Feartura font: Day 10. We begin with Sarah wearing a fetchingly short hospital gown and being strapped to a table, courtesy of her boss/one-night-stand. Alan lets her know he's also on to her tumor.
OK – permit me a digression here. I have a benign brain tumor, and I get annual MRIs to make sure it is not turning into something else. At no time have I ever had the vaguely kinky minidress-and-manacles MRI. Every time I get an MRI, I'm usually in scrubs and a medical gown, I'm covered in a nice warm blanket, I get an eye mask to keep the lights from bugging me, I've got earplugs in to muffle the sound and – this is perhaps the most important part -- I am not cuffed to the table like a convict. So none of this is ringing true for me.
Although I will admit that perhaps the eye mask is why I've never personally witnessed a vector leaping on top of the MRI machine, then killing someone in front of me. So maybe what Sarah just saw is possible. I can't say.
SWERVE! It turns out Sarah was just hallucinating the whole thing.
Cut to Hatake explaining to Julia that apparently he and Jaye were True Love for Always until she found out about his unfortunate habit of abducting and experimenting on Inuit children. Then Jaye ran off and barred Hatake from seeing Julia – "but I have looked after you in my own way," he adds, not at all creepily. Julia's all, "We're going to put a pin in that because I would like to return to the whole stolen-children thing?" Hatake points out that most were rehomed with infertile couples, but Julia just can't get over the word most in that sentence. I just want to know what made Miksa/Daniel so special he got to hang around, and if he's going to start displaying weird little traits because he survived the experiments.
Julia then asks what the deal with the silver eyes is, and Hatake feeds her a load of BS. She calls him on it and he protests, "I'm trying to protect you." I wish this show would have outlined exactly what is out there where "Being trapped in the arctic north with an ex-husband, an army of goo-spitting vectors and the Ilaria corporation" qualifies as protection.
Alan breaks the news to Sarah about how her cancer is now serious TV cancer, and we can tell she's near death's door because her hair and skin look seriously fantastic. Only on TV will people who are minutes from death have glossy hair and glowy skin like this.
Meanwhile, back at Anana's, Balleseros and Anana are forced to stop their sexy squabbling when Daniel comes back and acts like a buzzkill by getting Balleseros to admit that Ilaria is likely going to hunt down and kill everyone in the village in order to make sure nobody talks. Because apparently things like radios and/or satellite connections to the Internet don't exist and don't need to be talked about or dismissed with a line like "It's too bad Ilaria's already fried our transceiver array so we can't even get a final message out." Ugh, DO I HAVE TO DO EVERYTHING HERE?
Back at the base, Julia is freaking out about her dad/stalker to Alan, and his response basically illustrates why she might have possibly found anyone else on Earth to be more simpatico than her then-husband. Alan's focused more on being mad at Hatake than anything else.
Alan blusters into Hatake's office right as the latter is reviewing security footage and confirming that the drunken doctor Adrian took off with the Narvik virus. The two then engage in some paternalistic chest-thumping over who has more right to hover over grown woman and autonomous adult Julia. You know how the Bechdel/Wallace test is "A media product featuring a conversation in which two women talk about something other than a man?" We need a name for the obverse, where two men engage in moral posturing over which one of them has more moral right to be concerned about a woman. Because this shizz comes up on the regular, and it's incredibly infuriating.
ANYWAY, both sexist idiots review the footage of Dr. Adrian heading out into the icy unknown. While Alan is worried that Dr. Adrian has an exit plan in mind, Hatake says, "The ice will take him. Trust me." I hope we discover "the ice" is code for "the legions of Narvik-crazed ice monkeys I've been working on in a lab so secret, even I am not so sure it exists."
Cut to Alan freaking to Julia about the prospect of Narvik making it out of the Arctic circle and thus killing millions. I can't help but wonder if shows like this and The Walking Dead -- both of which are, in their own way, about a pathogen which strips the humanity from our species – are really just thinly veiled ways of working through anxiety about globalization and what cross-pollination of cultural norms and intellectual debates will do our understanding of what it means to be a productive member of society. And then I can't help but think, "I am probably thinking about this more seriously than the people who successfully pitched a TV show with "It's about ice zombies barfing in people's mouths."
AHEM. Julia asks the million-dollar question: "Why did Adrian take all the Narvik?" and Alan shrugs that Ilaria's probably involved on some level. After some monkeying with a map, Julia and Alan conclude that Adrian's likely headed for the Echelon station – abandoned in '85, formerly used for "deep space listening" – and decide to head out there over Hatake's strenuous objections.
Back at the lab, Peter is moving around, in a manner best described as "predatory." I enjoy how the camera's sped up to convey the impression of superhuman speed.
We cut to Sarah staring at a bottle of morphine and flashing back to her euthanization of Dr. Van Eigem. She'd be about a thousand percent more interesting if she would just kill herself already, or put herself in a coma and then turn into experimental fodder for Hatake and Narvik. Instead, we have her valiantly doing lab work and looking ever more glowy.
Hatake comes in and tries to pump her for information on Alan and Julia. He can't just read the map queries and see that they went to Echelon? They're in the Arctic, surely the notion of big data has made it up there. ANYWAY. Hatake takes the opportunity to monologue about how he's done terrible things in the name of science, and Sarah expiates him by invoking the Edward Jenner story, then concludes, "You may have done some terrible things … but none of that will matter if we can get this antiviral to work." Hatake looks he's about to make an adoption offer.
Alan and Julia have reached the Echelon station, surprising Dr. Adrian. You know Alan is secretly thrilled because he can now lord it over Hatake how wrong he was, but we still have to get through the scene where Alan has to talk Adrian out of making a deal with Ilaria. Things get physical, and while the good news is that Adrian is soon tied up and restrained, the bad news is that the working radio's been taken out of commission.
And now, the subplot about Anana and Miksa/Daniel and Balleseros, which maps uncannily well to Star Wars if you consider the whole discovery-of-siblings thing and redemption-of-the-mercenary-charmer thing. Also, Miksa is roughly the same size as Chewbacca. Anyway, his plan is to let Anana lead her people into hiding while he slows down Ilaria. The timeline is now greatly compressed with the discovery that one of the Ilaria thugs escaped the Balleseros massacre and has presumably sped off to warn the others of what's going on. Miksa decides he'll head out and stop the sole Ilaria agent. Mercifully, there are no shouty declarations from Anana along the lines of, "We just found you! We can't lose you again." I am honestly surprised by that.
Alan's turned Echelon's backup generator on, and as the station lights up with Christmas lights and music, Adrian dryly says, "Like that's not creepy." Julia pretends to ignore him while she continues fixing the radio. Then Alan and Julia squabble for a while as Adrian heckles them about their failed relationship, and it takes an actual bullet to stop him. Sadly, not from Alan or Julia – it would appear that Ilaria's on the scene. A goon shouts out, "Throw out the virus and no-one else has to die." Naturally, THAT is the moment that the radio sputters back to life with a lady responding to Julia's mayday call. The Ilaria goon takes that out too.
Hatake comes back from the lab to discover that Peter is in his office and is about to go springing away with his stalker album. Hatake tries to placate him with, "This will all be over soon," and Peter grits out, "Sooner … than … you … think."
At Echelon, Alan and Julia decide that the best time to conduct a postmortem on their relationship – more specifically on that fateful night when Alan caught her banging Peter – is when the guy from Ilaria is shooting at them. Well, why not? They seem to reach a peaceful resolution, and as if by magic, a trapdoor appears and they find a basement level. "Please tell me there's no cabin down there," Alan quips.
Sarahxcgdrgbfdssxzzzzzzzzzzzzz. Sorry. I fell asleep there. The upshot is, the virus has somehow restored Julia's DNA to brand-spanking-new, and Sarah's thinking that maybe she can inject Julia's spinal fluid into her own spinal column, reverse her cancer and cure herself. (So basically, we're being set up to believe Julia's a walking cure for anything. To the twelve of you reading this: check out Nancy Kress's Beggars in Spain series, in which a series of genetically engineered people basically come to the same conclusion about rewriting human DNA to eliminate diseases, then do so. It is worth your time.)
Because Alan and Julia's nerves haven't been shredded enough, guess what they run into the basement? A chained-up, silver-eyed guy in manacles. He stops singing Christmas carols to croak at them, "Free me."
We find out that this freak is one Gunnar Mikkaelson, he appears to be mad as a hatter, and he alleges that he knows Sutton and that Hatake's the one who locked him up down in the abandoned station. He also raves about having been both a Viking and a scientist, and I invite you all to join me in imagining a lab in which people with battle helmets peer into microscopes, then administer the blood eagle when conducting peer review of their research.
So: batshit, immortal, providing Alan and Julia with yet more fodder in their anti-Hatake campaign, providing us with more cryptic hoohah with "There can be no more than 500 … rebirth feels like dying. We had no idea of the enormity of it … to live forever is to die 10,000 times" … Gunnar is the gift that keeps on giving.
Anana is having a hard time leaving the shack she calls home, and Balleseros says, "I learned at a very young age that you have to build your home in people, not places." Anana asks where Balleseros's home is and he says, "I haven't found it yet," and BOOM. Anana's got her fixer-upper, giving him the "stay with me" pitch a la "You can be the man you want to be, not the man they made you." Houston, we have liplock.
As Gunnar acts creepy in a corner, Julia and Alan have an argument that basically boils down to Julia saying, "After all of the crazy shit we've seen in the last ten days, what's one bald immortal Viking who knows Hatake?" and Alan saying, "FINE, I guess I'll be the skeptic this time." Julia says she just wants to know what she is now, and Alan is all, "Can it wait until after the Ilaria goon who's after this virus stops trying to kill us?" It pains me to admit this, but he has a point.
Sarah's cancer has officially hit her brain. Her skin has never looked better.
Julia tries to talk with Gunnar, which goes about as well as expected. He claims to have been chained up 29 years, and he dangles hints about Hatake, which is all Julia needs to become sympathetic to him. She tells an incredulous Alan that she doesn't want Gunnar dead because she wants answers. But when Julia goes to cut his shackles with the bolt-cutter, Gunnar seizes the tool, plants it at his throat, spouts a monologue that Queen already covered in "Who Wants To Live Forever?", then stabs himself in the neck. All that drama alerts the Ilaria goon to their location.
In the scene, they're rescued by Miksa/Daniel. Cut to the base being burned down, Julia holding the cooler full of Narvik, No, wait, Julia flings the bag full of Narvik onto the fire. Alan says – probably incorrectly – "It's done. No more Narvik." Miksa takes the snowmobile and within minutes, Alan and Julia are in the snowcat and following him.
Back at base, Sarah finally looks legit sick. Alan bustles in and Hatake tells him that Sarah's had several grand mal seizures, and he had to induce a coma to stop the seizures. Anyway, Sarah's sliding toward death. I seriously doubt she's stay dead – she's too young, too think and too white to be axed – but I'm rooting for it nonetheless.
And then Julia comes in and changes the subject to Gunnar Mikkaelson. "This is not how I wanted you to find out," Hatake says, as he does with so many other things. Well, maybe if he stopped NOT TELLING ANYONE ANYTHING, he wouldn't be so disappointed when they found things out. Anyway, Hatake says, "He betrayed [Jayne] to Sutton. It was a death sentence. I repaid him with a life sentence."
Then we get another monologue that implies we're sitting atop a vast sea of secrets: "I know you don't trust me, but I was protecting you. They have gone to great lengths to keep their secrets … the 500 immortals. They run Ilaria Corporation."
Cut to Alan's shining moment in the series: His You have GOT to be shitting me expression as he listens to this. Or maybe it's Billy Campbell realizing that he's still trapped in this twaddle for another three episodes.
Sarah chooses that moment to "die" (supra white, young, pretty). We get a montage of Alan and Hatake using the defibrillator on Sarah and Julia doing CPR, all to no avail. I especially like how Hatake kept on her purple underwire bra on. So gallant!
The shot is of Alan watching what appears to be the vegetable Sarah. Hatake comes in and says, "She doesn't have much time left. If we are going to act, we must do it quickly." Alan asks, "How? The cancer's in her brain. She's dying." "Then she has nothing to lose," Hatake shrugs. Other than a few pain-free minutes in her abbreviated life? "You believe you can save her?" Alan asks. Hatake confirms the Julia-is-a-walking-universal-cure-for-everything-except-chronic-assholeitis theory with, "No [I can't]. But Julia can."
The episode ends on two unsettling developments: Peter papering the interior of a duct with photos of Julia and Julia rifling through her jacket to reveal that she's been hiding the Narvik virus vials in one of her pockets. Which … what? Why? Nothing good can come of this.
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.