Episode Report Card M. Giant: N/A | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Alpha vs. Alpha
By M. Giant | Season 1 | Episode 10 | Aired on 09.19.2011
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.The Alphas are all rounded up without warning and stuffed into Binghamton, but that's just the beginning. Agent Nathan Cley, who's never had the best relationship with the team to begin with, has decided that one of them is a traitor. His tipoff? The fact that a few old scientists who worked on something called MK-Ultra, the Cold War version of the Alphas program, were all tracked down and killed by Red Flag, using information that could only have come from Alphas HQ. Cley's individual interviews of Rosen and the team lead him nowhere, even with the help of an Alpha named Eric who happens to be a human lie detector. So Cley's next move is to stick them all in a room together and let them figure out. Instead, Rosen uses an apparent back injury as cover to stage a mass jailbreak. Eventually the team makes it to an abandoned warehouse, but they still have to deal with the problem of which one of them is the mole before Cley and his goons catch up to them. Rosen announces that he knows who it is, but prefers to give the culprit the chance to confess. When time runs out, Rosen fingers Cameron, and in case you ever wondered who would win a fight between Cameron and Bill, now's when you find out. Fortunately, Cley and his team bust in before anyone gets killed, and Rosen rushes Gary out of there by stealing a government SUV. Which is bad because Rachel has just realized that Rosen isn't Rosen at all, but an impostor. An Alpha shapeshifter, naturally. So the good news is that now we know who the mole really is.
Meanwhile, the real Rosen wakes up somewhere without his glasses and a bad haircut, but he's still spry enough to defend himself against a hench-Alpha who was about to kill him like he killed the MK-Ultra scientists. Rosen escapes to HQ and stops Gary from deleting all the MK-Ultra files on Faux-sen's instructions. Faux-sen almost makes his escape by turning into Gary, but Rachel's not falling for that again. So all our Alphas are back in the DoD's good graces, the mole's been caught, Bill and Cameron have patched things up, Eric is probably going to join the team, and the only things left to worry about are Red Flag's next move and how long it's going to take Rosen's hair to grow back.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!Things must be getting heavy, because we're getting previouslies before this episode. Which, see past recaps.
Two men meet on a concrete pier extending into a lake. One is an older, tweedy man who walks with a cane, and the other is a younger, squinty, unshaven hood who is clearly not the man that the older man was expecting. "You're not with the Committee. You're one of them... some mistakes never go away." The younger man's only response is to put his hand to the older man's chest, which causes the older man to basically turn into a human aneurysm, going livid aside from veins standing out on his face where there probably shouldn't even be veins. "Some do," the new arrival says, lowering the corpse to the ground. Cold!
Rosen is picking up Gary at home, rushing him into his convertible, despite Gary protesting that it's his vacation day. Gary's going on about the car show he's spending four days seeing, which segues into a discussion of American-built cars. "Like that one. That's terrible parking," he adds, because the big, black government SUV has just screeched to a halt, cutting them off, and armored agents burst out, guns leveled. "Get down," Rosen tells Gary, like the open-topped convertible is going to be any protection against the air pistols that the commandos are already firing. Let's hope Gary's mom isn't watching this out the front window.
Bill gets out of his car at Alpha HQ, clearly feeling so rotten that his fight-or-flight kicks in out of nowhere and causes him to crush his metal go-cup in one hand. Commandos are also there to greet him, but the leader of this team acts faux-friendly before they shoot him as well. Looks like they're using tranq darts, and it takes almost their entire arsenal to bring Bill down. "Alphas," the leader sighs before putting a few more into Bill's unconscious body for good measure.
Up in the office, Nina and Cameron are talking about movies, mainly Casablanca, in a not-so-subtle shout-out to the episode title. Suddenly they hear a scream from Rachel, and run into the hallway to find her already down. Nina yells at Cameron to run, and he pulls a few cool hyperkinetic moves to make a dash for it and leave Nina to her fate, but he's surrounded and taken down anyway. That would have been awkward to talk about on their next date anyway.
When he wakes up, he's on a cot in a bare, white cell. It's one of what looks like many, in which the other Alphas and Rosen are also coming around. Gary's cell appears shielded, so he can't get any EM signals at all, and Rachel's is completely soundproofed. It's almost as if they're in a facility specially designed to hold Alphas. These Alphas, in fact, which has to give them a warm, fuzzy feeling. Rosen demands to know what's going on, and Cley's voice comes over the intercom saying he's out of luck, he's at Binghamton, and "You're gonna be here until I find out which one of you is the traitor." So it could be a while, then, since we all know none of them is. Right? I mean, right?