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This week, we get our first guard out of the missing 63s. He's Guy Hastings and he seems like an all-around decent fellow. Back in the day, he had a family with him on the Rock and took pride in his job training the new guards. When he shows up in the present day, he spends some time reminiscing in his old apartment and beats up a park ranger who surprises him. The guard lives to tell the tale, so the A-Team figures out who they're looking for. But how to track him down? Except for the ranger, he's not leaving a trail of crumbs/crimes behind him like the other 63s.
They eventually work out that Guy's daughter Annie is still alive. Under the pretense of working on another Alcatraz book, Doc and Rebecca ask to see her father's old belongings. Among them is a photograph of Guy with Rebecca's uncle, Ray Archer, back in their guard days. About this time, the bartender at Ray's Bar calls to say that he's gone missing. That's because Guy has nabbed him and demanded to know the whereabouts of one Tommy Madsen. (It's what the mysterious "they" have told him to do.) Ray tries to play dumb, but his fifty years of lies are starting to unravel. In flashbacks, we see a young Ray becoming a guard at Alcatraz so he can be closer to his old friend Tommy. Ray's superiors are immediately suspicious, but they don't know the half of it.
In trying to figure out where Guy has taken Ray, Rebecca and Doc figure out that Tommy and Ray were actually brothers. Ray changed his name from Madsen to Archer before he went to work at Alcatraz. In the end, the A-Team captures Guy without much bloodshed, in part because they reveal that his daughter's still alive. Rebecca also figures out that there's something extra special about Tommy in this whole mystery and that Hauser needs her because of their connection. This, she realizes, gives her the upper hand in dealing with Hauser. One day, maybe she'll punch him with it. Stay tuned for the full weecap.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!Alcatraz, present day. A youngish man stands in one of the old, abandoned staff apartments. It looks like a moldy old dump now, but they could totally spiff up those units and turn them into a bed and breakfast. Total cash cow. The man looks sadder than Eeyore at a Sylvia Plath reading. He pulls away a piece of the baseboard and takes out a stash of pictures hidden behind it. They're all pictures of him with his wife and daughter. A park ranger walks in behind him and goes, "You don't belong here!" You don't know the half of it, buddy. The man attacks the ranger, punching him brutally until he slumps against the wall, bloody and unconscious. He returns to his secret stash, takes the pictures and a modern gun that was also hidden behind the wall. He replaces the baseboard, leaving a bloody fingerprint on the plaster. On his way out, he stops by the door and touches the place where his daughter's height was marked.
This brings us to a flashback. It's a rainy morning in the same apartment. He and his wife flirt in their bedroom as he's getting dressed for the day. "Why don't you call in sick?" she asks with romantic intent. "No, ma'am, today's a training day," he says. His cute little moppet daughter runs in long enough to show she's a cute little moppet, then runs back out again. The wife gushes about how happy they all are. In the pouring rain, he goes out to meet the new guard trainees. "I'm Guy Hastings, your training officer," he says, yelling to be heard over the rumble of thunder. He goes on to tell them that Alcatraz is the most dangerous prison in the world. The trainees look grim. "My job is to make sure you survive," Guy goes on. "Look to me. Trust me. Because on Alcatraz, no man can do it alone." The trainees introduce themselves. Among them is a baby-faced Ray Archer.
Present day. Rebecca and not-so-baby-faced Ray Archer sit down for a chat at the dim sum restaurant. He gives her a picture of him and Tommy Madsen as young boys. She realizes this means they knew each other long before Alcatraz. "Did he really kill my grandmother?" she asks. "I didn't think so... and then I did," Ray says. He doesn't know why Tommy did it. He thought of as Tommy his best friend. Just as a second round of pork buns arrives, Rebecca gets a call and excuses herself.
Alca-Hub. Hauser tells Rebecca and Doc about the ranger who was attacked. He shows them some security footage of the ranger going into the building and Guy Hastings coming out. Does this mean Guy materialized in there? Because, again, that's the kind of thing these people need to be questioning. Anyway, Doc recognizes him and explains he was a guard. Rebecca wonders why he attacked the ranger. "The guards were good men," Hauser says. "If he attacked a ranger, someone must have put him up to it." Doc and Rebecca are genuinely puzzled, like, "Someone? Who?" Have they not been watching their own show? It's the mysterious mystery people who took the 63s! They wonder what he could be there for. In the shot, Guy is watching Ray walking down the street. He makes a serious face. Cue the opening credits.
The A-Team heads over to Guy's old place. When Rebecca makes a remark about how small it is, Doc says guards paid $28 a month to live there. The living arrangements weren't part of the deal? That stinks. "What do you know about Hastings?" Hauser asks Doc. Doc wheels around on him and shouts, "What do you know about Hastings? You've had 50 years to bone up on this crap! You should be an even bigger expert than me!" Or maybe he just politely explains that Guy was in the Navy and came to Alcatraz in 1957. The "official" story is that he and eight other guards died in a chemical spill in 1963. "I wrote about him in one of my books," Doc says, "which I guess makes me a fraud." No, it doesn't. Rebecca notices the blood by the baseboard and pries it open. An empty clip is inside. "That means he's got a gun," she says. "Question is, what's he gonna do with it?" Hauser asks. Rebecca's stumped for ideas on how to find him. It's not like he's one of the prisoners who has a criminal pattern they can use. Doc points out the height markings by the door and suggests they look up Guy's daughter Annie.
Doc and Rebecca drop by Annie's house under the guise of writing a new book about Alcatraz. She invites them inside and tells them what an amazing place Alcatraz was. She has memories of climbing on her dad "like he was furniture." She tearfully recalls being told he had died in an accident on the island. They sent her his belongings, but never told her or her mother what happened. Doc asks to borrow her dad's stuff and she agrees.
Flashback. Guy takes the trainees on a tour. "Welcome to the mess hall, aptly dubbed the gas chamber," he says, explaining that there are 14 teargas canisters in the ceiling. Also, they serve beans with every meal. As the inmates make their way through the chow line, Guy explains that the mess hall is the most dangerous place in the prison. Ray notices Tommy nearby. Tommy notices him, too. Ray smiles, but Tommy flies into a rage and beats Ray upside the head with his lunch tray. Ray goes down. Tommy pounces on him and whispers, "You shouldn't have come here."
Ray's Bar, present day. Ray takes the trash outside, telling his bartender he'll be right back. As he's dealing with the dumpster, he hears a gun cocking behind him. "Don't move," a voice says. He turns slowly towards his would-be attacker and frowns as he recognizes him. "Guy?" Guy beats him upside the head with his gun.
Flashback to the infirmary. Dr. Beau stitches up young Ray's head wound. Warden James and Deputy Tiller come by for a look and question why Tommy Madsen went after Ray. Tiller seems suspicious about the whole thing, thinking they must know each other. Warden James points out that Alcatraz is full of murderers and the like. An inmate turning violent isn't exactly surprising, but Tiller suspects that Ray is there to break Tommy out of prison. He wants Ray gone. James leaves the decision up to Guy: "Shall we pull Archer close to our teat, or send him on his merry way?" What a visual! Guy vouches for Ray.
Alca-Hub. Doc goes through Guy's old belongings, noting that it's all "good-guy stuff" that they don't usually get to deal with. Rebecca says there hasn't been anything in the news that would point to Guy. Then she gets a call from the bartender saying that Ray went to take the trash out and didn't come back inside. She and Hauser head for the door, wondering if Guy might be involved. Doc calls her back, having just found a picture. "It's Hastings and Ray," she says. "They knew each other." Yeah, thanks for connecting those dots for us.
Ray wakes up in his apartment some time later to find Guy digging through his shelves. "What the hell is going on?" Ray asks. "You died." Guy's not into answering things. Instead, he wants to know about Tommy Madsen. Ray tries to pretend like he only knew Tommy from Alcatraz, but Guy finds a framed photograph of the two of them. Guy throws the picture to the floor. "Where is he?" he asks. "He's dead," Ray says. "He died in '64." Guy says Tommy's back, same as he is. This seems to give Ray a little pause. Guy demands to see Tommy's son.
Bar. Hauser and Rebecca show the bartender Guy's picture. You know, if they're trying to keep this whole thing a secret, maybe they should Photoshop those pictures so they don't look like they're from the 1950s. The bartender says he saw Guy standing across the street earlier. He remembered him because at the time, he was like, "Hey, isn't that Hoyt from True Blood?"
Hauser and Rebecca rush over to Ray's apartment and find it in disarray. Rebecca finds Ray's watch on a chair and figures Ray must be trying to tell her something, because he never takes it off. She gave it to him when she was 13. Hauser picks up the shattered picture and shows it to her. "That's Ray and my grandfather," she says. "Tommy Madsen," Hauser says. Yes, I think she knows her own grandfather's name. Rebecca figures that's who Guy must be after. "Why would the people who took the 63s be after my grandfather?" she wonders. Hauser says he doesn't know, but I bet he totally does.
Flashback. Young Ray is back on the job. Guy takes him aside. "I put myself on the line for you, so I'm only ask this once: Do you know Tommy Madsen?" Ray makes with the innocent puppy eyes. "No, sir, I do not." Guy takes him at his word. , he offers him some advice. Ray's got to make the prisoners respect him after they all saw him getting beat.
Alca-Hub. Hauser comes in with Rebecca and picks up a red telephone. Without dialing, he says, "I need to see you." Doc's like, "What's with the bat phone?" Hauser disappears into the Sub-Hub. Rebecca and Doc are only very mildly curious about it and then get back to the job of tracking down Ray and Guy. They exposit and figure they must be going back to the old neighborhood where Tommy and Ray grew up. Rebecca takes the two pictures she has of them. They were taken outside the same house. The house number is visible, but not the street name. Doc comes up with this whole complicated thing of how they can figure out where it is based on the architecture. The amount of architecture shown in this picture is, like, a door, some steps, and a skosh of wood siding. It could be a million houses. Has Ray, in all the time he was raising Rebecca, never mentioned the name of the city where he grew up? This seems unnecessarily complicated. Doc says they need a pro to help them out.
Meanwhile, Ray and Guy have dropped by to visit Tommy's son... at the cemetery, because he's dead. "Everyone connected with Tommy is dead," Ray says. "I'm the only one left." Ray tries to reason with Guy, remind him he's a good guy. "Why are you looking for Tommy?" he asks. "It's what they told me," Guy says. When Ray acts confused, Guy goes on, "You were there. You saw what they did to him. All that blood they took." Guy takes a closer look at Madsen Jr.'s grave marker. His epitaph denotes him as a husband and father. He thinks for a second and remembers the blond woman in Ray's pictures. He figures she must be Tommy's granddaughter. "She's damn near the spitting image of him," he says. She really isn't. When Guy demands to see her, Ray promises to take him to see Tommy instead.
Doc's Comics. The "pro" Doc was talking about turns out to be Chet, the stock boy. Somehow, he's managed to find the house using a laptop. It's in Daly City. They still don't have a street name, though, so Doc proposes they look up old census reports.
Sub-Hub. Hauser asks his crack team of nerds whether there was any seismic activity the day the guard returned. Instead of answering, one of the nerd asks, "Sir, do you think the keys, Tommy Madsen, the jump--that they're all related?" He sounds incredulous, but I can't fathom why. I mean, isn't this what they've been assembled for? "Humor me," Hauser says. One of the nerds says there was something "statistically insignificant along the North Hayward fault." Hauser thinks out loud: "The guard is looking for Madsen, which suggests that Madsen is unaccounted for." "Or lost," a nerd suggests. "Or lost," Hauser repeats, in case you missed the first time.
Doc's Comics. Rebecca and Doc go over an old census report. Rebecca reads an entry for the Madsen household aloud: "William, head of household. Laura, spouse. Tommy, son. Ray, son." She's a little surprised to read the last. "They were brothers!" Doc figures Ray must have changed his name to get a job at Alcatraz because they wouldn't have hired him if they'd known he was related to Tommy. "Ray's my uncle," Rebecca says. "My real uncle!" She's so much more shocked by this than by the mysterious appearance of eternally youthful Alcatraz inmates. Also, why wouldn't Ray have told her his true identity? It's understandable why he'd lie to Alcatraz officials, but why his own family?
Flashback. As the prisoners return to their cells, Ray and Guy make sure that Tommy is stuck outside his cell when the doors close. The other inmates start chanting in anticipation of a fight. Ray walks over to Tommy and bashes his head against the bars of his cell door. Tommy doesn't put up much resistance. He falls to the ground as Ray keeps on punching him. Eventually, Guy pulls him off and says he's made his point.
Daly City. Ray brings Guy to the old family home, which is kind of a dump nowadays. Tommy isn't there, but Ray insists he'll show up.
Rebecca and Doc are closing in. As Rebecca drives, she gets a call from Hauser, all ticked that they've gone to Daly City. Since he knows exactly where they are, they figure he must be tracking them. Also, the green-screen driving looks kind of terrible. Doc wonders what Rebecca will do if she finds her grandfather there and she reminds him he killed her partner.
Ray and Guy wait for Tommy. Ray's been handcuffed to the radiator. He remembers his first day on the job and how Guy was the only thing that kept him from running back home. "What happened to you, Guy? Where have you been?" he asks. "I haven't been anywhere," Guy says. He sadly recalls taking his daughter to the dock that morning. Later that night, he was in the north tower when a thick fog came in. "The morning, I was in the infirmary. They told us there'd been an accident. Our families were dead." The guards were sick, or so they were told. They weren't allowed to leave. "And then it wasn't 1963 anymore," he says.
Rebecca comes through the door, but Guy gets the jump on her. He grabs her and holds his gun to her head. Ray pleads with him to let her go. "You're a good man, a family man," Rebecca reminds Guy. "My family's dead," he says. When she tells him his daughter is still alive, he doesn't believe her. "She told me she used to climb on you like you were furniture," she says. "They lied to you about everything." Just then, Hauser shows up. Does he have access to a wormhole or something? He was still on the island when he called Rebecca and yet he shows up just minutes after she arrives? Hauser threatens to shoot Guy in the head, so Rebecca elbows Guy in the crotch (she's very petite and he's very tall) and grabs a gun out of her boot. She shoots him in the leg.
Flashback. Ray visits Tommy in the infirmary even though their relationship is supposed to be a big secret. There's a guard standing within earshot and yet Ray goes on about how they're blood and he won't leave Tommy there alone. "You and me are in this together," he says. He turns to go, but Tommy grabs his wrist. They clasp hands for a moment and then Ray leaves. Guy watches from the shadows.
Present day. Hauser drives Guy to Annie's house. They park across the street. What impeccable timing they have, because Annie's children and grandchildren have just arrived to act out a scene of familial bliss. They hug and laugh, unaware that they're being watched by their ancestor. "You're a casualty in all this," Hauser says to Guy. "You didn't deserve what happened to you." Guy tears up. "I'm never gonna see them again, am I?" he asks. He knows the answer. Hauser saying "no" is just a formality.
Alca-Hub. Rebecca finds Hauser in the Gallery, studying the board of retrieved 63s. "I'm not the first Madsen you've asked to be on this task force, am I?" she asks. "That's why Ray's not freaking out about Guy Hastings showing up." Yeah, but nobody on this show freaks out. Is that really much of an indicator? Hauser admits he offered Ray a job, but that was when Ray had just started taking care of Rebecca. Rebecca realizes that Hauser needs someone with ties to Tommy for some reason. "Now I know my grandfather is more important to you than I ever imagined," she says. "Which means you need me more than I need you." With that, Rebecca leaves Hauser to stew in his own grumpy juices. He goes over to Tommy's photo and lays his hand on the board. A strand of wooden beads is wrapped around his fingers. It must be important because a spotlight shines on it. Take note!
Ray's Bar. The night's patrons have gone. Only Ray is left when the door opens. It's Tommy. Ray isn't surprised to see him. "I told you never to come back here," he says. "You gave up the house," Tommy reminds him. "What else was I supposed to do?" Tommy also reminds him of the good old days, when Ray would do anything to protect him. That was before Rebecca, Ray says. "Every minute that you're near puts her in harm's way," Ray says. "If I see you again, I'll kill you." He looks like he means it. Tommy looks like he knows it.
Tippi Blevins disappeared from prison fifty years ago and then mysteriously reappeared to write about this show. Email her at b_tippi@yahoo.com, or find her on Twitter.
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