A field of white, then a caption with the words, "2 DAYS Ago." The chyron complies nicely with television's rules of typography: Things that are clean, futuristic and horrible get sans-serif fonts; things that rely on some complicated backstory and/or ancient eldritch lore get serifed to hell and back; things hoping to coast on an air of current events or just-the-facts-ma'am attitude get Courier.
ANYWAY. Two days ago, in an appropriately sleek and futuristic structure located in the midst of a snowy wasteland, two dudes in bunny suits are walking through endless corridors as a robotic voice says, "Contamination" over and over. They appear to be chasing after a blood-soaked, terrified man. He had managed to get through some gate with his handprint, then something grabbed him and yanked him off-screen.
But we're past that. The two bunny-suited men enter through the gate and go into the lab, which is empty save for a few scattered bodies. As they walk, Dionne Warwick's "Do You Know The Way To San Jose?" plays. I hope she also knows the way to a big bank account because the real estate in San Jose has gone bonkers in the past decade.
Anyway, we see that the runner is lying on his side, shivering at the back of the lab. One of the men leans down and smiles faintly before taking a water bottle from the other man. I'm just going to start using names here: Dr. Hatake squirts some water down the stricken man's throat. We see his veins (black-looking) stand in stark relief, then his throat bulges and pulses as if it's about to split. Behind Dr. Hatake, security head Daniel Aerov asks, "What is that?" Dr. Hatake smiles a bit and says, "Progress."
We go to the credits, which riff off "Do You Know the Way to San Jose?" as the san serif font of futuristic horror seeps black liquid. If aliens landed on our planet and asked me to define the SyFy network in one image, I'd use these credits, that's how predictable it is.
So now we're at the CDC and about to meet two of our protagonists: Dr. Alan Farragut (older, handsome, seemingly absent minded) and Dr. Sarah Jordan (young, stamped from the same "adorable, nubile genius" mold that produced Simmons over on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.). Dr. Farragut is about to give the welcome-to-the-government-the-work-you-will-do-is-vital speech to new employees and he wants to use a pump handle as a prop, and Dr. Jordan finds it for him. Sadly, she fails to remind him that if he's going to tell the story of London's 1854 cholera epidemic and its role in epidemiology, he may as well name one of the world's first modern epidemiologists, Dr. John Snow, and his partner in the epidemic, Reverend Henry Whitehead.
Farragut makes all the new CDC employees feel like they will likely end up like Kate Winslet in Contagion but they'll all die heroes, and then he's distracted by the sudden appearance of a cheekbonily intense lady. He immediately follows her out of the conference room, leaving Dr. Jordan to wonder what's going on with her boss/obvious crush object.
What's going on is more exposition: A private research based owned by Arctic Biosystems issued a distress call denoting a possible retroviral outbreak with two people dead and one more infected. Farragut is honestly confused as to who Maj. Sergio Balleseros is and why he's talking to him, so Balleseros gives his brief CV (he's U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases by way of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers) and then the other lady – Dr. Walker -- interrupts and tells Farragut he's there because the infected, still-live victim of the retrovirus is someone named Peter. When Sarah Jordan asks who that is, Farragut explains, "My brother."
Before you can say, "I need to go to REI," it's "DAY ONE" according to the caption and we're up above the 83rd parallel, where no one nation has jurisdiction and our team of heroes is there only because Arctic Biosystems is letting them be.
On the chopper, Farragut is giving everyone assignments, and splitting them up per the conventions of the horror genre: Sarah will be with him and Peter to identify the extent of the illness Julia Walker will identify the pathogen, and Dr. Doreen Boyle has the unenviable job of swabbing down the lab and every animal to find the source of the illness. She'll be backed up by Balleseros, whose work as a structural engineer will help identify any infrastructure that will aid the disease's spread. She'll also be providing the requisite sass, because why would you not have a willowy actress on a show if she's not going to be mouthy and assertive?
I instantly love Doreen once she has this exchange with Sarah:
SARAH: (as she watches Farragut and Julia spar): That's his ex-wife? Not what I expected.
DORREN: She's smarter than you.
SARAH: Doubtful.
DOREEN: Better in the lab too.
SARAH: Highly doubtful.
DOREEN: (smirks)
Anyway, the point to that conversation was to lead into the reason Julia is the ex-Dr. Mrs. Walker-Farragut is because she was stepping out on Alan Farragut with Peter Farragut. (You know, cheating on your spouse with his or her sibling always seemed so short-sighted to me. It only makes holidays awkward if things work out with your piece on the side, because you end up with the same in-laws, only a whole different set of resentments.) It's also to point out that nobody is fooled by Dr. Jordan's doe eyes toward Dr. Farragut.
We then formally meet Daniel Aerov and Dr. Hatake, then march inside the base. There's some back-and-forth about why Hatake has not taken crazy-scrupulous precautions, but he shrugs that the only three people who were infected worked in the same lab, and since they're the only ones infected, he's fairly sure the pathogen's not airborne. The chopper leaves – thus enabling another horror-genre convention, that of being trapped in isolation – and Daniel asks everyone to kindly let him inject an RFID tag under the skin. The tag will act as a security badge and grant them unrestricted access across the research base.
We see that the base is enormous and houses 106 scientists and 15 support staff – hooray, a large pool of characters/victims! – and Alan immediately swings into investigator mode. First stop: seeing his brother Peter.
He and Julia are suiting up with the containment suits and we find out that she hasn't talked to Peter since she was caught in flagrante delicto, then they go in to visit Peter, who does not look good. His veins are standing out in stark black, he's pouring sweat, his vitals are all over the place. You'd think that someone whose systems are going bonkers would not be capable of much beyond oozing.
Dr. Jordan watches the other two hang out with Peter and asks Daniel if he has a T1 link she can use to get online. He dismisses that network connectivity speed as obsolete, informs her they have a satellite connection that is so fast, it practically beams out Internet content from the future, but owing to the base's location, the uplink is only available one hour a day, thereby adding a third convention of the horror genre: No way to contact the outside world when one would need it the most. We also learn that Daniel was an orphan whom Hatake adopted, so there's a filial loyalty thing going on.
Peter continues looking bug-eyed crazy. When Alan asks him what happened, Peter moistly quavers, "The white room." When Julia draws his blood and notes that it's black, that's when Peter grabs the syringe, attempts to infect Alan, and bellows, "You lie! You all lie! Everyone lies!" He continues having the kind of freakout that someone undergoing a total systems failure should not be physically capable of having, and Julia manages to subdue him by jabbing him in the thigh with a giant syringe of what is presumably a potent lion tranquilizer.
Meanwhile, my girl Doreen and Balleseros are going through the lab under Daniel's watchful eye. Doreen is poking around the rats when she discovers they have no sex organs. Daniel says casually, "We've designed a way to inhibit the pathway responsible for genitalia. Makes control … easier." I wonder how many episodes in we'll be when we discover that Hatake perfected the process on Daniel? Anyway, Doreen continues to poke around the lab and asks where the monkeys are, since they're so common in serious medical research. Daniel claims that none of our simian cousins made it to the arctic.
And now, the scene where we learn that the other two victims of the virus have been turned into black goo and white bones. Sarah tosses her cookies. Unfortunately for her, she's wearing a containment suit at the time. Ugh, that can't be pleasant.
Doreen uses a few rats to establish that this mystery pathogen isn't airborne, and Balleseros is all, "Okay, then!" The two of them share some backstory – she's a military brat whose animals were her only constant companions as her dad dragged the family from pillar to post, he hasn't had to fire a gun since basic training – and then Balleseros disassembles a sink trap and discovers a fat wad of rhesus macaque fur. So, Daniel was lying about the monkeys. Doreen explains that the lie is a big deal because monkeys are one of the main agents of zoonotic transfer, i.e. passing a live virus between animals and humans. "What didn't they want us to find out," Doreen asks.
Julia goes to Hatake's office, they make some small talk where he creeps her out with his love of unregulated research, and then she asks for Peter's research. It's in mutagens, which means that Peter was dealing with highly dangerous little elements that can completely change the nature of an organism.
Alan pokes around Peter's quarters and finds a photo of himself and Peter as boys. He then finds a thumb drive which happens to contain Peter's video logs, and while Peter is busy talking about his love life ("Still seeing T. She is terrific …"), and then he makes a hand gesture – two fingers against his clavicle – that Alan recognizes as the sign for "Danger, run like hell" that he and his brother used to use when their dad came home drunk and angry.
Speaking of running like hell, guess who used a bone saw to slice through the ceiling and is now roaming wild in the duct? Hatake is all, "So tell me again why you thought it was a good idea to leave a complete surgical kit in there with your brother?" and Julia's all, "In my DEFENSE, he was sort of DYING last time we saw him. What the hell, weird recovery?" Anyway, Daniel's deactivated Peter's RFID chip, so that presumably blocks his routes around the base. I am sure that is a small comfort to whomever is trapped in the section of the base where the goo-spewing sick man is roaming. Daniel's also planning to flood the air ducts with knockout gas.
We then join a wild monkey hunt in progress. Doreen and Balleseros are discovering that Daniel's a lying liar who lies, since their RFID chips aren't allowing them into a corridor they'd like to have access to. Fortunately, since Balleseros is an engineer, he can figure out a way around the problem (using the liquid nitrogen that's lying around to freeze the lock, then break it open). The monkey hunt resumes.
Doreen finds an entire complex of empty monkey cages, and one looks like it's been ripped open from the inside. Her search in the unlit room (why the engineer does not think to turn on a light) is matched in creepiness only by Alan's search for his brother in the unlit ducts. You would think that at this point in building development, people would be saying, "We're going to be spending time in these ducts – why not install LEDs?"
Anyway, the two searches continue in tandem and we cut from search to search, ostensibly to ratchet up tension. Doreen finds a monkey, but he's bald as Lex Luthor and just as smart, which is generally not normal for lab monkeys. The monkey attacks her, but Balleseros manages to brain it, and the monkey didn't manage to break Doreen's skin. Hooray! She is the only character I like so far. Doreen looks down to see the monkey's throat throbbing like Peter's throat throbbed early in the episode.
Speaking of Peter, he's found a guard, killed and stripped him, then cut off his hand. That's one way to solve the RFID-chip problem. Alan is understandably puzzled as to what kind of pathogen turns people into goo-spewing supervillains.
And now, Julia and Sarah, trying to out-science one another and dishing on Alan at the same time. Because GOD FORBID we have any entertainment that can actually pass the Bechdel Test. Oh, wait -- Helix hasn't actually entertained me yet. Never mind.
Balleseros goes to put a little satellite dish looking-device outside (it's giving him connectivity to some network and he's uploading data) and while he's out there, he happens to notice one of the creepiest things I have ever seen on TV: a frozen plain filled with dozens and dozens of frozen bodies – and each tiny, bald monkey is in a posture of terrified flight.
Dr. Harake is busy watching Alan's two ladies dish on how this thing looks like a tiny, ancient viroid of some sort, and then Balleseros comes in to watch The Virus Show. Harake pointedly asks how Balleseros's walk was and adds, "A bit colder than you're used to." Start the countdown clock on how long it is before some character is locked outside to freeze because they either know too much or they're in danger of figuring something out. Neither man says anything like, "So, is it common to decorate the west-facing yard with a few dozen frozen fearmonkeys?"
Then Harake says, "The delivery will be on schedule" and Balleseros says, "The schedule changed when the CDC showed up … The people you and I work for aren't happy, and now I have to clean up your mess."" Oh, good – we have some sort of shadowy conspiracy going on where we don't know who to trust. I hope it doesn't take too much attention away from the Alan-Julia-Sarah love triangle! I love it when two brilliant women who are dedicated to their work spend all their time talking about the man they have in common.
Meanwhile, the love triangle has discovered that the tiny viroid is changing the cells into something black and sinister-looking. The camera fades out, then back in on Peter, who is dressed in the purloined security uniform and using his severed-hand trophy to move about the complex and make people start screaming off-camera. As he does this, Dionne Warwick's "Do You Know The Way To San Jose?" starts up again. I sincerely hope this song means something over the course of the series.
Meanwhile, the love triangle has discovered that the tiny viroid is changing the cells into something black and sinister-looking. The camera fades out, then back in on Peter, who is dressed in the purloined security uniform and using his severed-hand trophy to move about the complex and make people start screaming off-camera. As he does this, Dionne Warwick's "Do You Know The Way To San Jose?" starts up again. I sincerely hope this song means something over the course of the series.