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A man named Marcus apparently has the power to turn the whole world into his own personal Rube Goldberg machine with his preternatural control over cause and effect, as well as his ability to put coins in exactly the right place at exactly the right time. After he uses his power to engineer an escape from an institutional ambulance, Rosen and the Alphas are brought in. As it turns out, Marcus was a patient of Rosen's lo these many years ago, before Rosen had to send him to a place for dangerous Alphas called Binghamton. It is this place from which Marcus has escaped, and with his belief that nothing in the world is random, he's dangerous and paranoid. He soon finds Rosen, but after realizing that Rosen isn't in on whatever evil crap Marcus thinks the Binghamton doctors are up to, he just keeps engineering elaborate escapes from himself that tend to get other people killed. Eventually, Marcus signals his intent to come after Nathan Cley, the senior FBI agent in charge of the manhunt (and other Alpha-related stuff, apparently), but it's just a ruse to draw out Rosen and the Alphas so Marcus can grab Rosen. He then stages a standoff, wherein he alludes to Rosen that humanity is going to freak out over the Alphas and the outcome will be inevitably violent, blah blah X-Men-cakes. And as if to demonstrate, he lets Cley shoot him square in the chest, knocking him into the river below. Of course no body is found. But what we know, and no one else does, is that somewhere in the water is a quarter with a bullet lodged in it. Clever, that. Enough quarters and the Alphas will be invincible!
Want more? The full recap starts right below!Over high-speed footage of bustling Manhattan, Dr. Rosen VOs that there are six billion people on Earth. "Ordinary folks like you and me," he adds, lest someone later decide to try to give Rosen superpowers. But he adds that some of those ordinary people might have extraordinary abilities. "I call them Alphas." But he adds that some of those people's powers can be terrifying. My wife is certainly terrified of my extraordinary ability, which is to identify famous actors by their voices only. She's terrified that I won't stop doing it.
Cut to an ambulance screaming down a country road. The dude in the back is clearly a prisoner, not a patient, and is being watched over by a government agent in a suit. Not that the agent is being too watchful. The prisoner surveys his surroundings, and through his eyes, labels appear to everything, as if the whole world is an instruction manual that's actually correct. Taking into account various facts, including the speed of the ambulance and the few other vehicles on the road, the prisoner takes a nickel out of his mouth and flips it aside. It hits some release button which triggers a whole Rube Goldberg series of events that includes oxygen tanks rolling out of their storage compartment, incapacitating the agent back there with him, as well as the one riding shotgun and the driver. The ambulance skids and is broadsided by a truck. The prisoner looks pained, but has the situation in hand; as he raises his cuffed wrists, a truckload of bars crashes into the pileup and launches a piece of its cargo, Final Destination-style, into the handcuff chain, both severing it and breaking open the back door of the ambulance. Using the key he gets off one of the unconscious agents, he unlocks the cuffs and walks away a free man, the only person in sight still standing. Then he heads over a pay phone to "report an accident." So clearly, his superpower is the ability to find a pay phone in this day and age.
There's a proper title sequence now, complete with a semi-bluesy theme song. And after that, we're at the new Alpha HQ, where Nina has apparently been using her super-bossiness to quickly get her office decorated all fancy-like. Rachel's kind of jealous, and offers to move in to her, then notices that Nina seems unhappy about something, giving Rachel a chance to demonstrate her alternate superpower of being insecure with people. But Nina's just complaining about having to commute to Queens instead of walking to work in Lower Manhattan. Suddenly Rachel goes into super-sense mode, but all she's noticing is the nasty germs and mold that inhabit her office. "Man, I need to clean," she moans. Yes, that was the first thing I thought of when I saw what her power is; seems like it would have to go hand-in-hand with OCD. Well, Rosen did say these abilities have a downside.
Bill's also busy, manually schlepping the vending machine around to try to get rid of a hum that's bugging Gary. Because a guy who can tune into the entire electromagnetic spectrum can't put up with a 60-cycle buzz. And as Rachel determines, the hum is coming from the overheard fluorescent lights anyway. They're all annoyed about the new place, which they supposedly took because of the attempt on Rosen's life in the pilot, but really because the same set likely wasn't available after the series got picked up. I probably wouldn't have made any long-term plans for this show either. Rachel's cell phone rings (why she doesn't have it on low all the time is beyond me), and even though she's apparently resolved not to take any calls from her parents, she answers her mom's call in Spanish. Gary's eavesdropping until he gets bored and goes and bugs Bill about the hum some more, while Bill's in the bathroom. Gary's going to get a urinal thrown at himself.
New kid Cameron is the last to arrive, so he gets the windowless room. Now that the pilot is behind us, Nina explains the ongoing premise of the series to him: they look for other Alphas, and the ones they find are identified, tracked and, in some cases, sent to a "compound." Gary jumps in, explaining that the place that'll be referred to as Binghamton is a "research facility" where they keep dangerous Alphas. Gary is careful to point out that he and the other original Alphas don't have to worry about that, but that Cameron still kind of does.
Later, a red-haired woman comes into the office looking for Rosen, supposedly to give him some extra keys. Bill gives her a hard time for no reason, until Rosen shows up (shorn of his white beard and thus looking ten years younger) to introduce her as the buildings realtor. Bill's still uptight as Rosen ushers her out, telling her they do market research. "Cover story," Gary blurts while passing by. How does he filter out all those EM signals when he has no filter himself? As Rosen and the redhead walk down the hall, it turns out Rosen has been looking up not only realtor listings, but possibly up the realtor as well. Fortunately he gets an urgent phone call before I can make this any grosser.
Rosen shows up at the scene of the ambulance crash, where a fellow shrink (Dr. Singh from the aforementioned "compound") explains what happened during the crash/escape we saw in the opener. Rosen immediately realizes that the escapee is a guy named Marcus Ayers, and he looks a little worried about it. Singh says Marcus has gotten even crazier during his time inside, and Rosen tells a suited FBI agent played by Mahershalalhashbaz Ali (fortunately the character's name is Nathan Cley) that they're going to need Rosen's help. Apparently Marcus lives life like he plays chess -- constantly planning and attacking. As the other guys head back to the crash scene, Rosen notices the pay phone Marcus used earlier and sees the rough outline of a chess knight scratched into the Plexiglas. Well, that's a horse of a different color.
Flashback to Marcus lecturing Rosen (clean-shaven then, too) over an outdoor chessboard in a park. Discussion of the game quickly leads to Rosen trying to disabuse Marcus of his persistent delusion that everything in the universe has intent. "Sometimes it's a flip of the coin," Rosen says, tossing a quarter on the table. Marcus insists that the universe isn't random; saying that his status as Rosen's patient is a cause and effect chain leading all the way back to his roommates pissing him off. Rosen says nobody else could possibly see it that way, and the fact that Marcus can makes him special -- like the people Rosen is calling Alphas. Marcus likes that name, taken from the first variable, acceleration. Which I thought was delta-v, but I'm just an ignorant recapper. Rosen asks if Marcus can do anything out of the ordinary (like that's not already clear), and Marcus holds up Rosen's hand to catch a dry leaf that was blowing high overhead a minute ago.
In the present day, Rosen returns to that same outdoor chessboard -- on which is sitting a single dry leaf. Marcus' mastery of seemingly unpredictable variables is such that it hasn't even blown away. But under the leaf is a coin. Rosen looks around nervously, but he's not an Alpha, so sucks to be him.
While Rachel and Nina are leaving the office, Rachel's apparently having another cell phone argument with her mom about some guy she's not marrying. After hanging up, Rachel thinks Nina would have handled it better, but Nina sys she hasn't talked to her mom in years, so there. A minute later, she's in a red Mercedes convertible and pulls up to Cameron while he's walking down the sidewalk. She tires to buck him up too, with similar success. "Nice car," he says. "I borrowed it," she says as she drives off. Can't she just order her coworkers to be happier?
morning, a suited brunette (played by Zee from Off the Map) comes in looking for Rosen, and Bill rudely interrupts her with some snotty comments about how Rosen has some "game." She recognizes Bill, probably from an official description of his being tall, dark, and prickish, and declines to shake hands so as not to get hers broken. She also greets Rachel and Nina by name, and Rosen makes another late entrance. "Your cell phone is encrypted," Gary complains. "That's right, Gary, it is," she says. Rosen explains that the new arrival, Agent Sullivan, is the temporary replacement for Don Wilson, because apparently they couldn't get Callum Keith Rennie beyond the pilot either. And she wants to talk to Rosen privately before they all have their meeting.
In Rosen's office, she tells him that Marcus blames Rosen for having him locked up, so maybe he broke out to come after Rosen. Rosen says that Marcus left him messages, and would have killed him by now if he wanted to. She says he still has a conflict of interest, and he gets pretty pissy about that. But actually he's just pissy about Cley assigning his group field work, which is totally not what he'd planned to do with his group. Anyway, with that established, it's time to get to it.
Conference room. Rosen fills his Alphas in on Marcus's power over cause and effect . He warns against taking any unnecessary risks when dealing with him, which leads Gary to go off on a digression about which risks are necessary and which aren't. Fortunately, Gary is also leaving the room, along with almost everyone else. Now that it's just Rosen and Nina, she asks why he didn't tell her Marcus was out, indicating that there's some emotional history between Nina and Marcus as well, not that we'll find out much about that tonight. Now Nina's bringing up the question of whether she'll be sent to the compound one day, alluding to some shit she made her boyfriend do. So in addition to having super-bossiness, Nina also has the ability to bring up backstory that doesn't get explained.
Cameron is watching a video of Marcus throwing a coin off-screen to demonstrate cause, and coming up with a letter opener to demonstrate effect. Cameron pauses the video as Rosen comes in to explain that since Marcus thinks everyone has the same control over events that he does, his assumption that everything that goes wrong in his life (and apparently such things are legion) is on purpose has driven him into a state of paranoia. Rosen adds offhandedly that Cameron's brain is anatomically similar. I was wondering whether somebody was going to bring up the likeness between Marcus's powers and Cameron's. They even have somewhat similar faces. But the difference, as Rosen points out, is that Marcus blames everyone else for his problems, while Cameron blames only himself. Cameron thinks maybe Marcus does the same thing. Rosen looks startled at Cameron's insight. Or he's just making a dramatic end-of-scene face.
Rachel is micro-examining the quarter Marcus left, and Rosen guesses that she found some ash in the grooves. She wonders how he knew. "Past failures," Rosen says on his way out. I hope he doesn't share Nina's secondary superpower.
We see Rosen outside a brownstone apartment building, flashing back to what a subtitle tells us is six years earlier. He walks up to that same building, which is burnt out and empty, with fire engines still around it. Looking around, he finds a charred quarter on the sidewalk and picks it up. Then he's suddenly brought back to the present when none other than Marcus himself calls his name and walks right up to hi. "What took you so long?" Marcus asks. Just be glad it's not another ninety-minute episode, Marcus.
After the ads, Marcus is walking along with Rosen, asking about his new team and when he gets to meet them. Thinking he can see where this is going, Rosen says they aren't his enemies, Marcus's own way of thinking is. Sucking on a soda (apparently he's not allowed sugar in the compound), Marcus goes on about what's going in there, alluding to "big plans for the future." Rosen doesn't follow, but when Marcus asks Rosen why he was in the ambulance in the first place, Rosen's stumped. Marcus suddenly realizes that Rosen may really be in the dark. "You don't even know when you're being used as bait, do you?" he asks. Because Marcus has noticed the suited agents that are closing in from different points on the block. "Not much use, are you?" Marcus says, which is quite a thing to tell the non-superpowered lead on a superhero show. Marcus goes into his Alpha Mode, taking in a motorcyclist, some scaffolding, and a skateboarder, complete with all their variables labeled on the screen. "Sorry, Dr. Rosen. Our time is up," he says, and tosses the soda bottle into the air. It lands in front of the skateboarder, who is nearly hit by a car that nearly hits the motorcyclist instead. When the biker swerves, he hits a pole on the scaffolding, sending a load of cinder blocks down on the pursuing agents. Rosen runs to the downed men as Cley arrives too late. Marcus, obviously, is long gone. I wonder if these little stunts would be more elaborate if they were happening on a real network, like USA or TNT.
Back in Rosen's office, Cley and Rosen argue until Sullivan jumps in to try to make peace. Rosen asks Cley if there's anything to what Marcus was saying to him earlier, but Cley's not interested. "I got of kin to call and a murderer to catch," he snipes, walking out like he's the only guy in the world with those problems. Rosen tells Sullivan there may be something to Marcus's rantings, and it may point them to what he'll do . "We need to talk to Dr. Singh."
And over a fancy luncheon, apparently. As Rosen and Sullivan join him at a table, Singh's acting pretty nervous and shifty, even more so when Rosen asks why Marcus was moved in the first place. Singh says that none of the usual stuff worked, including shock therapy. "He redirected the current. Nearly killed one of my techs." So apparently Singh was sending Marcus out for surgery to "fix" him. Rosen's shocked at the very idea of taking away an Alpha's power, but Singh says if he'd succeeded, the agent might still be alive. And maybe he'd even have gotten a line. Singh's about to head to his meeting (keeps a tight schedule, does Singh), but Rosen tries to guilt-trip him. Singh turns it right around on him: "You have no idea what goes on at Binghamton, and that's the way you prefer it." Exit Singh. And since we're following him out the door instead of staying with Rosen and Sullivan, we know he's doomed. That's confirmed when he spots a black chess rook sitting in the gutter. He picks it up and looks around, fully aware of its significance. But all he sees is that some guys are unspooling some cable, and there's a big hotel luggage cart being wheeled past, and then we're back inside as Rosen and Sullivan heat the sounds of a car crash and screams from outside. Heading out to the sidewalk, they quickly see Singh strung up over the entryway. And the rook is still there, to the puddle of bloody drool on the sidewalk.
After the ads, the rest of the team has arrived and is looking around with varying degrees of usefulness. Rosen shows Sullivan the rook, and she's pissed that Marcus thinks it's a game, vowing that it'll only end with Marcus dead. Fun game. Cameron, meanwhile, looks to be reconstructing the murder. Following the cable down from Singh to a crashed car to the overturned luggage cart, he finds a bent quarter jammed in one of the cart's wheels. He shows it to the rest of the team and nervously explains how he was able to mentally reverse-engineer the crime. "Similar, but not the same," Rosen reminds him, but Rachel's micro-exam of the coin comes up clean. And Nina comes back empty-handed from her canvassing of useless witnesses. Their only lead is the rook Marcus left. "Assuming Singh was the rook, who do you think is the black king?" Bill wonders. Probably not you, big guy.
Rachel has found some pollen on the rook. Back at the lab, she's narrowed it down to the pollen from a stargazer lily. She relays this to Bill, who asks Gary to start searching for them. "I'm not Google guy," Gary protests, but Bill just wants him to scan security cameras around Manhattan for the flowers. Gary gets right to it, Minority Reporting those images that only he (and the folks watching at home) can see.
Rosen, meanwhile, is again flashing back to six years ago. Handing that charred coin to Marcus, he asks what happened. Marcus claims it was an accidental gas main explosion, which Rosen doesn't buy, especially since Marcus doesn't believe in accidents. Apparently Marcus's roommates are in the hospital after the fire. Marcus downplays it, saying, 'Nobody was going to die. Unless I wanted them to." I can only assume Marcus meant to give that away. Suddenly he comes over all headache-y, and Rosen says that he's sending Marcus somewhere else. In walk Cley and a couple of other agents in bulletproof vests. End of flashback. Bill's standing outside Rosen's office, and starts lecturing him about not getting sentimental. Rosen is filled with regrets over his past handling of Marcus, but Bill insists that he hears this stuff all the time form parents and teachers of kids who go wrong. "The fact of the matter is, Marcus was probably born broken." Rosen refuses to believe that: "Life just encourages." He says he even helped Marcus develop his abilities, which was a pretty smooth move. "Now we're gonna stop him," Bill says. Enter Gary, pissy at Bill about how his search parameters weren't specific enough. He narrowed it down to a Federal building. He tries to open Rosen's computer (which he can't do without help, which is a nice touch -- after all, why would he ever need a computer?) and explains that Cley's team is working out of that building.
Cut to Cley, who is on the phone to Rosen, boredly confirming that yep, there's a black chess king to a big spray of lilies on a table in the building. Rosen says that Marcus has been there and may still be. Cley is actually happy to be pegged as the black king. "Let him come," he says. Rosen warns Cley, who hangs up and says, "From now on call me your highness. Let's wrap this up." Back at the office, Rosen grabs his coat, apparently unaware that Cley is listed on IMDb as being in at least four episodes.
Meanwhile, downtown, Cley heads out into the night and stands on the grassy plaza outside the building with his arms spread, calling out, "I'm waiting!" Because he's an idiot. Or because he's seen his IMDb listing.
Rosen, Sullivan, and the Alpha team show up at the building. Sullivan's a little disgusted with Cley's vainglorious display, but Cameron points out that Cley was wise to pick an open space with no moving objects for Marcus to work with. Rachel can also spot the snipers on the roof. Rosen doesn't think this'll work to catch Marcus, so they'll have to figure out where Marcus is. Bill takes Rachel and sends Nina and Cameron to fan out and search. Nina would rather fret to Rosen about this attitude toward Alphas and how "when things go wrong we assassinate them?" Rosen points out that Marcus killed people, but Nina says it's not what she singed up for. But she storms off anyway to join the search. "Understandable concerns," Rosen explains to a doubtful Sullivan.
Alphas and agents move around the perimeter. Bill spots a shadowy figure, but it flees and gets away. Rachel scans. "There's gas in the sewer," she says. Armored FBI agents find a pipe with a torn off valve, hissing away. Marcus is spotted again, and the agents start shooting into the gas-filled plaza. Sure enough, explosions start erupting out of sewer grates. Cameron saves Nina, and they almost clinch. Out in the plaza, Rosen is looking around at all the fiery mayhem when Marcus runs up behind him with a knife, grabs him, and says, "Checkmate." He drags him off into a government SUV, while Cley says, "Son of a bitch." Just lost his bishop. Oh, wait, wrong show.
Marcus is making Rosen drive, and Rosen's wondering why Marcus is doing this. "If I was your target you could have taken me any time." So maybe you still aren't a genius. The other Alphas are in pursuit, save Gary, who's back at the office so Rachel can call him and ask him to track the SUV Marcus took. Gary's got him on his mental traffic-cam uplink, and Bill's following his directions. Cley and his men are right behind.
Marcus drags Rosen up to the bridge overlooking that selfsame outdoor chessboard, and forces him up against the railing. He rattles off some stats about how Rosen would hit the river below at about 70 MPH. Rosen admits he's scared, and Marcus says he's right to be. "Everyone is, no matter what side they're on." Rosen reminds Marcus that he broke the law, and Marcus says that what they're planning at Binghamton has nothing to do with that. "Singh was a casualty of war." He says he sees it all coming, but realizes that Rosen still doesn't. Rosen says he's trying. Which may be a mistake, because I think his sincere ignorance is the only thing keeping him alive. At least the pursuers are closing in. Marcus tells Rosen that the Alphas are an "out-of-context problem...no one saw us coming, so the response is instinctual. Panic. Violent." Rosen says it doesn't have to be that way, talking about Marcus's "gift." Marcus says that gift nearly got his head cut open, given how afraid Singh was. "And maybe he was right." Rosen insists that Marcus is better than this, and Marcus almost wistfully says he misses Rosen's ability to see how things can change even after the dominoes are already falling. "You're the variable," Marcus tells Rosen. "You still have one move left to make." What, falling? No, Marcus says, "Kick over the chessboard." The other Alphas roll up, just as Marcus planned, so they can see what happens. "This is the best possible outcome," Marcus says. "If I'm wrong, they'll take me alive." Cley and his men arrive, and right on cue, Marcus releases Rosen, spreads his arms, and drops the knife. Cley plugs Marcus anyway. Marcus topples off the bridge and hits the water. Rosen just shakes his head at Cley disgustedly, like, "Now we'll never find the body, and you know what that means on a show like this."
After the last ad break, it's the day and Rosen and Sullivan are back on the scene, discussing how a body still hasn't been found. What did I say? Rosen asks Sullivan what she knows about "out of context" problems, and she mentions the Spanish and the Aztecs and the end of Apocalypto. She says that Marcus used the term "out-of-context" problem but says, "I think it would be a mistake to get into that kind of thinking. Us vs. them. It should be us and them. That's the only option." Yeah, good luck with that. Sullivan lamely hopes he's right, and leave his watching the marine patrol dredging the river. Cley refuses to call off the search, even after 18 hours. Maybe time don't shoot the guy into the river, Nate.