Day 11, if the Feartura font is any indication. We see a woman, in considerable disarray, scampering down a hall and desperately gnawing at a scrap of food she finds in a wrapper at the end of a formerly-tidy laboratory corridor. Then she hears a few beeps. She looks down the corridor, sees a rat in a microwave, then goes down to investigate the phenomena instead of shrugging and saying, "It's one rat and I want no part of any freaky scene where people are nuking rodents."
So I'm neither surprised nor sympathetic when two vectors spirit her off. Peter oversees the whole operation, all king-of-the-vectors like.
Cut to Hatake dozing in his lab when a mobile phone goes off. The case indicates it's Constance's phone, and when Hatake checks the screen, it's bad news: Constance hasn't checked in, so Ilaria's sending the wave of goons to the base to see what's what. Hatake does the Hatake equivalent of an eye-roll , then goes to another secret bunker, activates what looks to be a suitcase full of explosives, then waits.
And now, bad news: Julia's managed to save Sarah by sucking out some of her spinal fluid and injecting it in Sarah.
Anyway, Julia is riding high on the fact that she is apparently the one-woman cure to whatever ails you, and she's determined to turn her special cells into a vaccine for everyone infected with Narvik. "We can save these people, Alan," she says. Because Alan is not an especially spiteful person, he does not say, "I think a base full of people who were all, 'Fuck, yeah, unregulated science!' until that unregulated science barfed down their throats are getting what they deserve. Let's blow this popsicle stand and drink ourselves stupid in Sitka." Instead, he's all, "We need to work smart and fast." Well, going by the tete-a-tete he had with Sarah a few episodes ago, we know he's capable of one of those.
And then Alan gets the news that people are disappearing. I realize this is a "Barn door, meet horse. Horse, meet barn door" situation, but you would think that someone associated with either the base or the CDC would have whipped up a protocol for taking a headcount every so often?
Hatake continues to plant bombs around the base.
Alan, who is now apparently channeling his inner Gil Grissom, looks at the microwave full of exploded rat and tells the bald scientist whose name I don't care to look up, "The vectors are back … They're using bait, setting traps now. They know food is scarce and people are getting desperate." (Except, you'll note, Hatake and the CDC crew. Either they're too excited by Julia's special cells to be hungry or they're sitting on a secret stash of Clif bars.) The fact that the infected are extremely smart suggests they're "a new step in evolutionary virology." Alan concludes, "This is an evolved virus that changes the host and stays active until that host dies of other causes. It's created a new kind of viral collective." The other scientist attempts to make us feel as though there are actual stakes to this infection with, "They were dangerous before. What chance do we have now that they've actually evolved?"
Well, given that you're supposedly a scientist and yet you've fundamentally misunderstood a central tenet in the theory of evolution )(individual organisms do not evolve, because evolution requires a fundamental change at the genetic level.), I'm liking the infected vectors' chances more. The infected, non-evolved vectors' chances.
Hatake is down in Level X. He cuts through the milling vectors like a disco king on the dance floor, then places more bombs. (Sidebar: I like how he's the kind of guy who actually has a suitcase full of bombs in reserve. I guess you don't get to be the kind of guy who keeps a frozen gallery of your ex-colleagues' heads without foresight.)
Then Alan and Hatake are meeting in his office. Alan shares his fears that the vectors are going to stage a coordinated assault instead of picking off the uninfected one by one. Hatake shrugs, "They will have to wait in line" and breaks the news of the impending Ilaria invasion. I pause the show and hope that these two with their eight different doctoral degrees look at each other and ask, "So how do we get our two problems to take care of one another?" Alas, no. But Hatake does basically admit that he's immortal. Alan pooh-poohs this, because apparently the events of the day made no impression on him whatsoever.
Miksa comes in to deliver the bad news that the base is not exactly prepared to outshoot the 100 mercenaries who will be landing in about six hours. Again, use the vectors as weapons. Instead, Alan decides the smart thing to do is gather the remaining 20 uninfected people and lock them in one room that presumably has no easy egress. Yes, because that worked out so well with Level R. But Miksa goes with that, and suddenly 85% of Hatake's contempt makes so much sense. Then we find out what Hatake's plan is: All those explosives we saw will detonate unstable ice. Miksa says, "His grand plan? We draw Ilaria mercenaries inside, then set off the changes, then implode the entire base on top of them." Alan nearly has kittens over how casual both Hatake and Miksa are about the prospect of saving only the uninfected. Mostly because Alan has proven not to have a decent grasp of logistics.
Cut to Alan reassuring the bald scientist who doesn't understand evolution that of course nothing can go wrong with herding the remaining healthy people into one room with no easy egress. I look forward to learning how wrong Alan is about to be.
Miksa does not take the news well that his adoptive father hid the existence of a super-secret earthquake bunker from him. When he finds out that the earthquake bunker has an escape tunnel leading directly to the surface, he's even less pleased. Because at this point, that bunker's not really for earthquakes.
Cut to Julia doing experiments using the NARVIK she pilfered and her own blood.
Miksa and Hatake have another resentment-filled conversation – well, it's more like Miksa monologues resentfully (as is understandable) and Hatake restricts his comments to, "You may loathe what I have done, but you are still my son … your feelings for me do nothing to diminish mine for you." Miksa nearly breaks down sobbing, because that whole unconditional … whatever thing Hatake's got going on only makes it harder to hate his child-stealing adoptive disapproving parent.
The vectors are planning something awful, as evidenced by the fact that Peter's now bloody-eyed and carrying around a pair of bone-snapping shears.
His less crazy, more boring brother is now discovering that Julia's gone renegade in the lab. The good news is that she figured out why she's so special: the Narvik virus rewrote her RNA somehow and gives her immune system the power to seek out and destroy any pathogens. Using the special Julia sequence in her genes, she could reprogram the Narvik virus to destroy itself. Alan's all, "Too bad we don't have the Narvik virus to – oh, GODDAMMIT, Jules!" Julia is unrepentant. The two of them get shouty about it, and the only reason Alan agrees to go along with Julia's feckless new plan is because she figures once they have a cure, they can get Peter back.
Or, you know, they can write him off as a lost cause because he seems to enjoy having bleeding red eyes and doing terrible things to frightened people. Even if I accepted the premise that an infection could make someone evolve, I'm not sure it's a net win if that someone's evolved into a murderous jackass.
Okay, so we hit the creepiest part of the episode: Julia's "cabin" home? Is the bunker Hatake was referencing.
Miksa takes in the bunker and he is really unhappy to learn that his dad was married and had a daughter, and that the daughter is Julia Walker. Understandably, he monologues: "So all of this, everything that happened, was all for her? To bring her back here? The CDC, Peter Farragut … all those people, infected, dying, dead! It's all for her?" Hatake doesn't say, "Well, she is pretty much the host organism for an immune system that can cure everything from the rickets to the dropsy." Instead, he defaults to the cryptic, "She is important. I need her." Miksa says, "You don't need anybody. We're all just an experiment to you." Hatake – who can take the long view on this – says, "Life is an experiment." Miksa does not see it that way.
And now, Alan's personal nightmare: His ex-wife and his quickie-colleague are teaming up to persuade him to do all sorts of Science!(TM) while he points out that one of them was dying of cancer the day before and the other is riding high on a God complex right now.
So! It turns out the vectors have figured out how to get to the remaining uninfected people: By filling the sprinkler system with black goo and setting it off. Everyone in the room freaks out to the sprightly strains of another 1960's pop confection, "Raining In My Heart." I like a music supervisor who was apparently traumatized by Burt Bacharach.
Alan stumbles around the goo-filled sun room – now empty, presumably because everyone fled screaming in terror or else the vectors carried off the newest recruits. Then he heads upstairs and Sarah states the obvious: the only uninfected remaining are series regulars. Wait – there are four off-screen people who are thus far uninfected and can therefore die at narratively convenient moments over the two episodes.
Anyway, everyone save for Hatake is kind of horrified that they basically walked into the vectors' trap with this one. He's like, "Regrets are for mortals. Let's blow up the base once Ilaria invades and kill two problems with one collapse." Because Alan and Julia can't let go of Peter, they're horrified that this even an option. (Also, I suspect, they want to make sure the cure to NARVIK is nailed down, in case another immortal whackjob's got an extra virus.) Hatake is admirably pragmatic: "You need to ask yourself: Are they worth saving?"
And now, the most subversively feminist moment on the show: Julia reduces Hatake to "my father" and Alan to "my ex-husband" and says to knock off the schoolyard squabbling. The most comic moment on the show comes immediately after that, with Sarah saying, "Your father? What?"
And now, the not-at-all-riveting scene where the CDC nerds test the NARVIK vaccine on rats to prove to Hatake that they've got the goods. Because the vaccine relies on a massive dose of coolant to give the concoction time to outrace the virus, the problem to solve is, "How do you corral 100 screaming vectors and get them to chill?"
It turns out Miksa is a mechanical savant. In his spare time, he's invented a backpack that can contain nearly any solution at any temperature; the wearer can then use the attacked nozzle to aim and spray the compound. He's dubbed his creation "Arca." Hatake is taken aback – both because he had no idea Miksa was working on this, and because Miksa makes it clear that Hatake did not exactly encourage communication. Hatake and Julia will spray down the vectors (because, as we know, they can control them with their freaky silver eyes). Alan and Sarah will handle evacuating the survivors into the bunker, then detonate the charges once Ilaria arrives.
And now, the sequence where Hatake and Julia freeze and vaccinate a boatload of vectors. Nearly everyone is cured with a dramatic disgorge of fluid. At least one vector manages to escape through the ducts, however, so I'm sure we'll be seeing more of him. Perhaps he can infect Anana during the "Anana, Tulok and Balleseros ride to the rescue" sequence, and then Seeeeeeeeeeergio's flirtation with redemption can die when she does. In any event, we'll be seeing him again. You don't put a goo-spewing vector in a duct in the denoument if you're not going to use him.
Sarah and Alan are now ministering to the recovering and/or fretting about her sudden, sharp headache. At least the fretting distracts from the fact that his ex-wife is ministering to his brother/her lover.
We set up a plotline for the net two episodes: Alan quietly tells Julia that Sarah's symptoms are recurring (suggesting that a. Sarah is going to get sick at the least convenient time possible in the two days, or b. the Narvik cure will only be temporary and everyone will be trapped in the "Montana" bunker with a bunch of relapsed vectors). But before they can chew on this, the alarms go off. Ilaria's about ten minutes out.
It's pitch black outside, and we get a cool aerial shot of hundreds of little lights heading toward the base – it's also a lovely visual metaphor for cellular invasion, if you ask me – and then we see that Miksa, Hatake and Alan are planning to try and shoot at the swarm to slow it down and buy the ladies (who are doing the evacuating) a little time.
Then the snowmobiles stop and dim the lights automatically. (A genuinely creepy moment, as everyone tries to figure out what in the hell is all means) We soon figure out that the snowmobiles were all driven by drones – exploding drones – in a ploy to distract any security from the fact that the mercenaries parachuted in.
These mercenaries are probably the smartest people on this show. I wonder if the mercenary corps has one of those Google-like hiring processes where you have to do brainteasers and all that.
Anyway, Hatake was winged by one of the drones, and once he's been carried downstairs into the cabin-bunker (the cabunker? No. Just no.) we see that Julia and Sarah are remarkably efficient at evacuating sick people in a hurry, as nearly everyone is down in the bunker. Hatake gasps that they need to blow up the base NOW because "HE's here."
Everyone is all, "Who is HE?" and we find out that HE is "The Scythe," an immortal who is an assassin. We get proof of this when he takes out an entire elevator full of scientists – including the poor bald one – in the brief moments it takes to descend to whatever level the elevator goes to.
So. It turns out that Sarah's migraine was caused by her eyes turning silver. That's … probably a reasonable side effect to expect if you're incorporating an immortal's spinal fluid into your immune system.
And in other oh-shit news, the charges don't blow and The Scythe (who is rocking a Daft Punk look with his two helpers) is on the loose in the virus locker. Our last shot is of his impossibly young face and silver eyes. Nicely creepy, Helix. Nicely creepy, indeed.
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.