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Things are quite a mess on the island, and we're dropped right into the middle of it. Kendal finds himself bloody, the town abandoned, scores of unconscious sailors and villagers near the river, and Julian packing up in a hurry. After he discovers that two of the Navy SEALs are dead and Julian tasers him into unconsciousness, we flash back a few hours. And forward, and back, but for this recaplet, I think I'm just going to have to tell the story in sequence or I'll be as confused as Kendal.
The injured SEAL, Hopper, is getting back on his feet, but he's still not talking. Chaplin wants to get on Skype with Secretary of Defense Curry and see if he can mess with him by claiming he knows what the SEALs know, but before the plan can be put into effect, people start acting really weird. Prosser recognizes the effects of a chemical weapon called BZ, which doesn't kill but turns everyone really wiggy for several hours before dropping them into a power-nap. Chaplin, Shepard, and Prosser sail the Colorado into the harbor to wait it out while Kendal is left in charge of the island, both parties counting on getting through this with the help of antidote stores that turn out to be missing. So things start getting weird. On the sub, people start passing out when a fire breaks out, and Chaplin's the only one who can put it out. Unfortunately, he's thoroughly distracted by an hallucination of his son Jeffrey, with whom he shares a bedtime story until passing out as well, while the sub fills with smoke and carbon dioxide.
Kendal isn't faring a great deal better, contending with alternately paranoid and guilt-inducing hallucinations of his wife and Paul Wells, as well as a sailor named McClure who offers to help him wake Sophie up and get the communications back online. But it turns out McClure is part of an incursion, passing off Kendal's unfamiliarity with him as the effects of the drug. He's also the one who killed the dead SEALs, and he and the men he came with want to take King and Hopper back. And there's also something that he really wants, and although we don't find out what that is, I've got a theory. After Kendal beats the crap out of McClure in an unsuccessful attempt to learn his mission, he later returns with King to liberate the monitoring station and rescue Sophie, which is when Julian confesses that he was the one who drugged the whole island in exchange for a promise that he'd get it back when the Colorado left.
Speaking of the Colorado, Chaplin wakes up on board with an antidote needle sticking out of his chest and the air levels back to normal, but he doesn't realize until later that his nuclear launch key has been stolen from the string around his neck. And we learn after the fact that during one of Kendal's hallucinations in which he made out with his wife at home, he was actually making out with Sophie. Ooh, that's awkward.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!A disoriented Sam Kendal runs through the jungle -- grimy, bloody-faced, and with a syringe in his hand over the subtitle, "3 HOURS AFTER THE CHEMICAL ATTACK," with the word CHEMICAL in bright red letters for some reason. As if suddenly spotting the needle for the first time, he more calmly walks into town, which looks as though it's been abandoned in a panic; overturned bikes, cards and money left on tables, all signs that some shit went down here, say, three hours ago. Suddenly Christine accuses, "You're never coming back, are you?" Sam turns, suddenly less bloody and inside his house, and gives his skeptical wife reassurances and a kiss before stepping out the front door and back into reality. Or whatever the current version of it is. He picks up an abandoned machete and climbs the stairs to the bar, which is equally abandoned. After getting a load of himself in the mirror and wiping some of the blood off, he goes out back to the river and finds what looks like a whole pile of bodies to the water, sailors and locals alike. Including Sophie's employee from the monitoring station, who we finally learn tonight is named Nigel. I should have guessed that.
Kendal finds goes to Cameron, who fortunately is only asleep, so presumably all the rest of them are as well. Kendal's distraction is the sound of music, and he follows it to where Mayor Julian is hastily packing up his car, apparently unaffected by either the chemical attack or the subtitles thereof. Realizing Kendal remembers no more of the past few hours than we the viewers do, Julian tells Kendal that he and everyone else have been drugged and he just needs to lie down and sleep it off. Kendal isn't calmed by the sight of the blood on Julian's shoes, or his promise that "your friends were already dead when I got here." Now Kendal sees the bloody tracks leading out of the house, and follows them into find two of King's SEAL buddies sporting some new bullet holes. While he's absorbing this sad sight, Julian sneaks up behind and tasers him, saying it's for his own good. "One more for luck," he adds, which is just too generous of him.
So now we flash back to "4 HOURS EARLIER," which is also "20 MINUTES BEFORE THE CHEMICAL [in red] ATTACK." King wakes up in Tani's bed, and tells her as she dresses that he hasn't slept like that in years. Maybe because she's polite enough not to eavesdrop when he talks in his sleep. Or at least that's what she tells him.
Kendal, Chaplin, King and one of the SEALs who has less than four hours to live are standing around the bedside of King's SEAL buddy Hopper, the one wounded in the moments before the pilot episode began. Chaplin alludes to the Secretary of Defense's keen interest in them, and tells them they're welcome here on the island if they don't feel safe going home. Hopper goes nuts in his bed, telling Chaplin he's dead already. People do keep saying that on this show.
Chaplin purchases some ugly-ass fruit from the declining supplies of a crabby street vendor, who says they need to let in boats if he wants a better selection. He's only too happy to price-gouge him, though. As they step away, Kendal explains that the SEALs guarded Hopper's door while King left, and Prosser comes up to happily eat what he calls Chaplin's "hairy balls." That would be the fruit, of course. Kendal figures the SEALs are hiding something (what gave it away, other than the last five episodes?), and Chaplin decides to mess with SecDef Curry by saying the SEALs want to go public with what they know. Chaplin's lucky he's such a good bluffer, because he doesn't have a lot else going for him.
At the station, Shepard, Sophie and Nigel are looking at an internet news item that features a photo of Sam's wife being hugged in their house by his old buddy Paul Wells. Shepard quickly has him wipe it when Chaplin and Kendal come in asking for a video uplink to Curry, but he pops it back up on the big screen for Kendal, taunting him and pissing off both him and Chaplin before scurrying off to set up the video feed. Nigel's in a mood, y'all.
Tani and King walk out to a cliff and talk about whether he's going home now that Hopper's getting better. Suddenly Tani comes over all dreamy and walks toward what she thinks is her mum, only to step off the cliff. King catches her and drags her back, saving her from a fall but not a sudden headache. And then he notices a boatload of SEALs motoring in toward the island. They may or may not be real, but I'll just tell you right now that yeah, they're real.
Things are getting tense in the listening post, with Prosser walking in to report a problem in town and getting shut down because Nigel is getting even sassier. And then he pulls a server rack off the wall. This works as a nice segue for Prosser, who says the same thing's happening all over town, and he recognizes the signs of a chemical weapon called BZ, or Buzz, having volunteered as a test subject "back when music didn't suck." Shepard has already pulled a file and reads off the mind-bending effects of the stuff (paranoia, poor judgment, delusions, hallucinations, your basic Ally McBeal episode), which last about eight hours and ultimately lead to unconsciousness. They figure someone dosed the island's main water supply, but the good news is that it can be counteracted with adrenaline, epinephrine, and allergy meds. Chaplin assigns Shepard and Prosser to come with him onto the sub to wait it out at depth in the ocean (because that's so much safer than just parking the damn thing), and leaves Kendal in charge of the island. "Stay awake and alive for the eight hours, because something bad's coming." You think?
On board the sub, things seem pretty calm for now, but there are only twenty epi-pens on board. "There's not a lot of bees on a submarine, ma'am," Prosser explains to Shepard. Chaplin says they go to the officers in the conn, then Engineering, then department heads. But then Cortez shows up and says they've all been stolen. She asks what they do. "We dive," Chaplin announces. Excellent: be sealed in a metal tube underwater when the entire crew goes en masse to the zoo. Sounds like the poor judgment is already kicking in.
In town, people are getting stressed out, and Kendal is accosted by the fruit vendor before sighting a vision of his own: Christine kissing Paul Wells right there on the street. "You're never coming home, are you?" she says to him. Kendal's snapped out of it by Cameron, who's on a desperate search for water. "It's in the water, Pitts!" Kendal tells him to no avail.
Back to three hours post-attack, Kendal revives on the floor to the dead SEALs, then exits the house to find more emptiness in the street.
On board the Colorado, Chaplin's on the PA telling his crew to keep their shit together and go to bed when they need to, promising they'll ride it out. Yes, what could go wrong with a submarine crew full of brown acid?
Kendal sneaks up to Julian's car and nabs his machete out of the back seat, only to be immediately confronted by King, who is armed to the teeth. "Hey, man," they say calmly but nervously to each other, and each agrees that the other doesn't seem too messed up. And they're both looking for Julian, so King gives Kendal his sidearm before they go off hunting for him.
They make their way to the station's control room, where they watch from hiding as some bashed-up, unfamiliar sailors are trying to revive Sophie to get the communications back up, ignoring Julian's protests that too many drugs will kill her. It turns out that Hopper's also there, as a captive. The beat-up sailor demands to know where something is, and even after some allusions to a body cavity search that apparently took place earlier, Hopper either doesn't know or isn't saying. Kendal whispers to King the question on everyone's mind: "Who are these guys? What are they looking for?" And I'm sure the chances of King knowing the answer to either of those questions was worth giving their position away.
One hour post-attack, Kendal helplessly watches Cameron go in search of water again, and then proceeds to the hospital, where he finds the two dead SEALs for the first time. And gets another visit from Christine. She goes away as Kendal wanders into the room, to find that unfamiliar, Hopper-threatening sailor casting his own broken arm and claiming Hopper went crazy and killed the SEALs. Kendal picks up the gun on the table and says he doesn't know this man, who claims to be Jim McClure from Colorado's supply department and seems to know all about Kendal. He blames Kendal's paranoia on the drug and offers to help. Kendal lowers his guard and asks for some epi, but it's just as gone from the hospital as it was from the boat. Gosh, I wonder who could have taken it?
Shepard and Chaplin seem to be the only two people still awake on the conn when there's an alarm indicating a fire in a machinery room -- near the oxygen tanks. Chaplin orders her to shut down the oxygen in that area, leaving the only air left to them "whatever you can smell." Chaplin hollers down the PA to the crew in that room, and for the absent COB, but there's no answer from either one. So he resolves to get the fire out himself, leaving Shepard with the conn.
Kendal and McClure have moved on to the monitoring station, where they -- or at least Kendal -- are trying to get the equipment online so they can reach the Colorado. Vision-Christine shows up to guilt Kendal about why they don't have kids, and McClure tells Kendal to wake up Sophie. He heads into her office where she's crashed out in a chair and tries to bring her around, but all he gets from her is some sleepy French, followed by, "He'll kill us. All for money." McClure comes in, sends Kendal back to work on the comm stuff some more, and injects Sophie back to unconsciousness, saying, "I can always kill you later." Flexibility is important on a mission like this.
On the sub, Chaplin makes his way past unconscious crewmen to... a pile of crayons on the floor, which turn to baby carrots when he picks one up. This can only mean one thing... and yep, here's a vision of his dead son Jeffrey in his single-digit years, running through the passageways in pajamas with his teddy bear. Chaplin follows into his quarters, where the screen showing the fire almost brings him back to alertness. Almost.Kendal finds himself back home with Christine, who's got dinner on the table and is acting happy to see him, but accuses him of not wanting her to find out about that desk job Chaplin offered him in the pilot. He denies it and admits he wants his own command, but she wonders why he doesn't trust her. "I don't trust myself," he says. "Well, you shouldn't," she agrees. "And you shouldn't trust him." This last is directed at McClure, who is literally returning to the control room while Kendal figuratively does. The two of them manage to get Sophie into a chair and Kendal spots the bleeding puncture on her arm. And then the gun concealed in McClure's arm sling. His guilt-induced visions of Christine are proving helpful after all. Acting like he just needs his memory refreshed, Kendal quizzes McClure a bit more, and trips him up by getting him to say he reports to a guy who got promoted last month. So now it's on, as Kendal attacks the fake McClure and tries to grab his gun while Sophie begins to come around. They both get pretty bloody, but Kendal ends up holding the gun and demanding to know who McClure really is. Sophie wakes up enough to ask Kendal what he's doing, and while ripping off some duct tape, he tells Sophie, "I'll fix everything. You'll see, Christine." He promises to be home soon, and moments later McClure is duct-taped to a chair, with Kendal administering a none-too-gentle interrogation.
And then we're back to four hours after, when the population of the control room still includes Julian, Hopper, Sophie, some guards and McClure, who just whomped Julian at Hangman (Note to self: remember to make people guess "gypsy") while impatiently waiting for Sophie to get the systems back up. Which she quickly does, almost, but she has to reset the antenna downstairs. McClure sends one of his guards with her, and tells Julian that Sophie's dead as soon as she's done. Julian protests and is clearly very upset about this due to his enduring crush on Sophie, but he gets slapped into silence as McClure tells him it's a long game. "Don't hang yourself on the first day." See what he did there? He tells his other men to get Hopper ready to move, and do it right this time so he doesn't break McClure's arm again.
Downstairs, King quickly sneaks up from behind and cuts the throat of the man sent to escort Sophie, and he and Kendal tell her they're going to get her out. But there's going to be some shooting upstairs first, although Kendal reminds King that he wants McClure alive.
Upstairs, Sophie returns, stalling a bit more, while Kendal stays in the shadows wearing the dead man's hat so that McClure suspects nothing. And soon there's shooting, just as planned, in which most of the sailors end up downed and McClure gets winged in his already broken arm. That leaves Kendal and Julian pointing guns at each other, but Julian quickly puts his down as he explains that McClure wanted the SEALs -- which is why they had him put the drug in the water. That also explains why Julian doesn't seem affected by the chemical, knowing enough to stick to his Aquafina. "They promised me my island back! They lied. That is what I know. The rest is as you see." King and Kendal take a very long time pointing their guns at Julian before Kendal sends him away to weasel another day. Kendal asks Sophie to get them back online. "Hopefully there's still a sub out there somewhere." Oh, there certainly is. The question is whether anyone in it is still alive.
On that sub, Chaplin slopes through the smoke-filled corridors, dragging a gas mask off a barely conscious Prosser, who gasps, "You gotta turn the oxygen back on." Chapin proceeds to the room, where there's a teddy bear on the floor and young Jeffrey watching him. Chaplin returns the former to the latter and asks if he's sleepy. "Me too," he admits, barely glancing at the alarming red numbers on a nearby air gauge. He gets down to Jeffrey and tells him a bedtime story about a peacock and a crane. Soon both of them are asleep. Or at least the one of them who's actually there. I actually loved that scene, because Braugher didn't play it all maudlin and reunion-like, but as a tired dad safe at home with his kid. And because it reminds me of when I used to read The Sleepy Men to M. Edium and it affected us both like a horse tranquilizer in the eyeball.
Kendal's trying to raise the Colorado, but nobody's answering even though Sophie's sure it's working. They get a little uptight with each other, and Sophie says everyone's having a hard time. And I don't think she just means the current crisis. She says something about a line of morals that once you cross you never have peace, apropos of what I'm not sure. Kendal just tries to wipe some of the stray blood off her forehead and gets back on the radio.
Chaplin wakes up with a syringe in his chest and the sound of feet running away from him on the metal deck. Are we supposed to believe that Jeffrey came through for him somehow? Whatever the case, the red air gauges are now all back in the green, so the mystery savior appears to have covered all the bases. Chaplin makes his way back through the sailor-littered corridors to the conn, where the only sign of life is Kendal's voice on the radio. Chaplin responds and calmly and competently says they're five miles out and waiting for the crew to wake up and for an all-clear on the island before they return. Kendal says it's under control, aside from how two of the SEALs are dead. But at least they have names now, not that I'm going to bother repeating them.
Out on the roof, King asks Hopper why the invaders wanted them, which Hoper thinks is a pretty dumb question given that they were the only ones who saw how things went down in Pakistan. "All I know is we killed a guy we were sent in to save. Still don't know why," King says. So his reticence with the Colorado crew is sincere and not just the product of bloody-mindedness? Hopper says the mission directive got changed from extraction to elimination. "I wasn't given new orders," King says, but Hopper says he was. And look what happened.
On the boat, Shepard offers to give Chaplin a ride back to the beach, but he'd rather hang back and shave first. She leaves him alone in his quarters, and when he removes his outer shirt, he sees an empty clip hanging from his neck. This is a very upsetting sight to him for some reason, and I think I know what it is. Don't worry, it's nothing along the lines of a top that won't stop spinning.
Back on the island, Kendal reports to Chaplin in person that Julian was the BZ delivery agent, although he doesn't know how he got it. Chaplin suggests asking McClure that if he survives his gunshot wound, and wonders how anyone was able to contact Julian to set up the attack in the first place. Kendal thinks maybe Julian has a radio or a sat phone, but Chaplin suspects a mole in their crew. He doesn't know who, "but when I was unconscious, someone took my firing key. We now have no nuclear launch capabilities." Kendal wonders why they're still alive with no defense, and Chaplin doesn't really care; "Either way, we have to find the key." Yeah, start asking around. Chaplin comments on Kendal's head wound, which Kendal says he doesn't remember much. "It'll come back to you," Chaplin says. "Most of it, at least."
And then we're back to just three hours after the attack, rejoining Kendal's beating of McClure, currently in progress. Suddenly he's at home, and Christine tells him to stop lying to her. Paul greets Kendal from the couch, much to Kendal's confusion (although at least Kendal recognizes him, so he's telling Christine the truth about them knowing each other before), and taunts Kendal about how long someone as hot as Christine is willing to wait for him. "This is the beginning of the end, Sam," Christine tells him, and suddenly they're both back in the control room, looking over McClure's limp body, which is surrounded by needles that must have spilled out of his pockets when his chair got dumped over. "You almost killed him," Christine says, and but adds that she'll always love him. Kendal returns to Christine, who begs him to come home, but he says he needs to finish this. "If I don't, my people will die. I'm not gonna let that happen." Christine asks what about them, and warns that he may never see her again if he uses the needle in his hand. Which he does, and she repeats to him, back in their house, "You're never coming back, are you?" Sam gives her reassurances and even more kisses, and walks out the front door again, promising once again to be home soon.
That night, Nigel steps into Sophie's office to say goodnight and offer any necessary apologies, and she says he wasn't himself. When he wonders what she's looking at, she tells him that the cameras in the control room were still recording during the attack, but she isn't willing to let him see the footage just now. He leaves her alone, watching footage of the moments when Sam was having that last hallucination of Christine that we just saw. Except it wasn't entirely imaginary; there was a real girl in Kendal's arms. It's just that it was Sophie and not Christine. Sophie goes back to watching Kendal kissing her. And watching, and watching, and watching. Wow, how many people get to have live-action video of their romantic fantasies?
M. Giant is a Minneapolis-based writer with a wife, a son, and a number of cats that seems to have settled at around two. Learn waaaay too much about him at Velcrometer, follow him on Twitter, or just e-mail him at M.Giant[at]gmail.com.