Day Four. By this point, lights on level R have begun flickering (horror trope), there's blood on the call box outside the quarantined people's main cavern (horror trope), there's an abandoned body on the floor in an empty corridor (horror trope), and some random guy is ranting about how they've all been abandoned. Julia's all, "No! The CDC would never do that!" but nobody's buying what she's selling.
The malcontent grouses that he's not going down without a fight, and his definition of "fight" includes taking out the CO2 system, thereby guaranteeing that nobody on the upper levels of the base will have breathable air in six hours. Between him and Balleseros, the arctic base is going to be reduced to the habitation level of a compost bin in no time. I just hope the season ends before anyone decides to take out the waste management system because Hatake looked at them funny.
Julia tries to talk everyone out of this idea too, and Dr. He'll-Be-Dead-Soon-So-I'm-Not-Bothering-With-Names snaps, "Thank you for your input, Dr. Walker. I think it's time you found a new place to bunk." Cut to a shot of her being shoved outside the main quarantine chamber and someone throwing her bag after her.
Julia stands in the hall and stares at the corpse in front of her, but before she can fall into the kind of dumb reverie that makes for good victims, she's distracted by the footfalls of a person behind her at the opposite end of the corridor. The person's wearing a self-contained breathing respirator, gloves and a baggy jumpsuit, and they've waved Julia to what is presumably safety. But when she rounds the corridor to catch up with the figure … nobody is there.
Upstairs, Hatake is looking out over the frozen landscape as Alan is losing his cool. News of the satellite dish being taken out has broken, I see. As Daniel tries to assure Alan he's on it, Hatake sips from a "Keep Calm and Carry On" mug, because the arctic chill preserves trends for up to five times their normal lifespan in more temperate climates. Alan asks how he's supposed to shut down an outbreak if he can't share information with the CDC or any other entity in the outside world, and Hatake's all, "This base is crammed full of brainiacs. You have everything you need here." "Yeah, but half of your brainiacs are infected and mostly useless" is a thing Alan does not say, because I guess "Witty Comebacks" wasn't an elective at his medical school.
The upshot to this scene is that the people on Level R are hosed. Or, as Alan and Hatake's exchange goes:
ALAN: So … we just abandon the sick and dying?
HATAKE: Yes.
up: Sarah's having a bad case of the tremors, so bad that it affects her brain to the point where she cannot think, "My hand-eye coordination is less than zero, and we are in an incredibly isolated locale, so maybe I should not open this bottle of precious, limited medication around an open drain?" You can guess what happens : A knock on the door, and her startlement sends half her pills flying down the drain. Someone named Dr. Van Eigem wants to see her. The other lady – who looks like she could be Sarah ten years in the future – had tested negative for the virus yesterday, but she's not feeling so hot and she's showing an early symptom.
Cut to Alan briefing Doreen and Balleseros on what's going on, and he concludes with, "We're on our own. The only thing we have going for us is our rapid response test to the virus." Sarah enters on that note and looks as if she wants to burst into flames to spare herself future awkward conversations. Anyway, the briefing finishes and Alan heads off to check on Peter.
Peter's not doing well. Dr. Duchamp and Alan quibble over whether or not to use SODRA on him, and Dr. Duchamp brings up many valid points – SODRA's never been tested on humans, killing a human being with an untested treatment is morally problematic – but Alan's all, "He ain't an ethics problem, he's my brother!" They'll be going ahead with SODRA.
Hatake and Balleseros have a meeting, where Balleseros says, "Keeping the word from getting out about this shit-show is one of my imperatives." Hatake points out that he has imperatives too, and Balleseros asks, "And they are …?" to which Hatake says stiffly, "My work here is protected, even from you." That seems like a bad thing to say to someone who is really comfortable with explosives and murder. Balleseros snaps, "You made a virus that does everything other than what it was advertised –" and Hatake gives him a Psycho, please look before saying, "You don't have the intellectual capacity to evaluate my work." No, but he's borrowing Doreen's brain for the duration and the only demonstrated area of stupidity she has is in believing a word that comes out of Balleseros's mouth. Anyway, Balleseros invokes their mysterious "employers" for the nth time, and whatever, unless the employers are space aliens hoping to convince humans to engineer their own Screwfly Solution, I'm not interested in the reveal.
Just then, the folks on the upper level notice that their air quality just took a long drop down. Daniel briefs Hatake and Balleseros notes, correctly, that it's a blackmail play to force negotiation. "Let's get some weapons and go negotiate," Balleseros says. Hatake sends him a quelling look and says he'll handle it personally. He vows, "It took many years to build this base. I won't sit by while someone tries to destroy it.
And now, the scene in which Sarah tests Dr. Van Eigem again, and while it comes up negative, she's already exhibiting symptoms like irritability and "labile emotions." We all KNOW where this is headed.
Alan and Dr. Duchamp administer the SODRA to Peter – it looks like a reverse catheter, only with the yellow fluid flowing in instead of out. At the end of the infusion, Peter unclenches his hand as if to infer he's no longer in searing agony.
Down in Doreen's workplace, she's telling Balleseros that he has yet to provide any compelling reason why she shouldn't tell Alan what's what, especially since he's made it clear he's no friend to Hatake. Balleseros spins some patently false tale about how he's with a special investigative section in the Pentagon and he's here to see if Hatake's making viruses that can be used as weapons. "What we have here is a hidden base conducting secret research outside the reach of any government. No-one knows the bigger picture!" he insists, because all the best lies are seasoned with a few actual truths. Doreen's hooked, and so Balleseros reels her in with, "I heard these doctors at Ft. Detrick talking about using viruses to move genes around –" "Gene delivery vehicles?" asks Doreen, hook firmly in her lower lip? Balleseros turns the reel one more time: "What if this virus is acting like a freight train pulling some weird-ass DNA behind it?" And this is how he gets Doreen to run the virus through the gene sequencer.
Hey, remember Julia? She's hiding to a supply locker when her reverie is interrupted by the sights and sounds of a balding vector (we saw this guy a few episodes ago – he's one of the three who was originally infected and escaped in the ambush). This guy's really infected now and he's gone full on feral. But guess who saves Julia? The mysteriously-covered figure, who pulls her into a room with a locking door, then rams the door repeatedly on Baldy's arm – snapping the bones of his arm in a really gross way – until he retreats.
After Julia delivers an impassioned speech about wanting to thank her rescuer in person, and the rescuer can feel free to beat her to death once she goes cuckoo, the figure takes off the gas mask and we see that it's a younger woman. She introduces herself only as "Jaye" and says that "I'm an MD, PhD, blah blah blah … I've got an alphabet soup after my name if that makes a difference." On this base, probably not. But Jaye's looking like she could give Sarah a run for her money in the ingenue geniuses category, so I can't wait to see how this goes down.
Anyway, the two decide they need to eat. Since Hatake stashed MRE lockers in strategic locations, it's obvious they're off on a treasure hunt.
Dr. Van Eigem is not getting better. Sarah is still clinging to the belief that her rapid response test is working, but then Van Eigem starts hallucinating about her boyfriend and angrily monologuing, and it finally occurs to our young genius that maybe, her test is somehow flawed. Before Sarah can run tell Alan, Van Eigem busts out the news that she's an oncologist, so she can recognize the symptoms of a neurological tumor (tremors, slurred speech, the prescription vial of gabapentin), and since Sarah's already keeping mum about one medical condition, surely she can keep quiet about someone else's too.
Doreen's finished sequencing the virus, and the resulting 3-D rendering has a big red section helpfully labeled "unidentified protein." Doreen breathes, "Someone designed this virus, and it sure as shit wasn't Mother Nature. We're looking at the hand of man here. Proteins specifically designed to bind the virus to specific cells so it can deliver its genetic message." Balleseros asks, "What's the message? Can you tell what it was designed to do?" Yes, Doreen can – and will find out. We cut to Balleseros swallowing hard. I guess he and his shadowy employers didn't realize the point to science was to be able to have reliably replicated (or reproduced) results?
Cut to Sarah coming in to visit Alan and Peter. She gets ready to say something about the test failing, but Peter comes to right about then and woozily hits on Sarah, so that delays the bad news through a commercial break and gives Sarah enough time to come up with a plausible lie about how she found out the test doesn't work, then top that with a lie about how no infected people have showed up or turned themselves in yet.
However, the upshot is that both of them are horrified by the idea that there are probably uninfected people downstairs. Well, they were uninfected when they were locked down on Level R. Alan demonstrates some measure of leadership when he tells Sarah to shut down her perfectionist pity party, find the flaw in her test and modify it accordingly, then find Hatake and break the news that they'll need to retest everyone so Level R will have to be re-opened. Oh, Daniel's security team is going to love corralling all the belligerent, goo-spewing lunatics.
Then Alan tries gently to pump Peter for information on the base, but Peter is drifting between flashbacks and the present.
Julia and Jaye are sifting through the wreckage of an MRE locker when Julia hears something. Jaye takes the opportunity to attract the danger by pounding on a door and demanding to be let in, but the scientists on the other side are not having any of it. Julia manages to get Jaye to shut up, just in time to cower as Baldy heads into the corridor, holding his broken arm and making the funny growl courtesy of his new throat-pouch.
Alan confers with Dr. Duchamp: It appears that Peter's somehow emotionally stuck in his volatile, frightening childhood (worrisome) and that his viral loads are rebounding and overriding the SODRA treatment (downright terrifying when your universal antidote can't conquer this bug). "There's nothing we can do. If you've got anything to say to him, take this time and make the most of it," Duchamp says gently.
So here's how Alan makes the most of it: He pumps his brother for information on the viral research Hatake et al. were doing, but it turns out Peter was basically a glorified grad student: "Hatake had me doing animal necropsies for the other docs. I was never the alpha. The only part of my life Hatake seemed interested in was Julia." Alan's all, "Why would he be interested in a one-night stand?" and that's how we find out that Peter and Julia had lied to Alan about the degree of their involvement, and apparently, they'd been involved in an intense, years-long, on- and off-again affair. You know, the exact opposite of what Julia said when she met up with Alan again in the pilot episode.
But other than that, the two of them have basically settled any and all emotional business, which is fortunate because that's the moment Peter chooses to die.
Sarah gets hit with a serious tremor and knocks over a meds locker looking for gabapentin. She doesn't find it, but she does find a whole boatload of morphine, and she picks up one bottle with a miraculously non-shaky hand. Oh good, just what this situation needs – a doctor with a bald monkey on her back.
We cut to Duchamp, who's doing notes on Peter's case, and we see that he's now hooked up to a respirator, etc., but his brain is essentially checked out. I strongly suspect we're being shown this so we can see how the virus wakes the dead, or vaults people to the step in evolution, or something equally horrifying. I do not think this is the last we've seen of Peter and his vertical leaps.
So, we learn that Sarah is using the morphine to keep Dr. Van Eigem quiet – though I think that's a very short-term solution to the problem – and she also takes a generous dose her own self.
Jaye and Julia have finally found a full supply locker, and after gorging themselves on cheez-whiz, discover a crudely scratched set of initials – JLW – punctuated by little drawings of flowers. Julia numbly concludes that she's somehow been here before, despite having no recollection of it whatsoever: "It's my writing, the way I wrote my name and the flower, evening primrose. It was my favorite when I was a girl – it grows in Montana." I think maybe Julia needs to work on a new hypothesis: Hatake is a lovesick loon and uses his secret office staircase to creep to different parts of the base and scratch her name out because he's grown tired of filling up lab notebooks with "Dr. & Mrs. Dr. Hatake-Walker."
Remember how Hatake said he was going to handle the environmental situation personally? That means he's going to personally shoot the scientists he was negotiating with after he gets what he wants. Daniel is shocked. "They were about to give up. Why did you – why?" he stammers, and Hatake says coolly, "They gave up, but they did not surrender." He then instructs Daniel to dispose of the bodies, then head upstairs. He's got business on this floor. Daniel asks, "Dr. Walker? Why take the risk?" but Hatake says only, "I need you upstairs."
Cut to Doreen excitedly explaining how this virus contains a completely new and wholly unidentifiable single strand of genetic material. The point to it, she concludes, is that "There's some trait they want us to manifest, and this disease is a way to force it in. The people who designed this virus want to change us from the inside out." We're getting a close-up on Balleseros's face and he's looking very appalled by all this. Doreen is oblivious, and she continues, "I may not be perfect, but I like what I am." Balleseros says, "I like you too, Doreen." And then she mentions how it's time to take this to Alan, and that's when Balleseros grabs a syringe full of something and jams it into Doreen's neck, apologizing profusely all the while. YOU ARE DEAD TO ME, BALLESEROS. I HOPE YOU GET THE KIND OF NASTY VARIANT OF THIS VIRUS THAT MAKES YOU HALLUCINATE DOREEN EVERYWHERE YOU GO.
The sprightly do-be-do-be-do music starts up and we see Hatake coolly walking down a corridor. Baldy is still loping around, and he turns, growling, at the figure walking toward him. But when he sees that it's Hatake, he subdues completely and lets Hatake go by.
And for those of you who, like me, were hoping that maybe he was just knocking her out? That syringe number was followed by kicking over an entire rack of lab animals and letting the crazed bald rats swarm Doreen's twitching body. So … she's probably not coming back from that. Rest in peace, Doreen. You were the best thing about this show.
Lisa Schmeiser is an Oakland-adjacent reporter, editor and blogger. She regularly tweets here, blathers about comics here, and posts the oddball personal piece of writing here.