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The present-day plot feels like filler. The really interesting bits happen in the 1960 flashbacks that hint at the growing philosophical divide between Warden James and Deputy Tiller. James feels the prisoners can be converted. Tiller, too, believes they can be converted, but in the "into a more effective predator" sense. Case in point: a newbie prisoner named Sonny Burnett. On the outside, Sonny was a nonviolent kidnapper who managed to stash away a big chunk of ransom money. On the inside, he tries to use this money to buy himself protection with one of the population's toughs. When the money can't be found, the tough nearly kills poor, wimpy Sonny. Sonny realizes someone has taken his money Tiller takes it upon himself to become Sonny's life coach and helps chisel him into a tougher, crazier, deadlier criminal.
Sonny shows up in the present day to seek revenge against the one who betrayed him. She's a woman named Helen, who was just a teenager when Sonny long ago kidnapped her. Back then, she pretended to love him in order to gain his trust, then took his money when he went to prison. So Sonny abducts her husband and mutilates him, then buries her daughter alive in the same field in which he'd hidden the money. The A-Team catches Sonny and rescues the daughter, but that honestly all feels like filler.
In the subplots, Dr. Beauregard has found that the blood of some of the returned '63s has special healing properties. This puts Hauser on the search to find the right blood type to heal Lucy. In other special blood news, both Hauser and Rebecca are keener than ever to find Tommy Madsen. Rebecca doesn't even mind when it involves spying on Uncle Ray. Stay tuned for the full weecap.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!It's a dark and stormy night in San Francisco. Ray has asked Hauser over to his bar. Sadly, it is not for drinks and reminiscing how they looked and sounded like totally different people in the 1960s. "I want Rebecca out," Ray says without preamble. "I'm not the one keeping her in," Hauser says. Ray wants a better life for his niece, but Hauser scoffs at the idea of her "chasing after a pension for 20 years." Just 20? Now I know this show's a fantasy. Hauser is suspicious that Ray is just now talking to him about this when Rebecca's been on the task force for months. "You've see him, haven't you?" Hauser asks, his tone taunting. "Tommy Madsen. You've seen him." Instead of waiting for an answer, he saunters back out into the night.
Rebecca's apartment. She's having a dream about the day Tommy killed her partner. When she opens her eyes, she thinks she sees Tommy sitting in her bedroom, watching her. She reaches for her gun, but he's gone. Hopefully creepy grandpa was never actually there and it was all in her head.
Time to get the night's plot underway. Two middle-aged gentlemen speed along a quiet road in their fancy car. The guy who's in the passenger seat lights up a cigar. "You ever hotbox with $100 Cohibas?" he asks. "It's like swimming through a cloud." A really smelly cloud. His friend in the driver's seat says he loves his wife too much to come home smelling like a poker game. A muscle car speeds past them. A few moments later, there's a man standing in the middle of the road. The driver swerves to avoid him, then pulls over and gets out of the car for no real reason. The guy approaches them with a shotgun. "Anything you want, just take it," says the man who just enjoyed his last cigar. "Okay," the stranger says, and promptly shoots him in the chest. He turns to the driver with a smile. "I'll be taking you, Mr. Pierce."
Flashback to 1960. Deputy Tiller arrives to let our shooter out of solitary confinement. "Sonny Burnett," he introduces himself nervously. Tiller only refers to him as his prisoner number. Sonny was in solitary as a new arrival, but now that has come to an end and it's time to join the general population. Sonny looks like he wants to cry. Once in the yard, he wastes no time in asking a fellow inmate named Hicks for "protection." At first Hicks declines, then Sonny mentions money. "My last job was a real estate tycoon," he says. "His family paid a hundred grand to get him back." He promises the money is safely hidden away. Hicks takes the job.
Present. Doc and Rebecca meet Hauser at the crime scene. Along with the dead guy's body and the car, they find Sonny's prison uniform. It was nice of him to leave it behind so that the team could ID him so quickly. They info-dump about the victim and the missing owner of the car, a man named David Pierce who runs the big cosmetics company his wife Helen founded. Doc says Sonny never used to kill. "If the ransom was paid, he returned his victims unharmed." Hauser says investigators found tire tracks leading away from the scene. His voice sounds strained. Rebecca tells him to get some rest. "You were shot," she reminds him. "You're only human." Doc has his doubts, as do I.
Doc and Rebecca pay Helen a visit at her home, which is kind of surprisingly modest. Everyone's downsizing these days. Helen's a little bit weirded out to find her husband may have been kidnapped for ransom, because the same thing happened to her when she was a girl. Her kidnapper's name? Sonny Burnett. Doc gapes at her. Rebecca looks... like she has no strong feelings one way or the other. Cue Hauser's annoying intro.
Woodsy prison. Dr. Beauregard tends to Hauser's bullet wound and mentions that the recaptured inmates have been healing from their injuries at an accelerated rate. Ernest Cobb's hand, for example, healed in weeks instead of months. Also, they're all in perfect health. "Any ailments they used to have are now gone," he says. This would have been so much more interesting if they'd shown it happening instead of just telling us about it after the fact. Dr. Beauregard goes on to info-dump about how the prisoners have colloidal silver in their blood. Hauser accuses him of experimenting on the prisoners back on Alcatraz, but Dr. Beauregard says he only took the blood. Only Warden James knows what happened after that. Dr. Beauregard suggests the blood could be used to heal Lucy, if they were to find an inmate with her blood type.
Helen's house. She says she was only 14 when she was kidnapped. Her name was kept out of the newspapers. That's why Doc is only learning about this now. Hauser joins the group and suggests to Helen that they're dealing with a "copycat." This gives them a plausible reason for asking her questions about her own kidnapping. She played along with Sonny, going so far as to help him kidnap someone else until she could get away from him some months later. Rebecca is pretty judgy about the whole thing. Somehow, she doesn't realize there are ways of keeping people prisoner without ever tying them up. She feels like Helen is holding back on some info, but Hauser sends her away before she gets too pushy.
So Rebecca goes back to her apartment to study the files. Uncle Ray shows up on her doorstep to complain about Hauser. "Your nutcase Fed boss has got people watching me," he says. "He must think you know where Tommy is," she says. "Do you?" He says he doesn't but she doesn't quite believe him. Nor does she believe him when he says he doesn't know why Tommy killed her partner.
Elsewhere, Sonny is just walking into a darkened room somewhere. He turns on a small lamp and aims it at something just out of frame. We flash back to 1960. It's night and the prisoners are just leaving the yard to return to their cells. What are they doing in the yard at night? Anyway, Hicks and some of his tough friends corner Sonny as he's trying to make his way up the stairs. "Are you stupid or crazy, Burnett?" Hicks asks. He says he sent one of his guys "on the outside" to get the money, but it wasn't where Sonny promised it would be. Sonny is genuinely confused because nobody else knew where the money was. Hicks whips out a shiv and sticks Sonny in the gut a few times. As he falls to the ground, he whimpers Helen's name. Back in the present, he chugs a gallon of milk and adjusts the lamp so that it shines on David Pierce's terrified face. Pierce offers him money. "Call my wife -- she'll give you anything you want!" Sonny leans in and laughs in Pierce's face with his milk-breath. Rude!
Back to 1960. Sonny comes to in the infirmary with Dr. Beauregard, Warden James and Tiller gathered at his bedside. "Who's Helen?" Tiller wants to know. Sonny, addled, doesn't answer at first. Dr. Beauregard informs him he was dead, or at least without a pulse for 30 seconds. Warden James grants him another 30 days in solitary before sending him back into the general population. He turns to go, but Tiller calls him back: "I think that's a mistake." James looks quite taken aback to be disagreed with so publicly. Tiller thinks Sonny needs to adapt, and he won't do that if he keeps getting reprieve after reprieve. Alas, Warden James doesn't believe in adaptation here. He thinks you either survive or you don't. "Natural selection is predetermined," he says. Then why bother with the reprieve at all? James says a man needs to know his place on the food chain. "You of all people should know that," he says to Tiller, who silently seethes. After the good warden has left, Tiller offers Sonny some advice. "You're either predator or prey. The sooner you accept that fact, the sooner you can make a choice: Which do you wanna be?"
Present. By the time Rebecca is allowed back into Helen's house, Hauser has already fielded the ransom call. He's told them to take $100k to Berkeley Downs, which is also where he had Helen all those years ago. Helen is nervous about something and it pings Rebecca's radar, but she holds her tongue.
While the A-Team and a bunch of cops head to the racetrack, Sonny makes his way to Helen's house. He shoots the lone policeman stationed outside, and then confronts Helen in the kitchen. He gives her an appreciative look and says, "Hello, Helen." She freaks out a little bit. He's supposed to be dead, or at least old. He backs her up against the wall, accuses her of betraying him. He gets right up in her face. "Do you know what it's like, having everything taken away from you?" he asks. Man, I hope he brushed his teeth. He pets her hair and promises, "You will know, Helen."
This is when Rebecca gets to the appointed drop-off place in the stable and finds Mr. Pierce's head in a satchel. It looks pretty mangled, even by usual decapitation standards. Rebecca nearly tosses her cookies.
The team regroups at the racetrack and figures out that Sonny is trying to torment Rebecca and that it's not about the money at all. Rebecca wants protection detail on everyone who might be important to Helen, starting with her family. Hauser mentions a daughter in Colorado. Doc is baffled by all this. Rebecca thinks there's still more that Helen isn't telling them. Nikki walks over to them, having had a look at Pierce's remains. She looks shaken. Pierce was dead before Sonny even made the call. "Rebecca, whoever this guy is, catch him," Nikki says. "Or shoot him." Hauser wants him alive.
Helen's house. Helen finally breaks down and confesses to Hauser and Rebecca. Sonny had told her she was the only person he could trust and told her where he'd hidden the money. After he went to prison, she dug it up and kept it for herself. She cries and blames herself for what happened to her husband. Neither Rebecca nor Hauser offer any words of sympathy, nor of any reassurance when Helen fears Sonny will never be caught. Rebecca tromps off to her car, hair straggling in her face like an emo sheepdog. Hauser follows after her and she tells him she knows he's having her uncle followed. Instead of telling him to back off, she says she wants to be called if Tommy shows up.
Hub. Doc and Rebecca blah-blah-blah about how they tracked down the car Sonny is using. That's honestly the entirety of what you need to know about the scene.
Sonny returns to his hideout, which is a tiny little house somewhere near the city. He's got another gallon of milk with him. He makes a call to a limo service, confirming an appointment. While he waits for them to pick him up, he has a flashback to the time he decided to Max Cady himself up in prison. He's doing push-ups against the wall, pull-ups from the cell door, punching the walls with his bare fists. Once he's sufficiently well-muscled and insane, he picks out one of Hicks's guys in the prison yard and starts beating the crap out of him. Tiller watches from the top of the stairs, waiting for the killing blow. Alas, Sonny spares the man's life.
Present. Rebecca gets to Sonny's hideout. He's gone, but he's left behind his bloody power saw and a slew of research on Helen. He's also written down her daughter Danielle's flight number. Cut to the airport. Sonny, posing as a chauffeur, picks up Danielle. Did nobody call this woman to warn her?
Sonny's stop is the hardware store, where he buys another saw and some plywood, which he orders cut to the weirded-out clerk's height. While the clerk sees to that, Sonny has another flashback. He's just finished another one of his workouts when Tiller arrives with a big tray of food. There's a slab of beef the size of a man's ass cheek. "You wanna move up the food chain, you need a lion's share," Tiller explains. Tiller compliments "the fire in [Sonny's] belly." They have not only forged his new abs of steel, but really motivated him to change. Tiller taunts him about Helen, then passes on this gem: "A chicken can do as many push-ups as it wants; the fox is still gonna eat it." But then the fox will be, like, "Damn, that was some stringy chicken!" He also taunts Sonny about not going through with killing that guy in the yard.
Sonny looks at Tiller like he's crazy, but later, when he's alone, he puts out a burning cigarette in his own arm. You might think he's doing it to inure himself to pain, but it's actually just how people used to make nicotine patches.
Present. The team blahs back and forth about Sonny having Danielle. They don't know where he's taken her. Rebecca asks Hauser if Sonny has contacted Helen yet about Danielle. Hauser says he hasn't, and Rebecca thinks that means Sonny hasn't hurt her yet, even though we just established a couple of scenes ago that he killed Pierce long before he called Helen. Gah! Somehow, they track down the hardware store where Sonny bought his first saw. They head over there and figure out from the weirded-out clerk that Sonny is building a coffin. They think he must have buried Danielle in the same field where he'd once buried his ransom money.
Danville. Danielle is still alive and screaming in the coffin while Sonny takes his time burying her. He takes so much time that Rebecca and Doc drive up in time to see him leaving. Rebecca makes sure the cops know where to start looking for Danielle, then drives after Sonny.
1960. The time Sonny visits the yard, he jumps Hicks. Hicks is older, and maybe not in the best shape, but he puts up a pretty good fight. He stabs Sonny at least once, but Sonny just keeps coming for him. At one point, he grabs Hicks from behind and digs his fingers into Hicks's eyes. They squelch like a handful of raw meatballs. Tiller watches approvingly from the stairs. Warden James joins him. "Quite the transformation," he says. Tiller gives him a pointed look. "You'd be surprised at what a man's capable of when he's pushed too far." They trade barbs about animals and pack mentality that are really barbs about each other. It's highly entertaining. If only this show could be all flashbacks.
Present. Cops shoot out the tires on Sonny's car. Hauser intervenes and takes him into custody. Everybody gets to work searching the field and dig up Danielle, still alive. Everybody's all "Yay!" and Rebecca finally assures Helen that Sonny is out of her life for good.
Rebecca tells Doc about Hauser spying on Ray. Doc is surprised to learn that Rebecca is okay with it. He doesn't judge her for it, but points out something. "One day, this is gonna end, and when it does, we -- you, me and Hauser - are gonna have to live with what we've done." There'll be hell to pay for all their droning exposition and clunky dialog.
Woodsy prison. Hauser is sitting by Lucy's bed when he gets the bad news from Dr. Beauregard. "It's no good," he says of Sonny's blood. "Right blood type, but no colloidal silver." Hauser seethes.
Just to end things on a creepy note, Tommy loiters around outside his granddaughter's apartment and watches her through the window as she sleeps. Why are the curtains open? The window is right there on street level! More importantly, why doesn't Hauser have anyone spying on Rebecca? If I keep trying to find logic in any of this, I'll be here till the episode.
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.