nathan (the more so if he told her what went on in that cave, augh) and reminding him that he shouldn't blame himself for Hayley, he did what he had to do. Yes, it was always going to happen, that's the problem. And Duke's coming down on the side of yes I'm fine now, but we know there's going to be a price later, and I'd really like to know what the fuck it is. But, Nathan reminds everyone, it wasn't for nothing. They've got the controller crystal! Which... none of them know how to use. We were afraid of that, though given that we never heard any of what Charlotte told them we didn't know for sure. Grrr. Still. (</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A: </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">If this turns into using one of the other rings to go get William for help, or William coming back all OH MY GOD YOU'RE ALL IDIOTS here I fixed it it's better now, I will laugh SO HARD.) As much as I'm not sure about Audrey's optimism, it strikes an almost meta note of both coming back around full circle and reminding themselves and each other that they've done more with less, they've done incredible things not having a clue what they were doing, and the three of them are together again. So they'll figure it out. Also Nathan is being SO touchy with Duke that I wonder if he can feel Duke now, due to whatever Mara did to him? Or they're playing it up some for great OT3 justice. (Is Bryant going for the no one ships Nuke like Balfour ships Nuke title?) Insufficient data, but it IS quite cute. Awww. That </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">is </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">a hopeful note to end the... episode... on?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">No, we can't have that. So we're back to Dave's body, which may or may not be dead, and grieving Vince, and now Dave's not quite so dead body. Not actually </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">moving </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">his mouth either, I think that's even more frightening than Vince advancing on his dead brother to do something. He's not sure what, I know, and Dwight's pulling him back already, but I didn't need to see Vince beating up the corpse of his brother. That's a bit much. Croatoan confirms that Dave succeeded and then states that it doesn't matter, he's done hiding, it's time. To be ominous, apparently. Also to manifest as a fog monster out of Dave's mouth, because most likely symbolic reasons having to do with breath and life and so on, and blast his way out of the cabin house. Well! That's unsettling in the extreme. Dwight is the one who spots the scarring on Dave's arm, which turns out to read 'He's coming for Audrey' Best Dave is best, assuming that Croatoan wasn't totally manipulating the poor fucker away from his real goal. There you go, though, it's all he had time for. And there goes the fog monster Croatoan! Will we finally see Croatshatner? Not in the promos, annoyingly.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Next week on Haven! Everyone's down at the station, including a bunch of people we've never seen before except maybe in crowd scene. Vince looks wrecked. Nobody likes Duke. Something's seriously wrong at the station or outside of it, maybe they're all hiding from Croatoan? There's something about the cameras not working from Nathan, which of course means we get a lot of shots from said cameras that implies they only look like they're not working. And a corpse in the storeroom. More use of Troubles for hopefully good or at least not evil, Audrey getting separated, it looks very much like another haunted house ep in some ways. HMM. </span></div>
Kitty Chandlerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05524808952260453841noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4271373189216022547.post-26426366387032847562015-11-27T20:11:00.000-08:002015-11-27T20:11:58.305-08:00Make It A Double Haven S2E08 Friend or Faux<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Previouslies! Duke and Evi. Duke and his dad and the deathbed promise he made! Evi and working for the Rev. For as little as she's in this ep, there's actually nothing else </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">in </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">the previouslies except catching us up on that. And then instead of opening on the Gull like we might expect, we open on a panover of residential Haven, cutting down to Random House after a bit. No, we're not suddenly getting to see where Nathan lives. Or the Teagues. Instead, we have Some Guy We've Never Met. He must be either Troubled or about to die of a Trouble, then! Or both. Both is… good? That is a lot of house for one man, too, I must say.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It's even a lot of house for two men, which it turns out to be after we get a focus on our unsub that marks him as careful, precise, neat, even fussy. Sleeps in a full set of pajamas, needs everything on his dresser to be just-so, wears pocket squares. Wealthy </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">and </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">fussy. Now we have two! Two unsubs. I wonder who the hell they used for a double in these scenes, since this was before Orphan Black's transparency in filming made it more common for people to credit their doubles, stunt or otherwise. (Also before we were paying such close attention to the technicalities of filming, so it's possible we just missed it.) (Oh hey, the IMDb page says Jim Swansburg against Cristian de la Fuente. Well done both of them! For an ep that's relatively filler, they make it stand out.) The double, by contrast, is in boxers and nothing else, is cheerful and peppy and casual. Our first unsub looks resigned and horrified to see him and goes about getting ready for his day like he's a prisoner in his own home. When he comes out, Unsub #2 has made breakfast in the form of an enormous pile of pancakes and an even more enormous mess. I freely admit I'd be pissed if someone made that much of a mess of my kitchen, too.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">They're dressed identically, too, except #2 is more rakish than #1; most would probably say slovenly. Top shirt button undone, tie loosened, cuffs unbuttoned and pushed partway up, pocket square rumpled into a puff of fabric, hair tousled. It's actually a look that takes significant effort and flair to carry as if you're doing it on purpose rather than rolling out of bed and not giving any shits, and he's more on the latter side than the former, but he sort of wobbles back and forth. Right now the differences are, I think, as pronounced as they get this ep. #1, of course, is completely proper, hair combed down, so on and so forth. For all that #2 appears to be an uninvited and unwanted guest in #1's home, he did at least offer to share the pancakes before claiming that he hadn't made enough (that is a 6" stack, dude, be a worse liar why don't you) and it's not entirely clear if this is a common keepaway occurrence or if he's at least </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">trying</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> to be polite, just in a way that's anathema to his counterpart. None of which matters, because #1 stalks off while #2 makes a giant fucking mess of the plate while he drowns his pancakes in syrup and starts eating, and comes back with a briefcase and a gun. Bang-bang, my double shot me down. Three shots, by the way, is somewhat overkill. Two is standard execution-style, three starts getting personal, particularly for someone as apparently in control of himself as Unsub #1 is. Or wants to think he is. And out to the car and what's this, after changing the station to classical from classic rock? (A false dichotomy if I ever saw one, she says, eyeing her playlists.) A sort of sickening crack of muscle and bone as another double forms, complete with a gun that looks to be a perfect match for #1's, held to his head. And this is far from the first time this has happened, which we could already have told by #1's near-immediate decision to just walk off, grab a gun, and shoot his double, but #2 confirms it by complaining that he really hates it when he does that. Much to nobody's surprise. #1 then gets ordered out of the car so that #2 can go off and kill somebody! With marked emphasis on </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. You are both so fucked up.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Now we'll visit the Gull! Where Duke appears to be doing inventory and some teenager's doing buswork without paying attention to the fact that the tray he's stacking wineglasses on is off-balance. Right on cue, things shatter, Duke proceeds to be the reassuring and decent boss he is and more concerned with making sure the poor kid's not bleeding from glass cuts than he is about the glasses themselves. It's true, it's a bar, that kind of loss is built into (or should be) his calculations for profit margin anyway. The kid tries to insist that he'll pay Duke back, and then I don't know if this is how they intended to play this? But Duke comes back with "I don't want your money" and for a second there it </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">really </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">looks like the kid expects to be told to get on his knees. Which says way more about his past than about Duke, as we know, and makes me wince a lot. At minimum he expects to get hit, and Duke drops the casual grinning loon act in favor of worried older-brother-figure asking if he's okay. No. No he is not. He thinks he's in really big trouble. In more ways than he knows! Ba-dum-tss. Ahem. It should be the call-the-cops trouble, by that preface, but we know Duke has no intention of calling them in, which just means they'll have to get involved some other way. Henry's been staying out at the Everwood, an abandoned old factory, I think it is. Factory-warehouse-industrial building. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">More information about who and what he saw will have to wait, because Unsub #2 has entered the building and Henry's dropped flat onto the floor. Oh kid. Duke, for his part, does a reasonably decent job of lying through his teeth while serving the guy a top-shelf single malt. For bonus points, we will have a silver dollar rolling around on the bar! I am trying not to wonder if there were 30 doubles. Duke if you're going to lie, control your dislike of this guy a little better, even though I think at least half of the immediate "ew" face is Duke and his class issues. They will now proceed to both lie their asses off to each other, Duke more so because he has more to lie about, although Unsub #2 is totally lying with his body language. Trying to. Not well enough to keep Duke from ducking under the bar for his chosen pistol (which, now that I think about it, I believe that stays consistent at </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">least </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">through s3 and possibly even after he loses six months and gets dumped into the aquarium?) and warning Henry that it's time to run soon. Unsub calls him on lying, Duke throws him out of the bar with all due threats, and now it's time for a shootout! There's several of those in this ep. In this instance, I will just note that watching Duke take a flying leap behind the bar is hilarious, and as ever, being left-handed even when you've previously indicated it gives you some degree of advantage in most forms of combat. Eventually Duke wings our unsub, after Henry's been able to flee, and now the unsub will also flee, and the credits roll with Duke staring out his busted windows in great annoyance. I would be too! I'm pretty sure at least one of the bullets should've gone through the wall and hit him, but apparently not.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We reopen onto the Gull in full daylight with substantially more cars out front - not, notably, marked or even unmarked squad cars. Despite the number of cops in the bar taking evidence. Evi's there too, cleaning off a scrape on his wrist which looks kind of ugly but at least it's his off-hand. I mean, small favors here. Evi and Audrey exchange "sigh, men" commentary, and Duke proceeds to lie his ass off to her. Here we get an immediate comparison, too, of Duke lying to someone he doesn't like and has no mileage in telling the truth to, versus Duke lying to someone he does like, might help, but he's keeping his promise to Henry not to involve the cops. After all, he doesn't have any idea at the moment that there's a Trouble involved, and even if there were he might go eh, I can handle it, Audrey doesn't have to. He did pull the plate number, and gives her the identifying info of the bullet wound and the coin. This Will Be Important Later. I wonder if the dreidel comment was improv or writers, because I can't imagine Maine has that large a Jewish community. Audrey calls him on withholding information from the investigation, Duke gives her shit, and Nathan comes up just in time for Audrey to complain to him about Duke being a shit. Must be Tuesday. Nathan brings the name of our unsub, or at least the name attached to the plates, is Cornell Stamoran, vice-president of a bank, which fits all the assorted details of set and costume we've seen. So! Away they'll go to his house, with a last admonition to Duke to show up at the station, and from a very particular point of view he's not lying as </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">much</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: he doesn't know what Henry saw or why Stamoran wants the kid dead, but he does have a better location than the guy's house. Dammit, Duke.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br class="kix-line-break" /></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br class="kix-line-break" /></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Nathan proceeds to apologize for being late and talk in a stage whisper about how annoying the paperwork is. Not just because of being the chief now, but because they keep two sets of files, one complete with the Troubles and one edited down for public consumption. Nathan. Both sets are in your office, aren't they, Nathan, this is a bad idea. Bad security. Bad secrecy. No cookie. And stop fucking talking in front of people, especially when one of them is Evi who you KNOW has talents to match and probably complement Duke's. One of those talents is not, however, talking Duke down. Duke is gonna go shoot someone. Please at least wait for him to shoot at you first? Then you can claim self-defense? Even though you're taking your pistol, which you just reloaded ominously, and the shotgun.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Over in Nathan's blue truck of random conversations, we have him sounding not at all jealous, really, Nathan, try a little harder. Chris Brody sent over vegemite from England, which Nathan points out she doesn't </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">have </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">to try just because he sent it. Audrey explains no, she's trying it because her memories aren't her own and therefore she has to make sure that </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">she </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">doesn't like vegemite, as opposed to her memory-partner of Audrey II. This is fair, if convoluted logic! That is a hideous Sean Connery accent, Nathan, stoppit. Up to Stamoran's house with guns out, like you do when your last known information related to this house involves a shooting that's essentially a drive-by. Walk-by? Stalk-by. We'll go with stalk-by, it's accurate. Stamoran the original (because fuckit, let's stop pretending here) looks duly confused and concerned. And, of course, has neither weapons nor injuries when they stop and frisk him, nor is his car in the driveway. Audrey starts pushing about that very thing when the car in question shows up, starts to pull in, sees cops, and peels the fuck out of there, all without revealing the driver. Time for a car chase! While Stamoran stares from his porch with a look of "oh fuck what can I do to best get out of this."</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The chase scene takes us along a foggy coastal road and to the outskirts of town, where the Everwood is located. I'm honestly not sure WHY we spend a good thirty seconds on this chase scene when it's boring as fuck and the only thing we need to know is the aforementioned outskirts of town. We could've expanded on the Rev's machinations, or Evi and Duke's relationship, or anything else? But no. Anyway. We get a good glimpse of a makeshift bandage-tourniquet-thing around our unsub's right arm as he flees inside and leaves the car door open, just for confirmation that this is our guy. Duke proceeds to start the gunfight again while getting shouted at, yeah, Nathan so saw that coming. And Audrey's the one who manages center-mass, in a nice bit of foreshadowing! So: Cornell Stamoran's dead, right? And Duke's much better. Cue further confusion about twin? clone? what the hell? while Duke checks for a Guard tattoo. Which isn't there, of course, because the Guard is so </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">incredibly </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">blue-collar coded that Stamoran would never associate with them. Plus I doubt he knows about them. They don't get any further into explanations for why the fuck Duke's there other than "so you were lying to us and this is related" before another double forms with that truly creepyass noise and, due to where he was positioned, ends up having to run past them and duck inside. I admit I'm rather curious what the rules about this are, and how they're controlled (or not) by original!Stamoran's presence. First one forms within probably 50 feet of the body and within three feet of the original. Second one is I think closer to within 20 feet of the body. Third one we don't know, but it's got to be somewhere in the Everwood and both body and original are in it at the time. So that's a somewhat weird set of rules. Maybe just, not in line of sight from his body and all else is random? Anyway, Duke peels off after the latest double shouting about how Henry's in there, and Audrey and Nathan follow with all due grumbling.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">After the commercial break, we're informed that the Everwood was actually intended to be a resort before the developers ran out of money. This is one of those very obvious breadcrumbs that never got picked back up, alas, at least as far as I remember. Maybe this coming season! She says, optimistically. But yes, it's a maze, and it's huge, making it a great place to camp out in or hide bodies in or, indeed, just about anything you could want to do. They all confirm that yes, they saw another guy form and Nathan offers the rather unlikely possibility that it's the other Stamoran that they talked to at the house. Um. Nathan? There wasn't another car pulling up, and this would be a strange time for any TV or movie writer to remember that gunshots affect your hearing if you're not wearing earmuffs. So it's a Trouble then. Duke admits, in typical reluctant and flippant fashion, that yeah, this is what he was lying about back at the Gull, and goes on to explain the overall situation with all due defensiveness. Maybe they should in fact get backup? No, sez Nathan, it's not just that he doesn't want a bunch of witnesses to the Troubles (particularly less-trained witnesses), it's that he doesn't want to give the Rev more ammunition. Sigh, Nathan. I mean I see his point, but this is going to go so poorly. On the upside, all three of them are already used to working together with firearms at the ready, so they proceed up the stairs watching each others' backs until they reach the top and Henry's current crash space. Which is a bit of a mess, kind of like maybe he's been rifling through it, or Stamoran has. Or left in a hurry. Or just a teenage boy living there! Who knows for certain. What we do know is his body's not there, so that's a plus, and Duke looks it over with commentary about how it's not that bad, he's been in worse, and Henry's older than Duke was when he ended up on his own. That barely merits the jar of surprised face. Duke, honey, your rough smuggler front isn't fooling anyone about your softheartedness. And in the spirit of finding the kid before the bad guy, he will now be the one to spot the hiding place and rather than approach it to pry Henry out, he just stands back and tells him it's okay. These are his friends. They're safe. Awwww Duke. I love the little touches of Henry checking the hall to be sure it's clear before he comes across, and Duke's hand on his shoulder for a second's reassurance and then letting go, and neither Nathan nor Audrey approaching closer than they already are so as not to crowd him. Henry explains that he saw the guy from the bar arguing with someone and then he killed the other guy, and since he </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">doesn't </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">say that it was a twin, we can take a guess that it was someone else. Nobody's given time to consider that and reach the obvious conclusions, though, because the newest double will now show up and start shooting! Where the fuck did he get a second gun full of bullets from. I mean, later we find out that he's got an armory, and I accept that he formed with a loaded gun and took the second off his corpse, but in the moment all I can think is that this is somewhat egregious even by normal TV standards of bullets never running out. So I'm REALLY glad they actually dropped the line reference during the standoff.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhu496oNuRIjYMR3F9rEI6zHT7p2coR9g8Vvmbp3VVxQEGhgRtVq6QDoPIeKLML-UXg-ZNT723j7k26WDsByMB0Ezbk1BGk_nNP91J1WB2qSKViXiCXCoKxfh6VZjNnbeldDHdZmCcRtPc/s1600/haven208cc03.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhu496oNuRIjYMR3F9rEI6zHT7p2coR9g8Vvmbp3VVxQEGhgRtVq6QDoPIeKLML-UXg-ZNT723j7k26WDsByMB0Ezbk1BGk_nNP91J1WB2qSKViXiCXCoKxfh6VZjNnbeldDHdZmCcRtPc/s320/haven208cc03.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">NEVER SPLIT THE PARTY. Except when the party is being forcibly split by bullets. Then I suppose it's advisable, as you wish not to be shot. Nathan and Audrey go right, as instructed by Henry, and Duke and Henry end up going left, but hey, at least he's got a guide! He is also 100% correct in that his cop friends can take care of themselves. Splitting the party results in the double showing up and lying his ass off, though I will grant that he's done a good job of cleaning himself up and appearing to be the original Stamoran. Guys. Fucking check for fucking gunpowder residue. But still, he's not shooting at them and he's claiming to be the original and promising to explain. With diagrams! Or, y'know, piles of bodies. Whatever works. This pile of bodies numbers three to match the number of doubles we get this episode, so you should definitely drink. And make it a double. Kudos to props for not only changing up the tie colors so it's clear this was different days, but also for giving the bodies that bloated look that semi-fresh bodies SHOULD have. Nicely done on the horror there. I still severely question the writers making Audrey and Nathan dumb enough to think that this is the real Stamoran, but they </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">have </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">been getting shot at rather a lot today, even by Haven standards, and that's enough to throw even trained LEOs off for awhile.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We get a nice pan of the exterior of the Everlook when we come back, which finally makes it clear that this was definitely a resort. And definitely not a nod to the Overlook. At all. Really. At least Stamoran's not as creepy as the twin girls. He proceeds to explain that all his copies are focused on killing this kid named Henry who he </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">certainly </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">doesn't know, and that he tried tying one up but he escaped, so all he could do was kill the copies. Obviously. There are so many fucking holes in this story that I could drive a truck through them. Oh, and he killed the first copy at the Everlook. Be dubious, Audrey! I would be! Especially after all the lying that's been going around. (Hmmmm it's almost like keeping secrets makes things WORSE. Drink for thematic elements!) Despite the dubiousness, they do have to assume that there could be another double wandering around, they don't know for certain how the Trouble works and he could be either lying or confused. Or telling the absolute truth! Without confirming that Duke and Henry are still alive, though, there's reason for concern. Personally I would've just handcuffed Stamoran, original or otherwise, to the nearest sturdy location and continued NOT splitting the party, but okay, whatever. We do have to get Audrey alone with the double somehow, even if this is a somewhat clumsy way, it's no dumber than people are regularly on TV.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Meanwhile Duke and Henry are slowly clearing a hallway. Well, Duke is and Henry's being pretty smart for a civilian and sticking close behind him. Complete with edged banter of the very fucking nervous could we PLEASE stop being shot at kind. I cannot blame either of them. Duke provides the opening for some poorly timed, under stress revelations. Questions. Both! He'd like to know if anyone else is looking for Henry, which gets him quipped at about "not with a shotgun," and Henry does that wary asking thing kids do about why Duke never bugged him about running away. I mean, he frames it as why did Duke never ask him why he left, but I'm pretty sure what he means is that Duke took every aspect of that and didn't ask questions and has acted as though this is perfectly normal. Except for having someone out to kill you. Yeah, Henry, I'd be giving you the "fucking really you're bringing all of this up now" look too. The more so as he goes on to explain that his mom left and he and his dad drifted apart, and Duke tries very hard to brush this off and pretend not to give a damn except that fathers are hard. This is giving me momentary "wow Duke would've been a good father under any other circumstances" thoughts, since in the next moment he gives the very very sanitized version of how losing his father was the best thing that ever happened to him. Which apparently gives Henry second thoughts about something or another as they approach one of the doors to this creepyass place, and rather than getting out he will now proceed to run back INTO the building. Excuse Duke while he throws up his hands and runs after him because WHAT THE FUCK, KID.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Nathan's coming up the stairs and into cell service and rather than calling Duke who should he run into but the REAL original Stamoran. Yaaaay. Except no. Once he points out that he doesn't know Nathan's partner's name, and that his house is ten miles away. Now, I don't know how long they were running around the abandoned complex before they ran into the double pretending to be the original, but even assuming he has two cars in a show of conspicuous consumption, he still has to decide he's going after them, get car keys, get in car, and that didn't look like a 60 mph chase scene to me. If he doesn't have two cars, he has to figure out another way to get there, up to and including begging a ride or taking a taxi. I would say walking but he has clearly NOT done that for ten miles in those shoes and that suit. At any rate: he's here now! And couldn't have gotten here sooner. Therefore the man you left Audrey with, Nathan, is the one who's supposedly "every bad part" of Stamoran. Ooh ooh who buys that dichotomy as being complete and accurate, to say nothing of completely accurate? Yeah, nobody raise their hand all at once now.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Back in the basement, we get a brief ominous shot of the double watching Audrey fidget with her gun a nice safe 10-15 feet away before going to commercial. And it's back to the basement of unsuspecting shared background where she's declaring they'll go after Nathan soon, cuing other!Stamoran to take the coin out of his pocket and start fidgeting some, himself. Whoooops. You know, Audrey, for as good as you are at keeping secrets in some respects, you're a fucking </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">awful </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">liar. I'm pretty sure this scene is supposed to be shot as everyone being knowledgeable by the time she declares she's going to go check on Nathan, except I have serious objections to, what, Audrey deciding to prove that her suspicions are right by GETTING CAPTURED. No, Audrey. Audrey, no. Bad. Range of efficacy dammit. For no apparent reason, we cut back to Nathan and original!Stamoran for a bit, getting lost in the basement: sure, I can buy that they feel we need to know they're lost and all the Stamorans are uncooperative fucks, but that seems awfully perfunctory. At best. Anyway. Now with other!Stamoran holding the gun on Audrey while he professes to have all the balls out of the two of them. Audrey will now use all her complicated feelings about not having personhood of her own! It's Super Effective! She's very good at it, too, complete with throwing his own words back in his face from when he was pretending to be the original. Which finally leads to an anecdote about a sixth-grade best friend (who may or may not have existed) and other!Stamoran opening up about where the silver dollar came from: he stole it from HIS best friend. Audrey would like to point out that no, actually, Cornell stole it. The best part about this for </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">us </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">at least is that she's absolutely using the truth against him. The second best part is that she happens to have FBI training in her reflexes. Both parts mean she's just jumped in his estimation a whole helluva lot, along with his respect, but this won't stop him from killing her. He'll just feel bad about it. Awww. I think. With other!Stamoran handcuffed to a pipe (not as carefully as he should've been, as we'll shortly see), it's time for her to go look for Nathan with gun in hand! An excellent plan.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">For reasons passing understanding, we cut over to the station house now and spend some time going "who the fuck are you." Who the fuck this guy is turns out to be someone well-known and respected by the officer on desk duty at the time, and I'm not even going to bother rewinding for his name because he's purely a MacGuffin to serve as one of the Rev's tools. He "stops in to leave Nathan a note," by which we mean take quite a bit of time to rifle through his desk and cabinets in search of the un-doctored files about the Troubles. Nathan. You don't even keep the fucking thing locked? DAMMIT WUORNOS HAVE BETTER SECURITY. I cannot even with you sometimes. I wonder, thinking about it, if this actor was supposed to actually be recurring and then got hired off somewhere else, because everything about this looks like an introduction to another bad guy that ended up fizzling badly.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We will now return to Duke swearing in his head and grumping out loud over Henry pelting back for… a medal! An Iraq war medal from his father that was supposed to watch over him on the road; given Henry's age this could be either the Gulf War or the Iraq War. Hell, given the age of the man we later see, his father could be (probably is) career military and served in both, or in one of the myriad Balkan conflicts in the mid-90s. The medal, though, looks like your standard Purple Heart, albeit on my monitor/in the lighting it looks blue, which was kind of unnerving for a second until I remembered my monitor is terrible for colors. Apparently Henry's father gave this to him because it would watch over him on the road, and couldn't stop him so much didn't. Oh everyone. Duke might have more words to say about this except Audrey comes pelting up. Audrey you KNOW everyone's on edge for good reason maybe you should announce yourself? Since to the best of your knowledge the bad guy is handcuffed downstairs? No? No. Fortunately she doesn't get shot, and after some brief discussion with Duke calls Nathan to inform him that she's safe, the copy is handcuffed to a pipe, and they agree on a meeting point of the atrium. Yay! Everyone is thrilled! Especially original!Stamoran, who wants to get the fuck out of here pls and thx. A wise decision, as it turns out, because you know what other!Stamoran can do downstairs? Why yes. He's going to escape. In the least pleasant way possible. Sting might be an understatement, but I suppose if I knew what dying felt like and really wanted out, I'd do something like that too. Seriously that re-forming noise is creepy as FUCK. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Other things that are, if not directly creepy, definitely disturbing: the smell of a dead body! I'm actually pretty impressed by the physical acting, not just between the difference when de la Fuente is playing each version of himself, but as original!Stamoran approaches the very first crime scene (well, with physical evidence), and turns into the world's WORST LIAR. My god. Complete with trying to hustle Nathan along despite claiming not to know the place before, and that "no" in response to "do you smell that" sounds way more like a question than a statement. Stamoran, honey, your cleanup really sucks. And your attempts to derail Nathan really suck too, as witnessed by the fact that he is physically moving you OUT OF HIS WAY to get to the body. Also that whole wall screams fresh addition. I mean, for someone who's never done this before and doesn't read all the wrong books and watch all the wrong shows, it's not </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">terrible</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, but the second, as we see, a cop gets hold of the scene, it all goes to pieces. Specifically, pieces of concrete blocks. Dude you didn't even hack the body apart. Or put it somewhere other than propped upright. And you have a fair bit of construction equipment lying around there. Nathan, sweetie, if you're going to make suspicious faces at the guy you're alone with could you please for fuck's sake NOT TURN YOUR BACK ON HIM. Even to make a phone call. Bad cop. Now it's time for the expo-dump via other!Stamoran coming up with a shotgun and a shoulder harness that screams "hi I have an armory here." That's just… great. Awesome. They will also have this argument in plain sight at more or less the tops of their voices. Blah blah you have no cajones, blah blah I'm a terrible liar. Seriously if you were a decent liar this wouldn't be such a problem. I do kind of wonder what Stamoran was like prior to his Trouble activating, because as much as he seems to be timid and hesitant in comparison to his double </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">now</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, he surely had to make some pretty firm decisions even in his job. Other!Stamoran goes on a rant about accepting who he is and listing off all the bad things, which are, in fact, pretty bad! Thief and murderer, certainly. The gist of the matter is that Stamoran embezzled, got caught, killed the guy who caught him, and then refused to kill the witness, so his other self, shadow self, whatever, was created instead. What FUN. In the interests of "fixing" the coward part, other!Stamoran works on convincing his original to kill Nathan and make a proper team. Never mind that original!Stamoran, as far as I can tell, is the one who's committed almost ALL of the murders here. I don't think suiciding to get out of imprisonment via supernatural means quite counts. Attempted murder for the copy, sure!</span><br />
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">At any rate, it doesn't take much talking, I will note that the supposedly-evil copy is on the sinister/left side of the screen throughout this scene, whereas the supposedly-less-evil original is on the right. Who buys this separation? Yeah. Not us, either. Stamoran goes to kill Nathan with a brick, why, when he could grab a gun, I do not fucking know. But he does, and then the phone rings! Proving once again that timid or not, he has the brains of a criminal, Stamoran keeps both himself and his copy from picking it up because yes, it is in fact a trap. Well-spotted. Which of you made the noise. Henry, was that you giving away their position? Regardless, we will now have another gunfight with Audrey and Duke trying to shoot the Stamorans but not Nathan. Other!Stamoran's assertion of the fun they'll have sounds… awfully halfhearted, I'm just saying. But neither of them wants jail time, and I imagine other!Stamoran would like to stop having to die because that's pretty traumatic no matter the reason. So! A shootout it shall be, until such time as they run out of everything but shotgun shells. Assuming that's not the click of the empty on Duke's shotgun, too. Henry, notably, stays crouched next to Duke with his hands over his ears, and I would just BET that's under explicit instructions from one or both of them. Aww, kid. The standoff negotiation ensues where Audrey attempts to claim that backup's on their way, and Duke points out that nobody, including him, EVER believes that line. It's true. Even if backup's true, nobody believes that you're going to just give up and let these fuckers go, Audrey. Duke tries to come up with ideas that aren't "rush them and go out in a blaze of glory" or "convince the evil assholes who just started working together," which gives Audrey ideas! Ideas which Duke is not fond of, as they include putting her gun down and coming out to talk. Not to the original. To the copy. Duke's issues with this: LET HIM SHOW YOU THEM. It's a good thing he's got Henry to distract him from tackling her to the ground. And yes, her body language and the camera angle indicate from the get-go that she's going to talk to other!Stamoran, not the original. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Who is, not surprisingly, interested to hear what she has to say. Considering she can't kill him at all, let alone with the bullets she doesn't have, it's only dangerous inasmuch as it's always dangerous when people underestimate Audrey's ability to talk them into doing things that aren't necessarily in their own self-interest. So, very dangerous. But the copy is more impulsive, which means he overrides the cautious "shoot her and let's go" attitude of his originator. I like how she doesn't bother explaining to original!Stamoran what it is that they have in common; personally I wouldn't either, on the grounds of if he can't figure it out he's really fucking stupid. Which, well, considering his kneejerk attitude of "my crimes are his crimes," he kinda is. Certainly he's not used to seeing things from the particular skew of Haven. Also, I should note that after this entire ep, Charlotte's bullshit punishment as revealed in s5 makes me </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">even angrier</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> with her, and I wasn't sure that was possible. Audrey I can understand feeling responsible: it's her choice, and her identity is wobbly to start with, and by the time we get there from here she's been through so much more shit that I'd be shocked if she hadn't gotten more fucked up about what's hers and what's Mara's. Especially since she </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">has </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">had to spend lifetimes cleaning up after Mara and that is, as far as she can tell, the sum total of her parts. Poor AudSarLu. But here and now, she talks other!Stamoran around with the original's gun pointed at her, reminding him that if she and Duke and Henry die now, all that happens is they die and it's more of the same shit different day with Stamoran and his copies. Because he does think they're his, they belong to him, and he can use and discard them as he pleases. Other!Stamoran points out obliquely but definitively, as he raises his gun (probably far more in the interests of making the original lower his than any certainty that he's going to shoot her), that if he shoots the original he's almost certainly killing both of them. Yeah, but at least he'll have saved other people's lives, and while they're not saying it outright the subtext of "and you won't have to get killed the next time you're more trouble than you're worth to him." Pun intended. I think, too, that they're lighting this to actually make the copy more conventionally attractive in a bad-boy sort of way. Lighting and/or makeup, given how much we associate aesthetically pleasing with goodness. The original decides that clearly he's being tested again, which is, okay, not an unfair assumption after everything he's been snarled at for lately, but it does mean Audrey ends up with two guns pointed at her, which is not exactly her favorite place to be. And not that we need the conventional shoulders-up view when the gunshot rings out to know that it's the copy shooting the original, but it's what we get anyway. Complete with very confused look from the original as he collapses, and something resembling relief on the copy's face when he digs out the silver dollar, tosses it at Audrey with instructions not to tell his former best friend he gave it to her, and fades. In, I might note, a series of colors that looks sort of like the thinny colors. It also occurs to me that Audrey did </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">not </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">get this kind of choice when she and Mara split bodies, which irritates me to no fucking end. I'm reasonably certain if she hadn't been operating on sheer willpower just to stay alive she would've taken the same choice! And I wish we'd ever gotten a direct callback to this for comparison's sake, because it's the sort of thing that should've weighed on her, not least because she did just talk a man into committing a homicide-suicide.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We will not, apparently, get much discussion of the ramifications of this. Instead we get some drama with the selectman who's the Rev's henchman. Yaaaay. Nathan's been called into his office, it's your standard-ish Man Of Power office, if dimmed slightly for small-town Maine. Basic small talk about if Nathan's doing okay, asking if everything that happened up at the Everwood made it into official reports. I mean, Nathan was kinda unconscious or at least pretending to be (god I hope most of Audrey talking Stamoran down was pretending) but sure, we'll assume Audrey filed her report. I'm going to assume that they went with the suicide-by-cop story for what really happened. Hopefully all the other bodies of the copy vanished into the aether when they both died, and if not, well, there's lots of land and sea to get rid of bodies into. Anyway! Mr. Rev's Selectman accuses Nathan of falsifying police reports and oh look he's got the proof. Nathan seriously, your security on those is AWFUL. Hiding in plain sight only works when it's not semi-common knowledge that there's something TO hide, and it sounds like at least this selectman and maybe most of the town council or whatever they call themselves knows about the Troubles. Nathan insists he's doing what they've always done, aw, Nathan, you sound like Garland. Sorry, but they're firing you, Nathan, someone wants you out and yes, it's the Rev. It's not like anyone's made a secret out of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">that </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">either. And I would lean toward the Rev has at least a majority of the selectmen in his pocket, maybe all of them, or maybe just the ones who can lean on the others. Regardless, this one insists he was a friend of Garland's and that as such he wants Nathan to leave town so he can be safe. Uh… huh. So you care enough to give a warning but not enough to stand up to whatever blackmail the Rev's got on you. I see how it is. So does Nathan, who storms out.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Closure with Duke and Henry's little sub-plot comes in the form of quiet talk about whether or not Henry really likes being on the road by himself. Well… no, is the most honest to that, but he thinks it's necessary for whatever reason. Kid. You're a teenager. You're not known for good decisions, just to start with, and this is why other people are supposed to be taking care of you. And indeed, this is what Duke's decided, because he called Henry's dad. I rather expected him to show up in a wheelchair, after the discussion of how he couldn't stop him, but now I wonder if his disability is something more along the lines of, occasional wheelchair use and easily fatigued. Or something like that. We don't see enough to know for sure, and Duke very clearly wishes that his dad had been a good guy, and that he'd been able to have an adult who could take care of him. Aww honey.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6666666666667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Over inside the Gull, Nathan is getting steadily drunk on shots, just so we know how upset he is over being fired from being the chief. To the point where even Duke comments that it's a shame, he was starting to like that job. Duke you know you're not fooling anyone with your supposed dislike of these two cops anymore, right? Just checking. Nathan will now go dance with the random pretty brunette inviting him onto the floor, which Audrey tries to forestall either because she knows he hates dancing, can't dance, or both. It's definitely the second one, as we watch Lucas Bryant engage in some of the most hilarious fucking physical comedy he's gotten to do yet. Meanwhile the other two joke briefly about how Nathan totally has a copy and this one still can't dance. Which is Duke's none-too-subtle lead-in to asking if Audrey meant what she said or was playing Stamoran, with the loud subtext of "and are you really okay with it." Duke: still the most emotionally competent person on this show! She insists she's fine or at least working toward it, with that comment about needing to move past her memories to find out what she can be. I mean, she covers it by talking about Stamoran, but we all know that's who she really means. And now for the dun-dun-DUNN reveal, as Duke decides he needs photographic record of Nathan getting drunk and dancing. Badly. Audrey's phone is upstairs, so he snags Evi's which is on the bar (on? are you nuts, woman?) and snaps a quick photo. She wanders off with instructions to send that to her, and lo and behold, a text from Driscoll about thanks for the files info, he took care of the rest. The rest, in this case, we're meant to assume, is getting Nathan fired. Excuse Duke while he has no poker face, stares at Evi, and we fade to credits.</span>Anna Hammetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10095633218958433882noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4271373189216022547.post-83512690449661969562015-11-21T17:12:00.000-08:002015-11-21T17:12:58.939-08:00Cold Bitter Mist Haven S5E21 Close To Home<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Previously! Duke talked to Walter and we hid behind the couch. Also we get a flashback to the girl with the explodes everything she touches Trouble. Oh honey. Walter gave Duke visions of a seriously post-apocalyptic Haven in which Croatoan won, let us not go there, 'tis a silly place. Nathan ran back in time, figured out the Coulton family has a Trouble that'll let them open thinnies if they have a magic ring, and left Duke a note with the creepyass kid from 1983. Who turned into a creepyass adult. Who points him to Hayley, not that creepyass adult knows it. Hi Hayley!</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">NATHAN'S HOUSE NATHAN'S HOUSE HI NATHAN'S HOUSE. AWWW it's a tiny yellow house how cute! The house number is 247. I'm going to throw something at someone now. He and Audrey are having a relatively quiet start to their morning, she appears to have mostly moved in with him though by what point I'm not sure. Also I suspect this means that his house is well away from Trouble Alley, or anywhere else that might be a serious problem. He's bringing her coffee! They're doing one of the things we do, actually, which is grumble at the insufficient data and chew on it some more until they realize that they really don't have enough. Interrupted by Audrey being adorable at Nathan and warning him about the hot coffee and him being cute back and oh god stoppit both of you. This might be the most stereotypically couple-y we've ever seen them, she gets to check him out half-naked in the morning, there's coffee, they're talking about their plans for the day, and it's promptly turned into a semi-argument about yes this is awesome! You should stay with me and not go into the void so it can keep being awesome, Nathan. Yeah that's not going to happen, Audrey. There's some really sweet bantering about how tired they are of saving the world, and the thing is, it's believable! They should be! But it's also how they work, and what they know, and there's a definite undercurrent of that running through the banter too. What the fuck </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">would </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">they do without crises on a near-constant basis? WHO KNOWS. Not them, that's for sure. Speaking of which, he has to go get the controller crystal in the void when Duke comes back and yes that's a when and not an if, Audrey, I know you're hurt and feeling betrayed, but one of the things he needs is a fucking vacation from the crazy.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; line-height: 1.38; white-space: pre-wrap;">We cut over to a kid playing catch with the shroud. BEST USE OF IRRITATING MAGIC FOG THINGY EVER. Naturally, the third throw (drink, lord knows we are already) is the one that gets to Duke crossing the shroud with Hayley, and the poor boy runs the fuck away. I would too! Whether that's because augh a Crocker or because augh a guy coming through the shroud that nobody else has been able to cross or both, who knows. Kinda depends on if people have Duke's description down thoroughly. And yes, much to our utter lack of surprise, Duke can only bring people through if he's touching them. I don't know if that means he can do a big long chain of people all holding hands, or if he has to be touching each one individually, but since it doesn't actually hurt anyone if they don't go running at it or, y'know, driving at it, it's a good experiment to try. I vote for Duke-Audrey-Nathan testing this theory. Ahem. Now that Hayley's through the shroud she remembers Haven! That's good to know, in the sense of confirming previous assumptions and suspicions about how the shroud works. She's also in a white overshirt, which normally gives me all the fits about if she's going to end up covered in blood, but the blouse under it is reddish? Burgundy? So probably not. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Back at Nathan's house, we have all of the EEEE over what are presumably long-taped partial stickies on his stove marking where the no hot you should feel pain don't touch points are on all the burners. They're even slightly different on all the dials, which is appropriate to a stove, particularly an aging one as this appears to be, and all have variations on do not fucking burn yourself on the hot thing, Nathan. Which, really, is fair! Burns are vicious bastards as far as infection and healing rates go, especially hands where he's most likely to burn himself, and even several years with his Trouble on, one hungover/exhausted morning's mistake could lead to an annoying level of first aid. It is 8:27 am! I'm sure the 27 was in no way chosen for the 27 years Mara spent in the barn between cycles. Ahem. Nathan is the kind of person who sits on his kitchen counter drinking coffee while Audrey picks up wine bottle and glasses from last night, awww. This really is the most relaxed we've ever seen him, down to joking with Audrey about trading it for something really good, like wine or orange juice. Nathan stop that and help your girlfriend pick up the place. Or, okay, also pick at the festering wound of yes Duke's coming back yes Nathan's going please stop flailing all over the place, Audrey. She will not. She will propose that they go in together. Actually that's not a terrible idea! Considering Charlotte's notes do say the void isn't kind to humans, though I wish she was more specific. Is this a Rip Van Winkle effect? Is it a toxic between-the-thinnies land? What exactly is its problem? Insufficient data, Charlotte, you were a scientist, science better dammit. Science should equal infinite and usually redundantly repetitive notes. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">All right, speaking of redundantly repetitive notes, let's have a look around Nathan's house. For one thing, despite the fact that he came from time traveling to the early 80s his house looks a bit like he never left it. Mostly in the color scheme with those particular shades of yellow and the rough finish of the wood, but also some in the materials. He is not in the least bit a homemaker, which is to say that while his house is clean it's not exactly neat. There's books stacked up under a coffee mug in the bedroom, books leaning on the shelves next to pictures that haven't yet been hung up? Or he just decided screw it propping this up here rather than dealing with hammering something into a wall. That headboard looks hand-carved, or at least painstakingly program-carved but I'm betting not, and either was an incredibly lucky thrift find or given by a friend who would no longer need it, or it cost a month's paycheck at somewhere like Ten Thousand Villages. He's got a lot of artwork, not really hung with care but I'd bet selected with care or at least acute emotional intuition. Both the bedroom and the living room have a certain uniformity of spirit and mood. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Out in the living room the stove isn't the only thing that looks antique (I say looks because although the cookware on it looks like 80s style, upon closer examination the stove is actually from the 2000s.) (</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">K: </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">... I think I </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">have</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> a more recent version of that stove. Glasstop, though, not coil.) There's a full on turntable in front of the window over as we see Audrey picking up by the couch. And going by the fact that there are a couple record cases propped up in front of the stand it's on, it sees at least semi-regular use. The coffee pot is either a tea-pot on a hot plate design that might be coming into fashion now? Maybe? Or an older version because I believe the Mr. Coffee/Coffee Mate drip version is more in fashion these days. It clearly sees use, whichever it is, because there are mugs all over the place. No wonder Audrey's picking up, and not just to establish </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">some</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> degree of control over her surroundings. I wonder how many people, come to think of that, are coping with what's happening in Haven by cleaning their house, organizing something they've long meant to organize, or in other ways exerting control over their surroundings because they can't control anything else. Apart from the fact that, mugs everywhere, that's how you get ants, Nathan, I bet at least part of Audrey's tidying frenzy is that. What else. Nathan has a lot of condiments in his kitchen, a lot of sauces, so either he enjoys cooking or at least throwing sauce at things and mixing and matching, or the food resources in Haven really have gotten that bad. I choose to believe the former. He does at least keep the kitchen or part of the kitchen clean enough to cook on because that counter is polished to a literal mirror shine. The one he's not sitting on, obviously. There's enough counter space for a cooking person! There's even a bowl of fruit and veg and now that I'm looking at it those bananas are I got them from the grocery store a couple days ago ripe. Not, this town has been cut off from all incoming shipments of bananas for three weeks unripe. Yes, these are the kinds of things that bother me. Plants in the window, towels on the oven handle, Nathan Wuornos is a guy who lives in and loves his kitchen, especially given that it's open right upon the living room. He's got flowers. He's got a lot of plants, actually. I almost suspect the riot of color and cooking, tastes and possibly smells and definitely sounds that come with the flowers, high-use kitchen, and record player is his way of compensating for his inability to feel things. Everything in the room is clearly personally chosen (by props, but the sentiment is there) because it makes him feel something, feel good? Feel happy. Something. Which, let's wrap this all up by pointing out that there's a picture of him and Garland looking close and friendly to the right of the stove, visible to the left of Nathan as he's attempting to reassure Audrey. Awww. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Nathan your argument over who would watch over Haven is bullshit. You know why it's bullshit? Because Dwight's taken on that responsibility openly and loudly. I appreciate the joke about being a faster runner, though! That one's cute. And true, between not having to stop because he can't feel pain and being taller and ridiculously long-legged. We interrupt this attempt to derail the argument into cute with a knock on the door Which has a thermometer on it, presumably so ... no, actually, I've got questions on that, if you want the interior temperature shouldn't you have a thermostat for that, and if you want the exterior temperature shouldn't it be outside within view of a window? and if you're trying to take the temperature of the door, which as far as I know you only do in case of fire... no, I've got nothing. But it's cute and quirky, and maybe his thermostat doesn't work. At the very least it serves as a reminder that Nathan should </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">check </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">the weather and grab a damn jacket if need be. Anyway: hello, Duke! I'm intrigued by the implication that Audrey doesn't stay over </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">that </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">often by her question about morning visitors. Maybe this is a new routine they're settling into? Regardless, it's Duke, and Nathan's gonna come hug him now. NOW KISS YOU BASTARDS. Particularly that hug and leaving hands on waists is way more loverly than friendly, but okay fine no kissing. Hmph. Audrey, meanwhile, looks like about as much of a petulant teenager as Hayley can be, arms crossed and going all defensive. Duke, your banter is not going to help here. Well this is going to be fucked. Roll credits!</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Vince and Dave are in some kind of holding facility by that "door locks automatically" bigass warning sign and, you know, the bars on the windows, playing some kind of card game, looks like a shedding game rather than a collect 'em all game, which is kind of hilarious considering Croatoan. Possibly out of the Crazy Eights family and if it's Mao I'm gonna shit an addition to Kitty's house because THE RULES ARE NOT SPOKEN OF IN-GROUP. And Dave's hands are zip-tied. Guys what exactly the fuck good do you think that's gonna do if Croatoan decides he doesn't want to be tied up? Also that does not strike me as being just Dave, he's way too calm for the situation even </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">with </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Vince deliberately contributing to his stability by being present and playing silly card games. Besides which, "all the 3s have been played" and "do you have a heart" do not strike me as just the writers being silly and referencing the 3 times 3 years between Troubles. Or whether or not Vince is willing to try saving his brother. Dave-a-toan, stop sounding so condescending it's creepy. That is NOT ALL DAVE, VINCE, STOP GIVING AWAY INFO. Even the one where you don't want the Guard to kill Dave. Seriously why has nobody started just assuming Dave is at best compromised and at worst constantly sharing his body? We know that Croatoan is more powerful than Mara was, and though he's (presumably god I hope) not the original owner of that body, I would not be at all surprised if that plus being used to a more incorporeal state in this dimension (so many caveats. SO MANY MUST WE MAKE.) meant that he was </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">more </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">able to lurk and listen using Dave's eyes and ears. As it were. So, no, Vince doesn't know if the Guard's going to kill him, he's going to keep hammering away at the whole you were possessed it wasn't really you. We'll keep hammering at the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">you don't know it doesn't have him now, Vince</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. I understand his concern and there's a lot of arguments against killing Dave out of hand above and beyond filial feelings, but honest to fucking god stop acting </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">only </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">on those feelings. And when Dave-a-toan asks about staging a prison break well that just sets off Ideas in Vince's brain and he's going to go investigate them. Don't mind us, we'll be over here smashing our faces into our keyboards. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Aww, the younger boys are sharing information! At least some information. The only way this could be better would be if they were sharing </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">all </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">the information and also making out. Shut up I'm pretty sure the writers ship it too at this point, at least some of them. And it hasn't been this blatant in aaaages. One of Nathan's sources of random stress is semi-alleviated! There are not tanks around the shroud trying to get in and having very large explosive devices bounce back at them. There were in Cleve's Mill in Under the Dome, but not here. So that's good! Less good is the way the shroud fucks with everyone's memory. I do not like this, Sam-I-Am. Hayley evidently wanted to go to her parents' old house, fair enough, it is still quite yellow. Somewhat messy on the inside, but not with what I'd call trashed with malice. Covered in plastic and maybe slightly ransacked for things people could use, which follows from what the Guard might've done with otherwise abandoned homes. I still want to know exactly what that situation looks like, logistically: it </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">seems </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">as though after the darkness Trouble got solved they relocated anyone who lived in Trouble Alley and everyone else got to go back home? But it's not totally clear and I have a feeling that might come back to bite us at some point in the near future. Anyway. Nathan's glad he's back, aww, Audrey is walking outside with Hayley and talking, hopefully about her Trouble and what's up with what she can do and… isn't so much glad. Yeah, time is one thing they feel like they're in chronically short supply of. Duke wants to know what's up because persuading Hayley to come back with him wasn't easy. Alas, this is a scene that will have to go into the fanfiction annals, unless the writers' room has anything to say about it. And the problem with running on perpetual crisis mode, as Nathan will demonstrate, is that you give people the most information possible in the least amount of time, which is not at all like giving them all of the information </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">before you cause another crisis</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. You don't have the time to stop and breathe and make sure you didn't leave anything out, and under stress the brain does not perform at its best so whatever you leave out, however much you try otherwise, will probably be important. Unfortunately, breaking out of that habit </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">or</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> its bad side effects is probably something Nathan literally has no idea how to do or that such a concept even exists, the poor fucker. Also Duke is making assumptions in his explanation of his fucked up vision bullshit that are incorrect: vision!Vince said </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">since </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Nathan went into the void and didn't return, not </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">because</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. It's a fine, fine distinction, but the causal relationship here is not necessarily accurate. I'm skimming over the content of what they're saying because frankly what they're </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">not </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">saying is more important: Duke isn't explaining the humiliation of not being in control of his new, improved form of Trouble-sponging via blood and hence why Hayley might not trust him so much, or shouldn't. Nor is he explaining the sequence of events that led up to the vision side-trip to North Carolina. Nor, for that matter, as far as we know, is he covering the entire process behind How The Crockers Got Their Trouble, the worst Just So Story ever, which at least gives context to the evolution of his abilities and at best gives them some idea of how to predict or at least deal with it. Nobody knows how Hayley's Trouble got activated, which is crucial to understand how to help her use it. And Nathan isn't explaining shit about the sequence of events, that Dave is now possessed, oh, a whole lot of shit in there. His trial. Dwight and Charlotte getting back together. There's a lot of important stuff! I do like that Duke calls it a Haven vision with such derision, and there, Croatoan's the keyword that tells Nathan Duke isn't making it up to keep him here, nor has he finally snapped. YES YOU HAVE OPTIONS. Duke could go into the void! Audrey could go! Hell, Dwight could go! Dammit Nathan with the tunnel vision. And the ominous reappearance of the girl with the exploding-hands Trouble glaring at Duke from her car outside the house. Yeah, that's not going to go poorly or anything.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Meanwhile at what's left of the Herald, it's dark inside despite being daytime and outside there's a spilled trash can and trash bags in the street. Have some symbols of chaos and declination of Normal Societal Standards. Extra points, we start by looking at Vince through a collection of glassware that looks ridiculously like the contents of an apothecary. Dwight wanders on in to stare at Vince's piles and </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">piles </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">of notes and announce that he wants to talk to him about Dave. Funny you should say that, Dwight! He also recognizes Vince bulling his way through something come hell </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">and </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">high water, so instead he circles around to whatcha doin, Vince? Updating the Troubles census! Which we're behind on too, come to think of it, over on our Troubles Index page. And we'll have to come up with a good way to delineate the original round from the ones Duke expelled. At any rate, Charlotte had a census started, it was a really complete one, and then she died and Vince took it over and he's fallen behind because, y'know, brother possessed by Croatoan. But it gave him a thought that one of the many many Troubles available to them must be somehow useful! Could cut the cord, etc etc, make Dave stop being possessed? Yes? Maybe? Plus he should update the census, really this looks like what happens when we go to update the blog's assorted non-recaplysis pages and we think of five other things at the same time and get distracted. Dwight, have a stack of file folders and sit your ass down and get to work digging. That is the resigned sigh of a man who's done more paperwork than he ever fucking wants to confront again, but fiiiiine he accepts the necessary evil here. Foreshadowing totally intended.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And once we're done giggling and facepalming fondly at the familiar activity of Updating/Searching Through The Files, Audrey is updating Hayley on what she knows about her powers. Which is to say, traveling through space by taking a shortcut through the void, by ripping a thinny open and jumping into it. But if and only if she has the magic ring. Audrey seems to be starting to explain something with "I know it sounds crazy" but Hayley interrupts to point out that Fucking Haven, which is to say that it's not any crazier than her completely forgetting the town in which she grew up or, you know, walking through walls. Nathan's the one to actively tell her about the thinny-ripping, for which we get a lampshade hanging on the peculiarity of the word thinny. (It actually sounds less out of place in the dialect of the Dark Tower, but this is allegedly the real world, or at least our world.) They need something on the other side, and help us Hayley Wan Kenobi, you're our only hope. Hayley's still in the first throes of no this is cool my power is awesome, so she's a lot more willing to try it than Audrey and Nathan seem to be, or seem to expect her to be, and Audrey cautions her to only try it a couple feet at first. Good advice, and I'm still waiting for her to lose molecular cohesion from all this phasing, but she tries it and goes a couple feet and pops out and all but does a victory dance at having done it. Nathan's quick to point out that yes that's good, but Barbara was able to keep it open for several minutes, which might be more like what they need. Hayley doesn't fixate on the failure, but on the mention of her mother. She doesn't talk about anything other than the phasing and ripping open a thinny, but the faces she makes and some of the light quaver in her voice indicates it's as much of an emotional hit as a revelation about her powers. She's going to try something, and does, and succeeds, something her mother told her but that didn't make sense until now. She explains that her mother, when she was going out on a job, told her she would always come home to her as long as she stayed connected. (Which, there we go, that's what causes the molecular discohesion, at a guess.) And as long as Hayley herself stays connected, she can hold the door open. Thinks she can do it. She's not sure how long she can keep it open, though, and it does start flickering after 30-45 seconds. So, no, there's no way she can keep it open for the length of time it'll take Nathan to go through and look for the damn controller crystal. But on the other hand Audrey has a good idea, open it at regular intervals and leave it open long enough for Nathan to see and go back through. And, you know, it's not a </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">great</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> idea? There are so many problems I can foresee here, starting with the fact that they're assuming physics, including time and distance, operate the same as in the real world and consistently, and moving on to the fact that Charlotte already warned that the Void wasn't kind to humans, to people, that you could get lost in it. Not to mention what if Croatoan's not the only monster? And going into the less dire problems like, how well does Nathan have an idea of what he's looking for? But it's the best idea she's coming up with under time pressure, which they're all feeling right now. He's got kind of a plan which is better than no plan, starting where the barn first imploded. And then there's not much more to be said. He kisses Audrey good-bye, saying he knows how she hates long good-byes which might well be a reference to the last time one of them went into a maybe I won't come back situation and certainly is a general reference to the fact that they keep </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">doing</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> that. And even so he dithers a bit at the thinny's entrance. Dude, if Hayley drops trying to hold it open while you poke at it you're going to lose fingers. No, she doesn't, though, and he doesn't, and goes on through while Audrey looks like she's going to collapse from nerves. Oh sweetie. Oh everyone. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">On the other side of the thinny it looks, at first blush, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">really </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">a lot like the fucking cave under the fucking lighthouse that is no more. It's certainly </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">a </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">cave, stalactites and all, and with a blue filter on that I'm glad we weren't supposed to be convinced was just because of the cave itself at first. Because we weren't. The thinny glimmers awhile behind Nathan, and oh hey roots hanging down, none of this is ominous in the least. Ooh, stalagmites too. No, self, Nathan is not going to go take samples and bring them back, besides which Charlotte's dead and she was probably the only qualified person to do any measurements or tests on them. As a piece of foreshadowing and also an indication of how careful you need to be here, we have a moment where Nathan loses his footing, oh no. We do </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">not </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">see the thinny close behind him. Instead he's wandering, wandering, that is a very blasted landscape, or it's supposed to be. I'm not sure if that's Nova Scotia in winter or fall pre-snow, with the snow 'shopped out, or an actual dead forest. Ex-forest. That they found to film in. Could be any of our options! Whatever it is, it's doing a pretty good job of looking like the woods around Haven while also being a completely desolate wasteland of doom where nothing's alive. Have some big boulders for an indication of No Plants Live Here Nosirree. When Nathan stops to look around there's a Something moving through the trees, which might be wind, might be animal, at a very far guess might be William but I doubt it. Anyway. He'll head downhill in the fond hopes of finding anything. We'll sit here muttering about reminding him of magical theory </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">before </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">sending him into the Wood Between The Worlds goddammit you guys. That ended in a literal train wreck, remember? Don't do that. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Duke is playing the Piano of Despondency and Ennui, and I'm only being partly facetious here because the imagery of fingers plinking on a piano is often a shorthand for contemplation in any mood from dreamy to sad and angsty. Extra bonus points because Audrey herself did it in season two (2x03 Love Machine) when she was dealing with her world turning upside down as she coped with adjusting her idea of who she was, just towards the end of Audrey II. Meanwhile Duke is now adjusting his idea of who he is now that he knows the origins of the Crockers and the context of his powers which, heh, is probably even worse than he thought. Poor Duke. He asks after Hayley, and Audrey does tell him she's fine, she's resting from the effort of opening the thinny, though there's something faintly distracted in her voice. Duke's even more distracted worrying out loud about Hayley, she shouldn't be doing this, she's impulsive and doesn't know how to control her powers, Audrey are you listening? No, of course not, she's distracted worrying over Nathan. She does answer when Duke asks her if Hayley told her why she's come to Haven, which Audrey answers yes, bad trouble with bad guys and ooh by the way Duke tried to kill her. You know, I don't even blame Audrey for focusing on that, that's not like Duke and with everything that's been going on, I'd be a bit concerned, too. I'm even more concerned, not that Audrey is, that Duke's completely avoiding </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">why</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> he tried to kill her and the fun new drawbacks to his powers and telling Audrey about that, which is information she really should know. It's not even like it's completely new information! But no, instead of dwelling on his damage he's going to use it as a means to point out Hayley's damage and that she came back here, to an unknown place under unknown circumstances she couldn't possibly remember as safe (not that Haven is safe), and is that the act of a stable person to you? And picking up Duke's Avoidance Ball and running with it, Audrey's skipping right past both Hayley's damage </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">and</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> the fact that Duke just admitted to trying to kill a young woman (this is a good sign that she's severely compromised right now because normally Audrey would have picked that up and poked at it more) </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">and</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> the question of what happened to make him even more broken and now angry out there, and swung the conversation right back around to her and her feelings of abandonment and how angry she is at him. Duke will fire back about how it's always about when she and Nathan need him, implying that they don't want him around for any reason other than that. And we have ample evidence this isn't true, we could fill up an entire other paragraph with citations from the text, but this isn't about what's full of precedent, this is about both of them hurting and </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">ripping</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> into each other instead of sharing information and comforting each other. Guys. You guys. This is not helpful. Audrey accuses him of only being concerned about how she's using Hayley because if anything happens to her it's on him. (This is going to come back to bite sooner rather than later.) Like everything bad that's happened in Haven is on him. Duke does not like this and asks what the hell she wants, he came back, didn't he? Oh Audrey, this is so not the conversation to be derisive about someone wanting a medal for doing the right thing, that's the kind of thing you say to a guy who gets an altered woman a cab home and then whines about being a nice guy. That's not what you say to a guy who risks sanity, life, everything to come back to a town where everything is fucked up, life is ten kinds of uncertain, and he at least feels responsible (even if he isn't) for the deaths of lots and lots and </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">lots</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> of people. Audrey. AUDREY. Duke points out that using Hayley isn't right, either, while we're at it. Yeah, Audrey hasn't been very concerned with Hayley as a person, has she. And he's got a point, which she will not acknowledge by asking him why he </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">did</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> come back, if it wasn't to Do The Right Thing. Well, because he can't escape this fucking town. Now would be a good time to relate everything Walter showed him, too, but after that truly spectacular fight I can understand why he doesn't, and opts to draw parallels between him and Audrey both being bound up in all the shit that goes on in Haven. She claims they're nothing alike, she cares about people. And with that last jab, walks away. Just in case we didn't have enough parallels going on here. I don't really have much to say about the summation of this scene, except this is not at all unexpected clawing at each other albeit entirely unhelpful. And painful to watch, given that we've all (a very general all but still) come to love these two and their connection, and now over the events of the last season or so their connection has been strained and turned into a world of hurt. Oh babies. Both of you. Come here so I can shake you and then hug you.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgu8YlX_IoxVVYUld8ypSGm-Hl63XLUWgGnyFb8xAAEkvoFsA9kyKV9VlfyC7a_HfQJ9ZedR_Y8l9AU1ctsp4UYT119icOv1AB3jJXuLX2nWc4BTmTJuFcsDZfMMEpd1sTx2Ynni3pqbz4/s1600/haven521cc03.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgu8YlX_IoxVVYUld8ypSGm-Hl63XLUWgGnyFb8xAAEkvoFsA9kyKV9VlfyC7a_HfQJ9ZedR_Y8l9AU1ctsp4UYT119icOv1AB3jJXuLX2nWc4BTmTJuFcsDZfMMEpd1sTx2Ynni3pqbz4/s320/haven521cc03.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Speaking of oh sweetie and worlds of hurt, here comes Exploding Girl bursting in, asking if Duke remembers her, and then providing a really good recall device by dropping a ball of some kind? I don't even know what that is. And then it explodes. Duke remembers her and gives her name as Lisa, so we have something to call her other than Exploding Girl. Oh hello, she says her little brother told her he saw Duke, that might be the kid with the ball, which would add more layers to him running away. Aheh. Yep, the trauma is definitely still there from her blowing up her boyfriend, even though she's got enough grip on it now to get the words out. That was really messy. Equally worrying is the fact that she's barely hesitating before she lunges for Duke trying to explode him, but of course she can't. That's not the way this works. She will, however, hit him a few times while I briefly ponder that it's a pity that the guy whose touch disintegrated things who worked for the Guard, do we remember that? All the way back in Nowhere Man (5x07)? It's a pity that guy isn't with us anymore and that he was also kind of homicidal, they could have a good chat and commiseration about coping mechanisms. I'm going to go ahead and bet this is Mara with the touch starvation fetish too, we brought this up back in that episode, Kitty's going with William, we'll see if we have any further clues by the end of the series. Anyway, she's going to cope by smacking Duke around. I can't say it's a bad coping mechanism, he'll allow it for a couple hits until he grabs her by the wrist and walks her back, reminding her with words and the fact that he's touching her that he's immune. Yes. She'll take her frustration out on the poor defenseless clock noooo that looked like a nice clock. Then she'll get the idea, since the exploding clock knocked Duke back a few feet, of blowing the whole place down and will it take him with it. Probably! Let's not do that. I can't tell if she stops because he tells her not to (unlikely) or if she's just fucking with his head when she stops and kind of smiles at him in a not at all friendly smiling and very much broken way. Her eyes are red-rimmed and purple-ish, not so much from crying but like she's been, I don't know, medicating? Not sleeping? Both? Both is good. Well, bad. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Vince, I mostly just want to shake. Vince what are you doing. Vince. Oh, hey, a woman with an exorcism Trouble who's… now dead, that's two out of two Troubles they thought might be able to remove Croatoan from Dave. Gee. Not that Dwight's saying this outright but this really rather feels like Not A Coincidink. Guys, maybe this is actually a terrible idea? GUYS. Instead Dwight hints around the edges of okay, I know this isn't actually Dave's </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">fault </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">per se </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">but</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> what if they can't get Croatoan out of him. Which leads to Vince delivering him a speech about how they've been responsible for protecting Haven, him and Dave, since before Dwight was born young whippersnapper and if the only way to fuck Croatoan's shit up is killing Dave, Vince will DO THAT. (We'll just be over here cringing because there </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">was</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> a timeline in Sarah 3x09 where Dave killed Vince. Ouch.) Himself. Could you be a little more sanctimonious, Vincent. Dwight has puppy eyes for that whole assessment, worried puppy eyes, at that. The kind of look that says he's worried about Vince's sanity if not now then definitely in the nebulous possible future time after he's killed his brother. Can we say Cain and Abel problems? I knew we could. Except oh look, what about the guy with the reincarnation Trouble that they tried to use on Mara to get Audrey back? And they split her in two? Well that's all well and good but Croatoan, to the best of anyone's knowledge, doesn't have a physical form in this dimension! And they have way too many variables! And YOU DO NOT FUCKING KNOW YOU COULD KILL HIM SEPARATE FROM DAVE'S BODY, VINCENT TEAGUES. You don't even know what it would take TO kill him. Or how he'd defend himself if you went to kill him while still possessing Dave. Or anything at all, in fact, because Charlotte has outright said that her people avoided knowledge of Croatoan. This is the worst fucking plan ever and I am ashamed of Dwight for going along with any of it at all. Not to mention the part where you're talking about putting a person known to be possessed near yet another of the people who could potentially end the possession and just because Croatoan doesn't want to give up this meatpuppet (yet) (judging by the deaths of the other two Troubled people and also the overall lack of body-hopping) (and the whole lot of memory erasure for that matter) does NOT mean that he'd be defenseless outside of Dave like you seem to think. Oh my god why.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Nathan's still in the Wood Between The Worlds. Nathan, go look for the tree with the magic rings buried in it. Oh wait, okay, controller, that's like magic rings, we'll go with it. But seriously, having more than three of the fucking things would be really handy. There's a noise! Aww, the void let him keep his gun, that's sweet, I believe my immediate comment was that it was about as much use as a security blanket. AND I WAS RIGHT. This is what I mean about magical theory. Nathan's excellent at handling the Troubles in real-world terms, not so good at handling shit when all the rules have just been upended. And oh hey! A trap. Pitfall trap, to be specific, which is probably easiest to swing in landscape like this. Second easiest; deadfall would be easier but more obvious to anything sapient. Nathan's just fucking lucky he didn't break anything, or rather, didn't compound fracture anything on that fall. Since he presumably wouldn't know otherwise. And it's a William! Hi William. So very not nice to see you again. Although I will allow for how he brings a certain </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">je ne sais quoi</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> to the show, and on a meta-level I totally appreciate how good a job Colin Ferguson does of making me want to rip his throat out with his teeth! I just mostly want to rip his throat out. As it turns out. After the ad break he gloats some more and wow does he look kinda wrecked, actually. What the fuck have you been doing in the void, William. Nathan would very much like to shoot the fucker right here and now, except then he'd have to get himself out of the pit which would be long, tedious, and possibly doomed to failure on account of it </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">is </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">dug as a trap. Plus there's that little problem where machines and moving parts don't work either because they never did or because the world has most definitely moved on and sigh I told you so. This was actually a reason why Roland in the Dark Tower used his revolvers rather than stealing more modern guns through the doorway, the world has moved on, things break down. Trains go insane. There aren't any trains around here, are there? No? Good. I admire Nathan's restraint in NOT informing William that beating him to death and/or strangling him could be arranged! First he will test the theory of guns not working, because we know William is a lying liar who lies and does so with the truth, and then he will come up with a series of lies to feed him in turn. I have to give him credit for this, it's thinking on his feet and he had no reason to expect that William, even if lost in the void, would be near where Nathan landed. We extrapolated it even before promo photos were released because those are the narrative conventions at play, and it was either going to be William or maybe Arla or James, given they were around for the barn's implosion. Most likely William though, for the conflict he presents. So! Nathan's lie is that Mara sent him here and then he builds on that with Croatoan's in Haven and everyone's lives are at stake and that's why they're temporarily working together. Not that he's happy about this in the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">least</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. And Mara wants William to come join her and help them! It's honestly a really </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">good </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">lie to start with: Nathan's keeping back the part about Charlotte existing and where he got this knowledge from, and claiming Mara's still around and taken over Audrey's body. But Audrey might still be around so he's going to help save her! Which is exactly the Nathan thing to do, and plays into events that really did happen with Maraudrey, so while it's a lie it's pulling straight out of William's playbook. I have to admire it even as I worry about the implications of Nathan being able to lie like that. (Not that he hasn't always to some extent, but this is trying to pull that trick on a professional with a lot more experience.) And for what it's worth, William's face goes from the smiling smug I am enjoying myself far too much and totally in control to actually worried and hiding a lot of other emotions and thoughts underneath. Who's worried about that, given he must know a good deal about Croatoan? I am raising my feet off the couch because I have to use my hands for typing. Confirmed by his next words, that he spent five hundred years "getting Mara out," which definitely implies a good chunk of that was wandering around the void and/or hammering on the barn. I have so many concerns right now and a lot of them involve whether or not he's one of Croatoan's meatpuppets and/or greater servants. SO MANY CONCERNS. Except that all said, William </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">does </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">agree to help Nathan out of the pit so he can take him to where the barn crashed and then Nathan will totally really he swears lead William to the thinny. Sure he will. That's a nice bit of steeling himself to feel William's touch at the end there, because he's not Audrey and Nathan does not WANT to be reminded that he can only feel the touch of weird extradimensional aliens when this one is evil and wants to take Audrey from him. There is, of course, no possible way this can end badly.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I am surprisingly not here for Duke talking Lisa down. Normally I would be, that's fine, and it demonstrates that Duke's still good at people and can do this kind of shit? I don't know if this is because the actors aren't gelling well, she's overselling it a bit, or just because I am </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">so fucking sick </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">of all the victim-blaming this show keeps throwing at Duke that even when it comes from someone who doesn't know any better I want to scream. Maybe a combination of all of the above! Duke tries the line about people learning to live with their Troubles, which is true but before now he's been getting to say this to people with a family history of it. Much like a family history of any other kind of genetic shitstorm, that's the sort of thing that tends to get passed down at least in rumors and whispers and yes it may suck and be traumatic when it turns up, but it's not a complete shock to the system like the new Troubles are. We are, basically, seeing how people must have reacted (to some degree or another) back when William and Mara first turned Haven into their playground. So, no, she's not interested, she goes on a rant that updates Duke about how the Guard's been running the town and while all of those things are actually necessary in this kind of situation (rationing food, water, electricity, warning people off Troubled areas of town) it </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">is </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">the kind of thing that wears and wears and wears on anyone's ability to stay calm and in control of their Trouble. Duke's coping mechanism of joking about controlling the sewage treatment plant with a Trouble and do not want to know is not helpful here, though necessary to maintaining HIS calm, I'm betting. Here, have some more helpings of guilt about the thousands of lives that've been fucked up and/or ended as a result of being a Trouble bomb, Duke! I have to say that he does a really excellent job here of validating Lisa's emotions, but the problem is she's way too broken to bother listening to that, she's going to keep shoveling on the guilt by telling him what he's done and who all the people he hurt were. Okay. I get that this is totally justified FOR HER. I do. I do not fucking approve of the writers dumping still MORE guilt onto Duke and turning him into the whipping boy for all of Haven. And I further don't fucking approve of nobody calling Audrey on her bullshit. And I fourthly feel like this entire plotline is hugely contrived JUST so that Duke can feel guiltier, Audrey can realize she's being unfair, and the culmination of discovering that Hayley is not inclined to give up her powers fuck you and fuck your thinny can happen. Plus it's predicated on everyone being fucking morons about dealing with the Troubles.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Nathan and William walking along, questing for the controller crystals. William would like to have witty banter! Nathan would like William to shut the hell up and stay shut, which as much as I believe that's true because William is the annoyingest of the annoyings, I also wonder if that's not because Nathan, with his new-honed powers of deception and manipulation, is telling him that so William will talk more to annoy him and in doing so give away some information. At least it's the kind of thing I would do! Or so that William won't pick at the lies and Nathan won't have to come up with more ways to lie with the truth. Or with outright lies, considering how much he's eliding. Whatever Nathan's motivation, William will now start yakking just because Nathan wants him to shut up. He'll start with asking about Mara, to which Nathan has one syllable answers with is both smart in the way of not getting caught lying and typical of him! This does not amuse William, who offers a game of guess the Trouble with three clues, he calls it fun and educational. I call it a will resist roll with massive penalties to not punch him in his smarmy face. Nathan calls it NO and suggests William talk about Croatoan instead. YES PLEASE DO GIVE US MORE INFORMATION ABOUT CROATOAN. Apparently they're okay, for a very bad value of okay that I wonder how much of that has to do with William's species prejudices, as long as Croatoan's riding someone like a cheap meatsuit. (Sorry Dave.) Well, no, apparently it doesn't all have to do with William's species prejudices (some of it undoubtedly does), it turns out if someone doesn't stop Croatoan the whole world will be laid waste and turned into another void. Whether that's literally, restructured and the dimensions around it reworked so that it's a between-worlds place, or figuratively as in complete and total waste land, hard to say. Functionally, it doesn't matter. And to underscore the fact that it doesn't matter what the waste land of Earth is connected to, Nathan will now cough somewhat raggedly. With William giving his smug look of uh-huh saw that coming. Also a very evaluating look, I don't like that look, it doesn't bode well for anyone or anything. By his next comments some of the evaluating is calculating how long Nathan has left out here since humans "don't do well in the void," determining how much "Mara" told him, and I doubt that suggestion that Nathan tell him where the thinny is before he dies is an idle one. It's flippant, and I don't think Nathan has any intention of telling him where the thinny is and I'm sure William doesn't think he will either, but it's not that flippant. And by the way Nathan looks after him he's sure William's not being that flippant either and is probably calculating the time he has left. See, shit like this is why Audrey didn't want you to go. Nathan. Though I don't think really anyone else would have done any better, certainly Nathan and William have, however much they might hate it, at shared reference point in Maraudrey. Now Audrey. Not that William knows it yet.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmq7R7qanSsYaXLJmKofJoHJ7x8pDfYvuKbOa6RFpADFoMKHVUDayMaLwjKq1yOKHKhY-AbolRFlbIrZgmKQ_sEF2IZ0FQGYC7RKQityp_Rf-uJPqm6OeKVdvTQwMWJtOArgKPhGuVdIo/s1600/haven521cc04.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmq7R7qanSsYaXLJmKofJoHJ7x8pDfYvuKbOa6RFpADFoMKHVUDayMaLwjKq1yOKHKhY-AbolRFlbIrZgmKQ_sEF2IZ0FQGYC7RKQityp_Rf-uJPqm6OeKVdvTQwMWJtOArgKPhGuVdIo/s320/haven521cc04.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">After a panover for an ad break and some passage of time, we're just about at the barn's crash site! I'm particularly intrigued by the weird holes in the spooky mist. There doesn't appear to be a particular pattern but it feels like there's a potential reason. Like they're the void's equivalent of holes in the ozone layer. Nathan pulls the are-we-there-yet card. Nathan please just whine at him like a kid it'd be funnier. That's not his style, though it would be Duke's, and William calls him "it" for his pains. Goddammit I didn't need </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">another </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">reason to want to rip him apart. Even if it is in character. And now I get to pick apart all the nuances of what William's saying, because this gives us some really fascinating insights into what the barn was and how it worked, which might in turn allow them to build another one. The wreckage is of its final form (boss fight? boss fight!) with the bar where Lexdrey was hanging out and William was trying to prime her to pick life, preferably a life with him, which then got ruined by Nathan shouting Audrey's name across the void whoops. William calls it a construct, with the underlying technology not being wood, emphasizing once again that their tech is different. Well. Yes. We knew that, Captain Obvious, moving on? It kinda sounds like he views it as a computer, from the perspective of someone who's never opened their computer and doesn't want to, so he barely has an idea that that might be a motherboard and what it's made out of, let alone the details of how it works. So! Also he's been here before and never found anything of value, which suggests any number of things from William has only been here to mourn the loss of Mara and his inability to get the fuck out of the void to the controller crystal was deliberately hiding itself from him. I kinda like the second option at a minimum, considering Nathan spots it immediately with its whole crystal-shaped self and glowing blue on and off. Yes do let's pick up the magical thingie made of fuck-knows-what with our bare hands, Nathan, that can't possibly go wrong. Or in this case, apparently it calls up a Galaudreyel! No, seriously, that's a white-haired white-dressed Emily Rose looking very serene and very creepy. William would like to know, if Mara (ahem) is back in Haven, what the fuck is that? Great question! Nathan doesn't know either.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Back in Haven Dwight and Vince are taking a bound at the hands at least Dave to see Boyd, is his name, with the reincarnation Trouble. Did I mention this is a bad idea? because this is such a bad idea on so many levels. Starting with the fact that Dave is starting to freak out about why he's here, what are they doing to him, did I mention we still don't trust that Dave is Dave all the time or even ever again at this point? BECAUSE WE DON'T. Dwight has the semi-sensible approach of it's okay, no one's going to hurt you, which is safe to say to a panicking Dave and a wary Croatoan. Vince, on the other hand, is flat out telling Dave-a-toan that if this works he'll be free of the smoke monster riding him like a pony. Vince why you do. Your brother has been compromised and you don't know how to tell when or even if it's Dave anymore. STOP GIVING HIM FREE INFORMATION. My god Vince, for someone who ran the Guard for many years and at least has been implied to have covert tactical training you can be amazingly dumb. And speaking of tactics, it turns out Boyd was hiding behind the door the whole time, out of which he will now come out with guns pointed at the boys. Well, a gun. Good enough for everyone's purposes, and Dwight would like him to please be putting away the gun now, it's fine, they're fine, they spoke on the phone earlier. Boyd does lower the gun, talking some about how it's not the Haven he grew up in and he's a little jumpy. Yeah, you and the entire rest of the town. Boyd will now go on to address one of the central issues of the episode, one that I take somewhat less issue with, the whole using Troubles as tools thing. There's definitely some discussion to be had over that, at least for the people with more voluntary control over their Troubles (Boyd, Hayley, earlier Marion Caldwell or Vicki.) as opposed to the people with no control over their Troubles (Dwight, Nathan, Jordan McKee, cake-eating girl, the entire male Glendower line). Unfortunately none of what we've heard so far about the solution to the Troubles makes me think there's any way to let the people who can control their Trouble would be able to keep theirs, it sounds very much like it's all or nothing. Which, as we're about to see, can cause big problems when the people enjoying their Troubles (Hayley) find out it's all about to go away. But. That's a later problem. Right now Boyd is just apprehensive about using his curse for good, even as Vince assures him this has happened before </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: line-through; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">and will all happen again</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and it helped someone then, and it'll be okay. No, it really won't be okay, because while Dwight tries to find out what strong emotion activates Boyd's Trouble Croa-Dave will take action to keep his lovely meatsuit! Namely by grabbing Boyd by the throat and sucking his Trouble out through his eyeballs. And this is where I want to grab Vince and shake him till his teeth clack together like a skull rattle VINCE YOU HAVE SEEN THIS BEFORE. YOU KNOW THIS IS A THING DAVE-A-TOAN DOES. WHY THE FUCK DID YOU BRING HIM AT ALL NOT TO MENTION WARN DAVE THAT THIS oh never mind. Because yes, given all of the information we have, I find it a pretty safe bet that Croatoan's been wandering around killing anyone who could harm him or pull him out of his meatsuit. This does raise the interesting question though, that if Croatoan is actually more dangerous outside of his meatsuit, as William said, why does he want to stay in it. The annoying part about that question is that both facts as we know them, Croatoan being more dangerous decorporealized and Croatoan wanting to stay in his meatsuit, could be true. Croatoan might have been influenced by Shatner, he/it might have goals that do not involve turning Earth into a barren waste land, Dave being what Dave is might actually enhance Croatoan's abilities where a normal human would just be consumed or an interdimensional alien of Mara and Charlotte's ilk would just fight Croatoan endlessly. Or at least for a very long time. We don't know! Come, sing with us the song of our people. At any rate. Dave-a-toan has been killing a lot of people and now he's killed the guy who could de-couple the two entities. Dwight is just staring all WHAT THE SHIT IS THIS. As you do, really, the first time. Vince saw it he was pretty dumbstruck. This is not the first time. Vince ... actually, it turns out Vince is the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">next</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> target, and while he's trying to talk to Dave under the a-toan I'm not sure whether he reaches him and Dave fights the other creature off or whether the creature decides leaving Vince alive and just threatening to eat him makes his point well enough and leaves Vince alive to be useful. I'm leaning towards that latter, mostly because when Dave comes out of it he seems more freaked and less self-aware as one might be to fight off a supernatural creature in one's head. Boyd is just dead. So, so very dead. And both of you are fucking morons, Vince somewhat more than Dwight because Vince SHOULD at least have a better idea of what Croa-Dave is capable of. No? No. WHY.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Lisa is wrapping up her recitation of horrible with the darkness Trouble, which is fair: it was fucking terrifying and frankly they could've really used Duke and his immunity to maybe start talking people down. The part nobody's addressing under this, and I understand why but I kind of wish they would, is that Duke also left because in order to be of any help to others, he would have to spread the word far and wide that this was done </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">to him</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, and we all know how thrilled victims are by trying to explain that, right? All the more so when you mix in toxic masculinity issues, Duke's specific brand of trying to assert control over his life and his fucked up family history, and the problems inherent in trying to explain about Mara and Audrey. Speaking of which, as Duke is explaining that he left because he believed he would only ever be able to fuck things up worse and Lisa tells him oh don't worry she'll make it so he never does THAT again (hahaha. ha. ha. oh honey you have no IDEA the ways that someone dying, especially with supernatural shit at play, can fuck things up worse), here comes Audrey! Looking slightly chastened for having overheard all that. (Oh and let's add to the laundry list of Reasons Duke Won't Speak Up About Mara Trouble-Bombing Him is the usual rounds of victim-blaming. See also WHAT AUDREY DID EARLIER AND WHAT'S HAPPENING RIGHT NOW.) So. Okay, she backs down from the victim-blaming here, that he didn't mean to hurt Lisa, and this could possibly be more blatantly staged as a case of Audrey speaking through Lisa as her proxy because she can't handle talking directly to Duke about her fuckups and feelings but oh my god. There would need to be neon signs. Now she's going to prove to Lisa that Duke returned to save them all! Audrey stop sucking at your JOB.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Speaking of neon signs, we shall now return to the more Dark Tower-esque land and people, which is saying something considering how bad Haven-proper has been for it this season. With Galaudreyel! I want to know what the fuck with the necklace, it looks like silver or maybe mother of pearl? Inquiring minds, though presumably it's mostly there to add to the Otherworldly Not Really Human At All attitude. William suggests she's a template, presumably for how wiping or burying Mara's personality works: first there's Mara, then a template onto which the personality for each cycle can be laid? Sure we'll go with that. Her voice is definitely echoing like she's some kind of AI. I have to wonder a bit, here, if they wished they could get Agent Howard back as the barnvatar but Maurice Dean Wint had scheduling conflicts? Or just lack of interest. Or if they meant it to be Galaudreyel the whole time. (He did have a TV movie come out mid-2014, so it's possible he was filming that while Haven was finishing up their eps here.) (</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>Note:</b> Confirmation from Millikin says that they always had it in mind to be Galaudreyel. Which then gives us all the questions about the nature of the original barnvatar that we saw, but Twitter is a poor medium to grab the writers by the lapels and shake them until answers fall out.)</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> No, Nathan, do not touch the weird Galaudreyel template whatever, she might explode you. William the only thing more asinine and less believable you could say in that tone of voice is "we come in peace." Also since this being is essentially the failsafe that, at best guess, Charlotte installed to make sure the crystal didn't fall into the wrong hands? And it's of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">her daughter</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">? I'm a little creeped out about Charlotte all over again, are you? Anyway. Nathan tells her what they want, I'm going to continue being disturbed that she looks like a Vorlon and talks like a Vorlon and asks questions like a Shadow, don't mind us and our B5 fixation over here. And why they want it, with some significant hesitation before coughing up the great evil Croatoan by name. I don't blame him, considering there's so much they don't know about it and it's entirely possible the failsafe got corrupted at some point and all KINDS of things like that. So! The question to determine who the right person is is, why was the barn created? William has the easy answer, the one about punishing Mara for making the Troubles, which is predictable, the one Agent Fuck You hinted around at the end of s3, and also totally wrong. On the other hand, William also seems to have enough self-awareness to know that he's not what would be considered the right person, so it's hard to say whether or not that's his real answer? I'd buy it though, given his viewpoint. Apparently this is not a forgiving failsafe, you get one wrong answer a person and the countdown doesn't stop until Nathan coughs up his answer. Well. Ouch. Nathan's answer is that the barn was created to save Mara from herself, that she wasn't born evil and was capable of being so much more than she was, that Audrey Parker is essentially what-could-have-been. Which strongly suggests that whatever template </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">was </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">in the barn, it involved bits of Mara's personality </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">at all times</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. This only makes me feel very slightly less squicky over Charlotte choosing Audrey over Mara, because they're both still people even if you consider them alternate versions of each other. Unfortunately, Nathan in his eagerness to elaborate and get the right answer out there forgets to be a good liar, and he talks about Mara in nothing but the past tense. We can even </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">see </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">the place where it registers with William that Mara is dead, gone, or otherwise locked up, and he's so going to fuck your shit up for that, Nathan. Look at that jawline and those cheekbones of ANGRY. Nathan stop gloating silently it's only pissing him off more. The ONLY piece of luck in all of this is that he's kept knowledge of Charlotte from William, which means that as he has the confrontation leading to the chase through the forest, he thinks they're still in the same body and he can get Mara out. I dunno about all that, William! She might be really truly gone this time. Also it's quite telling of William's instability and impulsivity that he doesn't wait for Nathan to lead him toward the thinny before he starts in about past tense and Audrey still existing and so on and so forth. It might've been smarter to wait! It might also, granted, have allowed Nathan to try and lead him into a trap and then go off to the thinny without him, but waiting would've given him more time to plan and pump Nathan for information and so on. Instead we get a demonstration that yes, in fact, Nathan </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">can </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">run quite fast and also William has leet tracking skills now? I'm going to go with, he's spent an unconscionable amount of time in the void, assuming he needs to eat and drink and perform some kind of normal bodily functions (and we've seen nothing from Audrey over the past five seasons to indicate otherwise, so it would be void-effects, not alien-being), he's figured out quite a lot of survival skills.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Outside, Audrey introduces Lisa to Hayley and asks if she's ready to open the thinny, because it's time. Hayley's already looking kind of dubious about the whole thing but sure, she can open the door and hopefully Nathan will come most likely crashing back through. Lisa's not sure what's going on, but Audrey assures her that when Nathan comes back through he'll be able to help them end the Troubles forever! And everyone will be normal again and she can have a normal life, and while that's probably tempting for someone like Lisa someone like Hayley is thinking wait a second I </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">like</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> my super powers, and it's the Rogue-Storm debate all over again. "There's nothing wrong with us!" Says the girl who can control the weather or make doors. "There's everything wrong with us!" says the girl who can't touch anyone ever. Nobody actually told Hayley why they wanted to open a thinny, because nobody is actually telling anyone everything or even most of the thing in this episode. Except Vince, who is telling everyone everything including the people he should not be telling the thing to! We were so not here for this, and we are smashing our desks into kindling with our faces. Audrey continues the practice of telling people things even when she should possibly either keep her mouth shut OR be more judicious and aware of what she's saying, or both. Although finally we get someone (Audrey. Who could have remembered this 20 minutes ago) pointing out that Duke didn't choose to Trouble everyone in Haven, but he's choosing to do what he can to help fix this. Yes. Thank you. Now can we stop punching Duke for Mara's fuckery? And maybe pick him up, dust him off, give him all of the hugs? Duke's gotten nothing but shit from Haven for at least the last two seasons, I think? Three? It was season three where it was the most pronounced with Duke being all "I am not succumbing to my FUCK my destiny will not let me escape it at all." And he's only been getting more and more beaten down since then, albeit with moments of relief (Jennifer) that then get taken away (Jennifer's death.) And Audrey acknowledging that she forgot or discarded how much Duke cares about this town and its people is not in the least proportionate to the amount of shit being heaped on his head, which she contributed to earlier. Hayley is still making faces of I don't like the sound of any of this but at least she is still holding the thinny open. For another couple seconds. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Nathan does make it to the thinny! And shouts Audrey's name, which she hears on the other side, but then William tackles him and the controller crystal goes flying into a dramatically appropriate corner. Audrey is still running off her emotions rather than her usual good sense, we can hear it in her voice and see it in her lack of focus as she tells Lisa it's going to be okay, they're going to end the Troubles. Duke is somewhat more focused, giving Lisa a hand she can touch and hold which she hasn't been able to do in weeks and telling her she's going to be okay, she's going to pull out of this, and making her laugh with a joke about what she's going to tell her little brother. Mostly I think it's the human contact and the arm around her shoulder that's helping her. Hayley, on the other hand, is not cool with this and is dunzo, and lets the thinny close again. Audrey hasn't figured it out yet, asks her what's wrong, she needs to keep it open. Audrey her emotions are splashed all over her face and have been for the entire conversation with Lisa, how do you not see this? Because she's running on adrenaline, emotion, and to some extent hysteria, that's how, not that I approve because I most definitely do not. After the ad break Hayley yells at Audrey about why would she want to give up these awesome powers she has, see again the Rogue-Storm X-Men version of this debate. Hayley is Storm, she sees nothing wrong with being different, being a mutant or Troubled, because she won the superpower lottery and her Trouble doesn't inconvenience her in the slightest and enables her to do awesome things! And apparently her point of view is so self-centered that she can't extend a bit of empathy to people like Rogue-Lisa, who literally cannot touch another human being for the rest of her life if this goes on. For those of you who want to know how damaging this can be, google cloth monkey experiment. It's bad. Very bad. We've mentioned this before, and pointed at Nathan and Jordan as exhibits a and b. Hayley is not interested in this, however, Hayley is not apparently interested in anybody but herself and while I recognize that this is a trait of adolescents to be self-centered and/or short-sighted, this is jacking it up to a very annoying eleven. To Hayley this is all about taking her powers away, and the hell is she going to be a part of that. Dammit, Hayley. Dammit Audrey, who isn't listening to Hayley and attempting to appeal to her you don't want this town to be a hellpit forever do you? Audrey you do remember the part where the Coultons were known and infamous as petty criminals, right? Hayley isn't like you, she hasn't invested in this town, she's invested in stuff, why am I even bothering. Hayley will proceed to prove how invested in stuff she is by taking off the ring and dropping it to the ground as she says she's going to rob banks and buy an island and be happy with her drinks with little hats. Audrey, yelling "Hayley, stop" after her is the least effective thing you have done in an episode full of ineffectuality. Meanwhile on the other side Nathan is getting half strangled by a very angry William. And the thinny's closing while they're fighting. Good job, both of you. Oh, and the impact of the thinny closing is causing a rock fall which blocks the entrance to the cave! NICE JOB BREAKING IT EVERYONE.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Speaking of nice job breaking it, Dave is now chained to a chair and Dwight and Vince are marveling at how Croatoan can see everything and hear everything through Dave. No shit, you guys. I'm honestly surprised Dwight didn't figure this out sooner, considering Croatoan aka the No Marks Killer has been operating clearly with an astounding amount of information and an ability to move freely for </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">months.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Not to mention Dave's visions of chasing people through the woods and then death, and then they find oh look a dead body? The signs have all been very much there, Vince just didn't want to believe it. Dwight, on the other hand, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">really </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">should have known better, he knew Dave-a-toan killed Charlotte, it should have been obvious that Croatoan basically sits lurking in Dave and comes out when it feels it's convenient. Like, oh, to kill a threat to his dwelling. Heh. Vince is still freaking out about not being able to talk to his brother, which is understandable if unhelpful and I would have a lot more patience for this if he hadn't been the dumbass that caused this in the first place. Both the death of Boyd and the possessing of his brother under truly ridiculous circumstances! Dwight, on the other hand, is doing what every good operative does with a known mole: advocating feeding him false information! Wait, no, he's advocating Dave confront Croatoan inside his own mind on allegedly equal footing. Okay, Dwight? Croatoan is a being of unknown age but at least five hundred years old, experienced, with an unknown array of powers that include sucking people's Troubles out through their eyeballs. There is no such thing as an equal footing with Dave. There might be such a thing as a footing that advantages Dave and gives him a chance of survival and even victory, but it would in no way be equal. Also </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">stop talking about this in the same room as Dave-a-Toan. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Jesus fuck, you guys. Vince's plan is to hypnotize Dave to get him into the battleground inside the mind. Vince has apparently forgotten that they tried that already, with very little result that we could tell because of Croatoan mind-wiping. I'm almost afraid to find out what happens when he tried that a second time, and I'm not entirely sure whether or not I should be this exasperated with him still because although he was shown to remember that they called in the regression woman, he was very fuzzy and it's unclear whether or not it wrote to long-term memory. Certainly they didn't get anything useful out of it that they were allowed to keep. I wouldn't put it past Croatoan to have gloated about it before he wiped them, though. Croa-Shatner? At any rate. This is a job for the Iron Maiden, the regressionist we saw earlier.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Back in the cave of rocks and hate Nathan at least has the controller crystal, for what good it'll do him, and William has his arm pinned by a boulder. How pinned? Well, he's not moving, but he's not showing any signs of pain like it's being crushed by the boulder, so... I'm not sure what's going on there. He's definitely fairly disgusted by this turn of events though. Nathan comes to stand over him and William sort of taunts, almost seems resigned as he asks Nathan if he's going to kill him, saying that's not him. And it's not. Nathan's going to leave him there to die instead, because while Nathan doesn't often directly hurt anyone, he's in all probability not above leaving people to stew in their own juices and possibly die from them. We believe this so strongly that we actually spent several minutes looking for examples to cite from the text; we didn't find any, so we're going to have to say it's part of our interpretation of his character. And unfortunately Nathan can't really do that anyway. As William attempts to move the boulder on his arm (and hisses either in pain or anticipation of pain when he gets a better look at how it's situated on him) Nathan tries to move the boulder in front of the doorway. Really? Seriously, Nathan? I hope it's less that he thinks he can move it and more that he wants to </span><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">do</span><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> something, and he does look like he's being careful not to strain himself in a futile attempt. William, on the other hand, isn't even bothering. Just sitting back and bitterly gloating about how they're stuck here for the duration. This is hell. Nathan is pretty much in hell. Goodie.</span>Anna Hammetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10095633218958433882noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4271373189216022547.post-18462063234355305572015-11-20T12:08:00.000-08:002015-11-20T12:08:41.200-08:00Communes Are Just A Red Herring Haven S2E07 The Tides That Bind<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Ah, scenic Haven, beautiful coastal small town in AUGH FUCK WITH THE CREEPY CHILDREN AND THE CHANTING. See, this is the kind of quality content I expect from anything to do with Stephen King. I'll be over here behind the couch, shivering.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Yes, there are creepy chanting children. Chanting something about the sea being deep and the things that sleep under it. I could blame Lovecraft, I guess, but we're not in Lovecraft Country, we're in King Country, and while both are far worse places to stop than Bat Country in King Country there's a lot less in the way of grand cosmic horror and a lot more in the way of inexplicable horror mixed with small town folksyness. All those of you who have lived or live in a small town and know the ways those can be horrible are now twitching as violently as I am. Anyway. Creepy chanting cultist children. Because you know that's what it sounds like. Also in the way four of them are tying a rope around the fifth's ankle and shoving him in. Followed by the cinderblock he's now tied to. And then more chanting. And then an adult calling them over to supper, looking down into the water with a grim expression and... doing nothing. Now, this is Haven, so we can assume all kinds of things about how this isn't what it looks like, and it isn't. But that doesn't make it all that less fucking creepy. Mad props to everyone who set this episode up, I'm wigged out. Oh, for extra bonus wig, the guy has a tattoo. Or to be specific, The Tattoo. </span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSPmsL6JD3FTf8c7cbprftE-TGgGKNcCufXBeuZgP1OIHwJTcKU4Lj-rGJP3xoaJAG8u_o_GciF5mVpOnzUjAZZfSZTcsPKj6TYBgtsnWpE9EO2RUSiu51oQreIPGlWxm1XxcYneTeo9E/s1600/haven207cc01.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSPmsL6JD3FTf8c7cbprftE-TGgGKNcCufXBeuZgP1OIHwJTcKU4Lj-rGJP3xoaJAG8u_o_GciF5mVpOnzUjAZZfSZTcsPKj6TYBgtsnWpE9EO2RUSiu51oQreIPGlWxm1XxcYneTeo9E/s320/haven207cc01.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So, we of course switch up to Audrey and Nathan walking along the beach and talking about Lucassi finding the body. Oh goodie. It is not, in fact, the kid! It's the tattooed guy. So I guess he's not going to kill Duke today. No wallet on the guy, just keys and a picture. And a note! It sounds like a suicide note? But as always, context is everything. Also this is way too early in the show for it to be a straight up suicide. Back at the police station Duke would like to know everything Nathan knows. Which isn't much at the moment, and how did Duke find out a guy with a tattoo washed up on the beach anyway. Duke will not reveal his sources, Duke will be obnoxious until Nathan gives in. Which he will do because Nathan still doesn't have an ID on the fucker and he's hoping Duke will give him one. Sadly, no. Duke does not know who he is. Nathan is aggravated and promises to tell him anything he finds out related to his imminent demise, with the subtext being and it might just be me that kills you if you don't get out of my hair. And of course this is the moment when Audrey comes in with an ID on the woman in the keyring photo. It's a woman who works at Revered Driscoll's soup kitchen! Duke perks up, the Rev's involved? No, Nathan is done informing him of things now, he will get out before Nathan sticks him in a cell and he can ask his cellmate about tattoos. Duke's retorts at Audrey are equal parts, I think, bluster and genuine annoyance or offense. Not the least of which because that's the kind of generic retort that you come up with when you can't come up with something as cutting as you'd prefer, but you don't want to leave without saying something either.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So. Okay, over to the Rev's church to see this woman since it turns out she's working today. She identifies the guy as Leith. Which is either a port on the eastern coast of Scotland or an Irish clan name from County Langford, either way, similar and in common roots. And let's not forget Glendower is his last name, which was the name of a famous Welsh king, so that's there. (Glendower is also a Scotch. Which I will be drinking quite a bit of through this episode.) Anyway. Having determined that Leith is probably from the British Isles we also determine that a lot of the Glendowers have that tattoo (to say nothing of the silversmith mentioned in 2x05) and okay, now I'm going to digress, brace yourselves. We'll start another paragraph.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Basically this episode is all about the Glendowers, and a lot of things are either revealed or discussed in a sense that the characters are audibly trying to figure things out, that haven't been discussed or revealed before now. I'll discuss those as they come up but right now we're going to touch on the tattoo. It's obviously not an exclusively Glendower thing, we saw that it was on the arm of a non-Glendower in 1x05 Ball and Chain and with the ever-irritating disappearing-reappearing tattoo on Julia Carr's shoulder in 1x13 Spiral But it's now being established as predominantly (out of the proportion of people known to have it) Glendower thing, and given prominence here, as are the Glendowers. Who we never hear from again. Later, the tattoo is established as being the mark of the Guard, drawn from the one on Vince Teagues' arm which is hereditary with his Trouble and comes and goes as needed. The simple answer here is that the Glendowers make up a good portion of the Guard, but, well, why? They're insular, they have a clear hierarchy and structure of their own, they don't seem like the type in this episode (the only episode where we see them at all extensively) to associate themselves with an organization that at least so far as we've seen demands obedience above all societal and legal regulations, which would get an already clannish and suspect group like the Glendowers into deep shit. Potentially. Probably. Given the Troubles. On the other hand, by the time the Troubles come around and are active, the Glendower men all go into the water and the women are left to mind the children and the family property, and women sometimes get more leeway in that regard than men, not to mention if it really is only the men in the Glendower family that have the tattoos, there may be limits to how much the Guard is willing to draw on them. And on the other other hand, up to this point and up to the end of the season, the Glendowers are occupying the space in the narrative later taken up by the Guard and to a less populous extent, the Teagues. They're mysterious, clannish, have purpose and practices unknown to the viewer and only revealed in dribs and drabs. They serve an anchoring function in Haven, clearly going back several hundred years and possibly being one of the founding families. And they own considerable property to maintain this kind of clan, as do the Teagues. They maintain order at least amongst themselves, as do the Guard. Were they, then, meant to fulfill the role that the Guard took over, after presumably something changed behind the scenes? Were they meant to be more connected into the overall mythology than Haven than they ended up being? (Highly likely, all things considered, but still unproven.) We may never know, especially given that the Glendowers are all underwater and likely to stay underwater as long as the Troubles remain active, and even when that line is tied off the Glendowers might continue lurking at the bottom of the ocean. Waiting. Who the fuck knows. Not I, says I.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Okay, cranky digression over, back to the episode. Audrey continues to work under the suicide theory, which wouldn't be my preference but they do have some pretty compelling evidence in that rough direction. And as it turns out, according to his ex money was a stressor. He tried to provide for her and their son, and if money was tight and he couldn't, and. That would do it, particularly if there's family pressure to provide for your children even if you're not with the mother anymore. Oh, Nathan will explain now the clannishness of the Glendowers and how a lot of people think they're a cult. Yes, Nathan, I'm one of them. Sort of. Not a ritualistic cult but definitely a cult of tradition and personality. Nathan doesn't know if they're Troubled, but he did know his father went to check on them periodically, presumably in the way that you do when you're a small town sheriff and you want to have at least one finger in each potential trouble OR Trouble pie. We interrupt this establishing of situations for a panicked mother freaking out because the father of her child apparently killed himself and the child himself is not at school where the father was supposed to drop him. Yeah, I'd be freaking too. When was the last time she saw Daniel? (The kid.) Leith had him at the Glendower complex because he likes hanging out with his cousins and they hadn't worked out a custody agreement yet. Now's when we all go OH SHIT THAT'S THE KID THEY DROWNED WITH THE CINDERBLOCK. Is it? We don't know. But that's definitely the implication by conservation of characters.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiN6uDvuj7jNLta1qEBN1lzhfTg838R_WIlsPR_tgemNcvLQe8k6li6zDXWteDbvLWEoy5rZwhJFgj8RTeM1NW3TqoLjSfWKHxR8Cpt186uH3KmipgOXx4_GQBVp4b_Tuv3n_vSklYS25o/s1600/haven207cc02.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiN6uDvuj7jNLta1qEBN1lzhfTg838R_WIlsPR_tgemNcvLQe8k6li6zDXWteDbvLWEoy5rZwhJFgj8RTeM1NW3TqoLjSfWKHxR8Cpt186uH3KmipgOXx4_GQBVp4b_Tuv3n_vSklYS25o/s320/haven207cc02.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Going out to the Glendower place gives a lot of buildings, fairly tidily kept buildings and grounds, and no kids. No people, really. Oop, two people, Gwen and Cole Glendower, both of whom are quiet when they're greeted with Nathan being somewhat official. Well, as you do when you're a cult leader, which presumably he is. The less obvious part is that they're also quiet about Audrey being, well, Audrey. We'll get to that later, I think. They're here about Leith, which might relax them some, they might want to know that one of their own is dead, and it's possibly a suicide, and do they know anything about the note he left. Gwen's 'no' is quick and Audrey's squinty eyes do not believe her. Nathan is pushing about the boy, telling them that Mary said he was here, they've come to take him home. Cole is adamant that Daniel's place is with the Glendowers, the phrasing he uses suggests there's something special (read: Troubled) about the Glendowers, and that Mary can't help him, which is interesting right there. Audrey would like to know this for herself and by the way, where are the rest of the children? Hell, where are the rest of everybody, but that's just me. I would actually like to know, though, in this scene, what time and day it is so that Audrey's question is either reasonable or un. Because if it's in the middle of the day on a designated school day, then no, the children shouldn't necessarily be outside playing. Anyway. Oh, here are some more Glendowers! And they have guns. That's not good. And Cole is done answering questions, so it's time for our heroes to get run off by the creepy people now. Cole is also not intimidated by the warrant, so, um. Yeah, that's even scarier, actually.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">They do see a kid on the way back. It's the creepy kid in the plaid shirt. He says Audrey? Audrey and Nathan? The outside world? He says a very general you can't have him, he's one of us now. Given that the last time we saw this kid he was being drowned with tying ankles to cinderblocks, this is, um. Yeah, I don't know what this is but it's not good. But at least Daniel didn't get tied to cement and dropped in the drink! And we finally get opening credits!</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Oh god, the Rev's getting in on this. And men loading things into trucks. Probably ammo and guns. Nathan tries to talk Mary out of of getting the Rev's help to go deal with the Glendowers and get Daniel back, but it's not working. Especially not because Daniel texted her a picture of him and the other kids (yep, still creepy) saying he belongs with them now. The fun part of Haven is, because it's fucking Haven, we know this isn't what it looks like. But because it's fucking Haven, it could actually be worse! Yay! Wait, no, that other thing. Nathan will now try to talk the Rev out of going after the Glendowers, which is rather like pissing into the wind and to much the same effect. Back to talking to Mary, then, pointing out that storming over to a clannish, tight-knit, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">well-armed</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, Nathan, you could mention the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">well-armed</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> part, storming over to their compound and trying to attack them on their own ground is idiotic at best and suicidal at worst. And also they are also Daniel's family by his father's side, and they can't be any happier about Leith's death than she is. Nathan doesn't get her assent but she doesn't speak up against him when he starts ordering the Rev's crew to go home in her name. The Rev holds his staring at Nathan just long enough to make it a challenge and an insult, then tells him he won't wait forever. Yep. Pretty much. Nathan tells Mary he'll call her when he has Daniel. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And back at the police station oh god the Twitter posters. Go away guys. Audrey has uncovered a clue as to why the Rev's so fired up about the Glendowers, especially since they aren't obviously Troubled. It turns out that his wife went missing all those years ago and the lead suspect was Cole Glendower! And then she turned up dead in a car crash, the Rev accused murder, but Garland never pursued it. Which definitely indicates something hinky, because if he knew any evidence to exonerate Cole one would think he would have entered it. And yet nothing. So, Audrey has the flimsiest of excuses to go to the Glendower compound and investigate. The absolute flimsiest. They have no grounds for anything, which Nathan points out to her, and she points out that the Troubles aren't exactly covered under standard operating procedure and besides think of the children. I'm not entirely sure that's the best argument to present, but Nathan's not wrong that she'd go without him if she had to. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There will be no breaking and entering. There will, however, be picking and entering, and a line reference (see how important those are?) tells us that this is the only locked building on the compound. It's, um. Well, surprisingly ordinary. There's a kitchen, a fair amount of greenery, a hutch. Pictures on the wall. Including one of Lucy. Heh. And Garland. Who never, ever told Audrey that he knew her from back when she was Lucy, so there'll be that to contend with. The back of the picture says 'wedding day celebration '83' but it doesn't say who's getting married, so that's... interesting. Nathan is distracted by running water. leading them to what looks like either an old or an old style bathroom, for actual bathing. The tub is pretty big and full of water and a kid, the floor is tile, there aren't as many mirrors or shiny and chrome things as we'd expect in something more modern, and there's a vanity. And a boy in a tub. He looks like he's sunk to the bottom, but then he opens his eyes and Audrey and Nathan jump back in startlement and that's when we cut to commercial.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTsun42Bx0FkudWPl7CZhH_2OIECn_ycv3Ar9arcAurdv-23gKq2ys69g_X158_jNlyYfI6jTSK7L7OlPklg2TfDoWVWFpYxEK_ML4BI2vFLmQ0eFyHlkO40uf82tOPEgXFBpptHXdfhY/s1600/haven207cc03.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTsun42Bx0FkudWPl7CZhH_2OIECn_ycv3Ar9arcAurdv-23gKq2ys69g_X158_jNlyYfI6jTSK7L7OlPklg2TfDoWVWFpYxEK_ML4BI2vFLmQ0eFyHlkO40uf82tOPEgXFBpptHXdfhY/s320/haven207cc03.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When we come back Daniel, for it is he, is sitting up in the tub and gasping. Audrey and Nathan, not knowing any better, try to help him, but Cole is there with a gun to make sure they don't. Mostly because Daniel's gasping until he goes back under the water. There's an argument, that if either man went for their gun could turn into a fight and meanwhile Audrey's watching the boy and his pattern of gasping. Finally she does interrupt and let Cole ease him back under the water, where he takes a huge breath and breathes easier. Even if it's still creepy. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Over at the Cape Rouge Evi is complaining that Duke was going to make her dinner. Did they have a date or something? Duke is more preoccupied with the body with the tattoo, not bringing up the death thing yet but definitely bringing up the Rev. He tells her the last time he asked the Rev about it he got all bitchy and cryptic. At this point we now know that Evi's working with the Rev, so her line of interrogation is even more funny and suspicious. She knows he's not prone to the religious cryptic, unless you count talking about how the Troubled are damned. Duke doesn't notice, though, he's busy seizing on the fact that, hey, the Rev hasn't met her before! As far as you know, Duke. As far as you know. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Over at the Glendower compound Cole is explaining to Nathan and Audrey how Daniel and the other children can no longer breathe air, and need to breathe water for several hours a day now. As far as reasons why Daniel needs to stay with his family, that's a good one! Every cycle when the Troubles come back, the Glendower men stop being able to breathe air. Apparently they breathe water instead. No mention is made of how they survive the cold at the bottom of the water, never mind the pressure if they go down deep enough. Okay, yes, I know, I'm not supposed to nitpick this. All the Glendower men and boys go under the water (wait, how are we defining boys? Past the age of puberty? Do prepubescent boys get to stay above the water? Do infants? Does that indicate they're genderless? Okay, now I'm definitely over-thinking.) at the ebb tide of a new moon. Which is in two days for maximum urgency to wrap this up. No one's told Mary yet, either, because she works for Reverend Driscoll and, well, we all know how that would go. Both we the audience and we the characters. Cole does confess that he and Penny Driscoll were having an affair and that's why the Rev's so upset and inclined to accuse him of killing his wife, and that does explain a lot! But no, he didn't kill her. According to Gwen, Reverend Driscoll isn't a man to let anything go. We'll come back to that in a second, right now Audrey's calling Gwen out on recognizing the note. It was in her handwriting, the same handwriting that was on the back of the picture that said 1983. And who was the note to? Well, her first husband, who wouldn't let her leave, so she had to find another way. Audrey suggests faking her own death, and remember when I said we'd come back to that in a second? We just did. It was a literal few seconds. Penny Driscoll is Gwen Glendower! This isn't even the most shocking revelation, that belongs to the woman who just walked in saying the boys had been kidnapped. It's actually the third most shocking revelation too, because the second most shocking revelation is that Gwen could easily stand in for Gwenivere, making the Rev the worst Arthur in the history of Arthurs, and I'm including the one where Malcolm McDowell played Arthur after a series of psychopaths including Caligula. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It's morning now, Cole and Nathan are talking and walking down the coast basically adding nothing except tension, speculation, and underscoring how little time the boys have now that they're adjusted to breathe water instead of air. It does however provide a nice parallel and contrast to the next scene, where Penny/Gwen's talking to Audrey about Driscoll. Apparently he was if not less intense, at least less angry. Then they came to Haven and that all changed. Driscoll changed, and Penny grew distant, grew to possibly resent him, certainly the relationship turned absuive. She says when he found out she was having an affair she actually thought he'd kill her, which is as good a reason as any to fake your own death. And leave your daughter behind, not that anyone's bringing her up right now. Everyone remembers the daughter from 1x02 Butterfly, though, right? Of course right.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">(Across town, Duke is sending Evi in to distract the Rev, as it turns out. Probably so he can ransack the office later. Let's all take note of her/their body language here, this will be important later.)</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiW02AFv1QzlgD4NIm9hZy4GblUWFdML6LrHFeS4tQl6nMpXtmJuEA9qsOdUI-oPJpgvzsY5XadCCWOSaUK_XjVWudO48Z7sAbBKTjI0jiIjltMCQ3ludI-dKWDzIQLwpEfy13bR1ichyphenhyphenE/s1600/haven207cc04.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiW02AFv1QzlgD4NIm9hZy4GblUWFdML6LrHFeS4tQl6nMpXtmJuEA9qsOdUI-oPJpgvzsY5XadCCWOSaUK_XjVWudO48Z7sAbBKTjI0jiIjltMCQ3ludI-dKWDzIQLwpEfy13bR1ichyphenhyphenE/s320/haven207cc04.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Audrey thinks she can reason with the Rev (HAH) or Mary (somewhat less hah but that requires that she be out of the Rev's influence) and Cole thinks there's no reasoning with the Rev (accurate) and that they should go in and take the kids by force (bad strategy, bad). It's up to Nathan to negotiate between the two, if there's any negotiating.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Duke's ransacking the church. Bad Duke. Efficient, though, he does find a list the Rev's left in some secret box. It's a list of people "killed by the cursed" or rather, by the Troubles. We've reproduced that list on our blog for you, the upshot is that some of those names have been the victims in actual episodes, and some not. And Duke is possibly about to sneak out with the list, except that's when Audrey and Nathan show up. Everyone wants to know what the other is doing here. Heh. Duke, that's a shitty lie. Nathan, act less shitty. Audrey wants to smack them both, particularly when Duke holds the location of the Rev hostage against getting that list back. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It turns out the Rev is on the docks. Because that's exactly where you want to be when you've taken the children of water breathers. We'll get back to that in a second, meanwhile Nathan is trying to arrest the Rev on no evidence whatsoever, unless an action happened that we didn't see here. The Rev has an alibi anyway, he's been right here all morning waiting for a late boat. Evi and Duke have an exchange which leads to the Rev giving Evi a somewhat shaded look until she confesses yes, she's Evi Crocker. Which is even </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">more</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> layered because the Rev presumably knows this, considering he's calling her and talking to her about spying on Duke. Y'all are way too complicated. Nathan deduces that Mary has the boys then, and before we can get into </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">that</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> some more Glendowers jump up from the water and grab two of the Rev's men and drag them under. What was I just saying about not going near the water if you're taking the children of water breathers? It's like pissing off Aquaman and then not immediately fleeing to, I don't know. Central Russia or something. Kansas. Cole jumps out of the water last, it's a bit contrived but I'll allow it, and he wants the kids back. Nathan points out that the Rev doesn't have the kids, he promises he's not just saying that, he needs to trust him as he trusted his father. It's a tense moment, considering there are people drowning while Nathan's basically pulling an Audrey here. Do we even remember back that far, when Nathan was as capable of talking people down as Audrey based on his knowledge of and compassion for the people of Haven? Because he's a Haven boy, and he's Troubled, and he knows what that's like? He never got to do it as often as she did, but there was a time when he listened and empathized more and obsessed over Audrey less.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Ahem. I'm not here to do the overview, I'm here to do season two, I'll stop digressing. Or at least try. At any rate, that is what Nathan's doing here, talking Cole down not from an explosion of Trouble-incontinece, but from using his Trouble to do something stupid and potentially homicidal. And he does manage it. Evi reveals the existence of a barn (AGAIN WITH THE BARNS) on the edge of town where food stores are sometimes kept, my god it's a barn being used as a barn. Okay, most barns in this show are being used as barns, except That Darn Barn. And we cut over to...</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">... the barn! Not that barn, the other barn. Where the children are dying and Mary is trying to protect them. And to be fair, she is trying to. As much as she can, as much as she can understand with her limited experience at the moment, and with the Rev's influence and what he's been telling her. Now she has her son telling her, which may be the first time given that Leith was too something to fully inform her. Too scared, too uncertain, too aloof, who the hell knows, he's dead now and can't tell us. It's up to her son to try and get her to understand not just how this works physically, but how this works as a family, emotionally. It's unclear whether or not he's getting through to her when the rest of everyone arrives, and by the rest of everyone I mean police, Nathan and Audrey, the Rev, and possibly some of the Rev's men in attendance outside the perimeter. It's a fairly sizable crowd. The Rev calls out to Mary, and Mary calls out to him to help them because the children are sick. It's sweet that she thinks he's going to do anything or be able to do anything. It's also a good sign that in general, everyone treating her as an extension of the Rev was correct, if she's calling out to him in the sort of situation that has to do with Glendower blood rather than a general illness or, well. Even in the absence of her own son telling her what they need, she's still calling to the Rev. That's not the best of signs. At any rate, the Rev wants something in exchange for him talking her down. Because of course he does. He wants Nathan and Audrey to come to Sunday services, to show the town that they stand with him. That's both insidiously suggestive and insidiously harmless-sounding. Fortunately Nathan and Audrey aren't buying it as harmless, and hell to the no with that. It is so un-harmless, in fact, that the Rev is willing to let the children die because he can't get what he wants. Nice, Rev. Penny/Gwen's estimation of him may not have been far off, although this may be age and ossification at work as well. Thats fine, though. Nathan has a trump card, according to the signal to the officer.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">That trump card is Penny/Gwen, herself. He does seem genuinely shocked to see her, or at least surprised into being deadened or suspicious, he's quieter than usual, I think is the form of the shock. Oh hey! There's a mention of the daughter. And an actual couple of lines about how could you leave her, and she didn't want to, but then we're back onto the subject of the humanity of the Troubled. I will actually accept that, given that it's more than we get a lot of the time and the Troubled are the focus of the scene right now, a pretty urgent focus. Penny tries to talk him out of hurting innocent people to make the Troubles go away, is essentially what he's doing. And to see the Troubled as fellow humans in need of compassion instead of monsters. I feel like there was an opportunity missed here, and yet it's done so smoothly we don't see it, to give the Rev a real origin point for his hatred of the Troubled, even if it was something as simple as one day he was walking down the street and saw a headless dancing bear suit. On the other hand maybe that </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">is</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> the point, and the Rev doesn't have an origin story, no Troubled killed anyone he cared about, he's just a hateful bigoted man. Ostensibly his reasoning is because the Troubled killed his wife, but, well. There she is. The Rev accuses her of not believing. As he does, is the unspoken conclusion of that sentence. And now here's an opportunity taken, where Penny calls out the Rev that this isn't about hating the Troubled because they're cursed (or possibly even because they're different) but because he got to Haven, he turned into a hateful bigot, and Penny left him, and he's been bitter about that ever since. So, she concludes at him, what he does here today isn't about saving anyone, it's about him and his ego. I added that last part in, but it's true. The Rev, though we don't entirely get the conclusions he's drawing from this or even if he's drawing conclusions from this, goes into the barn. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There's something to be said here for ongoing motif of Person Goes Into A Barn, Everyone Waits Outside And Is Tense For Things To Resolve. The Rev is no Audrey, though. He's not much of a Mara, either. Audrey is starting to sound like she wishes she'd done something else, possibly something involving storming and shooting, when the door opens and the kids come out. Walking, rather than being carried on stretches even though they were lying down gasping before, but never mind. Audrey congratulates the Rev on being a fucking human being for once and says that was very brave, convincing Mary that the kids needed more than prayer to save them. Which only gives the Rev the opening to say something ominous about the time for prayer is over. Yeah, why is that not making me feel any better. It's clearly not making Audrey feel any better either, but that's only because she's been witness to a lot of the Rev's frothing hatred. </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Meanwhile Nathan's got a call from Bangor about Leith's body. Turns out there was no water in his lungs, therefore no drowning, therefore probably murder going by the bruising patterns that came up post-mortem. The next scene they confront Cole and Gwen (we'll call her Gwen since she's not confronting the Rev and her past life anymore) about the bruising and the lack of water in the lungs and flat out say that Cole murdered him. It turns out Leith told Daniel that he'd figured out a way to provide for him and Mary, and it turns out that way was blackmail! Nice, Leith. Very nice. Especially since that's your own people you're blackmailing. We don't get any real sense of Leith as a person except for a few specific facts like this one, so it's hard to say if this is desperation or typical of his character. Doesn't speak well, though. Cole doesn't sound surprised or shocked or anything to hear this, although Gwen is. Not elaborately shocked, but still surprised and upset. Actually, probably after you've been both married to the Rev and on the compound for as long as she has, you learn to mute your responses, which isn't the healthiest thing ever, but. Ech. She seems more appalled by the whole thing than afraid of anything. Cole's reasoning isn't terrible either, the Rev probably would have, if he'd found out, come for the women and Penny in particular when the men were all underwater. That's exactly the type of chauvinsim he thinks like, never mind that if the women are at all prepared for this span of a couple years (AHAHAHA oh god no) when all their menfolk are underwater, they're more than capable of handling themselves, especially since this is kind of a cult. But then, the Rev has people too, and they might have more of them. So. Not terrible reasoning at all. Gwen blames herself for bringing this down on them, which, oh honey no. You are the catalyst or the cause, not the actor or the initiator meaning that it's all on the people who took the actions. I can't quite tell if this is typical empathy or typical abuse trauma, either. More likely a bit of both. Cole is quick to point out that this was his choice, this was how </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">he</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> decided to solve the problem. At which point Gwen also points out that Nathan can't take Cole to jail. Nathan agrees, it's not like the jail has a facility for housing a guy who can't breathe except underwater, the phrase he uses is that bringing him in would be a death sentence. Cole and Gwen have a momentary poignant good-bye, reminding us that their relationship is an enduring and healthier one. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Cole </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">is</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> panting some as they walk to the shore, which is subtle but he has been seen as otherwise healthy. He and Nathan agree that when the Troubles pass for this cycle (AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA) he'll come to him and turn himself in. ... You know, I said I wasn't going to think about this from the perspective of down here in sixth season, but damn the Glendowers are probably under the water for the rest of time or something. That sucks. Both for the women, for Mary in particular, and for the men and particularly the boys who must be scared by now and waiting for this to end. It hasn't been so long, what, a little over six months? And the Troubles are usually mentioned as sticking around for I think up to a year and a half, but they've got to be getting worried by now. Anyway. Nathan and Cole have an agreement to work within the bounds of both the law and the Troubles. Audrey meanwhile is asking Gwen about Lucy Ripley, and we just get the usual description. Gwen says that she disappeared after the Colorado Kid murder, that that was the only time anyone saw her cry. Enter Duke! Who has been watching them from the jeep, and who gives us the most interesting statements of this entire scene. First of all the tattoo, Duke asks about the tattoo and Cole responds that when the Rev's men come for them, there are those who will fight. Which, to me, yes, that sounds like either the Guard is heavily populated by Glendowers (which, I wonder how that was supposed to work in times of Trouble, so maybe this was supposed to co-exist with the Teagues after all?) and definitely that at least something Guard-shaped was going on with that tattoo right now. Second, about him and what it has to do with him, and all Cole knows is he's being watched in case he decides to follow in his father's footsteps. That's </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">definitely</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> foreshadowing, but on the other hand we get payoff on the Crocker bloodline curse/gift a lot sooner than we get payoff on anything about the Glendowers or how long they've been in the town, so there's that. In very very long retrospect, I kind of wonder if the Glendowers weren't meant to be specifically such a big thing, and it was more the founding families of Haven in general. Crocker, Glendower, Rasmussen. We got a lot of buildup of that, and later on the Teagues, but then the origins of the Haven curse turned out to be all otherworldly, so, um. So much for the founding families? I'm not sure, I got nothing. Just a couple of statements that have definitely at least somewhat paid off later. Duke wants to know why one of the Glendowers killed him. Cole doesn't know who killed his father, and by the sound of his tone he doesn't think it was the Glendowers, but he does think Duke should stay the hell out of Simon's business. I'd agree, but clearly he doesn't have a choice.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Rev is also watching, along with Evi, who's starting to have doubts about whatever it is they're doing. The Rev is not up for doubts today, he wants to be sure Duke doesn't suspect anything. It turns out Evi getting the Rev away from the church </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">was</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> a double-double, and she thinks the Rev has his loyalty or at least his tenacious curiosity now that he knows his father was murdered. Evi, your inability to read people accurately is going to get you killed someday. I'm not even kidding.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Enya! For when you absolutely need that Celtic one-woman-wail and have a surprising amount of money left in your budget. (I have no idea what use-rights to Exile are, but it's one of the more high-profile songs they've had in their soundtrack.) Mary and Daniel make their goodbyes, Mary visibly trying to be brave in the face of something she doesn't at all understand that's taking her boy from her. Poor sweetie. Daniel isn't worried, he's going with his family and it's weird, but it's going to be okay. Which just goes to show a strong family unit can get you through a lot of shit. Gwen comes over to offer that strong family support to Mary, which seems to be accepted. At least for now. And once again I'm struck by the fact that, at least so far in Haven... they're never coming out again. Poor kiddos. Nathan and Audrey watch and have a somewhat maudlin conversation about the splitting of the family, Audrey commenting on they don't even know how long they'll be gone. Nathan commenting that the family is united by secrets (well, a big secret and all the ones that secret causes) and that he wanted to get to know his father better and he didn't even know the right questions to ask. Family secrets evidently being much on his mind right now. Audrey tries to reassure him, because that's the sort of person she is, that Gwen told her Lucy and Garland helped a lot of people, and they've been following in their footsteps without even knowing it. Aww.</span>Kitty Chandlerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05524808952260453841noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4271373189216022547.post-38405861628835392072015-11-14T16:58:00.000-08:002015-11-14T17:29:47.375-08:00Remember To Forget Haven S5E20 Just Passing Through<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; line-height: 1.38; white-space: pre-wrap;">We have written a new verse to the song of our people. It is called STOP FUCKING WITH THE TIMESTREAM. Previously on Haven, we have a brief summary of how Stuart Mosley's Trouble works (Nathan's fault. Because of the aforementioned fucking with the timestream. Or IN the timestream, NATHAN.) and another summary of Dave telling Vince he's terrified he killed the Colorado Kid. More interesting: Hayley! Huh. Hi Hayley. ...Hayley Coulton. Well that'll be significant later! And then the reveal that Dave killed Charlotte from the end of last ep, as if we were going to forget THAT. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Rather than starting </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">exactly </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">where we left off, we pick up down … at the school? Is that the school? No, that's the Chief's office, upon further/closer inspection. And who knows where Vince is. Probably off pretending that he doesn't need or want support from Dwight or Audrey in the revelation that his brother's been getting possessed on a regular basis. Oh don't worry, Vince! There's worse to come! Nathan's questioning Dave and trying to pry answers out of him, which boil down to he swears he was being possessed and he doesn't remember anything or know why Croatoan would want Charlotte dead. Uh. Nathan? You've previously established that he knows more or less what the hell you're up to, and what her proposed plan was, Croatoan does not appear to WANT to go back into the void, would you like to ask another stupid question and get another dumb answer? Dave is rattled enough to cough up the story of waking up on the beach near James Cogan's body, which Nathan pretty much knows is going to happen the second he asks the question but he's being very, very restrained and trying to hold himself to cop questions. (I find it interesting that the order here goes "James Cogan, the Colorado Kid, your son." Particularly since the poor bastard's been known only as the Colorado Kid for so long.) Dave claims not to remember much at all, except there was a woman on the beach opening? or passing through? a thinny right before he got sucked into it. I have so many questions about whether this is really all he remembers or if he's just trying not to fuck with the timestream, or if for that matter this is due to time paradoxes. Or what. Insufficient data. The important part is that there's another way into the void, which is where they need to go next! Yay! Dave does not think yay. Dave thinks oh fuck my life also you're scary when you're intense, Officer Wuornos. Just count your blessings that he's NOT blaming you for this, Dave. Yet. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We're </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">certainly considering whether or not we blame you or if that really is all trauma. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Down to the beach they go! I have some eyebrows for how they're walking all arm-in-arm, but turns out that's going to be a deliberate callback to 1983 in a bit, so that makes sense. Besides, to be fair, the last time Audrey went near a thinny, Mara showed up and possessed </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">her</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (or perhaps the better term is repossessed), so I can understand Nathan being jittery about it. Nathan. Audrey. Both of you. Charlotte sealed all the thinnies so Mara couldn't get across in </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">this </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">month, year, however long it's been. Although I will accept that she likely also sealed several of them 500 years ago, too. Also the shroud appears to have made the thinnies inaccessible, though it was never clear if that was due to where it landed or due to something in the very nature </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">the shroud. Regardless, it's not really a surprise that Audrey can't see a shimmer or sense anything. Also of interest: Nathan called her Parker more often when he has a purpose and feels like they're secure in their relationship, which is kind of adorable. Audrey questions this whole controller crystal barn rebuild crap, how the hell are they supposed to be able to do this without Charlotte. And she hesitates over calling her her mother, but it's a title she seems to have accepted. Made some kind of peace with. We get another recap for the folks in the back as to how this is supposed to work, remove the Troubles and the evil Trouble-eating monster formerly known as Mara's father and send them back into the void whence they came without killing everyone. So far it doesn't sound like that's gotten distorted by memory from when we first heard it, so that's good. We hope. Okay, so no thinny, so… what. A Trouble? Caused by this unknown element of the woman on the beach? Nathan this seems like an awfully fast leap from woman on the beach to LET'S GO 88 MPH BACK IN TIME, I'm just saying, but it </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">is </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">the only place they know a thinny was and therefore it's their best bet to do anything. Plus he's gone back in time and returned successfully once before! I still think this is not a thing you fucking gamble on, even when you know that fucking IN the timeline previously caused the Troubles to have a particular new shape for the two cycles after, which seems to be more fruitful in reaching an end to the Troubles. Maybe. Roll credits and let's go find out.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">That police station looks like it's been rather thoroughly cleaned up since it was the Last Home for Zombies. And very quickly, too! Actually that whole street looks very… calm and non-threatening considering the whole downtown stretch used to be Troubles Alley. Uh. Guys? Is your continuity suffering or were actions taken that we didn't see? Okay, so, Vince gets filled in on Nathan's plan to use Mosley, he confirms that he recognizes the woman (presumably that's his sketch) but he doesn't remember a name, it's been a long time, etc. Nathan has on the 80s version of his usual clothes, which are at least always somber enough that the only thing we have to facepalm at is that tie and the jacket. I'm not sure why we need to have </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">another </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">litany of the reasons Nathan's risking traveling back into the past, but he fills Vince in and we learn that Vince was actually laid up in-hospital that day. Why? We don't know! Fuck. I wish we did know, I have the suspicion that might be important later. But we pause now for Audrey to give Nathan shit over the nylon jacket (he raided Goodwill! aww!) and admit that she's glad she's immune to this Trouble. So are we. As much fun as I think it'd be watching various versions of AudSarLu interact, I don't think that would be a good idea here. Yes, Nathan, you switch on his Trouble because you KEEP FUCKING WITH IT. The poor guy. At least they have the reverse switch in the form of the photo all ready to go this time. Vince offers to go with him because he knows 1983 and his other-self is in one place and they can at least avoid </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">that </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">piece of paradox. Well. I guess that's fair, though I have so many questions about why he thinks it's necessary he goes. Is it because he wants to protect Nathan from Simon Crocker Just In Case? That'd be </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">my </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">inclination. Plus it turns out he thinks he can save his brother. It also paves the way for the hilariousest exchange over Vince's clothes and him pulling his hair into a ponytail. Audrey feels it's necessary to deliver the No Timeline Fucking You Guys speech. I don't blame her, but I don't know why she thinks it's going to do a single fucking thing, especially with that look on Vince's face. She also has a fake ID for Nathan! Awwww. He thinks this is adorable and hilarious. Not at all hilarious and less adorable is the reminder that he can't change what happens. He can't save their son. Even if they both wish he could. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I'm not sure what Duke has to do with Don't Fuck Up The Timestream, except for the part where he went off and did not, fortunately, kill his grandfather the last time they got blasted to the past. He's asking for a wake-up call at something that looks about as good as the Winchester brothers' default no-tell motel, which is adorable. Duke you're really severely out of practice with being on the run, aren't you. Which does also speak well? I guess? To his ability to form and practice new habits. But still. (In therp-speak they call that emotional resilience. The More You Know.) This is, of course, a cue for something big to happen; given the previouslies I kinda expected it to be Hayley tracking him down all WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT, having spied from afar to be sure he's no longer aiming to kill her. It's… not. It's a bunch of guys doing a very bad impression of being from the government. Guys, this is such an oversell I cannot even begin to tell you. I lived in From The Government for 18 years, I have experience in I Am From The Government, and this is the absolute least convincing and worst oversell of Ma'am We At The Alphabet Soup Agency Have No Sense Of Humor Or Personal Space. Though I guess their suits are ill-fitting enough! That's like the one detail they got right, though they don't appear to be packing enough weaponry and earwigs for that to be the reason for the bad tailoring. (Concealed holsters and comms make bad seam lines, unless you get expensive and specific modifications made to your suits.) (</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A: </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Ask me sometime about playing spot-the-shoulder-and-ankle-holsters at the Dalai Lama's talk because the sound system was so bad I couldn't hear his speech.) And I also don't understand why we've got all the drama for this thing. I am, however, going to giggle madly over Duke's alias being Skip McMannis, with a DL issued from Massachusetts and oddly dated like it's a Canadian date of birth, day first then month. (May 22, 1978, which is actually NOT Balfour's DOB at all so I think we can safely say that this is anywhere from very carefully arranged or semi-intentional on the part of the writers and props department.) Interestingly, that's also a Class C license, not the normal Class D, which is to say that it's a commercial license, it specifically disallows Duke from driving a semi or most buses, but it </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">does </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">allow some fairly heavy-duty hauling. Good for smuggling, in other words! Also allows him to carry more than 15 people if the vehicle meets all other regulations, y'all can go look up the super-specific numbers, but it sounds an awful lot like specifically for that monster of a yellow truck he's got. Issued in '07, so yeah it's a few years out of date but you do want a nice padding of backstory to a solid alias. So the asshole in charge of dumping all his stuff on the bed is wrong and stupidly wrong, but he does provide useful data in the form of implying that they've been keeping tabs on Duke since (at least) 2007! He is officially very fucking confused now. And tired. And would like his fucking life to stop having random assholes barging into it, or not so random, on account of these guys shouldn't even remember him. Interesting: he </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">also </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">refers to it as the shroud, though in this case I'm chalking that up to consistency for the sake of not confusing the audience, not any greater meaning. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">That police station continues to look busy and active like it's a normal station. Um. Guys? What the fuck. Seriously. Also where's Dwight? Is he off running the place? Inquiring goddamn minds. Anyway, the benefit to having Vince go along with Nathan is that it allows a second person who's not Audrey to go in and talk him through do you remember this event? And where you were on that day? Vince stop drawing on your authority as former leader of the Guard, that's creepy as fuck. I assume he's doing it to start agitating poor Mosley, but stoppit augh. The poor bastard apparently also spent the whole damn day in the station fighting about parking tickets, so hey! They know where to find him when they want to go back, and as long as the station layout hasn't changed so much they get sent back in time halfway through a wall they'll be fine. (Seriously I feel this is a potential downside of that Trouble as yet unexplored.) One downside they do get this time: a witness! With a camera. Lucky for them it's a Polaroid camera so Nathan can just confiscate it after the ad break with unnecessary 80s clothes. Some nice details in the station house, though: the Challenger did indeed first launch on April 4, 1983, and Reagan was indeed promoting the everloving fuck out of SDI, also known as Star Wars, after announcing it March 23, 1983. How convenient for such extremely well-known events to occur early in the year! Also cigarettes, Twinkies, and other snack foods all over the break room. Yes, Nathan, you and Vince should both have come up with a cover story in case of witnesses because you </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">knew you would be transported to the goddamn police station</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Where there are </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">people</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. What a shock. Fortunately Nathan can pull off We're From The Government We're Here To Help better, largely by dint of being a lifelong cop in the first place and partially because taciturn and carefully contained is his natural state. While he may not remember a ton about the fearmongering of the 1980s, he remembers enough to pull off "your country thanks you for your help," which just makes me laugh. I'm so disappointed that this isn't ickle!Nathan or ickle!Duke, but I suppose we had to avoid having that level of timeline fuckery. And the kid turns out to be important later. So! May 22, 1983, as it turns out, because they keep a calendar on the wall. Because not everyone has a smartphone! In fact nobody does hello tape recorder for confessions. Yes, Virginia, we really are in the 80s. And they've found their ticket home, pun intended, so now it's time to… split up? No Vince. Vince. No. Nathan would like to tell him no in much stronger words except this is Vince and any Do Not Do The Thing, Vincent Teagues will only make him increase the fucking thing. Goddammit. Nathan has bigger problems on his plate, though he hopes they'll meet up on the beach later. Look at him not discussing how they're going to go see horrible things happen to their loved ones. </span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNDNq_zD5z_LJafe1XH52gGgfxwl7pV9Mf3P1SFrBtXA_pjcUL8GEn8vWrGykJ8MAQA-sJJHeUUjcMJz6tVfgThucbpNjYr5bWlsXsaswDicqs1cBYNNfLQsMdT3tbA-Vhul5rVJ2-OPc/s1600/haven520cc02.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNDNq_zD5z_LJafe1XH52gGgfxwl7pV9Mf3P1SFrBtXA_pjcUL8GEn8vWrGykJ8MAQA-sJJHeUUjcMJz6tVfgThucbpNjYr5bWlsXsaswDicqs1cBYNNfLQsMdT3tbA-Vhul5rVJ2-OPc/s320/haven520cc02.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">He'll deal with the problem in front of him! Which is, namely, how to go talk to his father without giving away the homeworld. Good luck with that, Nathan! Oh my god young Garland was kinda hot, in the Stereotypical Rugged Cop way. I'm so disturbed. They did find a good actor for him, too, having gone and looked for younger pics of Nick Campbell oh my god. That's actually kind of freaky. About the main difference seems to be that Nick Campbell was a brunette before he aged into salt and pepper. I'm going to hide behind the couch now. And it's Lucy! In the office. Holding hands with Garland. WHO CALLED A ROMANCE OF SOME KIND. DID WE. YES WE DID. They're so wrapped up in each other, in fact, that neither of them notices the door opening until Nathan makes with the awkward throat-clearing. Guys. Situational awareness, dammit. Nathan you really should've seen that coming, though I admit it's reasonable to have a huge filter of NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPETOPUS over thinking about your dad being involved with the same woman you love now. Be a little more weird and awkward about it now, though, why don't you, that won't tip them off that something's wrong at all! Lucy obviously knows who the woman is, Garland would like it known that he's not welcoming random idiot strangers into his office what the fuck. Nathan BUTTERWORTH? BUTTERWORTH, AUDREY? THAT'S WHAT YOU WENT WITH? This is about the pancakes isn't it. That explains everything about those glances they exchanged of "oh really" and "I had to" when she was handing him the IDs anyway. But BUTTERWORTH? Okay, okay, calming down now, enough with the giggling. Except then we have to capslock all over again over SHOW MY LADY FRIEND OUT. Both for Garland calling Lucy that to Nathan's face (and not knowing why it's hilarious) and for the idea of AudSarLu as anyone's "lady friend." She's not laughing, or having to hide it, though, she's too unnerved as Garland walks her out, passing along that she recognizes the woman, it's Barbara Coulton. HI HAYLEY'S MOTHER. Lucy is planning today as her last day here, she's going back into the barn and wants to talk to James, see him one last time, Garland will get rid of the feds on their back so they don't draw the wrong kind of attention. Good luck with that. Aww honeys. There's something kind of weird underlying Lucy making sure James gets out of town, and I don't think it's </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">just </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mom wants to be sure her son doesn't see her disappear into the personality-eating barn for 27 years. I suspect it has as much or more to do with the Guard and/or Simon Crocker. And/or Arla, if Lucy sensed something off about that woman even then. And/or James' Trouble. (Did he inherit Nathan's? WE HAVE SO MANY QUESTIONS but we'll save some for the beach.) It's nice, too, to see Garland at least trying to be emotionally supportive even though he's also apparently emotionally stunted sort of by default. Less with women than with other men! Yay toxic masculinity.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Duke appears to be handcuffed to the bed. Well, with those bars who </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">wouldn't</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> go there. He starts trying to find out what they know, what the shroud's taken from their memories, because hey! First people who know who he is outside of, well, Hayley and Seth, and Seth only after he essentially inoculated him against the memory-fuckery. So far the two points of difference there are that Hayley and her parents knew Duke well before this round of Troubles started and presumably from interacting with him in locations that were not Haven and therefore not obfuscated, and as far as we know Seth is </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">not </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Troubled. Still, it'd be a bit odd to have at least five mooks in suits who don't have the right bearing or knowledge to be of the Guard (they're not nearly scared enough of him for that although I suppose it's possible that taking away their knowledge of Haven would also take away at least some of their reason to be scared/wary of Crockers and this is why I fucking hate mind-magic. and time travel.) but also be Troubled at this late date in the game. He goes on to prod them into coughing up that they're not from the government, which by that look serves pretty much as confirmation. I'm not sure what anyone thought was going to happen as a result of that information, either the mooks with Duke yelling for help or Duke with getting knocked unconscious and possibly gagged. I mean, you already handcuffed him, guys, might's well bring out the gimp suit.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Meanwhile in 1983 Garland returns with the coffee, black, with a touch of head-explodie. Nathan keeps giving him these quiet looks of incredulity and amusement, it's a very nice touch from Lucas Bryant, sort of the Nathan Wuornos version of WHAT THE FUCK. THIS WAS A BAD IDEA. Because that's damn well what I'd be doing by now. Of course Garland has to bring up that he has a kid named Nathan, because that's what you do when you're proud of your kids even if Nathan didn't always hear it as much as he wanted, or feel it all the time. He does know this now, though, so his only response to the jibe about butts on desks is to make a not at all veiled to the viewer comment about a kid wanting to be close to his dad. Oh sweetie. I wonder if that'll come back to haunt Garland in a bit. Anyway, to business. Which is confidential, of course, what he wants with Barbara Coulton, but Garland will totally put every available man on it, and it just so happens that the only man available is him. He's not saying that last part but I'm inferring it from the skepticism. And the outright lying. Not that I can blame him, Nathan is an absolute shit undercover operative, considering that when he tries to direct the conversation over to the Teagues by asking very not at all nonchalant questions about the local paper, well, first, it's clumsy as hell, and second he's referring to a local hospital by its local name. Which an FBI guy who didn't come from this particular small town would never do! Gee. You think that aroused some suspicions? Garland has a much better poker face and is going to go check on one thing, letting Nathan infer it's to do with the case and in actuality having to do with Nathan's utter shite cover story. And in the meantime Nathan will sit here gormless and clueless. Or are those the same thing. Clueless squared.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">While Garland checks on Nathan's totally fake credentials, the kid from earlier wanders in! Hi kid. Who must be significant somehow but isn't anyone we've met before, although if he's in Duke's grade he's presumably in Nathan's as well, so I guess Nathan just… never knew him? Argh details people. Anyway, Duke stole his good camera and now he wants the nice outsider's help, probably because he </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">is </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">an outsider and therefore an object of curiosity and less likely than the other cops to tell him that they're just being kids. Particularly with the possibility of blackmail, at a guess. Nathan doesn't do any of those things, though, he beckons the kid closer and tells him the secret of Duke's hiding stash. Oh </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Nathan</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Stop fucking with the timeline, Nathan. Though at least it's minor comparatively. Also this is definitely by way of putting the fear of "I work for the government" in the poor kid. Which, come to think of it explains a thing we find out later. Never mind.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Lucy's using the payphone in the station to say the beginnings of her goodbyes to James, which is arguably weirder to us than the tape recorder and the polaroid camera. I mean, apart from the issue of when was the last time you used a payphone (I'd say when was the last time you saw a payphone but there was actually one near where I work until a couple years ago), do you see how old that thing is? It looks like it's made out of cast iron instead of the bakelite phones that were showing up at that point. No, that's not the weirdness, that's just what distracted me for a second there, here's the weirdness. First of all, Lucy and James who we barely know. Second of all, the way she says she has to go away for a while at least at that time implies that she hasn't told him about the barn, the 27 years, and so on. On the other hand after they have their moment of cling and arrange for the walk on the beach he tells her "I love you, Mom," which only makes sense if she's already told him about the 27 year time jump because otherwise, um. They are kind of the same age. That's impossible in the extreme or at least highly improbable in Haven without a few very specific Troubles. Arla's being one of them, but he doesn't know that yet. At any rate, one can assume several contradictory things from that about a minute's worth of conversation, so, yeah. We're confused! I'm going to go with Lucy's obfuscating not because of James specifically, but because she's in a police station surrounded by people who might be passing and wondering why she's going to have to be in a barn for 27 years. We do yell at people a lot for talking about secret things in the public haunt of men, but it damn well does make things confusing when it hasn't already been established who knows what. At any rate. We can guess that James knows the basic shape of at least some stuff given that he's calling Lucy "Mom" and put a pin in that for now. Garland's coming up to tell Lucy that alarm bells are ringing, can she go stall him while he checks out this alleged FBI guy. Yes, sure she can, because hell no FBI coming stomping all over my town. Come to think of it, with the exception of the real Agent Howard, has legit federal presence </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">ever</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> come to Haven? Or has it always been Our Heroes or people from other dimensions in disguise. (</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A: </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">While she's screaming below, no. Apart from Audrey II and the real Agent Howard, no legit federal presence has been in Haven. Barnvatar Agent Fuck You and Charlotte.) </span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhp62T0gmc5qPVe5hc69SB50_O9QSMBhitMZN63Kv3oWsy8-a_oaV6VaMIAEWkt29tY1YETuDfdN-3OyRwhTxVL5diowVsV9hqhDfX4rknqgZMmNcQ3D57OfNM7s16jQA3ZFtT6u2FBR7s/s1600/haven520cc03.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhp62T0gmc5qPVe5hc69SB50_O9QSMBhitMZN63Kv3oWsy8-a_oaV6VaMIAEWkt29tY1YETuDfdN-3OyRwhTxVL5diowVsV9hqhDfX4rknqgZMmNcQ3D57OfNM7s16jQA3ZFtT6u2FBR7s/s320/haven520cc03.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I was going to think back and count up all the federal presences but now I have to go OH FUCK YOU ALL OF YOU. WHY DO VINCE AND DAVE LIVE AT 19 WHATEVER WHATEVER. WHY. Because Stephen King, that's why, but I'm still going to scream. A lot. Also at some point the Teagues repainted their house, though it being blue I guess is the least of my continuity concerns. (We saw their house in 1x06 Fur for those of you who are all "But wait, when did we see the Teagues' house?" There was a bear. Someone made a bear.) (Yes, I in fact remember that their house was white and not deep blue shut up.) I'm more concerned with the continuity of VINCE WHY ARE YOU TALKING TO YOUR BROTHER. LEAVE THE FUCKING TIMESTREAM ALONE. Not to mention why are you also a terrible liar. It's not so much the details which I'm sure he's pulling from bits and pieces of conversations with Dave over the years as the drastic oversell. Because the Teagues all do things dramatically. Apparently he's trying to get Dave out of town under some pretext of wanting to hire him or buy his story, it's unclear in all the giggling and mania and lobstering. No, no lobstering, leave the lobstrosities alone. Vince's persona would like Dave to explore the dude ranches in New Mexico, which I guess is very far away from both Colorado and North Carolina and Haven, Maine, so I guess that's as far away from Stephen King country as you can get? And he keeps selling it and he should have just stuck with a dude ranch in New Mexico or better yet, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">not actively gone after Dave</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> because we all know that trying to fix things in the past only breaks them further. Ahem. But he should have kept it simple and not gotten carried away, is the main point, because when Dave starts trying to figure out where's the catch, that's when he figures out it's almost 30 years older Vince. Yes, Vince, you've been made. That's because you're a moron. Having established that, I give you a random outburst of HOLY FUCK IT'S GILBERT FUCKING BLYTHE WHY IS GILBERT BLYTHE YOUNG DAVE TEAGUES. Sorry, I had to get that out there, it's been bugging me. You're welcome.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Back at the police station no seriously what the hell is that ugly-ass lamp thing on the Chief's desk that looks like it's a popsicle stick model of the damn lighthouse. Better than what is why. Why is that. Nathan shove it off the desk so it doesn't give young!you nightmares, it's going to give me nightmares. Nathan's too busy going through his father's desk and his father's files and generally being stupid as he lingers over the files long enough to almost get caught by Lucy. Okay, actually get caught, but she's not calling him on sliding a file underneath the desk blotter, she's just going to pretend she didn't see that and give him a chance to be honest by asking him what he's doing behind the good detective's desk. He was just borrowing a pen. Let me give that capital letters because it's so cliche it should be trademarked at this point, he was Borrowing A Pen. Lucy counters with Oh Here You Can Use Mine, because yes Nathan she saw what you did there. And they don't shake hands but their fingers touch enough when she hands him the pen that she knows something happened, and immediately comments on it. Not necessarily because of something she felt (although we don't know she didn't feel anything) but because of Nathan's reaction. And her immediately commenting on it is why out of all of the AudSarLuMar incarnations Lucy is totally our identification version. Ahem. Nathan has no idea what she's talking about and he's just going to go now. Garland or no Garland, not that Lucy is supposed to know he said he'd be right back. Lucy recovers quickly, though, enough to stall him with hey, I was supposed to help you, maybe I know this person you're looking for, all sly and poker-faced. Mostly poker-faced. Nathan even stutters over his answer to her. Partly because that's a very Audrey sort of a thing to do and say, and, well. How many incarnations has he met now? Audrey, Sarah, Mara, Lexie if Lexie ever existed, and now Lucy. Poor guy's head must be spinning. No, he's just going to go, the last time he was fucking around with an Audrey incarnation in the timestream he really was fucking around with an Audrey incarnation in the timestream, and how that ended up is about to die on the beach. Also it looks like his dad is sleeping with or at least romantically entangled with this version. Hawkward. Lucy does call him back to get her pen back, but rather than risk touching her again he's just going to leave it on the sill. Yes. Nathan looks so pained and so tired, poor bastard. Lucy's look in his direction is some bizarre mix of, I don't trust you you are up to something and I'm going to shake you till it falls out, oh you poor boy, and all right you amuse me good night sleep well and I'll most likely kill you in the morning. And of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">course</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> the second he's gone she's going and pulling the file out from under the blotter where he stuffed it and seeing that he was looking up Barbara Coulton. Now she really is going to kill him in the morning. After she calls Barbara and tells her that there's a Fed looking for her.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Barbara's house is terrifyingly yellow. Were all houses in the early 80s these bright vivid scary colors? Is this just a Maine thing? I know a lot of the New England Victorians I've seen have been absolutely scarifying bright colors. Never mind. Nathan's approaching Barbara with all the tact of, well, of a guy who thinks going into the past to scare up a thinny is a good idea, so I guess there's that. He's about to tell her some kind of a story even as she tries to brush him off with Now's not a good time when he notices the ring on her thumb. Uh-oh. Double uh-oh. Because it's not until Nathan comments on the ring that she freaks out. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Triple</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> uh-oh because she just ripped a thinny through in her living room and there it she goes! Well, fuck. Says Nathan's expression, doubly so as he sees her come out of another thinny in her yard and go running off. He starts to give chase, too, except there's a six-gun in his way held by a very angry Garland. There is no Nathan Butterworth, he's got a strange Fed in his town going after a Troubled person, and no, he is not letting Nathan go until he gets some goddamn answers. He's even looked into the staties and other police agencies and he can't find any record on Nathan. Have you looked in your filing cabinet at home for an adoption certificate? Okay, I'll stop. The funny part of this is on first viewing I was shrieking about how Nathan should just tell him the damn truth, and then Nathan proceeded to do just that. Well then! A novel approach. But, really, when you're used to a town like Haven, weird truths suddenly become a lot more of a sliding scale and a lot less of a stepping outside a rigid set of boundaries. We get a few pieces of concrete data such as when and where he was born, and a repetition of his bio-parents' name(s). Not that any of this is useful, but it's nice to go in our little indices. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Garland is incredulous after the break. As anyone would be, really. Nathan tells him how he got there and whose Trouble it is, and while Garland knows the family he also points out very reasonably that anyone can pick a name out of a phone book. He did lower his gun though. And, smart man, he pulls out his badge and pokes Nathan in the back of the neck with it to see if he feels it. Back of the neck, so Nathan doesn't see it coming. Not that Nathan doesn't know what he's doing and have I mentioned I love how quick on the stick everyone is here? Not wasting time asking what are you doing and why, not bothering to deny what at least is possible given Fucking Haven, just boom, information, discussion, information again. It's so glorious. I want all of the Garland-Nathan buddy cop show. They have a further laconic exchange about the prick test, which Nathan totally knew he was going to do because he knows him, how he thinks, and Garland's visibly and audibly taking this information in and wrapping his mind around it. Pretty damn quickly, too, this is not a small thing Nathan's asking him to accept. But he's managing it. Enough to crack a joke about making Chief when Nathan calls him by that moniker. And an even better crack about the ears. Oh boys. I think the hardest part here is watching Nathan's eyes tighten and become strained at the 'son.' Because ... well, because. Years more baggage, and a few more months to a year plus with Garland gone. Oh sweeties. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I have some, I will admit, oh-sweeties sympathy for the Teagues. Not a ton. I'm going to keep yelling at Vince, we can just take that as written? I'm also going to yell at Dave, who's trying to pry stories of the future out of his future!brother. (I still want to know why the fuck 1983!Vince is in hospital besides getting him out of the way for this episode. It could just be that! But we have finely honed suspicious as hell minds about "coincidences" on this show.) Vince is not here to tell you about flying cars, death rays, or the end of the Cold War, Dave, stoppit. I am, however, incredibly disappointed that he doesn't use (probably due to copyright reasons) "I'm sorry, Dave, I cannot do that." This Dave is also much… sharper, in some ways, much more reckless and confident in his abilities than the one we've come to know and who's been tossed around like the Troubles' plaything for at least a few months. Up to and including snarking at Vince over the terrible danger he's supposedly in. Once he plants himself in a chair with clear intentions of going nowhere until Vince shares details, Vince coughs up quite a lot about Croatoan, possession, blah blah blah, ending on the vague but ominous note of Dave's fate will be sealed if this doesn't get stopped. Oh Vince honey. I admire your desire to save your brother from a miserable fucking time as a monster's meatpuppet, but you are going about it ALL WRONG. Dave may be more reckless than we're used to, but he's also used to listening to Vince and maybe even taking orders, such that once Vince finishes the shortest possible version of Your Life's About To Suck A Lot he's willing to leave. I have a question! Does Dave know he's a freak even by Troubled standards already? Or is this knowledge, such as it is, that he picked up after his initial possession? Okay, two questions: how much, if any, of this does he retain post-beach? And how much of the garbled version that we get in the present day is due to mind-wipeage and how much is due to almost twenty seven years happening between then and now. Or now and other now. I demand answers to Croatoan's memory-fuckery that aren't just "it works however the writers need it to." Internal consistency is a goodness!</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVpxN_EQN5LHLE56qbkSgSjdYwbvMOn50ZjL5ZDjl9Wf1z3RGmRdUOhknz0ZYx8fPpr8O4vyYx5PRHjZqK4zzM6j3Fbi85RittSBO6BolM7AQ3s2Pj9IBgMsXXebP1NikEcIkatshlrC8/s1600/haven520cc04.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVpxN_EQN5LHLE56qbkSgSjdYwbvMOn50ZjL5ZDjl9Wf1z3RGmRdUOhknz0ZYx8fPpr8O4vyYx5PRHjZqK4zzM6j3Fbi85RittSBO6BolM7AQ3s2Pj9IBgMsXXebP1NikEcIkatshlrC8/s320/haven520cc04.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Duke comes back to blurry consciousness to the sounds of a chopper's rotor whirring. O-kay. This is seriously WAY more drama than is necessary, dude. The be-earwigged mooks mostly leave to "go help him" which lets us see that Duke's in room #4, for whatever significance that may or may not have. The only thing that brings to mind within the show's cosmology is the four figures on the labyrinth/Guard symbol, although if you really want I can give you chapter and verse on the symbology of the number four in several cultures. No, probably not. Head Mook stays inside to keep an eye on Duke, who makes a more halfhearted than usual attempt to bribe him into letting him go. Seriously, where do you think you're getting that money from, Duke? Given you no longer exist to the banks? It's a bad job of lying and a worse job of bribing, honestly, since he hasn't taken the time (or had it) to find out anything about what motivates these guys. MICE doesn't work so good if you have no intel to apply it with. (That's Money, Ideology, Coercion, and Ego, for those of you less up on your Cold War-era counterintel acronyms.) No, Head Mook likes suits! Of course you do, honey. Though he does have a better tailor than the other four. Enter Head Honcho, in a much nicer suit, with all due pomp and declarations of hi I've been looking for you. Duke is so over this shit. Duke would probably rather be back in vision-land with Walter's cryptic bullshit; at least that involved DATA at the same time as Walter kept jerking him around. Pretty concise, clear data too. Surprisingly. This is just overblown for the sake of being overblown. Sigh.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Oh hey, it's time for the inevitable Accidentally Overhearing Things Out Of Context scene! I guess we know how Lucy found out about the Troubles now. I'm a little surprised that both Nathan and Garland failed to notice her pulling up and coming up the porch, given Lucy wasn't hiding her footsteps and the guys are plenty paranoid and attuned to their environment. But it serves the scene. Nathan and Garland discuss the Coulton Trouble, how it lets people move through solid space but thin air is a new one on Garland. Well, how about those interdimensional rings? Which Lucy has. Garland assumes Barbara stole it, which I suppose is possible, but it's also possible that she was given it for some other reason? Hard to know for sure in the context we're given, though there's a behind the scenes bit on SyFy's site that confirms yes, it was stolen. At the moment we know there are at least three rings in not so much play but this point in time: Lucy has one according to Garland, Nathan has one that we see, and unless something else happened that we didn't see Vince and Dave have one tucked away in the museum they call the Herald offices. Nathan's and Lucy's should be the same one, duplicated by time travel. Vince refers to the one they have as Sarah's, so that one wasn't likely in play in '83. So who the hell's is Barbara's? I'm not picking at this more because it's possible it's Vince and Dave's and they recover it later in time to give it to Audrey in at the end of s1, but it's going to bug me. Meanwhile Nathan's version of the Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi, the thinny-creator is our only hope is all the more poignant for being typically understated. Which Garland seems to recognize. There's a lot of really, really lovely acting and bouncing off each other going on here; they got very lucky with their casting, I think, both in terms of someone who passes as a young Garland and in terms of the actor chemistry. Garland offers up Agent Howard's name and we will all take a minute to yell at the screen about KNOWING someone and SHOOTING him are TWO DIFFERENT THINGS, NATHAN. I suppose that's </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">like </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">not messing with the timestream any more than he already has, though. Howard has apparently coughed up the kill the one you love clause to Garland, which only gives us, oh, ALL the questions ever. Why? Under what circumstances? Why Garland and not Lucy? Or James, for that matter? What fucking game is Agent Fuck You the barnvatar playing at this time? We already know Garland has a self-sacrifice streak from his death in 1x13 Spiral, is Howard banking on that? See also one of many reasons why we call him Agent Fuck You. I do not trust any of this. Though it does put a new spin on Garland's meeting(s) with Howard at the beginning of the 2010 cycle. Not to mention dead!Garland's warning to Nathan about don't fall in love with her, and more importantly don't let her fall in love with you. Heh. Nathan rather generously, for him, admits that that's Garland, but no, not anymore, it's all her son now. We continue to have all the questions ever, but they're not new ones anymore, since we still don't get to know how James and Lucy found each other, who went searching for whom, etc. It </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">does </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">emphasize what it is that makes AudSarLu different from the other times, that she's got the anchor of James. Actually, Garland, NOW you've told Lucy about this! Nathan. Now would be a good time to cough up that it's good he hasn't told her because it's a BAD SOLUTION let's not kill everyone. But no, they're sitting and talking because they have some time, or think they do, and they don't need to rush to everything like one of them's about to die. Which makes for a nice change for Nathan, if only the irony weren't so thick you could cut it with a spoon. And the layers and LAYERS of meanings when Garland says that that's no choice for a parent to make. Lucy appears to think this is a valid choice! Or at least that she doesn't have much of one, judging by the shellshocked silent crying as she disappears off to get a weapon. Oh honey. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">How are they in the future? Well, Dad, you're dead. To begin with. I appreciate how </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">incredibly </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">restrained Nathan is in not commenting on that. Or that they buried him in a cooler, shut up that still amuses me. Nathan describes him as tough but not without reason, preparing him for the Troubles, and then he found that when the Troubles came back he was ready for it, and credits his Dad with that. Well, explicitly, says to young!Garland that he never gave him credit for it and young!Garland replying that he just did before briskly moving back along to let's save the damn town already. Oh Garland. You have some issues that could use addressing regarding emotional connections. And on the other hand, this conversation probably IS one that Nathan needs to have. Though I severely wonder how much this affects Garland's parenting style in the future. Heh. Speaking of awkward parenting, Lucy is now taking off and </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">now</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> the boys hear her, get up in some alarm. Extra alarm for Nathan because she overheard just enough about the part about killing the one you love ending the Troubles for good to be dangerous. Which means Nathan now has to rush through explaining to Garland that, no, that will end the Troubles but only by killing everyone with them, activated or not, one assumes. Meaning yes, a whole lot of people will die including them. We're going to take a second here and be somewhat amused because as far as we know, Garland either never told Nathan he was Troubled or never told him what his Trouble was. Of course, on the other hand, young!Garland doesn't know that, so, sure, go stop Lucy from doing something really horrible. What was once your salvation is now your doom indeed. So to speak. Though killing everyone already seems kind of doom-y. Eh, never mind. Save that for later. First chasing down Lucy and Barbara, two men, two subjects, two different directions! And does Nathan need a car? Apparently not when the blue Bronco's sitting parked just at the next intersection. Oh Nathan. Of course he knows how to hotwire it, which actually brings a fair bit of approval and amusement from Garland. Oh </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">boys.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Right, off they go. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In the spirit of asking for emotional reassurance from loved and respected family members (adoptive, no less), Dave's wondering why Vince pulled that cover story out of his hat among all the ones he could possibly have chosen. This leads me to once again wonder what the fuck kind of formative experience in military or quasi-military organizations Vince has/had, beyond just the Guard, but that's data for another day, if we're lucky. The </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">real </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">answer, I suspect, is that Vince knows appealing to Dave's ego is a surefire way to get him to jump without thinking too hard, but you don't say those kinds of things to your brother when you're trying to save his life. At least not with the relationship these two have. Instead he asserts that he knows Dave could make it as a writer outside of a tinyass town in the middle of nowhere, Maine, and any further speculations about that will have to wait because Lucy's just pulled up. Leading to a lot MORE speculation. Again we have absolutely no data to go on, but it seems like the Teagues may have told Lucy more than they told Audrey, at the outset. Not that that would take much, and indeed Dave will lend a hand to my damning with faint praise by instructing Vince to stay out of sight inside fuck no she can't know you're here. Clearly Vince hasn't told Dave that he didn't come back alone, either. My keyboard is wearing out under the force of all the faceplanting I'm doing. The important part here is Lucy asking what Dave would do to save Haven from the Troubles and stop all of this. Well, after going through them twice, pretty much anything, he says, clearly without thinking about it </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">too </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">hard. This is one of those places where I think it's really obvious that Vince has tried to shelter his brother from the kinds of really hard, heavy decisions that being a leader during the Troubles causes, and one of the reasons we trip occasionally on the fact that Vince is still the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">younger</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> one (at least according to the chameleon ep in s1). Lucy would like a gun now please. No questions, Dave, just the fucking gun. Dave pretty clearly thinks she's going off to commit suicide, which, no, I think she'd hate that but be a lot less outwardly miserable if that were the case. At least then she could rationalize that she's not hurting anyone but herself, not more than going back into the Barn and not remembering anyone when she comes back again does. That isn't true, of course - it's different for everyone - but it'd be an easy rationalization to make for suicide. This? No. But Dave's a pushover, so she gets his gun and he goes back in to questions from Vince about what the hell took so long. Vince. You know why she probably wanted that gun, even if you don't know how the hell she could've found out about it. I'm disturbed by Dave's use of the term "our" Lucy here. Ours in what WAY? Is this related to the rings that keep getting tossed around like a set of pogs? Or just ours because she's Haven's savior and they're even now a bulwark of the town? Apparently Lucy being scared to death but insisting on fighting for Haven has inspired some spine in him. At the worst possible moment. Vince knows he's going to lose this argument from the moment it starts, too, he's just trying desperately to fight a rear guard action of some kind. Also he's WRONG. Like a very wrong thing. Croatoan may have </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">merged </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">with one of Charlotte's kind, and whatever kind </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">that </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">is can be killed, but for damn sure with the void and all that aether floating around </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">he is not normal interdimensional alien anymore, Vincent Teagues</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. My fucking god you're a moron. Does Dave even know who Charlotte is, or are you just flinging names around willy nilly at this point? Argh. Dave's getting the shotgun in the interests of finding out if they can kill the evil monster from the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: line-through; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">black lagoon</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> void and Vince points out that maybe running into the jaws of this fate is a bad idea? YES. YES IT IS AND IT WAS IN THE FUTURE WHEN YOU LET HIM DO IT, TOO. KNOCK HIM OUT AND SHOVE HIM IN A TRUNK. Love of god. But no, Vince crumples for Dave's terrified-and-stubborn face just like he always does. This can't possibly end badly!</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0X3x5xA5pB9eFDyvYd1sT7NUFNp5G6VgoYGBnGYUTV96d115zckz30S8uATzHInpIf1idJKS39Y3aRqjJc-R9bcw8NBDxinx4IMGd1kOi2ceVXGH1udrDV-vRGyNuFkJg7Qw3xWqbgns/s1600/haven520cc05.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0X3x5xA5pB9eFDyvYd1sT7NUFNp5G6VgoYGBnGYUTV96d115zckz30S8uATzHInpIf1idJKS39Y3aRqjJc-R9bcw8NBDxinx4IMGd1kOi2ceVXGH1udrDV-vRGyNuFkJg7Qw3xWqbgns/s320/haven520cc05.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Over on the beach Lucy is contemplating all the heavy things she's just learned while crumpling or shredding a tissue, which makes it obvious enough that James notices and tells her not to be sad, she'll be back. Maybe she'll remember him the next time, which suggests that he knows at least most of what we know about how he came to be and the Lucy-Sarah connection, and that however they discovered it at least it was in a beneficially bonding way. To my surprise we continue to get information about this meeting, which is to say that apparently James went looking for her, found her, either after she found out who she was (to an extent, since I doubt anyone else is suggesting she knows who Mara is or any of that ridiculous mess) or shortly before and they came to know each other while she was figuring it out. Close enough at least that after she figured that much of it out she felt very much adrift, the way we've seen our Audrey go through, and James made her feel connected to something. This beautiful moment of love and family and affirmation is unwittingly spoiled by James saying something about ending the Troubles for good, reminding her of what she has to do to do that. And probably in a way confirming for her that this is what he'd want if he knew it was a thing. We're not of course going to ask him about if this is what he'd want now that she knows it's a thing (but only part of the thing), no, instead we're going to claim oh it's just chilly out that's why we're shivering could you please get my sweater from the car. This is where Lucy takes a sidestep out of our identification incarnation because really, if you've been following our recaps you would know that generally we prefer to err on the side of hi have an infodump and let's process this together into very small bits before we do anything irrevocable like KILL SOMEONE. Ahem. No, James, car, sweater. Parting comment about Arla wanting three kids. I'm reasonably sure the writers just put that in because a) it'd look weird if Arla didn't get a line reference and b) to make us twitch. Because they're sadists like that. Fucking Arla. Lucy has a second of smiling or so at the thought of being a grandmother? James and Arla with kids? Both? I'd laugh at the thought of being a grandmother in my apparent late twenties/early thirties. And then the laughter goes very quickly away, replaced by tears and "I love you, James" and a very shaky hand on the gun. If it weren't a revolver I'd say she would have shot him already, but that looks like it takes a strong pull. So. Yeah. We know it's not going to happen, because that's not how it did happen, but. Yeah. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Nathan stops her, of course he does. Nathan stops her and remember the whole part about preferring to infodump, spread around the information until everyone has it and then make decisions? Apparently Nathan got that memo because he's telling Lucy at least enough to get her attention, that James is </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">their</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> son. On the heels of that revelation it's very easy for Nathan to tug her into the trees so they can, and this is the only phrase I can think of for it, bear witness. He explains that yes, he's come back in time before but he's still from the future, which gives Lucy an "I knew there was something between us" moment and she's all happy because he totally came back from the future to stop her from killing James, their son, yes? :D :D :D. (Seriously, the effusive relief right there on her part calls for smileys, is that effusive with a touch of desperation I see? Emily Rose is knocking Lucy as her own individual person here out of the park, as usual.) No. Actually. Not really. And he does tell her that it would end the Troubles by killing all the Troubled people, and while she's absorbing </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">that</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> new shock (this is a rough 24 hours for Lucy) Garland is pulling up and calling for Barbara Coulton to stop where she is. Which of course causes her to rip open another thinny to escape. Causing Nathan to have to at least sum up thinnies and so on. Good thing one can do that in a couple sentences oh shit it's James. Here we go.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Oh hello there Teagues. Vince what are you DOING. Vince NO. BAD VINCE. STOPPIT. NO COOKIE BAD JOURNALIST. Oh my god. Lucy, your questions are good but lack a certain punch to the face. Vince do not shoot the fucking thinny. Trying to change the past is </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">one </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">answer for what he's doing. Being a fucking complete dunderhead is another. DO NOT SHOOT THE THINNY IT WILL EAT THE NEAREST GOOD CANDIDATE. And you brought Croatoan Dave, both in the sense that Dave is now about to be a carrier of evil and in the sense that you brought Dave to Croatoan. You are so fucking stupid sometimes, Vince, you didn't even try to make him get well behind you? You were in the cave under the lighthouse! You were in North Carolina! You have SEEN YOUR BROTHER GET SUCKED INTO THINNIES BEFORE. If ever there was a candidate for Nice Job Breaking It, Hero on TVTropes, this would be it. Gold star, Vince. Four for you. So, yes, Dave gets sucked in with an at-best weak attempt to haul him back on Vince's part, lands on the other side of the thinny Barbara Coulton created which is of course right by James out on the pier. And then there's a truly creepy mistlike film that covers his eyes as he gets possessed, and some really nice physical acting of the turning puppetlike and stiff. Lucy did not sign up for this shit. Lucy would like a gun from Nathan rather than listening to him tell her that they have to stand here and do nothing about their son being killed. Which is, admittedly, easier for Nathan to say and do. Not easy, I can't imagine he </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">likes </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">it, but he's never gotten to know and love James as his own person instead of the abstract concept he represents, whereas Lucy has been confronting losing James for awhile now. First in the one sense that provides some comfort, knowing he'll be out in the world living a life even if she's not there with him, and then in the last hour or so the flipflop between I have to kill my own son and wait that's a bad idea so he can live? Yay! Not yay. None of this is yay. Lucy argues awhile longer, including the emotional argument that </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">he's your son too you asshole</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Not that she says it but it's all over her face, how can Nathan be such a stoic asshole about this? Well. He doesn't have time to explain but he </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">did </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">apparently learn from shooting the barnvatar, I think, and made it so that Haven was almost completely fucked once before! He doesn't want to risk that happening again. Which is fair if cold; I have no idea </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">what </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">saving James Cogan would do but for damn sure it would mean that picture didn't end up in the paper and Audrey Parker would not be investigating her former self because she stayed in Haven looking for her mother. (Hey! Some quests do have an endpoint. Too soon? Too soon.) Nathan continues to be bad at comfort, though in this case I think it's because he doesn't know Lucy very well and out of the three of them she's a bit different from Sarah and Audrey. Harder and sharper, like we said the first time we ever got a glimpse of her. Look at how quickly she went from "wait I have to kill the one I love to end the Troubles" to "give me the fucking </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: line-through; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">fruit</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> gun." So. Croatoan!Dave smacks James in the back of the head with a brick or block of some kind, which might be enough to kill him all on its own if untreated, but then he goes on and sucks out the aether. Given that James is a halfling (like Dave!) and may have also inherited Nathan's Trouble, or maybe some kind of weirdass partial Trouble? There's more aether there, is what I'm saying, and I don't think that's all for dramatic effect. It looks like a greenish-yellowish-black mist when not viewed through Dave's monstercam filters and seems to be going into his mouth? Maybe? General lower face region mostly delineated by the part that isn't covered up by glasses. Also that is a creepy fucking smug smile of I-win, I can't tell if it's directed at Vince or at Lucy and Nathan. Now that Lucy can't go save James, Nathan will let go and hustle Vince out of the inevitable range of people wandering up to the beach. Why are they wandering up to the beach, other than to make that photo come true? Who knows. Maybe they were out for a walk, maybe some of them saw the fight and came towards it, maybe something in Croatoan's makeup lured some Troubled people closer, maybe they're just wondering if that guy's really dead. Some of them actually do look possessed. Maybe Croatoan just knew they were potential witnesses and is bringing them into mass range for memory alteration? It's also possible, I guess, that someone saw Lucy with the gun and now people are coming to see what that was about. Vince is still standing there in emotional shock, gets hustled off, Croatoan!Dave turns to the crowd and raises his hands and THAT'S interesting. Those shock waves of here you weren't using those short-term memories anyway looks an awful lot like what we saw pulse out of the lighthouse at the end of s4. They don't knock over anyone this time, though, probably because they're more directed and controlled. Just make them all look confused as fuck. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Dave </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">will now fall over so that Croatoan can dissipate in a cloud of that same evil fog-mist gunk, which passes through a thinny that… somehow still exists? Did Barbara Coulton make a new one when we were all looking at Dave and James? Lucy's mascara is smudged, the thinny closes, Dave wakes up in shock and runs away when he sees James' body, and I still really, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">really </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">want to know how much of his memory of these events he's retained. Or lost. Both. Both is good. The little boy from the station is back! He got his camera out of Duke' stash and now he has a perfect angle… for the photo in the paper. Man, how much must it suck to be known for THAT all your adolescence? And there's ickle Duke appeared from nowhere holding Lucy's hand! </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We shall have no further resolution to this issue, we're just going to have Nathan and Vince walk back into the station while Nathan declares it time to go home. Every fucking time this happens, it turns out it's because some crucial data is being elided. Dammit you guys. Flash of light, nice touch with the foreground being someone scrolling through a tablet so we really most sincerely are in the present. And Audrey is checking in on Nathan, who is most definitely not okay, he had to watch James die and watch Lucy watch James die. Of which he doesn't mention the former and focuses on the latter, but watching James die for himself even if James is more a person in the abstract than his son can't have been comfortable either. He does wish, kind of, in the way one wishes for the isolated effect rather than the consequences of it, that Croatoan had gotten his memory wiped too. But on the other hand he did come back with valuable Barbara Coulton data, that her Trouble opened the thinny and that she used the ring to do it. Nathan's speculation is that Barbara had Lucy's ring, however she got hold of it (SyFy website has a bit from writer Brian Miliken which confirms Barbara stole it, so at least there's an answer there), and that Garland got it back after some point. That's not even a bad idea, because then Garland would have kept ahold of it and kept it for Nathan. As he says, it explains a lot. (We touched on most of that lot above.) Now for the complicated part: finding a Coulton. Audrey wasn't able to find one in all of Haven, which Nathan knew, they've been out of town for years. They're fairly disreputable, the entire family. He's looking surprisingly calm for all of this bad news, Nathan, what did you do.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj24oid2ilzFr89tJgzCQUwC_CvW2vOYdk27Kt9STpjd8wiwnKuPwa6FCJ2JtjGeOM_Q5iCBy4tLe5HtnY3VH0U1Hn7CZz1qSZG5gnJqUVgCTJwgn8VAZdaHlOdUBZoWy1JRY5qoO1O22c/s1600/haven520cc06.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj24oid2ilzFr89tJgzCQUwC_CvW2vOYdk27Kt9STpjd8wiwnKuPwa6FCJ2JtjGeOM_Q5iCBy4tLe5HtnY3VH0U1Hn7CZz1qSZG5gnJqUVgCTJwgn8VAZdaHlOdUBZoWy1JRY5qoO1O22c/s320/haven520cc06.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And we're back to Duke and the Very Bad Melodramatic People Of Unknown Origin! It turns out the well-dressed guy trying desperately to be a Secret Keeper from X-Files is Saul Goodman, aka Saul The Kid Whose Stuff Duke Stole In Grade School. Aka That Kid With The Camera! AH-HAH. The plot coagulates. Of course Saul doesn't remember Duke from grade school, but he has something for him, and what follows is a very interesting convoluted set of sentences that must have been fun to write. Basically it goes like this: he's been watching him for three decades (he's aware of this because he has a rough sense of amount of time passed, despite chunks of it being lost to the Haven interdiction), he doesn't remember why he started watching him (because of the Haven interdiction), but he has something for him. The part he doesn't explicitly say but I'll fill in because I know people are going to pick at it is, he probably is aware of all of this and never lost the thread because a) the interdiction has only been fogging up people's memories for a few weeks and doesn't actually erase all the actions that took place before it, which we know because of Seth's video shot of the Rougaru. Otherwise I would be giving the show some side-eye, but no, there's internal consistency and small clues that say it's a mental interdiction, not a complete rewriting of this particular universe to wipe Haven off the map. And b) Duke's spent considerable chunks of time NOT in Haven, presumably with Evi, with Monty, doing what he does so well so if Saul was watching him, those memories would be un-fogged. This is not explicitly said, again, I'm just laying it out because Haven is a confusing beast at the best of times and sometimes you need to pause the playback and pull all the pieces out and look at them like this. Hitting play, Saul's long assigned task is over although it did make him very good at watching people, enough so to start his own firm, whatever that means (PI? skip tracer?). And now that it's the assigned time, he's giving him the letter he's been holding onto for thirty years that he was told (one guesses) not to give him until this day. And then he walks out into a door of light, which is presumably only a door of light because it's very dark in the room and light outside but that's still a fucking creepy effect all things considered. Duke even apologizes for stealing his stuff. Aww! The letter is, of course, from Nathan. From the past, now talking to Duke in the present and telling him he needs to find a member of the Coulton family and bring them back through the shroud to Haven. And that would, indeed, be where Hayley comes in. Hayley who was last seen running for her life from Duke. Oh this is going to be fun. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Wee pause here (wee paws?) for a brief complaint that this entire episode, neat as it is in the context of the last couple-three seasons, also contradicts a lot about what we learned about Lucy in second season. Because okay, if she'd discovered how the Troubles started but people wanted to erase her, why was she willing to go into the barn but described as wanting to fight the people who wanted to erase her before? That whole part is then contradicted by the shortened timeline between her finding out and going in, there isn't enough time for her to go see Lucy Ripley original flavor. Simon Crocker is then supposed to have threatened her (original Lucy) but then according to later information he died one day before the Colorado Kid. This isn't even going into the part where her behavior around the Teagues is weird given that the Teagues already confessed to trying to get her to remember Sarah, although that's less contradictory given that we only saw her interacting with Dave, who has previously argued with Vince over best approaches anyway and let's not forget, Vince made mention of "and you're not going to stop me this time" at Dave over something to do with AudSarLu. I tend to think that was a throwaway line designed for something else, but it works well enough for this purpose too. So, yes. We have a body of canon that reconciles mostly with itself somewhat neatly! But we still have an endless snarl of contradictions and nitpicky questions and possibly continuity issues. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Next week is even more fun, we get to hide behind the couch from William! Oh </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">goodie</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, I was so looking forward to that. But on the plus side, fucking adorable domesticity between him and Audrey IN HIS HOUSE! IN HIS HOUSE YOU GUYS FINALLY. Complete with post-its on eeeeverything in the kitchen to keep him from hurting himself. Awww. They're going to have an argument over who goes into the void, settled at least initially with let's go together. I'm not betting on whether or not that'll last. And Duke's going to come back. Nathan has faith in his boyfriend. Well-placed, it turns out, because there's a knock and a Duke and a Hayley looking extremely twitchy and out of place behind him and HUGGING. THE BOYS ARE HUGGING AND NATHAN STARTED IT, THIS IS NOT A DRILL. Audrey is much less sanguine about this whole thing, but we don't get to see whatever shape their reunion takes until next week. Booooo. My OT3 heart wants all the happy for them. Shush, we haven't had ANY OT3 anything in the longest time, though I could so have gone OT4 with Jennifer. I miss Jennifer.</span></div>
<br /><br />Kitty Chandlerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05524808952260453841noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4271373189216022547.post-87262693913384790612015-11-13T10:20:00.001-08:002015-11-13T10:20:14.753-08:00And Then You Wake Up Haven S2E06 Audrey Parker's Day Off<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Hey look, it's the Groundhog Day ep! This may make the recaplysis slightly shorter, or it may not, who knows. Perhaps we've learned some concision in the last year? Stop laughing, you there in the back. (</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">K:</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> No. Shan't.) The previouslies this time include a massive focus on Audrey Parker, Savior of Haven, and her slowly coming to accept this role and her immunities. Also Chris Brody and his charisma Trouble, which continues to be creepy. Like way to point up some of the ways in which her and Nathan aren't a healthy relationship either, dude! Nobody believes that her immunity plays no role in why you asked her out. We pronounce that "wishful thinking." A more honest statement would be that he's not sure what role her immunity plays but it's nice to be around someone who calls him on his shit instead of fawning over him, maybe. Except I don't have that much faith in Brody that this isn't a case of Dickhead Wants What He Can't Get Easily. Never mind that Audrey finds being wanted for herself and not her abilities with the Troubles its own kind of intoxicating. This whole thing is so fucked up.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But we start with what appears to be a rather cute morning-after! This means it'll be ruined shortly, because fucking Haven. I can't even fault Chris Brody's wakeup, it's a brief kiss accompanied by some teasing, and he informs her he made plans for her day off. Surprise plans! That is, my misgivings about this relationship aside, rather cute and sweet, provided you're the kind of person who enjoys romantic surprises like that. We also get a Significant Shot of the alarm clock set to 7:34, which I don't </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">think </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">has any Stephen King type significance. (You could stretch to adding the numbers and come up with 14, but that's one more than Maerlyn's Rainbow, so I got nothin' offhand.) Audrey has a day off, but one official piece of police business beforehand. And before </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">that </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">there will be first thing in the morning sex, which she initiates, which is at least nice to see.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAhlf4v6QqggtmZnHbZ3MdMK1X_-ElyH08vfQsNzTJ2TJFGcCzX6z3-sYyVk42tKHecIyfu4uuuzWHEiL4ve3gpkfW0OSm2YoJ90h5plyB8Zgli7kHygKCz0I8xO2a1rxz4MqCcWnasCA/s1600/haven206cc01.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAhlf4v6QqggtmZnHbZ3MdMK1X_-ElyH08vfQsNzTJ2TJFGcCzX6z3-sYyVk42tKHecIyfu4uuuzWHEiL4ve3gpkfW0OSm2YoJ90h5plyB8Zgli7kHygKCz0I8xO2a1rxz4MqCcWnasCA/s320/haven206cc01.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">After they finally make themselves presentable, we get further indication of what day it is because Duke's out writing the Taco Tuesday sign with a careful hand. Audrey and Chris will now sneak out like errant schoolchildren, because Audrey doesn't want Duke poking his nose into her love life (which he will TOTALLY do) and neither of them wants the Brody Trouble interfering with their plans. Guys, if you just TOLD Duke to look away? No? No. They scamper into the car and drive away over Duke's grumbling about it's the 4th of the month where's his rent check, and then some truly adorable (and well-placed) grouching about trusting law enforcement. Bear in mind that this is somewhat before they start </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">really </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">trusting each other, though after a number of lifesaving events, so Duke has ample experience with law enforcement abusing their positions of authority. Especially after the stunts Audrey II pulled on him to get him to help her look for the barn, let's not forget!</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Audrey's Official Business turns out to be giving a talk at the local grade school's Career Day, which she lost out on in a game of rock-paper-scissors with Nathan. Well, if anyone has a tell out of the pair of them, it's liable to be her! Chris displays a certain degree of knowing people despite his being Scrooge McDuck around them (seriously we're both introverts and we're not THAT snarly at other humans most of the time), since his first question is if she lost a bet. We then proceed to focus the camera on a number of small but significant events: the kid speeding to school late without a helmet, the jogger who hurdles the bush, and the couple arguing in a minivan. Moving on inside, Audrey will now demonstrate that she </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">does not know kids oh my god Audrey what are you doing</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. I mean, when I was a kid I would have been fascinated by a nice FBI lady coming to tell me all about her drug cartel bust, complete with fourteen snipers and synchronized explosions! But not every kid is quite that weird, and you DEFINITELY shouldn't be doing that in front of their poor discombobulated teacher. Who is going to have so many awkward questions to answer after this. She winds that up awkwardly with a never-do-drugs sentence and takes questions, which will also Be Important Later. In fact, just assume everything will Be Important Later! No, you cannot shoot the gun, kid, it'd probably break your wrists. And maybe your nose. Recoil is a thing. No, she has never broken the law, shut up in the back, she would never, hey Chris, if you're going to laugh so much she's going to sic a roomful of kids on you. Yeah, you kinda did deserve that, dude. Although I semi-appreciate his attempts to teach the kids something important (to him, granted, but still) if he has to deal with them around his Trouble. I mean, in that setting at that time, it's not a bad use! It's where he starts later talking people out of money that I give him a lot of side-eye. Or intends to, as he tells her when talking her out of seeing to a downed tree. (On Route 27. I see what you guys did there.) I will allow that no seriously, it is a downed tree, unless something supernatural gets associated with it it's probably NOT something Audrey needs to go deal with, stop being a workaholic. But I also disapprove of his "I was going to go bilk a bunch of suits out of money for funding for my pet projects but you're more important than that!" Uh. What about all the other people doing important and meaningful projects, are they going to get money for theirs? Also that is crass emotional manipulation. She seems to know it, too, because despite the new relationship glowy kiss, she breaks off to go to work when the all available officers text comes in. He is so not happy about this, but yes, he can find a ride, he'll just walk along a road somewhere and someone will inevitably offer.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As it turns out, the all officers text is not about the downed tree, or not directly: it's about an accident with a fatality, that turns out to be a kid wearing a green shoe. Nathan doesn't even have time to tell her boy or girl before he has to hold her back from going to the site, and he even looks red around the eyes. Plus that stoic fuck-this-hurts way he's got. So we know it's bad, and that he doesn't see any reason for Audrey to be scarred by it too…</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And then she wakes up. To the very same kiss and "did I wake you?" as before, and the time is the same, and Audrey has a Very Bad Feeling about this. Roll credits! When we come back she's making the confused face of please let this not be a Trouble please let this just be a dream, and Chris is trying to tease her out of it because he has way less experience with weird Haven shit happening to her than, say, Duke! Hi Duke! Apparently they didn't take that long with the early morning nookie, because he's not that much further back on his sign-making. Alliterate, Duke, the word you're looking for is alliteration. Audrey is still looking for reasons that this isn't the same day all over again, pays Duke her rent, and Duke will now proceed to give Audrey the shovel talk. Which would be much cuter were it not Trouble-influenced. The waffles speech, however, is still adorable regardless. Duke are you smuggling maple syrup out of Canada? You know they frown on that, and the Mounties enjoy busting people over it.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Ahem. They scamper out of there and over to the school, the only change is that Chris asks if she lost a bet to Wuornos rather than to Nathan this time, because he's somewhat more annoyed and on edge. The kid who was late on the first iteration of this day is still late, Audrey confirms that it's his first tardy and reminds him to wear a helmet because she is a Good Cop, we don't see the other two people but we can assume they're around. By now Audrey is thoroughly rattled and proceeds to rattle everyone else by answering questions before they're asked. Did you come up with that law-breaking explanation on the spur of the moment, or were you thinking about it the whole car ride over, Audrey? She will now turn the floor over to Chris Brody (and I forgot to mention last time but this is the season where they started sticking up Vince and Dave's Twitter handles on random sets; this time it's at the back of the room next to Brody) so she can run away. Down to the station where she can be unnerved at Nathan! Who cracks a joke about her being stuck in his second-favorite Bill Murray movie, thank you for the lampshade, Nathan, and then accuses her of finding excuses to work on her day off. No, she's serious, someone's going to die at noon and she refuses to let it happen the same way again. So he'll take the details she's got from last time, and points out that he doesn't feel any different. Audrey hasn't yet considered that it's a Trouble doing this and she knows what it is because she's immune, which is kind of jarring to leap back to from s5 where everyone's all "oh something fucked up is happening WHO'S GOT THE DAMN TROUBLE THIS TIME." Nathan, instead, brings it up, because he of all people is aware (constantly) that she's immune to them. They will attempt to find a kid with green tennis shoes in order to save them, and right on cue the downed tree alert shows up to provide her with more tangible credibility than "you're my partner and I trust you." I like that you think you can get ahead of this somehow, Audrey, but no, not so much.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Our first sign of this comes with Audrey talking to Nathan on the phone about how nothing out of the ordinary is apparent, and Duke shouting her name. Why? Because he wandered downtown to deal with payroll a day early, and discovered she forgot to sign the check. As you do when you're confused and distraught! Be furniture for Audrey to sign the check, Duke, and he'll keep grumbling in typical Duke fashion. Hates payroll, hates banks, loves money, yes, dear, we know it's such a letdown to be a respectable-ish businessman running a normal payroll and maybe sometimes paying taxes. Despite all the grumbling, he's still perceptive enough to ask Audrey why she's stressed, turning it into a joke about Chris Brody not being a good lay and getting punched for his pains. You two could be somehow more siblings on the playground but you'd have to work at it. I'm just saying. And he crosses the street as the noon bells start ringing, which of course means we need a momentary red herring to the tune of hey kid, are your sneakers green? No they are not. But we also learn why a kid was out in the first place: half-day of school, which means it could be </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">anyone</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Great! Just great. This is now Audrey's cue to call Nathan back and say maybe just being here was enough to stop it, no, honey, that's very optimistic of you and no. Nathan, I think, is about to say something about how that's not how it works, you can't make that assumption, and then is interrupted by squealing tires and a thump. No, Nathan is not dead. (Yet.) It's Duke's turn to get hit and die! Unfortunately all of his injuries look internal, and not to the tune of CPR being any help, which means there's just about nothing they can do: elevate the legs and keep him warm are about the only things outside of a hospital setting. Internal injuries are vicious. Audrey will now proceed to blame herself because she gave Duke his rent check and therefore it's her doing. No, but given s5 revelations I would not at all be surprised to find that Charlotte's bullshit punishment bends reality around Audrey and her compatriots to increase her trauma. That was a bad thought. I wish I hadn't had it. Even if it does turn out to be bullshit fanwank for narrative causality. Everyone stands around gawping, Nathan comes running to tell them the ambulance is on the way and starts to have an awkward stoic-Nathan attempt to explain feelings? Apologize? We never find out, because Duke's last words are "shut up," which despite the circumstances is kind of funny. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Audrey protests some more, asks about the green shoes, and on "it wasn't supposed to happen this way," oh look, another reset. In which Audrey will steadily grow more and more traumatized, and poor Chris Brody, who I actually end up feeling some sympathy for in this ep (poor guy had NO idea what he was getting into, but that whole keeping secrets thing bites Audrey's love life in the ass). Because her first, understandable response, is oh god put on clothes go downstairs find Duke, which is the opposite of what Chris Brody's ego needs. That and the long desperate hug. Audrey you are confusing at least two of the men in your life. Please to be spitting out explanations soon. Not just to Nathan. No? No. Duke, to his credit, has a sort of "what the fuck Trouble is happening that I don't know about are you trying to seduce me what no" expression on. And then any potential explanations get sidelined by the Brody Trouble. I'm so amused and entertained that even though Duke keeps getting whammied by it, he's still emphatically </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">himself </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">about everything. "Express yourselves. Physically," indeed. Audrey sees her opportunity and takes advantage of the Brody Trouble to shove Duke and Chris together for the morning and please both of you just stay at the Gull and don't get dead, okay? Okay! Eric Balfour had way, WAY too much fun with these bits, right up to and including and probably especially "how do you like your maple syrup." (Dark, you heathen. How dare you suggest otherwise.)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Much of the dialogue remains the same with Nathan, until Audrey preempts it, but the setting changes this time to the school for Career Day. At first he's a bit dubious, because the first thing to happen (and the one that will eventually turn out to Be Significant) is the couple that starts fighting, and that could just be a good behavioral eye. The other two, though, the jogger and the kid on the bike? Not so much. There's a quick cut to the comment about Bill Murray movies so that we can skip explanation, Audrey yells at him (and mildly abuses her immunity, though I would too for so many reasons. how many times have we encouraged this? SO MANY) for joking about Duke dying. They skip over to such immediate questions as, okay, who the fuck's Trouble IS it? Can't be the victim if the vic changes, could be the driver though Audrey has a point, if it's the driver it would probably stick to the exact same place and time, and the victim might matter even to a hit-and-run. Nathan brings up the point that, fine, they know the area and the time, they'll set up a checkpoint to catch the driver. Everyone feel free to facepalm now. Nathan is, at least, doing a good job of talking Audrey down from her freakout over but what if it happens again what if someone else dies, BEFORE she can get up to what if YOU die, and points out that she'll just tell him again. It'll be fine! Also, why are they at school? Because she needs help checking all the kids for green shoes. Oh AUDREY.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUdnewhITBJtUxDlsB_fto5sSXyPHkuvYiPSjWtNnwa1Kb7oW_ih6I4tlcAlYZPGVxl0qTyAbDk2kQk7PhsJUAmpVzSEI9PPOidHfZPdZuVylfetUSlXveqWhgWeneTxeiax-fWKiGGuw/s1600/haven206cc03.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUdnewhITBJtUxDlsB_fto5sSXyPHkuvYiPSjWtNnwa1Kb7oW_ih6I4tlcAlYZPGVxl0qTyAbDk2kQk7PhsJUAmpVzSEI9PPOidHfZPdZuVylfetUSlXveqWhgWeneTxeiax-fWKiGGuw/s320/haven206cc03.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Our time to get Audrey's optimism of "maybe it won't happen!" is even shorter and seriously, woman, this is like saying "what could possibly go wrong" at this point. STOP DOING THAT. They have a perimeter, which means Audrey and Nathan are pretty nearly the only two around, which means of course Nathan will now die. After a jump-reveal from no-I'm-fine to oh-that's-timber-through-me. Yeah, Nathan? You are never the best judge of whether you're fine or about to be dead, okay? And that would be the blood loss kicking in for maximum woozy. Poor everyone. Especially poor Audrey, who gets to remember all of this! We get camera focus on her hand bashing into the broken-off sawhorse, which means as soon as Nathan's done dying and traumatizing Audrey some more, that will be important. Because Nathan is awesome he's trying to give her all the details he can about the driver before he expires, as it were, since he can't feel the pain and all he appears to have is basic shock. Again, this is not the kind of injury where you can do anything for it via first aid, you need a damn hospital and a surgical setup. Even a field hospital. Actually, that's a good question, Audrey, why haven't you gotten a field hospital into downtown Haven? You have about four and a half hours from when you wake up, there's a CHANCE that would be enough time. Probably because she's not yet used to commandeering everyone and everything in sight to deal with a Trouble, but seriously, that's what I'd do. Nathan proceeds to his Gothic Romance death of "the only thing I feel is you," which was kind of heartrending the first time and after five seasons of watching him get progressively dumber over Audrey, makes me go OH HONEY THIS IS WHY IT'S A PROBLEM. (Seriously third season would have gone SO MUCH DIFFERENTLY if Nathan, Audrey, and Jordan had just set up a cuddling club instead of sexytimes. Physical contact is a basic human need! WE KNOW THIS. But it doesn't have to be sex! Oh why do I bother.)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Our fourth restart breaks the pattern, both in that Audrey is really grateful for the reset and in that it's the first indication that her immunity has a terrible downside. Yes, she did keep her injury, which means if she dies in the repeating day, she dies for real. I have no idea what on any world the Barn would do with that, I assume it would do </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">something</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, but that's small consolation to the fact that Audrey-qua-Audrey would be dead. So yes. She had best get around to stopping the loop. We come back from commercial break to Chris bandaging her up and getting her clothes and trying, in general, to be a decent human being. I will give him massive points for that! Just, dude your issues. Audrey honey, how long have you been around stupidly strong-willed men who take matters into their own hands? MAYBE you should offer explanations quick. But no. He's giving her the what the fuck is going on what the fuck did I do look, and sadly because he's the LEAST used to her being the epicenter of all Troubled activity out of all her friends, he's only sort of going to listen. After all, when it comes to people Audrey personally knows and cares about dying, we've only had two so far, so we gotta go for the rule of three. Yaaay. And for bonus points, Chris Brody's heard just enough of her traumatized babble to make some guesses, because he's not actually stupid. First, though, he has to go be corralled by Duke once more, this time not just with malice but with Audrey's request beforehand. Sigh, everyone. Sigh.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I would hate to be one of the people on the road as Audrey drives down to the station. I'm just saying. She can't freak out the same way she did with Duke and Chris, because people are around and they'll notice and probably assume romance rather than "oh hi I just saw you die in a different version of today." To be fair, Audrey, you're ignoring the blatantly obvious in favor of the first guy to actually ask you out, but hey. It's a very </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">controlled </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">freakout, complete with the utter adorable of Nathan using her to test the coffee, which is apparently a usual thing with them. Awwww! Also for all that she's trying to hide it, Nathan does a quite literal doubletake and then asks what's up. I should also note, finally, that in this lighting her costuming for this ep looks much darker, enough that I had to go back and make sure it was in fact the same chemise-buttonup-jacket combo. She's getting a bit sloppier about dressing herself, too, which is probably partially injury, partially fatigue, and partially trauma. I appreciate that after the first couple iterations we skip 90% of the explanations; we have a brief time-passes shot of the front of the station and then Nathan's reaction to dying. Uh-huh. I'd be a little wobbly too. It is only a little wobbly, Audrey skipping past it so </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">she </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">doesn't wobble and straight into the part where she keeps her injuries and thus she can die. It's very nice writing, too, because she's progressively not just more traumatized but more exhausted and less able to communicate clearly. Which is totally accurate! We can all count a number of times when we've been tired and gone "pass me the… the thingie." Nathan clearly gets it once Audrey's talking about keeping her injury, but she goes ahead and spells it out for maximum stoic!wobble. Oh Nathan. And with typical efficiency they move onto the thing they maybe </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">can </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">control, which is the hit-and-run driver. With a very nice bit of physical acting where Nathan rubs his side where the wood went through; I assume that's meant to indicate that Audrey told him all the details instead of him retaining some body-memory of the incident. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We come back after another panover of the town and they're doing everything they can, more or less by the cop book. Because Audrey has not yet adjusted to the fact that she has to almost always throw out the book and/or rewrite it in order to get anywhere with the Troubles, and it's her fallback coping mechanism. So there's a whiteboard of timing, each of the three accidents' locations, they've delegated green tennis shoes to the schools, they've given up on checkpoints, but wait there's one more thing: Nathan cannot go downtown. Complete with Audrey reaching to touch his hand to indicate how serious she is about this; she doesn't generally abuse her immunity to his Trouble. That she's doing it twice in one episode, not counting when he dies, is indicative of how unraveled she's getting. He finally agrees, and she gets to go off downtown herself because hel</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">lo</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> messiah complex, secure in what she thinks is the knowledge that Nathan, Duke, and Chris are all out of harm's way. And yeah, it does suck that she's making personal decisions like that and prioritizing her people, but by the same token if she's the one who can fix this, it would help if she were only the level of upset that comes from seeing someone die that she thought she was going to save. Not the added level of trauma from having that be someone she very much cares about. So! Audrey goes to downtown and works on getting people off the streets, she calls to update Nathan and he points out that everyone currently hates him for booting or impounding all the beige sedans. Yeah, that's probably a LOT of people. While they're busy thanking each other for their trust and fussing that Audrey needs to clear out in time, we get the bonus of her bandaged hand in the center of the shot. Just in case we needed reminding what the stakes here are. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Meanwhile back at the Gull, Duke is safe and cleaning bar glasses, and there's a nice big crowd in for lunch. Well, that's a lot of people who're safe! (If this were later in the show they might have just dealt with the potential panic caused by evacuating people away from the accident zone, and tried to save everyone that way, but it's clear they're trying very hard </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">not </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">to let on about it here. Which makes everything much more difficult.) There's a Red Sox game on which Duke gushes about when he picks up Audrey's call, and yes, Chris Brody is no longer at the Gull. Much to absolutely nobody's surprise. Guess who the next victim is! Duke was still, shall we say, heavily under the Brody Trouble's influence when he tried to talk Chris into staying, which is the only particularly humorous part of this ep. (And only because it leads to the hilarious Nuke shipping moment at the end.) In fact Chris is there when Audrey calls! Like right there. He is trying </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">so hard </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">to be a good boyfriend, too, which makes me wonder exactly how much of his grumpy asshole is trauma-related thanks to his father, or what. He brought medical supplies! And get-well stickers! And Audrey will now freak out at him. You know how I said explanations, Audrey? This would be a GREAT TIME FOR THAT. For fuck's sake. But no, the fact that this eventually turns out… okay-ish only cements in her head that she needs to shoulder it all alone. Now, where Chris Brody goes wrong is he severely, severely underestimates the weird. And is not so good at reading people, which doesn't surprise me given his terrible upbringing and current ability to just get… whatever he wants. But her pleas for him to get off the street end in snarly grumpy stalking off and throwing the presents in the trash. Which is not the way to continue convincing her that she wants to date you, dude, at least you could've left them with her and gone to cool off.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Audrey doesn't have time to dwell on this, though, because she </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">finally </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">spots the mailman who's our Troubled person, and the poor guy is trying desperately to cross the street. I would bet the bells are throwing his count off, too. At first all she assumes is that she needs to make sure he doesn't get hit by the car, and at 12:02 it looks like maybe they've successfully avoided the accident? Ahahaha no. And </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">then </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">she figures out that he has OCD issues and goes into Helpful LEO mode, bringing him across the street, and all I can think is wow dude </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">please get medication</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. She gets him across the street and gets the hopeful phone call to Nathan in and oh look it's a BLUE car this time. Um. Oops? That would be why the delay, though, whoever the driver is had to find someone else. And it comes straight for her and she does a rabbit-freeze, probably due to exhaustion again, just in time for Chris Brody to show up out of nowhere and save her while dying himself. Yaaaaay. Cue Audrey having all of the guilt and then Anson Shumway showing up at the scene and taking the blame. And the guilt. And claiming it's because he made her cross the street and thus the bad thing happened. Oh </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">honey</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Audrey just barely has time to have the realization that he's the guy out of the couple arguing in the car, that he's always been there and must be the source of the Trouble, and then we reset for the fifth go-round. Poor everyone.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This reset comes with still more refusal to tell him what's up, though this time I think it's because she thinks she might have to die to end the day. Or that someone else might have to, maybe the poor kid from the first go-round, since that's what tripped the endless loop. In which case she doesn't want to deal with civilian opinions of whatever she has to do to make it stop. And Chris has firmly established himself as a civilian throughout this episode, where Duke and Nathan aren't so much. But because she opens with all of this and all of the weird and wanting to tell him but can't, he's more willing to do as she asks. Also, y'know, the crying plays a big part in that. So off she goes to try and fix the stupid fucking Trouble. While I'm at this, it occurs to me that Haven is a much more tragic and/or realistic world than the world in the original Groundhog Day: sure, Bill Murray goes through some tough times in there, but ultimately it's not a </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">bad </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">thing. Here? It's a bad thing </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">every time</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and Audrey gets steadily more exhausted and traumatized by it.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Rather than go to Nathan, she books it for the school parking lot to see if she can talk to Shumway and get some info on him before his ex shows up and the argument starts. I'm not convinced this is the smartest idea ever, but it definitely works! The poor guy thinks that his ex-wife called the cops on him, and we learn that he's in a custody dispute over their daughter and recently diagnosed with OCD. He was supposed to pick her up for school today and missed it because of said OCD. Audrey is duly sympathetic to his woes, gets his name out of him, and yes, he's rather on edge. I wonder how much </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">he </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">carries with him from day to day. Also I would just point out that OCD that severe would probably be fucking MEDICATED oh my god. So either the psydoc is a shitty psydoc, or he or she (Claire, was this you?) hasn't found the right meds yet. Either is entirely possible! We also get the explanation of a sort for how his Trouble works; if he doesn't get things exactly right terrible things will happen and they'll be his fault! I honestly kind of hope nobody got triggered out of their heads watching this, because from what I can tell, while it's a fairly stereotypical portrayal of OCD, it is the basic nightmare scenario that a lot of OCD ruminations culminate in, as I understand it. Audrey is about to try and break this news to him when his ex pulls up to start yelling. I don't see the kid in the car, which I suppose is something, and while his ex is a little snarly I really can't blame her for taking the ultimate stance of, look, you have to be able to be a good father if you want custody. Neglecting your kid is not being a good father, and I can see all kinds of nightmare scenarios where, who knows, she's hurt or sick and he delays taking her to the doctor because he can't break the OCD spiral. Like at that point, dude, the terrible thing has already happened! Go deal with it! So I can see a definite argument for at </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">minimum </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">full custody until meds and therapy have some effect, and potentially for the rest of ever and supervised visits. Mental illness sucks on a lot of levels, moreso when you have a child's needs to place first. I'm not fond of the ex's worry over her daughter starting to see that her dad's not like other dads, but I will charitably chalk that up to concern over bullying at school. Which is valid! The kid without a helmet comes by again, cueing Audrey to shout at him about wearing a fucking helmet, and at a guess the exasperated tone in her voice is one of the things that causes Shumway to take off. Because the cop lady might have BEEN nice but now she's scary and might try doing things to him, who knows what the logic there is.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We skip explanations entirely this time and go straight to, we have an hour and Nathan has done all the things appropriate to the situation! APB on his car, flagged credit cards, sent manpower into the streets to look for him, etc etc etc. Audrey has a great point about the impound-and-boot attempt, that at least if they don't do that, they have a description on the car. And a timeframe that's more accurate. All of that useful stuff! She will now pinpoint guilt as the emotion at work here, yes, that's not much of a stretch at all, that even if Shumway's not directly responsible he feels like he is, and therefore he takes all the guilt and goes back to try and reset the day and get it right. But he takes that out of everyone else's memory every time he does it. (I have a question! Is something like this what happened with the memory-fogging for the Colorado Kid's murder? This plus the barn? How is this tied in? It's a memory Trouble, you would think there would be SOME kind of tie-in here.) This leaves Audrey as the only one with detailed memory of the events, and thus the best candidate to stop it, to whatever extent she still </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">has </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">details in her memory. As she points out, she's been up for five days straight, which, not quite? But assuming about 4.5 hours a day for four days plus the 3.5 she's been up now, yeah, she's over 20 hours straight, which is enough to hit almost anyone with fatigue poisons. To say nothing of emotional shock and trauma. So this freakout is completely expected and long overdue, in some respects, and Nathan reminds her that she's awesome and she's got this. In essence. And he means it every time! So there. Our adorable is forestalled by Stan sticking his head in to announce a hit on Shumway's credit card, and absolutely everyone knows it's green tennis shoes. Well, Audrey plus the audience knows.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Now we come to the big reveal, as theorized by Audrey! Anson wanted to see his daughter on her birthday, he gets her something he knows she wants, but then he gets stuck at the street curb and can't get across the street. Jeanie sees her dad, runs to him, gets hit by car, begin endless loop. I'm going to trust that "she was his first victim" is Audrey speaking from either Anson's point of view or from her trauma, not from what she really thinks of him. But he has the shoes, so now they have to figure out how to stop this before Jeanie dies again.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I would love to know what the fuck they're passing along as the voicemails to all these people who </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">don't </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">know about the Troubled still. Your daughter is in danger is very very ambiguous and liable to send parents into a complete panic. In danger how? From what? Or whom? And what on earth did they tell the school when they sent them off to search for kids with green tennis? I mean seriously, these are some bizarre requests, I know Nathan has ways of dealing with them but I wish we saw more of the straightforward civilian pushback and less of the Rev being a shithead. At </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">any </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">rate. Audrey drives downtown to look for Anson Shumway, nobody's been able to get hold of mother or daughter, while she's on the phone with Nathan and running the thank you for trusting me speech again she spots him! As you do for narrative convenience. I believe there's three iterations (drink!) of Nathan calling her "Parker" before she hangs up the phone. (I appreciate that there's NOT three iterations of the day, but there are three iterations of Audrey losing someone close to her, so feel free to kill the bottle regardless.) Poor Shumway is rather defensive, as people tend to be (well, people who believe cops are safe) when a cop is making abrupt demands of them. Particularly as self-conscious as he is over his OCD and not being able to beat it. Oh honey. Audrey helps him across the street again, fortunately well before noon, and once again we shall skip explanations.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And go straight into denial, doubt, shame, guilt, all of that. Isn't it FUN. With extra bonus points because this </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">is </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">a real disorder, it's one that's poorly understood by laypeople and even worse in its portrayal, generally speaking. I would say that this part, in the car, is actually the best depiction of how much this fucking sucks for Anson: he does KNOW things are irrational in his brain, he knows nothing actually terrible is going to happen, but that's all on the intellectual level. Just like a person with depression can (may not, but can) know intellectually that they're not a waste of space, that everyone has a right to get help, and may not believe it at all or be able to act as if they do. This desperate attempt to explain is really, really well-written and acted, and I kind of want to give him all the hugs. Audrey will now proceed with her </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">massive </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">lack of mental health knowledge to spout off about how if he can control his OCD he can save everyone's lives. Um. Audrey. A little clarity would go a long LONG way here. And no, I don't think what happens is directly her fault, but I also think that if she a) weren't completely fucking exhausted and b) hadn't rejected all help, she might have found a better way to talk him down. Or not! It is, as we will see, that doubt that gets you every fucking time. With eleven minutes to go Audrey also doesn't have a ton of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">time </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">to figure out a better way. I swear to god if the people in this fucking town would just take half an hour every night to study mental disorders, trauma, and how the two combine, they would all be MUCH healthier and probably safer. But they are Stoic Maine People and Don't Do That, and Claire was frankly a terrible shrink even before she got skinnapped, so that makes everyone dig their heels in harder and refuse any but their own perceptions. (Plus, yes, it's hard to look at these things in the middle of your own trauma, but if you're going to claim this is your JOB…) The moment comes, the moment passes, Anson tells Audrey where Jeanie is and asks for proof in return, which is somewhat helpful as a balance of power in this car. She gives him the Red Sox' comeback, and then lists everything after that, which was so NOT the right decision but I see where she feels like she needs to offer the maximum amount of proof. It's just a terrible, terrible idea, and gives Anson worse ideas, and the proof showing up on the radio cements it. I'm going to ignore that really bad believe-me line in favor of, okay, here are the shoes, he's staying in the car, she's going to go off and deliver them and make sure Jeanie stays safe. We can </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">see </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">from the jaw tightening and fingers twitching that Anson's making decisions as Audrey leaves, but she doesn't see this. The music informs us these decisions are bad.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">On into the ice cream parlor we go, with one of the most forced smiles we've seen out of Audrey in awhile. She gives Anson the out of "official police business" for why he's not here, and then his OCD kicks in when the phone rings. Being of a generation where texts aren't the be-all and end-all, I wonder how many important calls he's missed because of this ritual. He will now berate himself to control it, because that always helps, and finally picks up so we can have the tearjerking happy birthday/goodbye combo. Jeanie, in a demonstration of how kids understand a fuck of a lot more than we give them credit for, insists she knows why he does these things. I just hope that's not foreshadowing that this is a Trouble that doesn't care which side of the family it gets passed down. Anson will now give his daughter a speech about being anything she wants and keeping everyone safe, and I think his poor ex-wife has a pretty good idea of what's going on. Jeanie has a pretty good idea </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">something </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">is wrong, she must, and Audrey has the sinking expression of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">oh fuck what did I do</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. She will, of course, not be in time to stop Anson from committing suicide by speeding car, complete with jerky camera direction on her for maximum demonstration of her crying as she runs. And no, it won't reset, but she already knew that it wouldn't. I continue to wonder if Anson kept maybe some degree of body memory of the previous days, or something, because he comes to this decision awfully fucking fast.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The denouement takes us over to the Gull, where Audrey is firmly and completely blaming herself. They could foreshadow the parallels and Audrey's decision to go into the Barn in a season and a half a little more, but they'd have to bring out the anvils. Nathan tells us that the driver was an old man, confused about which was gas and brake, and the other car was his wife's. Everything gets nicely spelled out for us in case we didn't pick up on how this works, and Nathan proceeds to give Audrey a you-can't-save-everyone speech. Um. Nathan? Sometimes you can't save even the one person you desperately </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">want </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">to save, which would seem to be the point of this episode, and MAYBE YOU SHOULD TAKE YOUR OWN FUCKING ADVICE. Audrey, however, has taken her savior-of-Haven appointment completely to heart now that she doesn't have anything else to fall back on for identity. Cue more speechifying from Nathan, which only makes me want to shake future!him until his teeth rattle MORE. Got the world moving forward again? Did what he had to do to save his daughter and the town? NATHAN DO YOU HEAR YOURSELF. You hypocrite. I do wonder what would have happened had Anson </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">not </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">stepped out: would time have continued on? Would the driver have crashed and ended up killing himself? Would he have killed someone else in a much different location? We can never know, and Audrey takes that as her personal failure, which means Nathan tells her she can never fail him. Sure. So that's why you overrode her choice to go into the Barn. No I am not bitter at all why do you ask.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Not that Audrey looks convinced, but then Chris Brody wanders up with clear intent to check on his girlfriend, leading to an adorable head-duck and eye-shading so Nathan doesn't actually look at him when he walks back into the Gull. Duke, however, is still looking at him and being all, as Nathan puts it, man-crush. Nathan's going to just laugh at him for the next ever about this, which is unusual enough (and lacks enough malice) to startle Duke into demanding answers. Seriously I can't believe none of you told him this before. You assholes. It does give us an awesome Duke/Nathan moment of putting one finger on his jaw to turn his head back from looking at Chris, which is so fucking cute I can't even. Yeah, Duke, Nathan's going to tease you about this forever. And ever. At least when it's about this kind of thing it's not the sharper, more likely to result in damage to the tentative trust and friendship they're building here.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6666666666667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Chris Brody tries very hard to draw Audrey out, get her to talk about stuff, and she's even more withdrawn and uncommunicative than she was before. This time it's the withdrawn of still being in shock and having the past five days catch up to her all at once, and if Chris were a little better with people I think he'd just wrap her up, take her upstairs, and bug her about what the fuck tomorrow or the next day, but sometime after some sleep and some food. Triage care, in other words. But he's not, so he bumbles around awkwardly looking for something to make her feel better and sparks the declaration that Audrey doesn't get days off. This is true! Fuck you very much, Charlotte. And Mara and William. It sounds like a breakup speech! Chris takes it as the start to one, anyway, so it turns into one, go to London, get your grant money, do your work, don't give up things that are important to you for me. Which sounds an awful lot like, from this side, I won't give up my work for you. We do know this to be true! Because Audrey. Who is also being a fucking terrible liar, really, you could just hold up your crossed fingers in front of his face and it wouldn't be any more obvious. NOW he asks if she's okay, which should've been one of the FIRST things, but alas, he's no better with emotions than anyone else in this fucking town, so his response is cuddle and kiss and after that little speech that makes it a goodbye kiss. As the heartbreak music plays over, we get a tiny bit of lightening the atmosphere with Duke and Nathan turning away from Chris as he bellies up to the bar and some mutual shit-giving, but then we go straight back to Audrey the lonely outsider. On the clearest sung lines of "will you still love me tomorrow" we have first Duke, then Nathan, look up and over toward Audrey. Duke makes eye-contact, which I think is intended to highlight how in some ways they're both outsiders and how much more in tune with her he is than Nathan, in a lot of respects. Nathan gets only the empty space where she used to be. None of this is foreshadowing the Crocker Trouble or Nathan's worst fears at ALL. And Audrey, stop crying just outside the door and go up to your apartment and cry yourself to sleep, for fuck's sake. I'm just going to pretend that's what she does after the fade to black.</span>Anna Hammetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10095633218958433882noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4271373189216022547.post-15121301131538888602015-11-07T15:57:00.003-08:002015-11-07T15:58:22.345-08:00And Some Are Dying Haven S5E19 Perditus<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">No of course we're not planning to use the lyrics to When The Man Comes Around for the entire reason of Haven that would be dorky we are </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">never dorks</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Also I have a bridge in Halifax to sell you.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Previously! Deadly Tarot, memory wipes, and </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">fucking Walter.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> And Croashatner. Let's take a second to highlight something here that we shamefully didn't go over in detail last time: Croashatner (barring a proper name for Charlotte's husband) says </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">my</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> aether. You turned </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">my</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> aether into something. Prior to this we were working under the assumption that this was William's stash, which was admittedly smaller. So what, were they working together the whole time? Did anyone notice this or know it and it just never came out on camera? Or, because let's face it, William's balls did look a mite punier than those in the cave, did they never find William's box o deathtruffles but instead Croashatner's entire mining cave full of the damn stuff? </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">INQUIRING DAMN MINDS.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Anyway. Audrey has the aether core, Charlotte has the knife, I have a burning desire for a proper sound sampler so I can see if there's another voice under Shatner and the distortion, and then Charlotte's dying in Audrey's arms while thankfully imparting some final information. Between last episode and this one, Charlotte wins the prize for actually conveying some useful fucking data with her last breaths instead of just "Oh I always loved you" or "Oh you are so doomed, it's the *ludicrous gibs ensue*"</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiit3gBtx5ICMOjiJiG-M8oTHcxf6DV_JP9BMC0DCcOmNdEwszm7PpoP3mkW3bG9tr5mFoXcoS9y8_fMhkYD6hq-xQjkcA1mY0JTMCUcpAZsDkJ4ZU_htIWEwyO0eMdR6MZ97aSkq6KUC4/s1600/haven519cc01.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiit3gBtx5ICMOjiJiG-M8oTHcxf6DV_JP9BMC0DCcOmNdEwszm7PpoP3mkW3bG9tr5mFoXcoS9y8_fMhkYD6hq-xQjkcA1mY0JTMCUcpAZsDkJ4ZU_htIWEwyO0eMdR6MZ97aSkq6KUC4/s320/haven519cc01.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We open with a panover of Haven that includes the shroud, as ever, just in case we needed the reminder of the current situation. (Someday I hope to be able to make all the Shroud of Turin jokes.) Then we zoom in on Charlotte's body on a slab, for bonus yes she's really dead, yes she's had an examination done. We get almost no time to question WHERE that examination took place before we see the Benjy's ice cream logo, which appeared in Consumed (1x04??) and at least two later eps, Burned (3x10) and Morbidity (5x09). Of the creepyass dancing headless bear people. Ahhheh. Well, it's as good a place to store bodies as anywhere, and you can always move the ice cream other places. Still, have some Sinister Ordinary and Corruption of Innocence just in case you missed it. Gloria delivers the verdict so far: fifteen stab wounds, which yes, as Dwight says, indicates personal as a general rule. Personal to the victim or to the perpetrator's perception of the victim depending on the pathology involved, impulsive, disorganized, frenzied, all of those apply. Or whoever committed the murder wants us to believe that. With these tools, I'd be somewhat surprised if Gloria could tell us anything about the nature of the attacker, but that would be the normal next question: can you tell if he's right- or left-handed, can you tell anything about necessary strength, height/weight, etc. Granted, this is Haven, so some of those questions would have to be adjusted for "and the supernatural possibilities surrounding this are…", but that's where you start! Audrey and Dwight are locked in grim defensive fuck everything and especially Croatoan postures, as she relays that Croatoan was/is her father, nobody makes the requisite Star Wars joke. Heh. She might understand better later, or if she were less in shock, but as-is I totally get the no wait what the fuck just happened how do I emotions for this oh right I DON'T. See also her pulling away from Nathan's silent offer of comfort. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Dwight storms off in search of revenge and maybe partially to let Nathan and Audrey have their moment, which consists of her entire body language pulling the touch-me-not thing and swearing she'll be okay. Yeah. Nobody buys that, Audrey. The barnvatar's ghost doesn't buy that. Somewhere Duke is lifting his head and calling bullshit mid-vision and he doesn't know why. Nathan is also not buying it and trying for the old hug-and-cry-it-out routine which has, yes, previously worked but isn't this time. Instead she's going to distract him by sending him after Dwight and run away. Oh Audrey. Gloria informs Nathan that Conan, excuse me while I die laughing, already left to look for Croatoan and that if </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">she </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">were who he was looking for she'd just shoot herself in the head and be done. I would definitely agree with that assessment. Dwight might have just BARELY more control than that, but in the end it would only be in service of more destruction, overall, I do not recommend getting in his way. Or in his flight path. Or in the same county. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We will now commit epic foreshadowing by going over to the Teagues, who are counting up something - ah, they're counting up all the people that they know have had their memories fucked with by Croatoan. Are you counting yourself at least twice, Dave? Because clearly you've got some degree of a passenger in there (doors on the beach, remember? The Pusher? Did-a-chok? Dod-a-chum?) Half dozen on the beach with the Colorado Kid, Duke, Vince, Dave, Gloria, Therapist from that one episode, Witness from last episode, Nathan? so far I'm missing five and yes we're counting up all the people, this is what we do, we're the nitpickers, remember? And/or if there are other people who were both on the beach for the Colorado Kid's body being discovered and whatever else has happened since then? Though I think that's mostly down to them. There's actually very, very few people left from before Audrey's time who're still alive. The Teagues. Gloria. I'd be kinda concerned if I were you. Audrey, technically, though since she doesn't seem able to access her memories of Lucy I don't think that counts. Nathan and Duke were kids at the time. Vince finishes tallying and comes up with twenty people, that they know of, whose memories have been fucked with by Croatoan. I'm hopeful that they already took the count on how many people they know of who've been killed, but maybe that's one of the things they've been whammied to forget? It's hard to tell, since we don't get a look at Vince's note-taking. Alas. They also bring up the valid point that they don't know if this is all they know/used to know, what they're being whammied into forgetting (since they've forgotten it) and why exactly they keep surviving being whammied. Everyone stop jumping up and down and pointing at Dave all at once, let's have some order in here. No? No. Dwight shall now burst in shouting and making demands about give to me all your data. FINALLY SOMEONE DOES THAT WE'VE ONLY BEEN WAITING THREE SEASONS. Last time I remember anyone doing it was Audrey at the end of s2 over them knowing about Sarah and Lucy, and they've only gotten MORE annoyingly secretive since then, with occasional lapses into communication. To be fair, I suspect they've gone or tried to go to the others with this dataset and gotten whammied into forgetting they were going to. It'd be consistent with Croatoan's epic bullshit. Anyway. Dwight bursts in demanding data, announces Charlotte's murder, Vince looks horrified and shocked and all manner of other things that are appropriate to the situation. He also calls Dwight "son," which is equal parts creepy and adorable, not least because he appears to mean it in a familial sense. Not surprising, just telling. Dave, by contrast, is the one with tells of a lie, he looks abruptly like a harmless old man which is ALWAYS a bad sign with them. Always always. Vince just looks old and careworn and like a retired general who would like to stay fucking retired goddammit. Dwight is prepared to forget about the barn and everything Vince lists off as now a Serious Problem, lacking Charlotte's knowledge, in favor of revenge. Dwight. Thank you Audrey. She would like to announce that she has skin in this game too, not just via her mother's murder but also her son's. That seems fair, at least if you're pulling the Dwight shut the fuck up and admit you're not the only one who's lost someone here card. Which is I think what Audrey's trying to do, and also this is her regret that she never got to know her son, was just beginning to rebuild a relationship with her mother, and the fucker took both of them. So yes, she is sort of here to stop Dwight from going off half-cocked! Inasmuch as she's a helluva lot better at being cold and rational when she's decided SHE wants revenge. In that respect, I think she's very clearly Charlotte's daughter. At any rate. Dave's going to help. He's going to have another vision. If I were Dave, I would be somewhat concerned about if Audrey's accessed weird interdimensional alien powers to deliberately cause visions. Or baseball bats. I'm just saying. She hasn't, but I'd worry. That face suggests alien powers or baseball bats.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When credits are over, we come back to the creepyass fucking campfire with creepy fucking Walter by any other name, who proceeds to assert that who are you is the wrong question. Okay, who in the writers' room was watching B5. Though sure, Walter as a Shadow, I'll buy that. Duke tries again from a slightly different, thoroughly exasperated angle, and only gets stared at with teeth and eyes, the kind that make me want for a very big psychic weapon of some kind. Sorry, Duke, but if this is Walter or his kin and kind, he's used to that and he totally does it for the reaction. (IMDb credits say yes that's Walter, but I still question that, given how wrong IMDb sometimes is. Also, y'know: Walter. Look, it's either call him by name or by scurrilous nickname, of which we have several for him.) Also arguments about how little time you have for this shit aren't being bought, given a) he knows who you are and b) you're in North Carolina, which whether you measure from Haven or Halifax is a long fucking ways to come for answers. Especially by car. Walter's NEXT question is "what is it you really want to know" and no, seriously, who was mid-B5 rewatch for this ep. Duke gives in, at least seemingly, and will play along for now: what's wrong with him? Nothing! He's exactly what he's supposed to be, a Trouble-eating terror of the night. Insert your own Duke-as-Batman jokes here. Walter will now proceed to babble out a lot of information that's useful to </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">us </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">but really fucking not helpful for Duke, considering he missed a bunch of the developments up in Haven. It confirms roughly what we got last ep, though specifies that the Roanoke colony was made up of the Troubled, which he starts by calling "cursed," just in case we wanted to know where he stood on the matter. O-kay. Well, Duke doesn't know what a Croatoan is, which is kinda unfortunate for him, but we know that yes, that many Troubles in one place would be pretty attractive to someone who wants to eat the aether out of people. I'm curious about several things here, which will be derailed abruptly by WAIT FUCK I FORGOT THAT SIR </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">WALTER</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> FUCKING RALEIGH WAS THE ROANOKE FOUNDER. Oh my god I hate everyone. No wonder they went with that, you can do a Troubles connection AND a Dark Tower connection. I hate everyone. That SAID, I am still curious: was Walter Raleigh Troubled? Because he survived the Roanoke colony's loss/abandonment/whatever. Did he exist in this world? Signs point to yes, given they haven't deviated that far from our world except for Secret Supernatural History reasons. (Also let's not forget that Walter Raleigh got shut up in the Tower of London several times, eventually leading to his execution. In case you wanted more towers in your life, because you're a Very Important Person.) Ahem. One of those things I'm curious about is that Walter refers to Croatoan, but does he mean the original Croatoan, the Croashatner combo meal? Does he know about the Croashatner Combo? Or does he mean the original Shat who he's calling Croatoan because that character's original name isn't meant for us to know yet? I'm also curious about how the hell Haven got founded, if the Roanoke colony was actually implied for the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Troubled </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">to escape persecution, and not as a religious offshoot colony. How and when, and when did it become a haven, as noted. Was it before or after this?</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwQSGCrMUZI5YcI8LV_PNXN852gNDyljxeLFsuzhMOVHedP3C19h7WPZDDhXzk0Q_wT_xMO1ID0XsE7TCGSyPG5jP_1CHeRN_bdGFm3TS3TguGzPMIIytPruMQYeaRpt3p8qLSh5lULLo/s1600/haven519cc02.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwQSGCrMUZI5YcI8LV_PNXN852gNDyljxeLFsuzhMOVHedP3C19h7WPZDDhXzk0Q_wT_xMO1ID0XsE7TCGSyPG5jP_1CHeRN_bdGFm3TS3TguGzPMIIytPruMQYeaRpt3p8qLSh5lULLo/s320/haven519cc02.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The reveals just keep on coming: the first Crocker was made neither by William nor Mara, but by Croatoan himself. Out of a young Powhatan man, Walter tells us, which just fucking figures into the history of violence and colonialism that seems to underlie all of Haven's history. He can't do for himself being not strong enough to escape the Void, so he gets a Native to do it for him by force! Asshole. (We'll have to see, as the season progresses, if this is latent/benignly intended racism that turned misguided, or if it's really trying to say Colonialism Bad. Hard to be sure, but let's not forget the Mi'kmaq connection up north in Haven proper.) So the very first Crocker, who Duke refers to as an ancestor but I'm… less sure of that, collected Troubles for Croatoan by killing every single person in Roanoke Colony. That's </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">one </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">way to get a lost colony. That's also at </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">least</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> twice as many Troubles as the Crocker journal says the Crocker bloodline had in him, in which case were all those Troubles that came out of Duke mixed new and original, or were those </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">all</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> original? Ugh. Ten kinds of ugh. Skipping back a bit, the reason I'm unsure if this unnamed Powhatan man was a direct ancestor, or even an ancestor at all, is because it's heavily implied that Croatoan doesn't have the ability to claim Troubled aether for himself without killing the person holding it. So unless he already had kids and some supernatural inheritance happened, or Croatoan decided to keep it in the same bloodline because that worked well and then he could just kill the last Crocker and scoop up everything, or there was a way to claim the aether without killing him, or in fact Croatoan failed to get the aether that way either… too many fucking options, too little fucking data, fuck you VERY much, Walter. But the point is that we don't actually have proof, we just have glaring omissions in the historical record, no thanks to Walter.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Oh you know what notes we DO get a closeup on? Charlotte's notes! Yeah you knew we were going to go over those in epic detail, right? The first page looks like it may be a specific Trouble type, possibly the poison gas? "Concentration of item cloud is the main factor that leads to the incident." ... Incident? What the fuck incident, what are you talking about, incident? Incident is a very different word from phenomenon, it implies one incidence, rather than a semi-predictable thing that happens. Grr. "Once the powder particles and air are mixed as well as the powder. [line break] Particles are suspended in the dust cloud." Followed by bullet points under the particles suspended line: "slow decomposition" and "exp. will spread" are all we can see, though there's at least a third note under that. The second page: "Symmetric suspension is what the particle retention will spread in. [line break] Electrostatic force can also influence the ability of particle retention." Noted below the second line again is "materials: electrostatic / dust cloud / dispersion," with the /s indicating a new line. Oh and there's what looks like a bloodstain on this page. Then, somewhat blurry but here's what I got around Nathan's hand: "Electrostatic force will [???]der or help the [dispensation?] [something] of dust in the air." No, okay, this looks like discussion of aether, probably coded so that Charlotte's the only one likely to make sense of it just in case. I'm having His Dark Materials flashbacks here, but okay, dust, we'll go with that. It's not like King doesn't have his share of magic dust, too.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Anyway. Vince don't fucking sneak up on Nathan that's how you get shot let him demonstrate! Well, half-demonstrate. He is at least, assuming that's a fingertip I see, maintaining trigger discipline but I wouldn't put that to the test anytime soon. He doesn't </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">finish </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">accusing Vince of acting like Croatoan, because that would be fucking insulting, but everyone understands the impulse. Including Vince! Who has never seen Dwight so angry. Yes well he hasn't been broken this many times in a row that you've seen him, Vince. Nathan points out that Audrey's just as bad, and I love this next exchange in which we pull back some of the layers of bullshit and Vince and Nathan are upfront about, this is how Audrey's behaving, this is what it means. In other words, yes, she's shut down externally because everything inside fucking hurts, Nathan thought his family was fucked up (it's not a competition, Nathan! and yours is! was! both the biological and the adoptive!) and Vince is here because he claims not to be much use getting Dave to have another vision. I think the more accurate answer is that he doesn't want to watch Audrey and Dwight talk to his brother like this might be his fault, but he sympathizes too much to stop them, and also there are way too many feelings happening in that room so he's escaping to see if Nathan could use any help. Nathan! You're communicating again! Good for you. Once he's passed along that Charlotte figured everything out and he's looking for her notes, but her go-bag is gone and there's nothing in what's left, we move along to, so Croatoan took it? Yes probably. A bag that large would need to be hidden somewhere fairly clever, and we know she didn't and the crime scene pretty well told them she didn't have time. Hang on, I have to go laugh my ass off some more. So many unanswered questions, Vince? SEE HOW IT FUCKING FEELS. But he'd like to talk to Charlotte one last time! And Nathan has a hail Mary for that. It would be nice if they could have gotten to the resurrection sisters we saw in season four, but presumably they're outside of Haven by now. Alas.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Instead we get Lainey the fortune teller who has a sister who talks to the dead! Yeah this can't possibly go anywhere bad, especially not with the ep title Perditus. Nathan brings this over to her on his own, since he has the best rapport, and apparently he will be Officer Puppy Eyes Wuornos for the duration of this scene. Awww. I'm amused at the demonstration of how people will look for meaning via anything with the miserable randomness that the Troubles actually are, but yes, her sister has a Trouble now too and no, Lainey, I'm sorry but it probably doesn't have a damn thing to do with always being into the occult. She goes on to tell Nathan that yes it's real and here's her proof in the form of Ona coming over shortly after Herb's death in Trouble Alley with a message. Okay, that's nice and all, and it gives us information about the circumstances of their marriage, Herb's death, the car accident where Herb almost lost his arm that was Lainey's fault or so she believes, the location of Herb's scar… but none of this is information that a sister wouldn't have unless she was also estranged for some reason. Just putting that out there. And Lainey certainly doesn't say that some of this is stuff Ona had no reason to know. Trust me, we were waiting for that! At any rate, Nathan gets a location and it turns out Ona's squatting in the old HPD. Ah, conservation of sets. Lainey's hesitant to tell him, presumably because she thinks Nathan would object to his old place of work being used as living quarters and potentially destroyed by a bunch of strangers. No, I think they're a bit past that as far as pragmatism goes, though knowing that going in is a good idea so Nathan can brace himself for it.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Meanwhile Dave is </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">very </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">drunk and still not having a vision. Also he's able to say Croatoan more, which implies that Vince saying it in his ear and triggering a vision was a one-off, on the grounds of being so terrified of the name. Now you have to find something else to punch Dave in the adrenal glands, you guys. Dwight and Audrey are less than pleased, though Audrey's calmer and more inclined to think through it, whereas Dwight seems inclined to give Dave alcohol poisoning. Dwight, you don't want him slurring so much you can't </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">understand </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">the fucking vision. However! Dave thinks Croatoan knows how to block him out now, much like Harry and Voldemort, I guess? Audrey points out that Dave is fucking terrified and entirely capable of blocking himself. He's very good at standing in his own way. And to be fair, assuming that Dave's been telling the truth and that the visions we've been seeing are also truthful, he's getting the full force of emotional content when he goes along for the ride. Considering he's also complete shit at the kind of mental control that would allow him to delineate "this is how Croatoan's mind felt and I felt it too" from "this is who I am/am becoming," yeah, he's got reason to be scared shitless. I've got a question, too, how does Dave or how do we know that Dave and Croatoan haven't slipped together already without possibly even Dave knowing it, given the depth of the connection here? The answer, which will become relevant later but which I would have liked someone to have brought up now, is we don't know. Dwight no. Yes we know you're cracking, the answer is still no. I really, really love all of Audrey's Pointed Looks at him in this ep, they're </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">great </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">even if they're not exactly the kind of relationship we were so hoping for them. (Haven. Stop killing your women. Ahem.) So, she chases him out and starts talking Dave through it, starting with Dwight's right about being our only lead. Dave is drunk enough to babble about how he doesn't understand how the monster could be related to Audrey. Oh honey. Cue rueful snark about Mara, and I don't actually accuse Audrey of emotional manipulation very much, mainly because the times she uses it are almost never on her own behalf. Except here it very much is, and it's very much manipulating with the truth: they've all lost something, Charlotte's dead now, and if there were another way to do this she would. And I believe that! Even the last one, because dealing with Dave is frustrating for her and Dwight at the best of times, so no, she would be tracking some other lead if it were available. It's not. So. For her, Dave will try! This can't possibly go badly.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2-PEW9D8EkuYKAfdQHKsNOuTFP2EUcDDkJqlE0Ln5078uGtOSXRaRDD6agoBGpKoQWAkpBVExRn3p2sUeg0NR2HL2wFDG3fzzSngECIIIQHhnVLNwowbycnWMAZANnVhIeafSCEi_PKY/s1600/haven519cc03.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2-PEW9D8EkuYKAfdQHKsNOuTFP2EUcDDkJqlE0Ln5078uGtOSXRaRDD6agoBGpKoQWAkpBVExRn3p2sUeg0NR2HL2wFDG3fzzSngECIIIQHhnVLNwowbycnWMAZANnVhIeafSCEi_PKY/s320/haven519cc03.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Over at the station, Lainey's sister Ona is all set up for the séance that's going to go badly. Well, some part of this is going to go badly. Wow this is a really blatant show with absolutely nothing backing it up. And her Latin is bad and she should feel bad. (Perditus, lux, latem? Really?) Sigh. The music suggests something's going on, but not what Nathan wants, and specifically no, she can't reach Charlotte, she "must have already crossed over." I'm still stuck on facepalming forever, the cheese, it burns. That's not even good scenery chewing (which is a good performance from the actress herself, it takes skill to chew the scenery badly and do well at it). Looks like they did the séance in the old interrogation room, for maximum appropriateness. Ona apologizes for not doing more, and oh hey the station is full of people. I see dead people. He teases her gently about not kicking them out and no loud parties until the police station's needed again, so yes, he's made as much peace with this as he's likely to. Also, aww, Nathan! This is a Nathan we haven't seen in an age, he has hope, he's interested in making amends for past actions, he's empathizing with people in the course of his duties… oh hello Herb. Ona. Nobody ever replies "peachy" when everything's really okay, not in decades at least. Nathan has a Suspicion. Actually he has probably a certainty, but he goes ahead and does the handshake-check-for-scar thing to confirm, because he's being a good cop. A smart cop, anyway. Nathan confronts her with it and she gets about two seconds into denying that she raised her sister's husband from the dead and then </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">didn't tell her sister that she had done so</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> before Nathan waves that away with sure, let me just bring Lainey down here. Yeah, that wasn't going to work, it wasn't even believable at the outset. Okay. So she has a resurrection Trouble, I'm glad you specified </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">a </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">and not </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">the</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, Nathan, because we know that there's a resurrection Trouble out there with somewhat fewer drawbacks for the resurrected but Moira and her sister haven't been heard from in an age, and see also headed out of town the last time we saw them and therefore on the other side of the, heh, we'll call it a veil in this set of circumstances. This one has all new and unknown drawbacks! Apparently Ona revived all her friends and loved ones, which is… everyone in the police station. That zombie outbreak's not going to be any fucking fun, you guys. The music agrees with me. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Dave's vision, now that he's finally having it, consists of a monster-cam replay of Charlotte packing up, and then an immediate cut to her body on the floor with mocking commentary about Dave liking to watch. Complete with his name. Okay, I'll allow as how that's freaky, though given Croatoan's been fucking with your memory… Dave do you actually remember that at this point, though? I feel this is a valid question by his reaction. For that matter, Dave, is this really you Dave, or is this Croatoan riding you like a carousel pony and us getting the voiceover for Doylistic misdirection and Watsonian torture? I would also be curious to know if Croatoan can whammy him mid-vision, and that's why he's been allowing it. That or Croatoan's just a sadistic fuck, which we have ample evidence to support! I'm furthermore curious if Croatoan </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">can't </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">keep Dave out of his brain, particularly given end-of-ep reveals. But we'll get to that. On the upside, Dave did remember that Charlotte had an aether fragment in her go-bag, which makes it trackable, which means they have her notes. Whether or not they're in any kind of comprehensible format, nobody knows! Including us. Isn't it great. Audrey brings up the very real problem of needing Charlotte's guidance and instruction in order to build a second barn, which is Nathan's cue to drop in all excitedly saying they might not have to! Do without it, that is. Excuse Audrey and Dwight, they have to find their jaws on the floor where they dropped them. Nathan please stop making pronouncements like that when you know fucking well that all Troubles have a downside and you don't know what this one's is. Dwight looks like he's wondering </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">exactly</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> what the downside is, and given his Trouble I wouldn't blame him for being the first one to go there.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Duke stop making assumptions and leaps of logic without asking it in the form of a question or Walter will just allow you to continue on in whatever degree of wrongness you possess. Even if they </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">are </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">pretty reasonable leaps to be making: Croatoan created the Crockers so they'd collect Troubles so he could eventually have them, why is a great question. The same reason he wants them now is a shitty answer that informs us not in the least of anything, Walter, not that we expected better from you but fucking </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">still</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Duke may not expect better at this point, but he also has zero patience. I feel you, dude. He grabs onto Walter when he gets up all wait a fucking minute here don't walk away this is not enough information! I love you Duke. You are currently our audience identification character. Though I think I would try biting Walter's fingers off if he were whammying me with weird light in the third eye. Fuck you, asshole. Oh hey, it's time for some visions of possible!future!Haven. In which everything is blue-filtered and wavy and also destroyed. Given the massive lightning sheeting through the clouds without touching down, I'm not 100% certain the wavy look to the environment is </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">just </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Oh Look A Vision, but on the other hand this looks an awful lot like when Dave has his visions, only with somewhat less Evil Dead first person POV cam. I'm pretty sure the background noise is the same, too. Well, when caught in a fucked up vision-inside-a-vision, you go looking for clues! After swearing a bunch. Or while swearing a bunch. We're clever, we can multi-task.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Nathan, Audrey, and Dwight are having a meeting about what the right thing to do is, and Dwight asks how this is even a question. Because you're emotionally compromised, Dwight. Arguably worse than the other two, because he runs hot where Audrey and Nathan tend to run cold, under extreme stress. Notably, the guys are facing each other while Audrey sits in the middle, both as a bridge and, in this case, as the divisive cautious one. She's not sure they should do this, they have no clue how the fucking Trouble works, no Dwight it's </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">not </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">the same as bringing Nathan back because there they actually know how Moira's resurrection Trouble operated and what the downsides were, that it was painful for the Troubled person and there was a time limit, and that Ona hasn't </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">said </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">there's a downside indicates </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">she </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">hasn't run into it yet either. Actually, come to think of it, I'm pretty sure that the sooner the downside of the Trouble is made apparent, the less dangerous to other people it is. I'd have to go back and tally them all up (and we might, don't think we wouldn't), but Nathan and Dwight are really obvious examples of the theory, and the guy from Ain't No Sunshine is an example of the converse. So's Vicki, for that matter, since we see her again this ep. As the most level-headed person at this table, Nathan first acknowledges Audrey's concerns, leading to one of the most petulant outbursts we've ever seen from Dwight that of course he'd take her side, and then says that they have to take the chance. After all, he has </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">seen </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">the resurrected, he knows that for now everyone's still themselves or at least not Wrong in the way most people come back, which he'll reassure Audrey with after Dwight leaves to go get Charlotte's body. Body, Dwight. You're losing your detachment </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">really a lot</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. The only concern she'll admit to is that it seems too good to be true. Accurate! And not at all complete, Audrey, how much do you want to just move on and not have to grieve for her twice? Is it a lot? I bet it's a lot. I don't blame her, either, considering to an extent she already went through that with James. Let's have the world's most blatant subject change instead and play hot potato with the aether core. Nathan's turn to take it and hide it somewhere nobody else can find it and thereby theoretically prevent Croatoan from getting hold of it, now that Dave's coughed up that he's looking for the stupid thing. Oh yay. There is no possible way this is all going to end with a lost aether core, is there. Or a tortured Nathan </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">and</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> a lost aether core. Tortured someone. Nathan doesn't really have anyone to pass it on to, though.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Going to get Charlotte's body means going to see Gloria, who has apparently changed blouses? Well, autopsy. Gloria doesn't need to do more than take a look at him to know that he's found a way to bring her back, yes, of course she guessed, Dwight, she's been around the Troubles how long? I'm going to go ahead and guess three cycles. Also because Gloria is The Best, and she doesn't bother with a lot of the obfuscation and self-delusion that everyone else in Haven seems so keen to stick to. She does want to know if he's sure about this. While I'm not sure about the timeline of Dwight's whole emotional arc of in-love, betrayed, falling-in-love again over, what, six weeks? Two months? There's more than enough weight here in all that he's lost, which he touches on, that he's ready both for them to be over and for the Troubles to work </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">for</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> them for a change, I like that choice of phrasing rather than the typical and somewhat expected I'm-not-going-to-lose-her-too. Also it's an argument oh, there's the thing. Though still phrased more as what gets taken from Dwight, rather than what's important to him about Charlotte. Slightly. Anyway, it's an argument that holds some resonance with Gloria too, who, let's not forget, watched a guy she loved end up being tortured when they tried to literally make the Troubles work for them. (4x12 and 4x13) Fuck you too, William. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Back to the police station there's a whole lot less fanfare with the actual bringing back of the dead Charlotte. I have absolutely no idea what to do with Dwight and Audrey holding hands, except that I know the general idea behind it is bonding over their shared loss and I know that the cinematography is ... off, somehow. Seems off. There's a weight on it that I'm not sure will come back to haunt us, so to speak, in a later episode, but for now, yeah, the emotional resonance is definitely there, both of them clinging to the idea that this could work and have no bad side effects. You poor bastards. And at first, yeah, Charlotte is disoriented and she seems to not remember anything from after they were about to go into the deathtruffle mine and collect the aether. I am and remain deeply amused that her first question is what happened, her second question is where am I, and at no point does she ask why is she naked and wrapped in a sheet. Apparently this is not a thing to her. Well, Dwight, but that doesn't explain her daughter and this other woman and speaking of this other woman </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">why are you talking about purifying aether in front of her.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Oh my god everyone, have you never heard of operational security? Dwight, I am looking at you Mr. Ex Ranger. No, the last thing she remembers is starting Audrey's training and you're still talking about it in front of the stranger! And she's still not asking where are her clothes. heh. Outside of the room this apparently is not Ona's first rodeo either, spouting off a number of good points about traumatic amnesia and so on. Dwight's just going to babble about catching Croatoan, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">operational fucking security, soldier.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Oh, never mind. I do find it morbidly amusing that they were going to such lengths to keep the No Marks Killer a secret, but now that it's Croatoan apparently everyone can know. Go fucking figure. Meanwhile in the office where Charlotte's getting dressed she is remembering her death now, and either someone got a really good angle on Laura Mennell's pupil action there or someone in post is fucking around with the predator slit eyes. I would honestly buy it either way, given the whole being from another dimension thing and the depth of the fear and emotion we see in Charlotte. Outside, Audrey wants to know how long it took Herb to remember his death. A couple of days, apparently. That'll be important later, but for now the upshot is they need to give her time, help her remember who they are to her, where she is, etc. They will now go into the office to do just that and... no. No, she's gone.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLuMSaUM_mHOIB4qEX5Vi9UqucBcVs5_h5siolh5aV_dC7_wKo9av2IDCQUPHedWGjm9u6lQ2FIvyvV7yf85bsF9G5O0HKrIVvzdPAfFacs1BQQGFyj5Bl6b8jDajYzPATgJwXFNAUOUg/s1600/haven519cc04.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLuMSaUM_mHOIB4qEX5Vi9UqucBcVs5_h5siolh5aV_dC7_wKo9av2IDCQUPHedWGjm9u6lQ2FIvyvV7yf85bsF9G5O0HKrIVvzdPAfFacs1BQQGFyj5Bl6b8jDajYzPATgJwXFNAUOUg/s320/haven519cc04.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Where is she? Where is Duke! Still in the second layer of the vision, still annoyed with his life and his choices, still looking for anything at all that'll tell him what the fuck is going on or, probably a distant second, get him out of here and back to beating up Walter for information. Sorry, no, that won't work, this is all the information he intends to show you </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">or </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">us. Some trash goes floating by, followed by what looks like a plastic version of a lobstrosity in case we needed further King references however oblique today... no, no that's a horseshoe crab. We all remember the last time we saw horseshoe crabs floating down Main Street all 'yo whaddup', yes? The distortion's making it hard to tell if there's human eyes on the fucker. (The relevant episode is 4x08 Crush, where the damn crabs were harbingers of opening otherworldly doors that were never supposed to be opened, etc, according to Mi'kmaq legends and the journal of Sebastian Cabot. Still fucking creepy.) As a point of order, the last time these things showed up I don't believe it was ever verified that anyone other than the children from other dimensions/half-breeds? from other dimensions? This is getting messy, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">non-humans and not-entirely-humans</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> could see these freakyass horseshoe crabs. So the fact that Duke appears to be seeing one now is indicative of Something. He finally finds Vicki drawing on the sidewalk in chalk, which is about the most color we get out of the whole thing, but it's too vision-wavery and whatnot to be clear what it is until Duke gets up to her. Which is highly indicative of how much this doesn't exist </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">until </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">he gets there and sees what's up, and and what's up is a rather crude drawing of buildings in child's bright colors. Vicki's trying to put everything back the way it was and can't, oh </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">honey</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Duke asks after Audrey and Nathan, like you do when confronted with someone you really didn't expect to see in your weird vision thingie, and gets informed that they and everyone else are dead now. Well. That's a shitty future! Let us not go there. 'tis a silly place. I wonder, too, given that she's saying she can't put back everything the way it was, is that because her Trouble is gone somehow, is that why everyone's dead? Or is this They're All Dead, Duke future because of something else? Signs Hazy, Try Again Later, I suppose, though some mixture of the two would fit with Croatoan's known activities to date. Anyway, Duke takes a second to process that, vision or no he would like to file a motion for his life to stop sucking, I'm pretty sure, and okay is anyone NOT dead? Yes, you're going to have to prompt the traumatized and/or half-real iteration of Vicki with a list of people, starting with Dwight and going through Dave, Gloria, and finally Vince, who's apparently alive for certain values thereof. Considering what he said about the Teagues line being guardians of the town for generations, I would not be surprised if that were </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">very </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">limited values thereof, with everyone dead and Vince's raison d'etre gone. So. Off they go!</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And off we go back to the really real world, or at least to Haven, where they're updating Nathan about Charlotte running off. Dwight, I know you're hideously upset but punching walls is not going to help. Guaranteed. Okay, they split up, Nathan'll take Charlotte's lab and Dwight is going off… somewhere unmentioned but probably special to them, with dire declarations about Croatoan getting to repeat history. Oh come on, Dwight, it's a running theme in Haven, are you </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">really </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">sure you can avoid that? Okay, Nathan gets to check up on Audrey on their lonesome for a bit, starting with checking on Dwight so it can seem more like the steadier person is checking on both the unstable ones. Well, yeah, of course Dwight's blaming himself. That's what Dwight does. Hadn't you noticed? Audrey brushes off Nathan's question with thoroughly bleak humor in one of the best lines this season, but at least this time she doesn't expect him to believe her. She confirms he's had a chance to hide the aether core, looks like out in the woods somewhere. Maybe at Nathan's house. I would LOVE for that to be our chance to get a good look at Nathan's house. Audrey plans to go after Lainey and her tarot cards because if that's what got them into this it can get them out of it! Maybe! Um. Sure. Now you're really grasping at straws, but this is important for Plot Reasons, so I'll take it. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Dave is apparently packing a six-shooter now, I'm not only twitching because the idea of Dave pointing a gun at someone is terrifying on so many levels although that's a good part of it, but also because a six-shooter revolver around this many Dark Tower/Gunslinger references is making me jumpy. And a stake, which brings Vince and his associated commentary about vampire Troubles. I'm also jumpy because Vince missed Dave putting the gun in the bag although with any luck he's going to assume that's there as well. And he does have a point, you never really know </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">what</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> you're going to run into at this point. The box of widdly-wee that goes ding when there's stuff, on the other hand, is to find the vial of aether that was in Charlotte's go-bag. Vince would like to question Dave's everything to do with this plan, it is a bad plan, and he should feel bad for having it. Dave thinks this is an </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">awesome</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> plan now that Audrey's forced him to confront the fact that Croatoan can see him and knows he's watching him and it's only a matter of time before he comes after, um, Dave? Are we forgetting the creepy-ass tentacle marks? The blackouts? </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">ALL THE OTHER TIMES CROATOAN HAS COME AFTER YOU?</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Dave, here's your sign. Shut up. Vince agrees with me, don't you, Vince, he thinks going after Croatoan first is a stupid plan. Seriously, I love his IT'S A TERRIBLE PLAN, it sounds like something we would say. Only with more swearing, but you can't do that on the SyFy channel. Dave has cowardice issues, so, fine, Vince will go with him. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Lainey is not in immediate evidence in her shop, which means Audrey starts calling out and oh look, a chewing noise. Those are never good. Especially when it sounds like raw flesh. Kitty is so glad that this is one of mine to post I cannot even tell you, I don't have her zombie squicks. (Actually I rewatch the Resident Evil movies because I find them comforting and great crafting fodder. Nobody ever said I was normal or sane.) (</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">K: </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Fucking zombies. Even headshots won't kill them.) Audrey, by contrast, seems to have at least a little of the squicked terror, though I admit I probably would too. It's the smell, you see. Anyway. Yes, that's Herb chewing on his wife, yes, she's dead, no, they're going for the gore route of showing us body parts that aren't the death wound. I guess that's LIKE small blessings. After some very halfhearted attempts to do the standard cop routine of stand up, hands over your head, stop playing with your food, she gives in and plugs him two in the chest, one in the head, and even THAT doesn't kill these zombies. Well fuck. Time for the chair-jitsu attack to shove zombie!Herb into a closet? Small back room of some kind and shut and jam the door. Good reflexes! Her next reflex is to call Nathan, which is definitely a superior choice to Dwight in this case, since Dwight would either snap and just shoot her rather than wait for her to zombify, or deny that anything was ever happening and make the same argument I'm about to make. Which is that Charlotte's not actually human. You don't know that this Trouble works the same way on interdimensional aliens as it does on this world's humans! Plus they have plenty of time, comparatively speaking, though the station not so much.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Over at the surprisingly empty police station Audrey is delivering some cold hard reality to Ona about what she found, and how long has Herb been risen? Only a couple of days. He was the first. By which Audrey deduces that Ona loved him very much, and we get </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">almost</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> an admission of an affair in so many words, though I find it interesting that that's never explicitly stated. A lot of things aren't getting explicitly stated in this episode. Anyway. When Herb died she couldn't stand it, her Trouble kicked in, she brought him back and can I just say it's real interesting that she talks about bringing Herb back </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">again</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> but makes no mention of, if she can make her Trouble work, bringing her sister back? I'm just saying. It might as well be an admission. But she's still focused on bringing Herb and the others back and speaking of the others, um, where are the potential ravening zombies? Oh, visiting their loved ones. That's going to end well. Yeah, Audrey's going to need those addresses, and she doesn't give a damn about Ona's intentions, there are motherfucking zombies in this motherfucking town. Nathan kind of comes to the rescue with a note in the Crocker journal about a Crocker asking a woman about her death and getting snarl rarr brains chew for his (his, primarily and/or solely, I'm assuming at this point) pains. So, yes, asking Charlotte about her death was probably the directly wrong thing to do. And then she'll turn, and she'll come after Audrey and Dwight. The same Dwight who has gone out to look for her! Oh joy. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">For extra bonus joy we get the ominous music and the shot of Charlotte from the back that outright waves a damn sign of I'm Going To Turn Around And My Face Will Be Blue And Falling Off. Apparently Dwight's idea of this is their spot and he knew she'd come here is because this is where she shot him. Aww? And then he puts a hand on her shoulder and she turns around and no, no she is not slavering undead yet. She does have a sense of humor about the whole thing though. About shooting him, and regrets about lying about being a CDC doctor, and for that matter Dwight has a good sense of humor about her shooting him, although to be fair he was wearing a vest and had pretty much prepared for that. Set it up, even. This is one of the better scenes between them, with less falsehood and mistrust and more genuine emotional bonding. Also, given that he doesn't have to remind her but only to ask and she flat out says she died, a damn good indication that she was never going to turn due to being not human, immune to the original Crocker Troubles, who the hell knows. But if she does remember everything and she's still fleshy and smiling by now? Chances are. Or at least that they have a few more hours, maybe a day, before she goes all Romero. Dwight, of course, wishes he could have/thinks he should have been there. For the record I don't actually think he thinks he could have done anything, but rather feels that he should have been able to, and is smart enough to tell the difference even as he says it anyway because that's what you do. Charlotte is more than likely sure he would have died too, and says as much with no uncertainty in her voice, not just for his reassurance. She doesn't entirely remember what happened, so, okay, I will allow that maybe she's not entirely immune. Trying to see underwater is a good approximation of how Croatoan-vision appears to us at least! Dwight also brings up the fact that she said Croatoan was Audrey's father, which </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">does</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> rattle her even if she tries to pass it off as she must have been confused. Not even Dwight believes you, lady. Though he's willing to buy there's more under that that she hasn't said yet, didn't have time.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Teagues took themselves over to Charlotte's murder scene so they could pick up the crumbs of an aether signal. I have not so much a question as a pointing at the gun on the mantel: that is so totally going to get used to track down the aether core some ep very soon that it's not even funny. Though I do find it curious that Nathan managed to hide it such that the Teagues could track the single ball o' deathtruffle rather than the giant purified mass of nuclear doom. So now they should be able to track the aether to wherever the killer left it! Yay. Dave's yay is very subdued, having lost his buzz. Dave what in the name of god and little fishes IS your alcohol tolerance? And how long has it actually been since you got drunk? After some weak joking about bringing the booze along to up Dave's courage again, Vince flat-out tells him to go home and let the professional handle this. Professional WHAT I'm not entirely sure, but professional Guard leader I will accept. Accustomed to handling the weird shit. Dave blows him off with brotherly rivalry, and Vince seems to think there's maybe something more but fine, they'll do this together and he'll even make noises about together until the end of all things. Vince. When you say that shit, it ALWAYS GOES BAD. Why would you do that.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">See, we'll demonstrate one of the ways right now. Vision!Vince is sitting in the chief's chair down at the station, all symbolic-like of the heart of Haven that's now empty of all actual power. Vicki's disappeared off somewhere. It's probably just that the ep aired on November 5 that we're having V for Vendetta flail over all the V-names being in town, yes? Yes. Duke's trying to joke about this because Duke would like this all to feel less real and plausible. Also that office is empty of almost eeeeverything. Vince would like to know how the fuck, which only gets more cheap jokes and oh look, Vince's eyes are occluded in traditional Hi I'm Blind Now And Possibly An Oracle/Prophet. (Often as a result of the blinding.) Which is very much one of King's massive, massive tropes of the disabled being somehow special and/or the sacrifice for wisdom. Okay, maybe that second one isn't only King. It does, though, put Vince in a somewhat similar thematic role to Abigail Freemantle, who made of Hemingford Home a </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">haven</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> for the survivors of the superflu and then lived to see it all go sideways and despair. She then, like Vince, returned to the page/screen just long enough to be near-death and infirm at people with some ominous instruction and wisdom before she died. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Anyway</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Duke is getting really fucking sick of people naming Croatoan like he's supposed to know who that is. Hey, you're doing better than most of them were until just a little while ago! They got stuck on the myth and it being a warning and forgot it could be a name as well. The point is, he won and Vince is our voice of nihilism for the evening. Cites a game played and lost, to which I go OH REALLY and also WALTER YOUR INNER VOICE IS SHOWING. But apparently this vision, whether it's Walter sending a warning or a genuine possible future, is caused by Nathan going into the void and not coming out again. I would like to emphasize that </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">both of those things </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">happened, so we don't know which is the worse problem. Duke starts to demand all the answers ever, starting with why Nathan went into the void, but they will of course be interrupted by a loud shout of pain. Male voice. Vince asserts that that means Croatoan's here, which begs the question of if that's </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">him </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">shouting in pain or rage? or some third person getting eaten for their aether. I would also note that it seems a reasonable bet that Vince's eyes are occluded like that because he's been Trouble-eaten, though why Vicki's eyes weren't I don't know. Anyway. Give in to your fate of dying in the vision, Duke! Fuck no, says he, and picks up a… cricket bat? Or something similarly shaped. I'd say hockey or curling based on location but neither of those fit, either. (</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">K:</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> If it had jagged edges I'd say it was a macuahuitl.) But he's going to go confront his fate with a weapon in hand. Have I mentioned lately that Duke's our audience identification character? He so is.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Often running him a close second is Dwight, except Dwight breaks in a very different direction. Ranger training, you see. Not something either of us has any inclination toward. He's freaking out at Nathan that he just asked Charlotte to remember and he just got her back and this is his fault. No, Dwight. Dwight no. If he were being honest with himself, he'd've admitted that he had every reason to expect this to be a short resurrection, long enough to say goodbye and not much else, but he's buried in the longest river in Egypt. Thoroughly enough that he </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">doesn't </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">make the argument about her being other-than-human, although that may just be that even as fucked up as he is, he doesn't really want to have a horde of unkillable zombies in exchange for Charlotte </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">maybe </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">not turning. Nathan argues, in his role as The Stable One this ep, that Dwight did exactly the right thing and Charlotte has to remember so she can tell them all the things about fixing Haven and who or what Croatoan is and all of that. Dwight has an </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">excellent </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">point that Nathan would never, ever, ever fucking give up on having Audrey, but he's supposed to just accept that Charlotte's going to remember, zombify, and need to die or Ona's Trouble will need to be solved? Unfortunately the resultant argument and/or acknowledgement of that point (hey, Nathan's been doing some growing this season, it could happen) has to be postponed because zombies attacking the station, having returned from eating their loved ones. Oh yay. Or at least, we're not being told they did anything other than eat their families! Assuming their families didn't barricade themselves in their houses somewhere until the shambling undead shambled away, which, we can hope. Poor everyone. On the bright side, this seems to be a more classic case of zombi rather than zombie, where it's not transmissible via biting, and it takes focus and force of will to raise them in the first place. Look, in the middle of a zombi(e) attack, you take all the upsides you can get. Like having two combat-trained men to yell at to stop talking and come help, since Ona's being fucking useless and cowering with a blanket around her. After the ad break, Nathan picks up the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">same </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">damn cricket bat/macuahuitl that Duke grabbed in the vision, which means… what? We're not precisely sure, but there's some parallels going on here, and I seriously doubt it has anything to do with the props department getting lazy about their placement of items, both because they've never been that lazy before and because that's a pretty specific camera focus. At the very least, it means that the vision is near-future enough that no one's toted the damn thing out of the police station. It may also mean something about the shallowness of the sideways step between the world Duke's seeing and the one everyone else is in right now, in a very go, then, there are other worlds than these sense, but we just don't know for sure. More important things! Like Nathan hacking off a zombie arm with it and being surprised by how easy that was, which would seem to indicate it's nominally a blunt weapon in addition to being, you know, made of wood. Solid-looking wood though. Charlotte and Audrey got the door barred, but it's not doing much good without additional barricade material, and then there's the windows to consider, so Nathan will run around thwacking zombie arms since he can't feel it if he gets bit, while the other three keep working on barricades. To absolutely no avail.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIC6uKKNtU3UyA_nCma6Vue-5ULCGENEhibNy3Pe2AxR8hnVoA6t3mXqrVFVbGTn1I5I7fa44OLr9ktyE_3mKGEd7CZDSR6VPcJdwOGY72DQSXNtBQnnmUT86XB97pElD-4rffKHEVqc4/s1600/haven519cc06.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIC6uKKNtU3UyA_nCma6Vue-5ULCGENEhibNy3Pe2AxR8hnVoA6t3mXqrVFVbGTn1I5I7fa44OLr9ktyE_3mKGEd7CZDSR6VPcJdwOGY72DQSXNtBQnnmUT86XB97pElD-4rffKHEVqc4/s320/haven519cc06.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Dwight doesn't want Audrey to try and get Ona to fix her Trouble. Ona probably doesn't want to try working on it that much either, considering she's fucking terrified and acts like she expects to be yelled at. Lady what the fuck </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">is </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">your backstory, since you're acting like an abuse victim in some respects, not to mention the attachment issues going by the way she fixated on Herb to what seems like the exclusion of everyone else. Or maybe that was simplified for time and dialogue? Anyway. She has a lot of protests about only wanting to help and doesn't understand at first that </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">she raised all her friends of course they're coming to eat her</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. We don't know, either, if this is a Trouble that would end on her death or if the unstoppable unkillable zombies would just keep going until, I dunno, could you burn them all? Explode them? Hack them to pieces? You'd have to get pretty gory in order to stop them from trying to eat you, is the point. And they have neither time nor resources, so the best plan is indeed to get Ona's Trouble under control. Nathan is full of disagreeing because they need to know how to build the new barn thanks that was HIS whole reason for being willing to bring her back in the first place. I so, so appreciate that Charlotte steps up to bash them all in the head for being overbearing assholes all HEY THIS IS MY LIFE AND DEATH SITUATION. Unlife and death. Whatever. She claims to've remembered everything, which means they're probably fucked pretty soon anyway, and that part of who she is, is not letting other people get hurt or killed so she could live. I, uh. I question this considering her early behavior with trying to break out of the shroud via a thinny? Not to mention a distinct sense of you all are very fascinating lab mice in her treatment of the townsfolk even when she was being a CDC doctor. But I believe in her using that phrasing in the sense of, this is who she's choosing to be at the very end of her life, and fuck you for trying to choose otherwise for her. Audrey apologizes for wanting her mother back, which, really? Nobody here is blaming either her or Dwight for their emotional responses, just their actions on those responses. Also she was the one trying to talk the guys </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">out </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">of resurrecting Charlotte. Okay! Audrey will take Ona off to talk her down and Charlotte will… give Nathan instructions on barn-building while they put their backs to the door. And we, of course, won't get to hear a goddamn thing about it, so we can't tear the data to shreds for our very own. GodDAMMIT.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And then Duke wakes up! In the middle of the field where he got whammied by Walter, with nobody else in sight, and at first he'd like to know if he's proper-awake and Seth is around? No? No. Instead, have this bleeding tree! That can't possibly go wrong! Duke. Duke you know what your fucking Trouble is </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">don't touch the fucking blood</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. I'm blaming this on vision!logic of suck and hate. He touches it, his eyes go black and he would like this not to be happening to him. I would like to know if this is the tree of knowledge of good and evil, or the tree of immortality, or the tree of life that was on William's little black box, or the tree that mirrors King's rose that's the center of the universe at the heart of the Tower and the Beams. Any or all of these together seem like good bets! Duke goes murderous and kills… himself? HAH I WAS RIGHT ABOUT THAT PROMO PHOTO. Walter stop fucking around. Dead-not-dead-not-Duke!Walter opens his eyes once Duke realizes he's still in the vision and informs him that he is "the fulcrum" who will "either kill [his] friends or save them all." Well. That's certainly shoving him toward accepting his fate as being of the Crocker line, but it also doesn't tell us a single fucking thing that the current iteration of his Trouble couldn't have, and wasn't already pointing at. On the other hand, it serves to push </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Duke </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">into going the hell back home, ending the road trip plotline, so I'll take it thank god. (It hasn't been a </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">bad </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">plotline? But I feel like the writers knew at what point Duke needed to get back to Haven and had to backfill some along the way in order for Balfour to meet his quota of screentime each ep, which made for some pretty slow bits. Despite us wanting Duke to have a fucking vacation.) And </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">now </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">he will finally wake up, the he who wakes up being the one on the ground for some extra brain-bending ow, yes thanks for reminding us that Walter was in Duke's HEAD. And Seth is standing over him all uh, dude, you okay, you were having some fucked up dreams. Yes. Yes he was. No, it was not the tacos. (Duke and tacos, I swear.) (</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">K:</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> The trippiest thing about this entire scene is that the music that starts up before it goes into traditional Haven background music sounds faintly music box-y.) No, Duke, Walter was not actually there, Seth didn't see him, if in the unlikely event he was physically present rather than metaphysically present he wiped Seth's memory of it. Which I am not discounting as a possibility because fuck you Walter and whatever your connection to Croatoan is. With a rusty chainsaw. Duke go have some coffee before attempting more explanations of your weird visions. You look like you need it.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I still want to know if Mara made new Troubles when she turned Duke into a Trouble bomb, but we do have confirmation now that she slammed at least some of the old ones back into him. Which makes sense: if they're already there and she knows the shape they take, or if they're still somehow floating around waiting for her to gather them up and stick them back in a Crocker, that's easier than coming up with all new ones without William's stash of deathtruffle balls. Or her daddy's. (Is now a good time to remind everyone that a crock is both a vessel and frequently used in colloquialisms as in, crock of shit? I'm just saying. Duke's reaction to being the former is generally along the lines of the latter.) They have ample evidence from the journal that the only way for Ona to resolve her Trouble is to let Herb go and admit he should stay dead. I appreciate how much Audrey is </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">not </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">saying in response to her flailing that they could find a way to fix him and this, yeah but I put three bullets in him, I don't think he'd stay alive if we did. Besides, even if they could fix the Trouble, the former zombies would still all have exciting traumatic memories of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">eating their loved ones</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. How about not doing that to them. Audrey and Charlotte exchange a look of well shit this is it, the moment of truth, while the guys banter about Trouble-proof doors. Aw boys. I could wish for a bit more banter like this in other eps, because it really stands out as a particular writing quirk here, and I quite like it. It's appropriate levels of gallows humor to the situation. Okay, Charlotte's turn, now Ona's protesting that she's trying but she can't stop thinking about Herb being alive and then dead and </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">no do not want</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. I'm so glad it's not Dwight with this Trouble, can I just say. We will all try not to die of the irony of Charlotte looking at Audrey when she says that memories are a good thing to have. I hope that's meant as a sidelong apology? And then the irony vanishes under the weight of wow I have no fucking sympathy for Ona anymore. Crying about how Charlotte doesn't understand and Herb is the only person she has left? Well, one, that's YOUR FAULT and two, YOU CAN GO MAKE NEW FRIENDS. In fact, crisis situations are a great time for building camaraderie if you stop isolating yourself. While I understand the fear of being all alone forevermore, my god, woman, you would rather your zombies eat everyone including YOU than FIX YOUR TROUBLE and never see Herb again? Let's also note that apparently her friends, the ones outside the doors right now, they don't count as people she has left, which does not say anything good to me about how she views friendship. See the aforementioned attachment issues, etc. Fortunately, Charlotte has the Excuse Me I Lost Everything Too button to hit, along with But I Gained A Daughter And Now I'm Willing To Lose Her In Order Not To Get Her Killed You Complete Asshole. This might be the most openly maternal we've ever seen Charlotte, and it's kind of really impressive. I would not want to be standing in her way. Because the narrative says so, the zombies break through and start stalking Nathan and Dwight juuuust as the message of love and grief and hate and what should be let go versus hung onto gets through to Ona, and the zombies start dropping. Not all at once! Slowly enough that Nathan can identify some kind of a pattern, and while it might be a last-ditch hope for a few more minutes it also follows with the rules of the Trouble that they de-animate in the order they were brought back. Yes, Dwight, but you get a chance to say goodbye to her now.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">First it's Audrey's turn, though, with a long clingy hug, oh honeys. They really do work amazingly well together, I actually buy the mother-daughter relationship on this little time. And now Charlotte needs to tell her about her father. Of course we also don't get to hear about that, because why the fuck would we. Helpful hint to network execs: if we're hooked on for a mystery already, I promise you do NOT need to drag out the reveals like this unless you're cutting for time. (Here, I suspect that's more the case, because we need to hit up two longer goodbye scenes and also get Duke on the road back to Haven.) (But still.) We will stay hooked after the reveals and speculate wildly about what it all means! Promise! Whatever she tells Audrey, it's unsurprisingly heavy and informative enough that she's blatantly in emotional shock when she comes out and tells Dwight it's his turn. Yeah, I'd be hesitant if someone came out looking like that too, not just out of bracing for being the one to hold a loved one through dying. That part's… relatively simple, in the scheme of things, considering Dwight's background. He might hate it, it'll make him hideously sad and he might well break some more and I'm kinda terrified how far that could go, but he knows how to do it. It's the information and responsibility Charlotte could drop on his head before she dies (again) that he's worried about. And rightly so! On the plus side, oh thank GOD she's using her available time to pass along as much useful information as possible. This is exactly what Nathan hoped for, and exactly the trope we were hoping to see averted, though I don't know how I feel about bringing Charlotte back for the purposes of plot coupons and angst, once we take the show's entire history and tendencies into account. Then I get kind of irritated. There's a fine line to walk, in other words, and it's a hard balance to hit, but when you have a habit of killing off all your women who aren't Audrey, keeping them alive is </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">generally a better idea</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. This time, Audrey doesn't flinch back or go stiff at Nathan trying to comfort her, even initiates engaging with her grief because if anyone would know about losing a parent and how fucking unfair it is, he would. And she's at least temporarily for maybe twelve hours or less, out of immediate issues to deal with in lieu of dealing with her grief. And Nathan's is somewhat older grief by now for constructive comparison and relational purposes, he's had awhile to come to terms with it and had his opportunity to talk to Garland post-death. Talk to, fight with, get respect and praise from, so at least there's THAT much. The upshot of what Charlotte told Nathan about the barn: they need a "controller crystal" from the void, but they need to be able to get into the void, which means opening a thinny, which means get rid of the fucking shroud. Yaaaay. Maybe Duke can bring people with him if he's holding their hand across the shroud? I don't know if they want to risk that, it seems like the kind of thing that might lead to amputations and/or death. Also, controller crystal? Is that what the barnvatar/Agent Fuck You were? Or were they just the… user interface </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">for </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">the controller crystal? What's the thing even look like, is it another chunk of aether shaped differently from the core? Is it a chunk of something else, like, say, the stones in the family magical rings? INQUIRING MINDS OKAY. And no fucking answers.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But a lot of different answers! Charlotte has already told Dwight a thing that we didn't get to see, in favor of seeing the results of it later. I have all of the wary. Now we get to see the emotional part of the goodbye, where she admits that she was "not the best person" before she came to Haven. We've argued at pretty substantial length that she was in fact a pretty terrible person before that, so I'll take that as dramatic understatement. But he changed her, the town changed her, falling in love changed her, and she got to be happy for the first time in a very long time. Say, probably five hundred years or more? Just at a guess. Now, I'm guessing most people know the Healing Cock trope, and I'd judge it here, except it's less about Charlotte's emotional fragility and more about </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">allowing </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">herself to be vulnerable again, and about allowing other people's opinions of her to matter. Again, if she got to live I would love this scene a whole ton more, because it gives us a couple different narratives for women and when you have more than one woman you can </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">do that </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">without it carrying the weight of all the incredibly shitty miserable narratives women have done in Hollywood for ages. As it is, ehhhh I'm mixed. But she's getting to say goodbye and I love you on her terms, with no expectation of reciprocity, though I think Dwight's going to kick himself for a long time over being too stunned-mullet to reply. Or too wary of her manipulation to be able to return the sentiment honestly, while still deeply caring for her. I also really appreciate a few other things about this scene: Charlotte initiates the kiss, not that I noticed it at first but </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">they found a woman who didn't need a Scully box</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> for Adam Copeland's love interest, and Adam himself does a fucking incredible job of acting this whole scene with nothing but body language, and a lot of that facial expressions. Grief, regret, relief that he gets to be there for her this time, tenderness as he lays her body down, the sort of very brief chaste goodbye kiss that </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">doesn't </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">make me go 'ew necrophilia,' it's all very much present. And as dubious as we are about how fast this arc went for both Dwight and, in her redemption, Charlotte, Adam Copeland and Laura Mennell are selling the everloving fuck out of it.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">You know one of the more unexpected, yet entirely believable things to come out of this? Also a high point of Adam Copeland's acting growth, is that apart from looking like he's wrestling with equal portions of anger and grief, he looks at Audrey as though seeing her from a new perspective, and a fond one, now. It's one glimpse of one glance, but I'm seeing a million dad jokes around the police station, mock threats of grounding, teasing commentary about 'old man' and so on that we could have had. Argh. Argh for an alternate timeline in which Dwight became Audrey's stepfather and they all laughed over the weirdness of it. Anyway. So that moment of bonding happens, or continues to happen since to an extent it's been going on all episode, and we find out that Dwight's tidbit of information was that she remembered how she died, and what happened then. On the one hand it seems awful plot-coupon-y to be handing out different pieces of information to each of the three of them, and on the other hand it's also a very efficient way for Charlotte to maximize her quiet time spent with each of three people who matters to her: daughter, lover, and daughter's lover, and for her to also make use of it to convey information that will help them. It's actually a very tight piece of writing that I appreciate more as we go back over this. Do we, however, get an actual straight answer and if not her own words, a verbatim repetition of what she said to any of them? Do we, bollocks.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Instead we get Duke and Seth discussing what to do and where to go. Seth votes for Roanoke but is easily overruled by Duke's No Must Go Haven Save Friends. So, all right, he'll go grab some snacks, and by that comment it seems like the interdiction field is more distance based than line of sight, since Seth feels comfortable going into the store when his van's parked much closer to it and Duke's in the front seat. And they've probably done this often enough that Seth's comfortable cracking reboot my memory jokes. Aw Seth. Double aw because when he comes out, Duke's in Not His Car. The tiny part of me that remembers Supernatural at all fondly wanted that to be an Impala. No, it's a Chevy Camaro, and Duke's going to take it up to Haven, and Seth's going to go his own way. Seth has one very weak threat of following him before he's forced to admit that once Duke drives off he's going to forget everything about him. I really do feel sorry for Seth, it's clear from his voice and his words that he's really gotten into this whole quest thing with Duke, and if his previous appearances are anything to go by, because Haven and its Troubles are the closest thing Seth gets to both the supernatural and the exciting, and to dealing with whatever strange encounter he had with a Glendower in his childhood. On the other hand, at least this time once Duke drives off, all of that will be neatly tucked away, folded over, and hidden by wacky extra-dimensional magic. As we see by Seth turning away, blinking, possibly wondering why he has this many groceries and road snacks, and blithely gnawing on a tube of super-processed mystery meat. Ew.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Vince and Dave are following the bleeps, the sweeps, and the creeps up the road to the Herald while Vince berates Dave for not keeping the door locked. More for the banter and humor value, I would expect, since I'm entirely sure a locked door isn't going to stop Croatoan or anyone from breaking in if they really wanted to get at something in there or make a point or example of the Teagues. Even with all of that, Vince is surprised at how strongly the sensor box is beeping, and Dave gets more and more agitated the closer Vince gets to the door. I use the word agitated very advisedly, because I'm not sure if he's actually scared or if he's using fear as a front for something else that we'll get to in a minute. I mean, not that calling for backup is a bad idea, but. Once inside it takes Vince a second to pinpoint the source of the beeping but the trunk/case isn't even hidden, it's just tucked under a desk. Ffffffffffff-- okay, who put that there and why, is more the question than the how Dave asks. See also Vince wondering why even as he's assuming who, which Audrey is quick to correct as the threesome not so much come up in the doorway as appear. Dramatically. Because we're down to the final reveal: Croatoan didn't put the bag there, Dave did! Because Dave's the one who killed Charlotte. Dave has no immediate response, just a lot of head-shaking and opening his mouth to say something before he's interrupted by the closing credits. Before we get into concluding statements I may also point out that as far as Charlotte knows, it might just be something Dave-shaped or something (Croatoan) wearing Dave like a cheap meat suit.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiO3gjeYU1Q84RAokr8YRanvw09LO625zb9mL1D-Zf_OiCWp4ZNbuML3NFy3QKZN2Tiehgo1XlM_vJm0haPkMHum1OAz5r0Vk92Bhaks11RZkPInUewEsaw28M0oaJ44TSe5Pn_41J4HCU/s1600/haven519cc08.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiO3gjeYU1Q84RAokr8YRanvw09LO625zb9mL1D-Zf_OiCWp4ZNbuML3NFy3QKZN2Tiehgo1XlM_vJm0haPkMHum1OAz5r0Vk92Bhaks11RZkPInUewEsaw28M0oaJ44TSe5Pn_41J4HCU/s320/haven519cc08.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Theories! Thoughts! We continue to have a lot of confirmation about things and how things work, most of them having to do with Dave and his possession. We also have a lot of thoughts and feelings about Walter, most of the former and all of the later hostile and suspicious, but we have so little data on that front that it's not really worth it to speculate, except that it continues to make us suspicious that Charlotte, William, Mara, et al, come from ... I don't know, Gilead or something. Mid-World or End-World. Those other worlds than these that are propped up by a Tower and its Beams. Dave and his possession, though, we have at least some theories on that. The primary question we have is how long has he been this way, if he's possessed? Just for the day? Since Duke exploded and the shroud came down? Since the door opened and whatever was pulling him went or came through? Since before that, since the door on the beach opened? Realistically, Dave's been acting squirrelly since at least then, although whether that's trauma and fear or confusion because of the mess in his mind or some combination of all that </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">and</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> intermittent possession, we have no idea. That just brings up the issue though of why did Vince never notice? Why did Charlotte never sense, although that's the far lesser of the two. In the first case, was the possession intermittent because it was waiting for Vince to be away or go to sleep, or what? Secondly, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">what</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> is possessing Dave? Is it Croatoan? Is it Mara's father? Is it the combo meal of both? There's a big problem there too, because if it's Croatoan we have so little data on the pure Croatoan creature, given that everything indicates by the time it came to our world it was already merged with Mara's father. We have slightly less of this problem because Mara's father is more shaped, is depicted as driven more by need to know and love of science than almost anything else, he might have the patience to lurk and wait in Dave's subconscious to see. The combo meal of both is the most likely given, again, the length of time that they've been melded and how long Dave's been possessed. Or not possessed. There's another theory that we had based on the tentacle-like spiral wounds on Dave's leg that appeared to be from an octopus or squid. Science currently indicates that octopodes at least have a primary brain and a vestigial brain in each limb, so what if Croashatner is the primary brain and Dave is being ridden by a vestigial brain, to simplify it a lot? And finally, how does this tie in to the greater plot, is it an obstacle or is it going to be incorporated into the solution? Right now we're kind of leaning towards obstacle and antagonist, but it remains to be seen, among other things, how responsible Dave is for his actions and which portion of the consequences are deliberate, obfuscated from his original intentions, or just plain fear-based and fear-driven. Let's not forget that this is the same man who brained his brother and threw him in a trunk, partially out of disagreement with the proper course of action but also very much out of fear.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Next week! HOLY SHIT WE GET TO GO VISIT THE 1980S. Via the convenient continued existence of Mosley and his Trouble. Note that we get absolutely fucking nothing in the sneak peek about where Dave is and what the solution there is, so we can safely assume they're picking up pretty close to right where we left them. Nathan and Vince are the ones going back in time, Nathan out of experience with time travel and Vince out of experience with the era, presumably? So if we're very lucky we will FINALLY get a bunch of FUCKING ANSWERS about Lucy Ripley and maybe Simon Crocker and a bunch of the Troubles and what happened that day on the beach. The synopsis suggests this is the way to fix Croatoan somehow or another, whether that's kill, jail, de-power, or what. So. Yay? Also I would bet you a lot that the kid with the Polaroid camera all OH HEY THAT WAS COOL is either ickle!Nathan (likeliest) or ickle!Duke. Feel free to bask in the fucking adorable, since we're liable to get screwed over on it sooner rather than later. This is Haven, after all.</span></div>
Anna Hammetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10095633218958433882noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4271373189216022547.post-50977927339079282542015-11-05T14:37:00.001-08:002015-11-06T10:06:30.032-08:00We Are Groot Haven S2E05 Roots<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Previously on Haven! Chris "Everyone Is In Love With Me And I Hate It" Brody! Evi "Duke's Secret Con-Artist Wife" Ryan! (aka "Her Name is Evidence? Are We Sure She's Not A Puritan?") The Crocker Box that apparently has no future significance ever. I'm not at all bitter/hopeful about getting closure on this, really. Though here's a crackpot theory for you, what if Fitzwilliam Crocker really was William in disguise and made it for .... no, see, there it breaks down. Though he certainly thought that his and Mara's love could conquer all. Also what's up with the funky glowing Crocker letters.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So. We open up on a house on some property with a barn. No, not that barn. There's a soccer ball on the ground in something of an ominous position and focus, this is probably symbolic of the innocent playtimes that are going to be destroyed by Troubles soon. Oh, hey, two people we've never seen before! One of them is Troubled. The lovely thing about formula is after you've dealt with it a while, say, into the middle of the second season, you can establish these things and move onto the how, and the details of the who and engage with those rather than having to re-exposit your basics. One of these two men is getting married to the other's daughter, and by the way the dialogue is played it sounds like neither of them is happy about it, for varying reasons most likely going back to the same source. As it were. But they're going to go along with it and play nice with each other for the sake of the woman involved. Honestly, and I say this as someone who did do a number of things only with the privilege of her family's resources of various kinds just so you know where I'm coming from, both of them sound kind of like assholes for this. On the one hand, yes, the groom should get himself a good job and pull his weight in the marriage. They're going with "traditional" patriarchal values so I guess that means be the breadwinner but, either way, pull his weight. And if he's been phrasing his requests as give me all your monies so I can do what I want with them, that makes him sound like an asshole. On the other hand, yes, in fact, certain things are a hell of a lot easier when you have money or connections, and denying them to your future son in law just because you don't like him, as it seems like he's doing, makes you kind of an asshole. You have the ability to make your children's life a little easier, why wouldn't you do so? You, groom person sir, you want to be treated as an adult, that does mean putting on your big boy shorts and getting a job (some of this phrasing makes me think he doesn't have one? is just starting one?) and maybe being a little more diplomatic and a little less fussy for the sake of getting along with your fiancee's family. It's </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">one</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> soccer ball, dude, we have a couple long shots of the yard, we can see there's nothing else on it. Pick it up yourself and take it inside. And stop berating the fucking help, I'm starting to have more sympathy for the father of the bride. Uh-oh, the trees spat the soccer ball back out. That's not good. Complete with supernatural spittle and ominous creaking, that's </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">really</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> not good.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Here to deal with the not good is Audrey! With Chris Brody in tow, aww, they're heading out on a first date. And she's got paperwork to apparently just drop off, and he's being kind of irascible. Dude, if you were talking to me like this after I'd presumably already told you I was going to do this thing real quick since her "it's really only going to take a minute" sounds more like reassurance than clarification, yeah. If he was still talking to me like that and then grabbing my arm, it'd also be a last date. I sympathize with Chris Brody, I do, it's not like it's easy to be fawned over by people you don't necessarily like back, as he says. Still and nonetheless, that's not an excuse to act like a whiny domineering dipshit to the woman you want to be your girlfriend. Said person coming up is, of course, Duke Crocker. And Evi! And Chris, you should have stayed turned around. Or better yet waited in the car. Yes, you go take that walk and stop fighting with your not yet girlfriend who's looking like she's really questioning the wisdom of this date. How long does it take to drop off a piece of paper?? You could have waited in the car and not looked at anyone.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Of course, then we wouldn't have an episode, would we. Back inside the house, kind of dickish groom (is this going to become a running theme of the episode, kind of dickish guys with very well hidden redeeming qualities?) is insisting that he is getting married tomorrow despite the scary stories of his grandfather? Grand-uncle? An older male to whom he is showing the patient respect of a guy who thinks this relative is senile in some way. There are scary stories! That mean the wedding is going to be a mistake! Well, this is Haven, so he's probably right, and unfortunately this is Haven, so the groom is probably valid in not believing him because he would have been in single digits when the Troubles last came around, assuming he was capable of forming long term memories. Ooh, blood spilling, that's not good. We interrupt this pronouncement of doom for Audrey with the marriage license! Shortly after that we interrupt the groom's happiness at getting married for the father of the bride to have a temper tantrum and crumple up the marriage license! You do know that doesn't actually do much, father of the bride, yes? They have these things called printers that can do another copy and then they just have to collect autographs again. Yes? No? Probably not. The groom can get the hell out of his </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: line-through; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">galaxy</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> house, so apparently the house, barn with a lower-case b, and grounds are all his. Which adds a slight new dimension of dickery to the groom's fussing earlier, dude, it's not even your lawn to worry about how it's presenting to the family you're marrying into. Pacify your lapels. But then if he hadn't thrown that hissy over the ball we wouldn't have the focus on the woods, would we. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This leads us to a nice brief bit of staging where Chris Brody is standing out in the green drumming his fingers on his pockets all "Come on, let's go," in pretty much the same stance, angle, and lighting, not to mention the impatient waiting dance, that people are usually in when they get munched on things in horror movies. Nothing's munching Chris Brody yet, though. The munching is coming from inside the house! Audrey doesn't really look like she's intending to go, she looks like she wants to straighten out the fucking license issue, but the point is moot because there's crunching and screaming. Audrey does try knocking in the hopes that whoever's screaming is in a position to answer, I guess? Maybe she hopes it's a movie playing on someone's phone? Not with those screams. The bathroom is destroyed, and there's blood on the broken windows. Roll credits!</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjO2CPP62A6AVAysT0YCTnOXmMwnX6_JQRDpsR-7x2g9EVH82npZ3PDLm3UunHQnY1pQ1rfu1a89oSmrzQZHMN3vGy0qiq692s_kxMMPMYd5k7ka916yCpGHmKavqh6kQ93PBMw6UFijgY/s1600/haven205cc02.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjO2CPP62A6AVAysT0YCTnOXmMwnX6_JQRDpsR-7x2g9EVH82npZ3PDLm3UunHQnY1pQ1rfu1a89oSmrzQZHMN3vGy0qiq692s_kxMMPMYd5k7ka916yCpGHmKavqh6kQ93PBMw6UFijgY/s320/haven205cc02.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">After the credits Audrey's walking around the house to see the swath of destruction left by whatever destroyed the bathroom and took the guy from inside. The trellis is broken off halfway down the wall, the curtains are torn and flying out the window, and there's no prints or tracks to indicate what the hell. This being the middle of nowhere there is, of course, no signal, but worse is that the phone line's been cut from the outside, too. That's a really big swath of destruction, we're talking rampaging single file of elephants there. That doesn't look good.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Heh. Okay, now I'm betting Duke doesn't actually have the alcohol for the party, he's just here to talk to Mrs. Keegan about the Crocker Box because she's head of the Historical society? He says queen, we can take that to mean at least in some position of authority. Duke will now try bluffing his way into her good grace, which results in an epic fail of alarm and not recognizing him as being anyone from the catering staff. Duke, sometimes that's just not going to work, and you should really be prepared for that eventuality instead of letting Evi step in, especially when she's as unpredictable as she is. Yeah, that's not selling her anything, and she's on the verge of even more explicitly kicking them out when he brings out the Crocker box. (Actually if he'd been capable of thinking, or if he and Audrey had been further along in their relationship of trust than they were, he could have asked to borrow her boyfriend's Trouble. Ah well.) The Crocker box does do the trick, anyway, so why he couldn't have just led with excuse me I was hoping to catch you and identify this, I do not know. It's not as though he could have kept the box a secret if he wanted her to tell him anything about it.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Audrey is in the woods. The music is telling us this is not a place she or anyone wants to be, but she is a) Audrey, b) a cop, and c) immune to most Troubles, which this probably is. So, headlong into danger it is! Let's have some overhead shots and some Evil Dead cam to emphasize that the danger is all around her, without doing anything to clarify where the threat is coming from. Sometimes using the old stand-bys is good for that, especially since the only establishing work we've gotten so far is typical Haven stuff, where it's a Trouble that runs in the family or families of the people involved in the wedding. It does quite a bit to set the mood without giving the entire game away, and many props to everyone for it. It's time for a false scare! In the shape of Chris Brody, who is in fact not just sneaking up on a person with a gun but sneaking up on a cop in full Weaver stance clearly looking for an aggressor. Dude, what the hell. Why would you even do that. If you'd seen her walk into the woods with her gun drawn WHY WOULD YOU NOT CLEAR YOUR THROAT AND SAY SOMETHING SO SHE DOESN'T ALMOST SHOOT YOU oh never mind. Chris is, understandably this time because it's been longer than it takes to drop off a marriage license, wondering if they're going to get back to their date. Audrey uses her words and explains about the fight and the swath of destruction which she rightfully describes as a drag trail. I do note she's leaving out the near-fatal quantities of blood she saw at the scene. I also, now that I'm thinking about it, kind of wonder if she secured the scene. Probably not, but since it's Fucking Haven that matters... marginally less than it otherwise might? Still, it doesn't make me think well of her (implanted) cop/Fed reflexes. With all that explanation Chris is, sure, going to help her look, because apparently he does have a death wish, Audrey, that's a shittyass Type to have. oh, but he did find something! Bloody glasses belonging to the father of the bride, whose name is now Ben Keegan. Chris warns her not to touch the goo for science reasons. I think she already knew that for cop reasons, but sure, why not. We have suggestions of spinal fluid and digestive juices, oh goodie, thank you Audrey for not asking </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">whose</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> digestive juices. Because just for that grisly pun totally intended suggestion, Chris will now bring up grizzly attacks, and how seeing the drag trail is worse than seeing the bear, because the bear sees you first. I have to agree, that does sound worse, except for the fact that </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grizzly_bear" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">there are no grizzlies in Maine</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Or on that coast. Or at least, there are no natural grizzlies, when you have people's Troubles conjuring up headless zombies in dancing bear suits, all bets are off. Still. They're going to keep looking, and the camera will pan up to the corpse hanging in the tree they didn't see. I don't think grizzlies do that. I could be wrong. You're still a fucking moron Chris. I don't think your Trouble works on Trouble-animated trees. Or grizzlies.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Anyway. Vince and Dave are over at the police station attempting, badly, to entice Nathan into going with them to the wedding because marriage license and they have business there too and blah. It could be camaraderie at first. It could also be that which it quickly turns into, which is needling him about Audrey and how she's all lonely and pretty and do you even know how skeevy you sound right now guys? My skin is about to crawl off my body that's how skeevy you sound. Ew. No. So says Nathan too. Ew.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Duke is trying to entice Mrs. Keegan the eldest to either buy or tell him more about the Crocker box. Probably more the latter, at least in Duke's case, Evi's definitely interested in the money. Mrs. Keegan, for our interest, tells him that it was Regis Glendower who made the box, around the colonial era. It'd be so much better if this actually paid off into anything, given how much time was spent on it, but so far it hasn't. </span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgteng1CwVPyUQD-ehOLClKvotDuvKYOI2OeOGxsediR7LOQj2ox5EclTLS3bt0BXbceUyN9q6718j5RMf9ULDrWUDSlz2jWZiNV3m6m6DwcHiEu3nBsaBPl5_uOiCdWV2yiLemXZ4P3Rc/s1600/haven205cc03.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgteng1CwVPyUQD-ehOLClKvotDuvKYOI2OeOGxsediR7LOQj2ox5EclTLS3bt0BXbceUyN9q6718j5RMf9ULDrWUDSlz2jWZiNV3m6m6DwcHiEu3nBsaBPl5_uOiCdWV2yiLemXZ4P3Rc/s320/haven205cc03.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">On another side of the property Audrey is trying to find out what happened with Ben Keegan before he disappeared, which means talking to the groom about the fight they totally weren't having, dear, I love your dad, really. Bride knows exactly what they were fighting about, apparently there's some land involved. Land, money, often the same thing, fair enough, and this is when Chris Brody decides to short-cut the whole prying it out of them thing by putting the whammy on. Chris. Chris, honey, that's not how it works. Look at them falling over themselves to offer him a bottle of wine, no, that is not like answers, which is what he really wants. But wine is what he's going to get, or at least what they're offering until Audrey not so politely tells him she knows what she's doing and step the hell off. I suspect a writer has been lurking around the X-Files, because "Sure. Fine. Whatever." was a repeated phrase in a particularly memorable ep. It gave me a bit of a giggle, anyway. So, it turns out the land involved is timber land, which is indeed potentially a fairly rich bag, and it belongs to her aunt who inherited it when she was a little girl, and I kind of wonder if that aunt is perhaps now identifying a box for Duke Crocker? Maybe? Conservation of characters says yes. Anyway, groom wants her father to talk aunt into giving it to them for a wedding present. I'm.... okay, speaking from experience, I am not even getting into the potential family politics involved there. Nope. Not gonna. The groom will now proceed to stonewall, at which point Audrey needs to go talk to someone else and can Chris keep the happy couple here, particularly the groom. I will admit here that Chris has some right to complain considering he's not a cop, using his Trouble grates endlessly which Audrey knows, he has no skill in any kind of social engineering, and why him he just wanted to go out on a date. The phones are down, and here's where I wonder if how come she doesn't have a police radio in her car? She has been in Haven a little while. No radio, though. This is a fluid situ-- no, Audrey, that's not going to fly either.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Oh, it turns out she's going to talk to the grandfather. I appreciate the man's forthrightness in saying that while groom (Peter, I suppose I should use his proper name) has his troubles, they're not the kind that come with a capital T. Audrey points out that he seemed to be afraid of violence happening earlier. It turns out he meant marrying a Keegan, because the Keegans are trouble and look they tried to kill him once a long time ago. There's a story here, but we don't get it yet because someone's screaming outside. Welp. There's Ben Keegan. And there's more of Ben Keegan a ways away. And as much as I do kind of want to shake Chris for letting his daughter see that, under the influence of Brodywhammy there's not much he could do to dissuade her from following him. At least the shock of seeing her dad ripped to pieces, literally, sends her away. So I guess in a morbid way now we know what it takes to break the Brodywhammy compulsion! Ew. Audrey points out the similarity in injuries, but if the Keegans caused the injury to the Novelli elder, and now a Keegan is dead with the same injuries, what gives? Unconscious Trouble would be my guess. Or a rift within the Keegan family, that also fits. Or a completely unrelated Trouble in the woods.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Dave's voice is coming over the radio with a hilarious pile of CB jargon. By Nathan's response this happens often. By Vince's response it happens often despite better judgment. Oh boys. All three of you, too. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">After a bloody mess like that no way in hell were the guests staying around. Audrey is rounding everyone up and trying to get them out of there, except there's a slight delay due to Peter wanting Ben Keegan's body? This would all have been a lot easier if he'd just said "so we can give him a proper burial" or something like that, Instead he just says he wants Ben Keegan's body, cueing his lovely bride to wonder why, did he have something to do with the death, is this a land grab, etc. Nothing Peter says is coming out right, mainly because he's making everything about him (he's right about his lack of motive though), which leads to an angry-sobbing outburst from Moira, and then the rumbling in the woods! It's coming right for them! Nameless caterer lady with the ominous angle and the retrieving of the soccer ball is the first to break for the cars, which means she's the first to die, of course. Everyone else goes running to the barn. No, not that kind of barn, a normal person barn. I'm going to go ahead and assume right now that everyone else is going to live, too, because conservation of characters and it looks like everyone's important here. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Inside the small-b barn the elder Novelli and Beverly Keegan are going at it about how your family was always bad, no your family, etc. Audrey trying to convince them to work together is no help, so she'll employ Chris to give them the whammy. Again. And in this case, yeah, I know he hates using his powers but in extremis, dude. And it doesn't help too much. And the roots are growing up the side of the barn and wrapping around it like a cocoon. Audrey keeps with the trying to keep everyone calm, and at least when Chris makes his pronouncements of doom it's in a hushed tone to Audrey. And trying to keep them calm isn't as ridiculous as it sounds even apart from the fact that calm people are more efficient and helpful in a crisis than panicked ones. Calm people also manifest their Troubles less haphazardly and less dangerously. Out on the road Nathan is sighing at the Teagues and trying to fix their van when, well, even they get enveloped by roots and vines. Apart from tying them into the main plotline, this also implies bad things about how quickly and how far those roots and vines can spread. The CGI is passable, if not very realistic.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfbYVU_EHZfEmtW3EBEaMn_UjZ1BVVIb2xyNjj_0oYTBwJotW8ejUXy3N9QAQySrcH8d7f3S7IB1qIHOnfev6LKFGIDxb-eynLDpr-cZ0WfYy8AN7KyR9tSn1pEMVXegIE9vUwFXHCSDE/s1600/haven205cc04.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfbYVU_EHZfEmtW3EBEaMn_UjZ1BVVIb2xyNjj_0oYTBwJotW8ejUXy3N9QAQySrcH8d7f3S7IB1qIHOnfev6LKFGIDxb-eynLDpr-cZ0WfYy8AN7KyR9tSn1pEMVXegIE9vUwFXHCSDE/s320/haven205cc04.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And we're back to the small-b barn. Audrey and Duke are discussing what to do and how he can help, with somewhat more cooperation and camaraderie than Audrey and Chris, I note. Her first question is can Duke get up high and see how they're situated, which isn't unreasonable. Her second question, though, is about Beverly Keegan. It turns out she doesn't actually have control of at least the money in her accounts? The family accounts? Ben had to write the check for the Crocker box or for whatever it was Duke was selling, considering he keeps the Crocker box later on. I'm not sure if he never cashed the check and changed his mind or if this bit of continuity was just forgotten, or if it was a check for something else. Anyhoo, that suggests to Duke that she doesn't control her own finances, which suggests bitterness towards Ben and maybe motive? I also, again, speaking from family experience, would point out that just because she owns the land and Ben had a checkbook doesn't mean that she doesn't have authority to buy and sell the land, that she doesn't have a bank book of her own, or that she didn't simply want it to come out of the accounts that Ben controls because of reasons unstated. There could be a lot of complicated things going on here. God knows there are a lot of complicated things going on behind the scenes not having to do with money. </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Anyway. It is a plausible motive. Duke goes up to the attic? Loft? Probably a loft but it looks like a full second floor by that staircase, and Chris argues with Audrey about the plan of action here. He would prefer the one involving weed killer and she would prefer the one involving his whammy as a blunt instrument to calm everyone the fuck down. She argues that the problem isnt' the plants, the problem is the people, specifically whoever's Trouble is causing this, not that she says that out loud. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">He</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> then proceeds to argue that if she wants to address the people problem whammying them isn't the way to go about it, you have to observe and record and not interfere. She said, pushing her sleeves down over the wrist tattoo. Not that tattoo, the other tattoo. He drops the point in favor of looking for an axe, though. It's not </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">that</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> kind of a trick, dude. And he's blown the argument by going back to weed killer and fire axes, making Audrey less likely to do the smart thing and watch and listen. Argh, you two.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Upstairs Evi brought lampshades enough for everyone about how this is a fairly stupid thing he's doing. The dialogue is slightly clunky but it's a fair point. Even more clunky, although not in the way of being awkward writing but in the way of Evi is the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">least</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> subtle, is her attempt at manipulating and/or seducing him. Probably both. Both is good. Duke keeps giving her 'uh huh what are you playing at' looks, even if he is tempted. Evi is both selling a bill of goods and failing to understand how tied Duke is to Haven, though to be fair to her he's keeping that part of himself tightly under wraps. To be less fair to her and more critical, she is amazingly bad at reading people closer to her, even for a con artist with a heart. I mean, seriously. There's also the little matter of misreading the situation later, but that's a whole other episode. She does say that the money from the box could keep them for a few years in Mexico, so that might indeed have been family trust Ben was writing the checks from, separate from the land. While I'm pondering this Duke has finally gotten the loft door open and the vines are screaming outside. I coulda told you that, dude. I like the touch where the vines are screaming any time there's a hint of them getting inside though.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Meanwhile, out by the van, well, they're all sitting tight with no radio since the vines tore the antenna off. If they have to be trapped, at least Nathan's trapped with the archivists! Although all they have to offer is a couple hundred year old story about this part of Haven being given up to the wild. And some hideously ill-timed inquiry about Twitter accounts that was originally tied in to Vince and Dave being on Twitter, and the campaign and posters all over Haven. We're not even going to discuss how unnerving that was, thanks guys. No, Vince, now is not the time for social media schmoozing. Seriously, dude. It is even less the time to talk to Nathan about Audrey. Dave, you are the least helpful. Both of you, stop with the shipping, the shipping has been delayed for the day. On the other hand it does nudge Nathan to improvise something like a torch with the hockey stick and flares. So maybe it wasn't entirely useless? But still creepy. Always creepy.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifO-qmf4apKrojzwIj8n9ZJqWYtb-XMWlU3gtyyLi8P1mE4VKfoZpEt_jGBLerTsP5iIyHgOLvkQHWq-G8LVHinzQVnNxfykeW_xDsZ76NqfLoNbsPa5C5o18q7KoIEDjgL1K_HgsuvX4/s1600/haven205cc05.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifO-qmf4apKrojzwIj8n9ZJqWYtb-XMWlU3gtyyLi8P1mE4VKfoZpEt_jGBLerTsP5iIyHgOLvkQHWq-G8LVHinzQVnNxfykeW_xDsZ76NqfLoNbsPa5C5o18q7KoIEDjgL1K_HgsuvX4/s320/haven205cc05.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So, Audrey is badgering Beverly about maybe having a motive for Ben Keegan's death, that motive being the finances. Beverly gives no shits about this and has no significant response until Audrey brings up the fact that all of this has happened before and all of this will happen again unless they can put a stop to it, or at least deal with whatever's causing this manifestation of this Trouble. It turns out the last time this happened was when she was in high school, there was a fight between her brothers and Dom "Grandpa" Novelli. They "caught him in a lie" and he attacked them and killed one of them, and, well, cue the screaming at each other. And the vines coming through the walls and the floor. Duke, heh, knocks Audrey out of the way, but it's not until everyone freezes up and stops moving that they retreat. Yeah, Chris, you do not have nearly enough weed-killer for this. On the plus side, Audrey has a plan. </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We follow with the exposition about how the Trouble works, which is basically that the angrier the Keegans (and the Novellis? that one's unclear) get, the more the woods attack people. The solution, Chris Brody says, is an equal and opposite reaction. I'd argue that the opposite of hate is indifference but for these purposes, it's less hate and love as opposites and more conversion? Inversion. Something like that. Audrey takes the lead with Moira who is still regretting the whole wedding thing. Moira tells them the story of the tree that killed Beverly's brother too, as told by Ben Keegan, and that clicks something in Audrey's head, I'm not entirely sure what points the finger at Dom or why it takes her so long to put the scars plus the story together, but, sure. Maybe it was just the outburst earlier. Or the way Beverly talked about it. Either way, when she goes to confront Beverly about her feelings, the barn starts collapsing as the tendrils cling tighter. So there's some truth to that then! As Chris Brody steps in to point out that hate is love in body armor with a battle axe. </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Oh, there it is, it's the combination of seeing Dom's scars plus hearing the story about how Beverly's brother died ... several times. I'm still not sure why we needed that repeated, but maybe it's just needing to fill the time? Or the fact that in the story Moira told the brothers catching Dom in a lie was deprecated to non-existent, in which case that should have been brought up more but, eh, either way. Audrey points out the scars, points out that Ben Keegan and whoever else was there lied to Beverly, because if she got married he would lose control of the property and her money and everything else. Dom was supposed to meet her to elope, but apparently Ben staged the whole thing and told Beverly that he ran away instead. It's a bit ambiguous whether they were all attacked because they were fighting, or whether Ben knew about the Trouble and started it (in which case why would he have been the first one caught by it? eh.) and what role he had to play in his brother's death. Either way, he definitely allowed Beverly to think that her onetime love had killed her baby brother, which is asinine in the extreme. Audrey hopes their love, if it remains (it does. really.), can push back the plants of doom. They all have to stick very close to them though. Belatedly, NATHAN! With a flare on a hockey stick! Oh Nathan. This is actually kind of... a letdown? Anti-climactic? I know it's supposed to be but right now my sympathy is more with Nathan, not that there's anyone doing anything wrong, per se. Timing all around. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So, we get a sequence of couples holding hands, aww everyone, I'm reasonably sure this only exists to make us feel sorry for Nathan and to reinforce the idea of love conquers all (hey, at least the Crocker Box came back once!) and as a moment to build the idea of Duke and Evi so they can smash it later on. Seriously, Duke has the worst fucking luck with relationships.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We get the final explasition ... that doesn't portmanteau well. Explanation exposition from the Teagues, of course, being that the Novellis were the original carriers of the Trouble and they had a lot of twins, and then one of the Twins married into the Keegan line and ever since then they've needed both families to start the Trouble. Which actually might also explain why Ben Keegan wasn't keen on his daughter getting married into the family apart from his grasping money issues. Nathan will now dismiss the Teagues with a few less than gentle nudges and no, you guys, he doesn't want to talk about Audrey. Really. You guys are being kind of gross. Go away, Dave. Vince stop with the damn signs. That is endlessly creepy. Years later, that's still kind of creepy. The Twitter accounts, by the way, are inactive now.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4z0z9nsbLjf7_RR7Eov-CGxe6LGw45bfNKzubFC8GlSKT-_jCQRrp7yG8qdGeii1XxSTvSDnTMkkpn6YkDeNXPnnDhNyJtK9YfDyOMxvTxcfqPBb7oN1GYBbtqm7elQEzficaNx4cmEQ/s1600/haven205cc06.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4z0z9nsbLjf7_RR7Eov-CGxe6LGw45bfNKzubFC8GlSKT-_jCQRrp7yG8qdGeii1XxSTvSDnTMkkpn6YkDeNXPnnDhNyJtK9YfDyOMxvTxcfqPBb7oN1GYBbtqm7elQEzficaNx4cmEQ/s320/haven205cc06.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So we continue closing things up with Duke and Evi having drinks on the Cape Rouge, Duke telling her he can't leave and it's not her, and Evi demanding to know what it is about Audrey that keeps him here. Given Haven, it's a fair question! Given Duke and Audrey's camaraderie earlier it's a semi-fair question, although it's only second season and I'd also argue that Duke and Audrey haven't quite become demonstrative enough in their friendship to warrant that kind of question. Yet. It might also be Evi being intuitive, as that part of her is written fairly erratically. But no, it's not Audrey either, proving that a few things in this show are actually not about Audrey. It's Duke's dad, who made him promise to come back to Haven if the Troubles ever returned. We know why now, but at the time this just made Duke and the Crocker box even more mysterious. The implication is that Simon died either literally right after he made him swear that or that he died within hours or maybe days at most, because he doesn't say anything about being angry that Simon wouldn't tell him. So, one can infer that Simon didn't have enough time to reasonably tell him, according to Duke. Because of this, he's in it up to his eyeballs and can't leave until he finds out why. And then he heads up topside because he doesn't like talking about this. Oh honey. Ooh, and now the mystery part. Evi's on the phone to someone. (I mistyped that Evil, which is certainly the implication.) Evi's on the phone to the REV. Telling him that Duke's father never told him, and the Rev says that then they have to keep pushing him. Evi, you dumbass. The Rev is a bad person to get involved with.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Aww, Chris Brody brought Audrey flowers. And is still able to crack jokes about being attacked by plants to her, that's a good sign. I'm warming to him some now. Oh Audrey, that's ... semi-rude, but at least he finds it funny, which arguably is also because he has a tendency to be semi- to outright rude. (Put these in water *tosses them into the bay/ocean*) So, wine and some honest conversation where Chris Brody says her immunity isn't why he asked her out, he promises. I'm pretty sure it's a contributing factor, though. He says she's amazing and she cares about people and that's why he asked her out. And because of hope. And people worth knowing. I can, still, kind of believe that but the immunity is totally a contributing factor, if only because it allows her to be her own self around him rather than a whammied puppet. Either way, the speech does the trick for now, and off they go to bed. I can't say this is the best of ideas, but it's not that terrible either. And of course the show must remind us about Nathan, so let's have a phone call from him being the last thing we close in on. Nathan/Audrey always was endgame for the show, I think that's true even with the transition in show-runners. So this makes for only a semi-obvious speedbump in the road to true love. It's up to the viewer, ultimately, whether to like and/or approve of it or not.</span></div>
Kitty Chandlerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05524808952260453841noreply@blogger.com0