Episode Report Card Daniel: B- | 59 USERS: C- YOU GRADE IT Touch Me, I'm Sick
By Daniel | Season 1 | Episode 4 | Aired on 07.15.2013
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.It's what, day three? The episode opens promisingly with the townspeople spray-painting the dome and raising a ruckus over what appears to be the army pulling out (Ollie has gone from "don't worry, the feds will save us" to "can't trust any gummint!" literally overnight) but then that just peters out and goes nowhere. It's like this place is a Sims-like game where the townspeople were given the task "riot" and it lasted a set amount of time and the experience points were earned and now they'll wander aimlessly until they're given something else to do (like come down with meningitis, I guess).
Yes: the Weekly Crisis this week is a meningitis outbreak, which has the good folks of Chester's Mill all coming down right at the same time. Well, they seem to come down in reasonably spaced intervals so they can be taken to the hospital in an orderly fashion. Alice (who we didn't see at all last week) volunteers her medical training (she's currently a psychiatrist), since she happens to be at the hospital to get Joe and Norrie, the seizure twins, checked out. The complication with the fire -- I mean the outbreak -- is that the hospital has no fire department -- I mean antibiotics. This leads to the forced sentimentality of Linda being given the hospital's last dose of meningitis medicine over her third-grade teacher, introduced to the show for the first time just so she can die because Barbie and Big Jim discover someone has stolen all the drugs from the pharmacy. The good reverend is going full religious freakjob now, and stole the drugs not to take them himself but to burn them because getting sick and dying is all part of God's plan, and he also gives Big Jim his share of the proceeds from their nefarious doings, since he's washing his hands of the whole thing.
Big Jim gives Junior the task of keeping everyone quarantined at the hospital. The best method the Rennies have is not "let's tell everyone how important it is that they keep the contagion within the hospital" but "give Junior the psychopath a loaded shotgun and have him stand guard at what is I guess the hospital's only entrance and exit."
But at least major plot points are advancing elsewhere. Angie's attempt to stab Junior and then presumably starve to death in the bomb shelter after killing the only person who knows where she is goes awry. But while Junior is out earning people's respect by not blowing them away with shotguns, she pulls loose a water pipe (she's pretty strong for an eighty-pound woman who's been shackled underground for three days) and almost dies of hypothermia. Fortunately, Big Jim hears her cries for help through his house's plumbing, and discovers her. I have no illusions that he's going to free her, but I'm looking forward to seeing this play out.
And in contrast to what I said in disparaging the show's subtlety last week, Barbie does already know Phil Bushey, who is the P.B. marked on his map. Julia follows the map to P.B.'s place, where she discovers that her husband sold his Beemer. Phil inconveniently comes down with meningitis before he can answer too many questions. Thankfully, so does Julia, and she manages to drag out a reference to the cabin, and then gets the location from Junior, who's all too happy to drive a wedge between Julia and Barbie. Julia manages to escape the quarantine and find the cabin, where she discovers that her husband has emptied their savings and the house will be foreclosed on. She collapses but is brought back to the hospital by Barbie, who confesses to being an enforcer collecting on Pete's gambling debts, but claims Pete must have taken off somewhere. Julia doesn't believe that Pete was a gambler. Fortunately, Barbie is a stupid enforcer and has incriminating evidence on his phone (a voicemail) that links him to the person he killed shortly after the voicemail was left.
Linda, impressed by the way Junior talked down a minor freakout by people quarantined at the hospital (and disregarding the way he first fired off the shotgun and then later left a loaded shotgun lying around a group of people who moments earlier were freaking out) and deputizes him. When the inquest happens, there's a lot of poor decision-making to ask questions about.
Daniel is a writer in Newfoundland with a wife and a daughter. He's really impressed that Norrie is aware of such pop culture obscurities as Star Wars and X-Men. Follow him on Twitter (@DanMacEachern) or email him at danieljdaniel@gmail.com. Want more? The full recap starts right below!
Back in the Sex Fungeon, Angie decides that maybe she should fully explore her space, and she finds some sort of air vent on the wall by the top bunk. She opens and starts screaming for help, but not for long, because she slips and falls, banging her head on the floor, knocking herself out, while the water from the pipe she somehow managed to pull out of the wall starts flooding the fungeon.
Over at the hospital, Alice pulls a blood sample from Norrie, who is not shy about shitting all over her mom’s needle technique. Joe has his head wrapped in sensors for the EEG, which Alice declares is as normal as she’s ever seen. Norrie calls him "a mutant, like Wolverine." "You know X-Men?" asks Joe, because he’s surprised that someone his age is aware of a widely beloved character who has appeared in wildly popular comic books for four decades not to mention several hit movies in the last ten years. Big Jim comes in, looking for some help from Alice, who tells the seizure twins to stay put.
Big Jim takes her to the waiting room, nearly every seat full of people coughing and sick. She gets ready to go to work, but the hospital is already out of basic supplies like gloves. After just a few days?
Elsewhere in the hospital, Junior and Barbie are hauling cots down the hallway, where a pissed Julia tells Barbie she came in with his friend, Phil Bushey. Barbie tells a smirking Junior to head down the hall without him. “If you’ve never been to Chester’s Mill before, how do you know Phil?” she asks. Barbie says he has no idea what she’s talking about, so she shows him his map, and she doesn’t have much time for his indignance over her going through his stuff, but she says he lied about getting into fight with Junior, and she wanted to know what else he was lying about. Barbie walks away while she yells about wanting the truth, but then she collapses herself. Barbie got lucky there!
Over in Linda’s room, her third-grade teacher, Ms. Moore, is being wheeled in. They greet each other warmly -- Linda declaring Ms. Moore an awesome teacher, Ms. Moore saying Linda was a terrible student. Ms. Moore might as well have a red shirt on.
In the waiting room, Big Jim asks Alice what’s going on and she says she thinks it’s a meningitis outbreak. They don’t have spinal tap kits, but all the symptoms are there. After quickly explaining that they have all been vaccinated and are therefore safe, Angie warns them that it’s highly contagious and therefore nobody can leave the hospital. But a more pressing problem is that they don’t have enough antibiotics to treat everyone, and Barbie gets the bright idea to go to the pharmacy for more.