By M. Giant
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.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.