"Are you or are you not one of them?"When it came time to write this post, we had to double-check the episode number because we couldn't quite believe it. Six? Only six episodes? If this was an ongoing series instead of a
done-in-one, half the abductees would still be asleep in their rooms. To the creators' credit, they've managed to pack a decent amount of story into those 6 episodes. Network television should really consider doing more of these types of limited series. It can be a more rewarding experience than slogging through a lot of filler episodes. Not only have they killed off one main character, they introduced another, revealed two of the characters to be moles and had one of those moles revealed to the rest of the main characters. Not to mention everything that's going on with Mark and Kat out in the real world.We don't like to do strict recaps but something about this show requires that we do so. Here's the quickie version:
Moira and Graham are suspicious of Joe and they think he knows they are. Joe's doing his best to seem UNsuspicious by running around in circles, which would normally make people suspicious but comes across as completely understandable when you've been kidnapped and placed in a petri dish that looks like a small town.
Janet and Erika continue to bond, but the whole thing seems awfully shady to us. For a supposedly typical suburban mom, she sure does cozy up to the death row killers with a lesbian crush on her awfully easily, wouldn't you say?
DUCS Bill decides he hasn't been douchey enough and figures taking a sledgehammer to everything in sight constitutes "taking control" of his situation and according to him "control is power." Okay, we think it's fair to say that we can add "delusional" to the list of adjectives applied to him. The good news is he got a fork jammed into his hand and his head slammed into a wall, and that's just quality television as far as we're concerned.
Janet and Joe have a talk after dinner about how Erika doesn't trust him and how that's understandable since he's been so reticent about his background. Joe skirts right up to the line of revealing everything, but doubles over screaming and vomiting, which means they won't be having that first kiss just yet. Joe tries to use the elevator to take him down to the secret room to see Tom, but it's not happening. Instead, he retires to his room. Tom pays a
visit via heretofore-unknown secret elevator and tells him he doesn't quite know what's happening to Joe but that it's probably a safe bet that he pissed off the Persons Unknown by breaking protocol and this is the result. He tells Joe that he believes "that no single life is more important than the greater good this program serves." Joe admits that at one time he believed the same thing.Later, the rest of the abductees visit him and Moira (who's quickly turning into the Professor on this Gilligan's Island) determines that he's been poisoned and somehow works up two antidotes, either of which could kill him if it's the wrong antidote. You've gotta love these lady-or-the-tiger dilemmas.
Erika shows up with her own antidote: a huge glass of vodka. Something, something...prison, moonshine, ethylene glycol, anti-freeze. It all went by a little fast. The gist of it: Erika thinks he was poisoned with anti-freeze and alcohol is the answer. Moira is impressed and gives it her seal of approval. Not so fast, says Erika. She holds the glass up in front of a barely conscious Joe and tells him she'll give it to him if he'll answer once and for all if he's working for the people behind all this. He reluctantly answers yes.
Meanwhile, out in the real world, Mark and Kat are on the run from the mysterious guys in the blue jumpsuits. The pudgy non-threatening middle-aged dude rescues them for some reason and sends them on their way to Rome, where they attend Tori's memorial service. A bunch of Italian thugs who look like models disrupt the memorial and pull out their guns. The Ambassador tells them to calm down and they leave, because there are no repercussions when you pull a gun on a U.S. Ambassador in public. Mark goes after them, they hit him, Kat speaks Italian to them, they leave. Later, they come back and kidnap Mark and Kat, so that they can reveal that Thug #1 was Tori's boyfriend and that he knows all about the men in blue jumpsuits. Later still, Mark and Kat go full-on "Hart to Hart" and dress up like a priest and a nun to attend some sort of reception? It had an ice sculpture. "Had" being the operative word. Mark takes the ambassador's security card, breaks into his office, and finds the cast photo for the NBC series "Persons Unknown." He sees Tori and Janet coming out of the Chinese restaurant. Later a taxi they were riding in blows up but they got out just in time.
Back in town, Janet and Joe have a moment which ends in a slap. Tom watches the whole thing on camera and wonders aloud just what is to be done with Joe. He notices Erika in her bathroom,
conspicuously dumping anti-freeze down the drain. She turns to the camera and offers a devious smile to Tom, who looks shocked.Okay, maybe that wasn't such a quickie recap. And now, the opinions, questions and theories, in bullet point format:
* What the hell is the "greater good" this so-called "program" serves? And who, exactly, is the subject of this experiment? We're starting to think it's Joe. Why do we think that? Scroll on down to the next exciting bullet point to find out!
* We think the point of that final shot is that Erika is working for the Persons Unknown, but at a deeper level than both Joe and Tom. Tom wasn't horrified that she poisoned Joe. He was horrified because he realized there was an agent in the program that he didn't know about. We propose that she was sent inside to test Joe's loyalty to the program. She got herself and Janet locked into that vault last episode and that's what ultimately caused Joe to blow his cover. Then she poisoned him and made him decide between his life and his cover. He failed the test, obviously.
* What's going on with Moira and Graham? Is that a real love connection? Because they make a mighty odd couple but something about it actually works for us.
* Mark and his bitch girlfriend are the two most annoying characters on the show, but at least their part of the story is becoming a little more integral to the plot. As an aside, a small
kudos to the location scouts. This entire series was shot in Mexico and yet that was a totally believable Rome they were running around.* Do we believe that male model who said he was Tori's fiance? Not really.
* Why did pudgy non-threatening guy help Mark and Kat out? Why did we clap when he clocked Kat in the face? Violence against women is never entertaining, T Lo!
* Violence against douchey guys posing as used car salesmen, on the other hand, that's just quality television.
* We still maintain that Janet is way more than she appears to be. We don't trust her as far as we can throw her.
As always, if you missed the episode, blogdaddies are here to provide:
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