Earthling
Updated 2009-11-06 09:23:54
We're in an immaculate, well-appointed penthouse that has everything: state-of-the-art kitchen, fire in the fireplace, modern but comfortable furniture, and big floaty letters in the living room that read "BOSTON MASSACHUSETTS." A guy in a blue dress shirt is at home alone, but when his wife calls from her car he lies and says he's about to get on a plane in fifteen minutes. He apologizes for the trip he's claiming to have to take, and for the crimp his sick mom is putting into their lives, but she's being pretty cool about it, and says she'll be home in about five minutes. Suddenly his TV comes on by itself and goes all staticky, and he says he's about to board. They wish each other happy anniversary and exchange I love yous before hanging up. Then he shuts off the tube and looks around the apartment suspiciously, unaware that a sinister shadow is passing behind him. Just then the front hallway light goes out. He lets the suspense build up before tuning it back on, but there's no one there, so he gets on with his life. What's left of it, anyway. He's just arranged a bouquet of roses with a card on the front table near the entrance. He walks back to the living room, pausing in confusion when the hallway light goes out again. He comes around the corner and flips the hallway light back on, revealing a man-shaped shadow standing there before him. And there are two strange things about this shadow. One is that it doesn't appear to be attached to an actual dude; it's just standing there. The other is that areas of it are undulating and pulsating in a very sinister way, so I think we can rule out the possibility that it belongs to Peter Pan. The guy freaks, of course, backing away as the apparition strides purposefully towards him. But he just ends up stumbling backward into a chair, experiencing an unexpected sit-down that takes him out of the frame. Although not entirely out of the episode.
Later, the man's wife comes home, sees the flowers, and reads the card: "Natalie -- I know how you like surprises...Happy Anniversary." She smiles and heads on into the living room, where she sees her husband still sitting in that armchair, blank and motionless. After a few seconds, she notices he's acting weird. Or rather, not acting at all. She takes a closer look. He looks just like himself, only totally inert. Starting to worry, she says his name and puts a hand on his arm. Or rather, through it, because she comes away with a handful of gray dust. She looks at it and backs away, screaming, "No! No! No!" as the place where she touched him continues to collapse into powder, the effect spreading throughout his body, clothes and all, until his head topples and bursts open on the floor like an ash-balloon. Happy anniversary! How you like surprises now, fancy lady?
Next morning, Broyles sits alone at a nearly empty white-tablecloth restaurant, looking thoughtful. He happens to look up and notice that a little boy a couple of tables away is sitting in a similar position. Also alone. Is it kids eat free day or something? Broyles sighs and shifts, and the boy mirrors that, too. Broyles is just starting to get into this little game, peeking at the boy around his menu and even smiling, when he gets a call on his cell. By the time the boy looks around his menu again, Broyles is gone, out of the place entirely. Fringey!
Walter is examining the remains at the penthouse, while crime scene guys do their thing and Olivia asks Walter what his thoughts are. Part of the dust-man is still intact; pretty much his hands, wrists, legs and feet, while the rest is nothing but powder. Walter kicks off his analysis in a typically unhelpful manner, reminiscing about Christmas logs that held their shape after burning, when Peter used to poke the husks with his finger. "And you'd draw genitalia on the reindeer decorations..." "Happy memories, Walter," Peter says, trying to get things back on track. "Do you have any thoughts as to what happened to Dusty here?" The lack of scorch marks on the cushions allow Walter to rule out fire or spontaneous combustion, so the first order of business is to get him back to the lab. "Peter, I'll need a Dust Devil...several." I assume he means Dirt Devil, which is the correct brand name, but either they didn't want to pay the product placement fee or I'm completely misreading the situation and Walter is literally asking for a group of sand tornados to be shipped in from New Mexico. Broyles appears next to Olivia, looking even more morose than usual. "What do we know?" he intones. Olivia gives him the bullet: the victim, Randy Danzig; was found by his wife, who thought he was flying to Hong Kong, "but he stayed home to surprise her for their anniversary." Mission accomplished, I'd say. Broyles asks if he was a doctor, or worked in a hospital. Olivia says he was an investment banker. "Has he visited a hospital in the last twenty-four hours?" Broyles presses. Olivia offers to find out, and wonders why. "It's not the first time I've seen this phenomenon," Broyles says. Yes, I was starting to suspect as much.
So he takes her and Peter to a self-storage facility, which seems like a strange place to keep old FBI case files. Letting them into the locker, he backstories that he saw five similar cases in D.C. four years ago, and all of the victims had either worked at or recently visited a specific hospital. After three of them, an Eastern European man with detailed inside knowledge of the deaths contacted Broyles, offering to turn himself in if they could decipher his formula. Olivia opens the manila folder Broyles just handed her, and reveals a complex diagram shaped roughly like Saturn. Peter recognizes it as a molecular model. "Some kind of complex organic compound." Going out on a limb with all those C's in there, isn't he? "He implied that solving it was the key to stopping the murders," Broyles adds. He says CDC and NIH couldn't figure it out, and then after two more deaths, it stopped. Peter heads out to deliver the document to Walter, because the CDC and NIH never had one of those . As Olivia answers her cell phone, Broyles closes up the file box, but not before ganking the microcassette recorder bagged up inside it. Why does the file include the whole recorder and not just the tape? Broyles's archiving system is becoming more mystifying by the minute. Olivia gets off the phone, and tells Broyles that the man Peter calls Dusty did in fact visit his mother in Latchmere General Hospital the day before. Another interesting thing we learn from this scene: this episode was directed by Jon Cassar, former executive producer of 24 and the director of scores of episodes. Let's see if he can tell a story with only one scene on the screen at a time.
Well, he clearly doesn't have much patience for big floaty letters, because the only ones we'll see all hour are the ones outside "LATCHMERE GENERAL HOSPITAL BOSTON." It's nighttime now, so the team has taken its time getting there. Oh, wait, they're still not there. In one of the quiet, dark hallways, a night nurse works on a computer as the shadow from before lurks around, passing behind her and causing her to look up, not that she sees anything. But then the shadow flickers back into existence, just before the ads. And it's obvious how this shadow is able wander around undetected, because unlike most hospitals I've been in, this place is lit like a Goth nightclub in an arctic winter. There could be hordes of shadows roaming the hallways and nobody would ever notice.
The next day, Broyles is bulldozing past a hospital administrator's speech on their way to her office. Olivia says they're looking for an employee of Eastern European descent who also worked in a DC hospital four years ago. I don't know why she's bothering telling her this; Broyles already has a warrant for their servers, and a team of agents ready to move in and take over the office, so it's not like the administrator's cooperation is relevant anyway.
Peter watches Walter dribble a bit of dust through his fingers, back into the big jar with a sticky-label on it marked "Randy" in cursive lettering. "Walter, that is a man's remains you're playing with," Peter admonishes. Yes, a man Peter called "Dusty." Walter agrees that's exactly what it is: "Reduced to its most elemental components: carbon and calcium." Before going through the whole rest of the list, he seems to remember that we've all seen that episode of Star Trek: TOS where a ship was discovered being crewed by piles of baking soda in Starfleet uniforms. Astrid arrives with a Geiger counter, and as Walter gets ready to count some Geigers, he explains to Peter, "We all carry low amounts of radiation...seven rads or so." He indicates the molecular diagram that has now been transferred from Broyles's file to the chalkboard, saying it "describes something highly radioactive and organic." In other words, he's expecting the dust to read in the mid- to low hundreds of rads, but when he sticks the Geiger counter's wand in the jar, the gauge registers nothing -- a big fat zabbo. Even Astrid is more radioactive while just standing there, which confuses Walter greatly. "Maybe [the radiation] dissipated when he did," Peter suggests. Walter doesn't think that's likely, and when Olivia calls the lab to check in, Peter tells her over the phone that so far all they know is that the body's not radioactive. Olivia asks whether Walter's made any progress on the formula. Peter says they've figured out that it represents an organism. "And, as of a couple of hours ago, he started referring to it as a 'she.'" Walter takes the phone and tells Olivia, "She's a complex chemical puzzle. For what, I don't know." He suddenly trails off, leaving Olivia hanging. "Titanium tetrachloride," he mutters to one part of the board. "You sly temptress." Peter picks up the abandoned phone and tells Olivia, "Needless to say, he's into it. I'll keep you posted." Olivia seems glad to hear it. And that she's not the one being called a sly temptress.
At the hospital, Broyles takes a break from glowering over his investigators and goes to sit with Olivia. She tells him to head on home, but he insists on waiting. Doesn't he have a family to get back to? She asks why the killer contacted him in the first place, years ago. "Was it just to taunt you?" Broyles says it was the opposite. "He was distraught. Said he couldn't control it. I got the overwhelming impression that however he was killing these people, he wanted it to end." They gaze into their coffee cups, because the light is much better in there. "Until today I thought maybe it had."
But no, because there's another nurse working in the stygian gloom of the hallway, and as the camera drifts past her, her computer monitor goes all wobbly. The view proceeds along to a sleeping patient in a bed, and then as the nurse prepares an injection in the foreground, the shadow can be seen briefly blocking the body as it leaves the scene. Then there's an extreme close-up of the patient's cheek. A fly lands on it (this hospital looks nicer by the moment, like it's Shutter Island or something), and when it takes off again, the woman's skin begins collapsing into dust where the insect landed. The nurse turns, sees her patient raining softly onto the floor, and throws the needle down with a scream. The only thing that scene was missing was the syringe lodging itself point-first in her foot.
In the hallway, Olivia and Broyles notice all the hospital employees suddenly hurrying in the same direction. Sensing a "code gray," if you know what I mean, they follow everyone, but still somehow end up in the patient's room alone, except for the incomplete remains of the dusty lady. Broyles orders the floor sealed, just before an agent walks up to him with a printout of their suspect: Tomas Koslov, who has a photo, a home address, and everything. He quit the hospital in D.C. at about the same time the deaths stopped, and started working here at Latchmere a week later. "He's a night nurse in a coma unit. He never showed up for his shift tonight." Or maybe he did, and it was just too dark for anyone to see him.
So of course the FBI goes busting into Tomas's apartment, all guns and flashlights and bulletproof vests. And of course he's not in there. "He knew we were coming," Olivia tells Broyles. "He must have seen us at the hospital." So now they're looking for someone who can turn people into dust and see in the dark.
The ad break is enough time for Peter to show up at Tomas's apartment and find Olivia looking with bewilderment over a table covered with bits of detritus. Peter's able to put together the clues, like bits of wire and electronics and the burns from a soldering iron, to conclude that Tomas was building something. And that's why we need Peter around. I'll take his theory even further and guess that Tomas's project was a robot girl. Only, as Broyles reports when he gets off the phone, "Tomas" is an alias. "Well, we still know he's Russian," Peter points out, holding up one of those bits of electronics so Olivia can see the Cyrillic printing on it. An even better clue is a sweet fingerprint one of the techs has lifted. "Run it through A.F.I.S.," Broyles orders. Is that the kind of thing he normally has to tell people to do? No wonder he's always in such a sour mood.
Wow, Broyles has an office after all, in the Federal Building. Except it's small and cramped with bulletin boards on every wall, so no wonder he never wants to entertain guests there. He's in there now, listening to the old recording of his conversation with Tomas. As he indicated before, the accented voice insisted, "This won't stop unless you can solve that formula." He gave Broyles ten seconds, and Broyles hears his own voice telling the caller that they're working on it, but they need more time. He asked to meet, but the caller hung up. As Broyles turns off the tape, there's a knock on his door. "Senator Van Horn's on line three," someone says. So clearly the phone switching system at the FBI is just as advanced as that at CTU . Or maybe it's just Jon Cassar's fault.
Over an aerial shot of Washington, D.C. (you can tell by the Monument), we hear Broyles saying, "What's so important that we have to meet face to face, Senator?" At least it's on a park bench, where Broyles loves to have his meetings anyway. The Senator, a stocky, graying man, tells Broyles that his fingerprint search apparently kicked over quite the anthill among the intelligence types, and now the CIA is taking the case over. Broyles tries to refuse, but the senator insists, "Your suspect is at the center of an ongoing international investigation led by the Russian government." Broyles wonders what's so hot about him that both the CIA and the Russians are after him, and Van Horn says, "He illegally removed some property belonging to the Russian Federation." Can't just say he stole something? Broyles asks if they're looking for a stolen weapon, but the senator doesn't know. Broyles doesn't buy it: "You're a sitting member of the Senate Intelligence Committee. A former FBI agent." Van Horn protests that he's not CIA. "There was a time, Dennis, that you would say that as a matter of pride, not an excuse." Van Horn says he's sorry, but it's out of his hands. Broyles gets up to leave, but not without stiffly saying, "Please give my regards to Patricia." That's some kind of subtle reminder right there.
At a motel somewhere, Tomas opens the back of a van and pulls out a lead-acid car battery. I can tell what it is because it says "LEAD-ACID BATTERY" on the front in big letters. I assume the back reads "ACME." He hefts it into a motel room, carrying it like it's got a black hole inside it, and sets it down heavily on the table -- where a good half-dozen identical batteries are already sitting, lined up and wired to each other, as well as to banks of mysterious electronic equipment -- all with Cyrillic lettering on the front. That's the ugliest robot girl I've ever seen in my life.
Olivia's at the hospital, and an agent has just finished cueing up the security footage from the night of the patient's death. Broyles calls from the departure gate at the D.C. airport to tell her their suspect is wanted by the CIA and the Russian government, and the CIA is taking over the case. "And they just expect you to hand it over?" Olivia says. Broyles assures her he has no intention of doing so. "From this point forward, don't put anything down on paper. No documentation." So, e-mail only, then? "Anything we need to say to each other, we do it in person." Olivia has her doubts: "When we break the rules, we've got you to protect us. Who's going to protect you?" Broyles is just saying he's aware of the risks when the A/V agent calls Olivia over to look at the footage. It shows the shadow passing through one corner of the camera frame. They think it's an ordinary shadow, until the agent plays back the same moment from a different angle (there's a lot of camera coverage in this hallway, isn't there?), which shows it's a shadow without a guy. "I think you're gonna want to see this," Olivia understates to Broyles.
Everyone's at the Fringe lab as Walter "analyzes" that same footage. "It's clearly its own entity," he concludes. Broyles wonders how that could be, and Walter guesses, "It's possible that the technology that our Russian friend stole allows him to become this shadow." Peter is kind of alarmed that this might be an experiment, but Walter is sanguine about what he calls the Russians' "stripe of the inconceivable." He tells Broyles, "Belly and I were always amazed at their advancements. Even forty years ago, you wouldn't believe what those pinkos were up to." "Russian fringe science," Peter says. "There's a pleasant thought." How much worse than the American kind could it be?
At the Federal Building at night, Broyles is in the hallway when he gets an envelope delivered from Senator Van Horn's office. He opens it, and inside a fat accordion folder marked to his attention is, among other things, a Post-it that reads, "I suspect you ignored orders today at the park. Maybe this will help." He opens the folder, and the first thing he sees is a Russian -- not Tomas -- in full cosmonaut gear. But Tomas's photo is also in there, along with a paragraph of text. Damn, if only it all fit on the screen at the same time, it might be the clue needed to crack this open!
Oh, fortunately, in the next scene Broyles is telling Olivia that the "property" stolen by "Tomas" -- who is actually named Timor -- was actually his own brother, the cosmonaut. The official story from the Russian space agency is that Timor's brother Alex died in space, but they still don't understand what actually happened to him up there. Olivia wonders if this means the cosmonaut is the shadow. Broy;es doesn't know. "What is clear is that Timor took his brother from the secret quarantine facility where he was being studied." He adds that his brother came back in a coma, and Timor's been moving him around between hospitals to guard him. But at least for now, the cosmonaut must still be at Latchmere, since no patients or bodies have left there in two weeks. Olivia offers to get a team together. "We're good," Broyles tells her, just as they come around the corner to see the team ready and waiting. "We're ready to go there now." Well, look who's all proactive when it's his own case he's working on.
Back at the lab, Walter and Peter are explaining to Astrid how they've been getting this all wrong: "It's not the radiation that's killing them," Walter says. "Quite the opposite. It's the radiation that the entity is after." In other words, the shadow passes through them, absorbs their bodily radiation, "and disintegrates them in the process." Apparently all the individuals who died has been recently irradiated somehow. Peter says that all the victims were going through radiation treatment. "Uh, except for the penthouse guy, he died of bad luck," Walter corrects. Peter explains that Randy Danzig had just happened to fly cross-country in a window seat. "It's like getting a big fat head x-ray." "So this thing followed him from the hospital?" Astrid says. "I'm not gonna sleep for weeks." Then who will Gene snuggle with? What I'd like the Bishops to explain now is why human-based radiation is so much more tastier than what the shadow could get from a microwave oven or an x-ray machine. I mean, it lives in a hospital, after all.
All this talk of radiation makes for a nice segue as at the hospital, a nurse comes out of the radiology room, heads over to one of those omnipresent computer nurses, and looks around as the lights start flickering. She heads off to check on the patients as the computer nurse takes a phone call to confirm that their lights and security monitors are off. They don't miss the lights in this joint, obviously, but they need the security monitors. "We're going to backup power," she says calmly. Meanwhile, the original nurse finds all the patients in order, and is fiddling with one of their monitors when a shadow passes across the curtain behind her. Fortunately, it's just a regular shadow, but unfortunately, the person it belongs to is Timor/Tomas. He pops into view, startling her, and she asks why he's there off-shift. "It's hard to explain," he says, but takes a shot at it anyway. "I have to disconnect a patient. I needed to confuse the monitors. I can't let them see me take him." Well, that wasn't so hard to explain, was it? "Maxine, I wish you hadn't seen me here," he adds. He stands there, and we can see the syringe in the hand behind his back. As he continues to stand there.
Broyles, Olivia, and their team burst into the ward, with guns and bulletproof vests all over again. The nurse who came in with them says there's a patient in every bed like there's supposed to be, but the nurse who came in to check on them is nowhere in sight. So we know what happened, even before Broyles spots the nurse-like white sneaker on the floor. Yes, Maxine is in the cosmonaut's bed. Alone, pervs. "He swapped her for his brother," Olivia obviouses. At least Maxine is only drugged and not dead. Or dusty.
Meanwhile, Timor drives a van out of the hospital parking garage with his brother in the back. Don't as me how he got that much deadweight in there when the dude can barely lift a car battery.
Walter is getting all A Beautiful Mind on his multiple chalkboards, blasting opera on his record player while Peter and Astrid watch him quizzically. Olivia and Broyles find the three of them this way, and Peter turns down the stereo to say Walter's been in this state for three hours. Walter freaks out at the interruption of his tunes, but manages to pull himself together at the sight of Olivia and Broyles. "What a pleasant surprise," he lies, and dispatches Astrid to get them all some licorice. Because what else are FBI agents for? Broyles asks Walter if the cosmonaut is the killer, and Walter admits that it could be something in the cosmonaut. He thinks maybe he brought something back with him from a spacewalk. You know, like that guy on The X-Files that time. It always comes down to "like on The X-Files that time," doesn't it? Walter says it's "an organism capable of projecting itself without ever really leaving its host." He says he has to get back to "her," but first Broyles asks if they can call Timor's voice mail and tell him they'll be able to solve the formula. Olivia has to repeat the question before he'll give a confident, "Yes. I can dominate her, Agent Broyles. But first I need something from home." He heads for the exit, and Peter grabs his jacket to follow him, without a word. He does take the time for a smirk, though. There's always time for smirking. In fact, everyone seems to be taking this case pretty lightly except Broyles.
In the motel room, Timor has his brother laid out and hooked up to everything as he listens to his voice mail. The first one his from a very impressed-sounding HR guy at Hartswell Medical Center. " We're going to have a new home, brother, " Timor says in subtitled Russian. The message from the HR guy concludes, "Call me when you get to town. We'll show you around Minneapolis," which I'm taking as a shout-out, even if nobody knew I would be recapping this episode when it was filmed, including me. The bowl of water Timor laid out for some reason is beginning to show ripples on its surface, which I'm suddenly convinced is the reason he laid it out. The second message is from Broyles, asking him to call about the formula. Suddenly the TV in the room turns itself on, tuned to a channel of static, and the lights flicker. Timor, knowing this drill, quickly hooks up a pair of jumper cables to his brother and says, " This is the only way to contain the shadow. Forgive me Alex. Forgive me. " He throws some switches and turns some dials, as the shadow struggles to materialize above his brother's chest while Alex convulses in his coma. Timor does some more yelling at Alex in Russian, cranking the voltage and telling him to fight. Finally the shadow retreats back inside Alex, and his heartbeat settles at a healthy 54. Yeah, Timor scored an EKG from Costco, apparently. As Timor watches, though, the shadow starts to rise out of Alex again, and Timor has to zap him even harder and beg him to fight it even louder. He's sobbing by the time the shadow disappears again, plus when he's done his brother is flatlining, as if they didn't have enough problems already. Timor tells him to live, and the heartbeat comes back, without his even having to do CPR. Now that's a gifted nurse.
The Bishops get back to their apartment, which is still not fully unpacked yet. "Must expand my thinking," Walter mutters to himself. Peter grins that he threw away Walter's LSD, but Walter has found the box he's looking for, which was fortunately on top of a stack of them. "The right tool for this job," he says, pulling out an ancient set, "Is Tinkertoys." Okay, that's cool, but as the father of a five-year-old, I'm relearning my old philosophy that there is nothing that can't be accomplished with Legos.
At the lab, Astrid has a phone trace set up in case Timor calls. Olivia wanders over to a shirtsleeved Broyles and asks why this case is so important to him. Broyles takes a long time to answer, but he says that when the case first came around four years ago, it was a bad time for Fringe Division. "The government was siphoning money away from us for things that had more public results." But Broyles says he didn't care about his own career. "I just wanted to make the world a safer place. I became obsessed with this case. And for my wife, it was the straw that broke the camel's back. It ended our marriage." He sees the irony: "I took this job to make the world a safer pace for my family. Instead I lost it." Olivia looks up at him, like, "Family. Huh. Mysteries never cease."
I think Walter has Jaws playing on his TV, which is the second homage to that movie in this episode, counting that first scene with Broyles and the little boy and not counting all the other ones I'm sure I missed. Peter has finished rendering the formula in Tinkertoy form, in 3-D. It's way more complicated here than in the Polaroid of the blackboard he's holding. But Walter has what he needs, and he and Peter start trying to pull apart the two main sections. But they get snagged and won't come apart. "Oh no," Walter murmurs. Just like that.
Timor has his brother all set up in the van again. " I know, Alex. I'm tired of running too, " he says. Then he leaves the van to call the number Broyles gave him. "Call Dr. Bishop," Broyles tells Olivia before taking the call in the lab. Timor asks Broyles f they've solved the formula, while Astrid gets Walter on the line for Olivia. She asks if he's solved it and switches her phone to speaker so Broyles can hear. Walter says it's bad news: while Timor is once again saying he's hanging up in ten seconds to avoid the trace, Walter tells Olivia that the organism can't be removed from Alex. "The two have become one. Bonded at a molecular level. They can't be separated. You can't kill the organism with out killing them both." Just before Timor hangs up, Broyles relays the news to Timor. As Timor sinks into a chair in the open hotel room, Broyles says that if anyone can help his brother, it's the people he works with, and asks Timor to give them a chance. Timor seems to agree. "I don't want him harmed," he says into his phone, all choked up. Astrid says they need ten more seconds for the trace, as Broyles asks Timor to trust him. Timor claims he's keeping the shadow under control, which is true if you don't count all the ways he isn't. Broyles again asks where they are, btu Timor's not answering. And the camera circles around Timor, so we can see the oscillating fan behind him. Which oscillates until it points at him, and blows away the left side of his head in a tiny dust storm. The shadow walks out of the motel room, looking pretty sated, if you want to be honest.
Astrid completes the trace. After a shot of the sun rising over Boston, we catch up to a Fringemobile rolling up to the "Inter City Motel." The agents hop out and draw their weapons, approaching the van with its back door still open. No one inside but the comatose cosmonaut, of course. And then they look into the open motel room and see the right half of his brother, his cell phone still to his ear. The radiation from those things will kill you, you know.
Peter and Walter pull up, and Peter helps his father into a bomb squad vest before grabbing his Geiger counter. Walter goes right into the van to assess Alex, who seems normal, other than being in a coma. He speculates that the jumper cables are there to contain the shadow. "It didn't work," Olivia reports. "It killed Timor." Broyles asks Walter what his next move is. Walter says they'll need an Alex-case made of lead, but the Geiger counter has bad news: Alex's little friend is out and about. Peter and Olivia wonder if Walter can bring the shadow back with some shocks, and while Walter is getting flustered and fumbling around trying to make it happen, there's something going on in one of the motel's other rooms. A little blond girl is watching TV on the hotel bed while her mom showers in the bathroom. Or at least, she was watching TV until the screen wavered and went blank. The shadow really isn't picky any more, is it? This girl wasn't even sitting that close to the screen, which not only undermines the internal logic but passes up the opportunity to make this a cautionary tale that kids won't soon forget. She gazes into the shadows of the closet. Which is still better lit than Latchmere General Hospital.
Walter is still fumbling around with all of Timor's crap in the van. "This equipment, it's in Russian!" he complains. Suddenly a piercing scream is heard. Broyles wastes no time: he immediately goes into action, moving quickly and drawing his gun. But instead of following the sound, he shoots Alex in the head. Dude, that is cold. But even though the rest of the team is looking at him in shock, I don't see any of them complaining. Either because they belatedly recognize that this was the only way to save a life, or because Broyles hasn't holstered his weapon yet.
The little girl's mom comes running out of the bathroom, with wet hair and a robe. Which already males this a nicer motel than any I've ever stayed in. She sees her daughter apparently staring motionless at the TV screen, and asks what happened. No answer, no movement. The mom slowly puts out a hand to reach for the girls shoulder, and when it touches -- it stays. As we knew it would. "There was a man," the little girl says. "A shadow man. He disappeared."
Outside, a couple of guys in full hazmat suits seem to appear from nowhere on the horizon. The team watches as a lead case -- man-sized, just as Walter ordered, but with Russian lettering on it -- is rolled into view in front of them. Olivia looks up at Broyles, who just stares impassively. I would at least be like, "You're welcome."
But that night, he pays someone else a visit. His ex-wife, I'm guessing. She says the kids aren't there, but he's there to see her. Her new husband passes through ("Hey, Phil." "Hey, Rob.") before Broyles gives her his news: "I closed that case. The one four years ago?" She does a very nice job of pretending to care, and even invites him in for dinner with them. Staying out on the front step, he politely declines, and they say goodnight. She looks like she might have more to say, but closes the door behind him. Yeah, whatever. I've had enough work project eat enough weekends to know that finally finishing one years after the fact isn't going to make the spouse feel all that much better.
Broyles starts down the front walk to his car, chirping the alarm, when someone calls out, "Agent Broyles. You've got a real friend in Senator Van Horn." Broyles turns, dropping his keys in his coat pocket, and sees a little guy in a suit, just standing smack-dab in the middle of the street with his hands behind his back and yet somehow looking totally ominous. Must be the musical score. "Is that so?" Broyles asks. "When the CIA says cease and desist," the man says, "we kind of mean it. A person could get into a lot of trouble." "I guess I should thank Senator Van Horn, then," Broyles says. "Understatement," the guy says tersely, giving Broyles a pretty spooky blue steel that clearly means, "That's the only reason I haven't already killed you". "So, this thing," he continues. "There isn't going to be any report, right?" It's not a question, so Broyles doesn't bother answering. The guy turns and walks back toward his car, until Broyles calls after him to ask what become of Alex. The CIA guy suddenly gets all helpful, saying, "We had no choice. Once he started breathing again." And then he looks up at the sky. Broyles follows his gaze up into the starry night, then watches the guy finish walking to his car and drive away. Broyles is left standing there in the street. Oddly, despite having closed an old case in a big way, he doesn't seem too over the moon.
M. Giant is a Minneapolis-based writer with a wife, a son, and a number of cats that seems to have settled at around two. Learn waaaay too much about him at Velcrometer , follow him on Twitter , or just e-mail him at M.Giant[at]gmail.com.
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