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A Korean War vet named Paxton Petty is sent to Alcatraz after setting out multiple land mines around the San Francisco area. His motive? Revenge for not getting a medal after the war. All but the last of his mines has been found and it's a case Hauser has been trying to solve since he was a baby-faced cop. When Petty shows up in the present day, he picks up right where he left off. Thanks to Lucy's interrogation techniques back in 1960, they know that Petty mentions the location of his mines in old song lyrics. Hauser sends Doc and Rebecca to what he figures will be Petty's third target, while he himself confronts Petty at his more imminent target. Hauser manages to step on one of Petty's mines, but has the presence of mind not to step off of it. He ends up stuck there for hours, not able to move his foot off the trigger mechanism.
Meanwhile, Rebecca and Doc catch Petty when he finally shows up at that third target. He says he'll give up Hauser's location in exchange for information. It turns out that Petty has no idea why or how he was brought to 2012. For him, it feels like only a week has passed. They have no info for him, but Rebecca figures out where Hauser is, anyway. Hauser is saved, but a cute and fun bomb squad guy dies in his place. Boo! Hauser shoots Petty in the leg and gets the location of that old, final land mine. In the end, Hauser goes to visit a still-comatose Lucy in the hospital. Since the modern-day docs aren't helping her any, he snatches her up and brings her to Dr. Beauregard in the forest prison. Stay tuned for the full weecap.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!Alcatraz, 1960. Hauser and another guard arrive on the island with a fresh inmate. Warden James and Dr. Lucy Sengupta are at the dock to meet them. Hauser is instantly smitten at the sight of Lucy. At this point in history, he looks several years younger than her. Warden James says, in his usual poetic drawl, "Mr. Petty, you arrive to us with much fanfare." He calls this Mr. Petty a "special case," warranting such a quick meeting. Mr. Petty looks pretty young. Indeed, when he smirks, Warden James makes a comment about the smiles of children, although his, as the Warden says, is "all the company of Hades." Apparently, Petty has left several mines around the mainland, which Warden James promises they will find. When the Warden and the doctor turn away to take Petty to his cell, Hauser stammers out, "Does -- does the lady need a ride back to the mainland?" She declines the invitation, but offers him a peppermint, which affords her the opportunity to touch his hand. He reacts like he just got to second base.
Present day. The cranky, old version of Hauser waits by Lucy's hospital bedside. Unlike him, she hasn't aged in 50 years. She's still in a coma, and a doctor comes in to say there hasn't been any improvement. The doc asks if Lucy ever mentioned a "DNR." "Are you saying she's dying?" Hauser asks. Instead of answering, the doc just touches his shoulder and leaves. Guess she didn't want to hear an answer about that DNR.
At a place called Pine Street Park, a man lets his dog loose to frolic. Man, that is one adorable dog. He looks like he's part dachshund, part floor mop. The man follows after his dog. Suddenly, an explosion goes off under his feet, blowing off one of his legs. Other explosions go off. People scatter, screaming. I hope the dog is okay.
Later, Rebecca and Doc arrive on the scene. Holy hell, what is she wearing? Rust-red pants, olive green shirt and orange jacket. It's like she shops at the "Woodland Nymph" section of JC Penney. With her keen sprite senses, she notices a young man with a backpack. Hauser is already waiting for them. Doc gets a look at the devastation and realizes land mines were used. He goes, "Holy crap! It's Paxton Petty!" Hauser predicts there will be more incidents to come. Back in the day, Petty hid four mines in the area, although only three were ever found. Hauser goes off to do his thing while Doc regales Rebecca with exposition about Petty. He was a Korean War vet who was court-martialed on suspicion of killing Korean schoolchildren. During the investigation, he worked "graveyard detail" at the Presidio. After that, he did his whole land mine thing around the city and then got sent to Alcatraz. Doc hands Rebecca his tablet computer. She recognizes Petty as the young man she saw just moments earlier.
She chases after him and very nearly catches him. That's when he stops, arms a mine and rolls it towards her. She dives for cover as it explodes nearby, showering her with glass from a decimated car window. Her ears ring. Lucky girl misses hearing Hauser's opening voice-over.
Rebecca gets a quick checkup from a handy EMT and worries about Petty's move. Back in 1960, he probably got his mines from Presidio. Rebecca wonders where he's getting them now, since it's not a base anymore. Doc speculates it's the same person who gave the other 63s their guns. "Someone's helping these guys, I mean, maybe unfreezing them..." He starts to go on about Captain America being trapped in the Arctic ice, but Rebecca cuts him off. She has no time for this geekery. She sees a handsome fellow in bomb squad gear and calls out, "Hey, Psycho!" They greet each other and hug. "You switch to decaf yet?" she asks. "Not a chance -- I got nine lives and I haven't burned through half of them yet," he says. He just doomed himself. The friendly Psycho shows her the shrapnel from the mine. It looks like pieces of metallic stars.
Doc and Rebecca head to the morgue. A cute medical examiner named Nikki is conducting autopsies on the Pine Street victims. Doc is awed when she takes off her protective robe and reveals a Golden Age Sandman T-shirt. Nikki shows Rebecca another piece of shrapnel. It's definitely a piece of a star, like a metal or badge, as Rebecca figures. Doc casually mentions that he owns a comic book shop and has every Sandman in stock.
Alcatraz. Hauser opens up a trunk of his old cop stuff. Among the assorted case files is a handful of pictures, including one of him and Lucy. He'll forget to hide that one of these days and inadvertently give away Lucy's ageless secret. He puts the picture to one side and takes out Petty's old file. There's a handwritten poem with the words "snow," "beard," "grace" and "twin tree" circled.
Flashback. Dr. Beauregard tries to get information from Petty about the final land mine. This involves submerging him in a tub of ice water. Lucy watches with disdain. Warden James isn't so bothered, but eventually agrees to let Lucy try things her way.
Present. Rebecca and Doc show a picture of the shrapnel to a guy at what looks like a military surplus shop. He tells them it's a Silver Star. Right in front of this guy, they start talking about the case. Petty didn't get any medals for Korea, but he thought he deserved one and wrote a lot of letters to the government about it. Rebecca figures he's planting the bombs as payback. He probably got the medals from soldiers' graves at the Presidio. They dash off to chase down their clue, leaving the surplus shop guy with the unlikely mental image of some 80-year-old codger planting land mines around the city.
Meanwhile, Petty is holed up in a tomb, polishing one of his ill-gotten medals. A guard walks in. Petty stabs him.
The morning, Doc and Rebecca show up at the Presidio. Doc says Petty's original stash of mines was never found. Rebecca figures out in all of five seconds that the mines were hidden in the tomb.
Flashback. Lucy hands Petty a cup of hot tea, which he drinks gratefully. "Now that's how you treat someone when you want something, Warden," he says. Lucy calmly explains she drugged his tea. "Just a mild sedative to help you relax," she says. His facial expression goes, "Aw, shit." Lucy switches on a reel-to-reel recorder. She recites a list of his wartime accomplishments, like clearing several minefields by himself. His fellow soldiers were awarded medals, but Petty went without. She recounts how he then killed children, whom he calls "little soldiers." Lucy straps him into a chair and places electrical contacts at his temples. She places a rubber guard between his teeth. She gives him a short jolt of 55 volts, then removes the apparatus and guard. He starts singing something in Korean.
Later, Lucy plays the recording for Tommy Madsen, who is also a vet from the Korean War. She wants to ask him a few questions, but he has questions of his own. He wants to know why he spends so much time in the infirmary, for starters, and why they're taking so much blood from him. He makes a deal with her: He'll tell her what the song means, if she finds out why he's in the infirmary all the time. She agrees and he says the song is a lullaby. The Koreans used the lyrics to tell each other where they'd hidden the mines. They were in the fields where they once played. They had to stop in their tracks, for fear of walking on the mines they'd laid. Tommy says that one word in each line would point to a different location.
Alca-Hub. Hauser goes over Petty's old attack locations. The writing that looked like a poem is actually Petty's lullaby. The lyrics match up with Beard Field, Grace Cathedral and the Union Square Snow Festival. To figure out where Petty might be hiding the mines now, he looks up the lyrics of the song. Why is he just now doing this? It's been a day since the park thing, right? Anyway, it turns out there's a second stanza. One of the words is "pine," which Hauser types into the computer, instead of just remembering that Petty's attack was at Pine Street Park. "It matches," Hauser says when a map confirms this very obvious thing.
Cemetery. Rebecca and Doc break into the tomb, realizing that Petty broke out of the tomb, judging by the state of the lock. They further realize that this where Petty "came back." Down in the vault, they find where Petty has been painting his mines to blend in with their intended environments. He has a stash of sandstone-colored paint and chunks of rubber turf that Rebecca realizes is used all over the city in playgrounds and the like.
The bomb squad comes in to retrieve the mines. Psycho is with them and tells Rebecca about a ransom note sent to the city, demanding $651,000 in exchange for the location of the mines. Rebecca muses about that oddly specific number, then calls Hauser. He tells her to look for the word "windward," which he got from the lullaby, while he cross-references the word "sunset" with the sandstone paint Rebecca found and comes up with Sunset Beach. Not that he tells Rebecca this.
Rebecca and Doc bring the bomb squad to a park outside Windward Elementary. Psycho and the squad search and come up empty, so Rebecca sends them off to check other places that have the same turf. She calls Hauser to tell him he was wrong just as he's driving up to Sunset Beach. He tells her to stay at the park. For some reason, he still doesn't tell her where he is. It's so dumb and contrived. You know what else is dumb? When Hauser finds Petty planting his mines in the sand, he starts walking over to him. Hauser has a gun. He could easily incapacitate the guy from a safe distance, but no, he tromps right on up to him and steps right onto a land mine. Unfortunately, he doesn't explode, because he freezes as soon as he hears the mechanism click underfoot. Petty takes out a gun of his own and orders Hauser to hand over his gun and his phone. Also, I am slightly distracted by how horrible the green-screen background looks behind Petty.
Windward Elementary. It's night and Rebecca and Doc are still hanging around when Petty finally shows up. He's just starting to dig up a spot to a playground slide when Rebecca pulls her gun on him. "You with the guy in the suit?" he asks, slightly surprised. She kicks him to the ground and cuffs him, then calls Hauser. She realizes something is horribly wrong when Hauser's phone starts ringing in Petty's backpack. "Where is he?" she asks. "He's somewhere he can ponder the error of his dumbass ways," Petty says. Or maybe he just says "tick-tick-tick!" with an annoying little smile.
Rebecca brings him to a cell back at Alcatraz. Do they have their own private ferry? A helicopter? Specially trained turbo-dolphins? The travel issues are even more glaring than on Fringe. "Why don't we just cut the cop-to-psychopath chitchat and you just tell me what you want," Rebecca says. At first he asks for his bombs back, but then he gets to what he really wants: "I want to know what happened to me." He says a week ago, he went to sleep on Alcatraz and then woke up in 2012 in a tomb. "Tell me how that's possible and I'll tell you anything you want to know," he says. So Rebecca goes back up to the Hub to go over Hauser's old files while Doc tells Petty about one of his theories. It involves quantum theory and a metaphor about waterbugs and perception. "You don't know what happened, do you?" Petty asks. "No," Doc admits. Meanwhile, Rebecca reads through Hauser's notes and realizes where he is. Not that he spelled it out, or anything. Rebecca just uses her insta-knowledge precocious brain and figures it out. Doc and Petty are still gabbing. That $651,000 Petty wanted amounts to the pension he feels he's owed. When it comes out that Doc wrote about Alcatraz, Petty wonders if Doc ever wrote about him. Doc admits he didn't, which just chaps Petty's ass. He goes on about how important he was. "The Warden said so himself," he sneers. "Him and his lady head-shrinker." That puzzles Doc, seeing as how there were no female doctors on Alcatraz. Rebecca interrupts before anyone can reveal anything important. Time to go to Sunset Beach -- fuel up the dolphins!
Flashback. Warden James and Lucy have a chat in one of Alcatraz's innumerable dark little rooms. She shows him the lyrics and explains how they reveal the locations of Petty's bombs. She doesn't know what the "twin tree" lyric means, but they're both confident the SFPD will figure it out. "Milton," the Warden says, "don't skulk out there like a common ferret." Dr. Beauregard, who's been waiting outside the door, comes inside. He seems like more of a skunk than a ferret, if you were choosing from the Musteloidea. At the Warden's urging, Dr. Beau grudgingly admits Lucy's work is "genius." He tries to skulk back out of the room, but she calls him back. She asks him about Tommy Madsen and his seemingly special blood. Dr. Beau warns her not to "overstep." Pure skunk.
Present. Rebecca and Doc find Hauser still standing on that mine. Rebecca grabs Petty from the backseat and points her gun at his head. "Walk me to him," she orders. "Doc, stay here and call Tanner." That's the guy previously known as Psycho.
During the commercial break, the bomb squad arrived and set up lights and a blast wall. Tanner is down on the ground, brushing the sand away from Hauser's foot to expose the mine underneath. Hauser sure is swinging around a lot for a guy who should be standing perfectly still. He and Rebecca talk about the lyrics of the song and how he still hasn't found the "twin tree" location. When Tanner steps aside to get some supplies, Rebecca follows him. It turns out the bomb has been modified in super tricky ways. He tells her he can handle it, but he's clearly shaken.
They go back to Hauser and tell him he's going to have to step off the bomb and get behind the blast wall as quickly as possible. Hauser and Rebecca argue over whether or not she should stick around to help him, but she wins in the end. Tanner places the blade of a knife between Hauser's heel and the plunger, keeping it pressed down as he steps off. Rebecca and Hauser duck behind the wall. Tanner clips some wires and triumphantly calls out, "Got it!" Then the bomb explodes and takes the rest of his nine lives with it. Petty smirks. Hauser, having gotten his gun back at some point, goes over to him. "Couple of things," he says. "You just killed a good man, and my legs hurt." So he shoots Petty in the shin. Heh. Hauser bluffs him, saying they found all his bombs. This gets Petty to whine about his "twin tree" bomb and reveal that he planted it on Mount Sutro. Sucker! Also: Hauser maybe should have led with that move.
Flashback. Young Hauser sits behind a counter at the police department, surprised and flustered when Lucy walks up to him. He admits he hasn't found the last bomb yet, but that he's working on it. Lucy offers her help, then gets him to ask her out to dinner. They're very cute.
Present. Hauser sits at Lucy's bedside, telling her he finally found the twin tree and Petty's last bomb. Then he unhooks her from all the machinery and gathers her up in his arms. He takes her to the forest prison and to Dr. Beau's lab. Dr. Beau looks genuinely devastated to see her like this. The intervening years must have softened him up some. "You know her methods?" Hauser asks. Dr. Beau nods. "Fix her," Hauser says. And while you're at it, maybe fix the show, too? Less standing around talking and moving ploddingly from plot point to plot point? I mean, if you're in the business of making miracles, and all.
Tippi Blevins disappeared from prison 50 years ago and then mysteriously reappeared to write about this show. Email her at b_tippi@yahoo.com, or find her on Twitter.