Finally the good guys are figuring stuff out on Helix, and in last night's episode we got a pulse-pounding dose of real action. Also, a Futurama reference. Spoilers ahead!
Alan Is On the Case!
At last Alan has stopped mooning over Peter for long enough to actually figure some crap out. Like, you know, how to modify the mega-antiviral serum to make it work better. Maybe even as an antidote or something! He also manages to finally figure out that Daniel and Hiroshi are kinda sorta on his side, and that Sergio is a Doreen-killing psycho. Good job, Alan! He even scored a kiss from Sarah, who was tripping on morphine.
Once Alan and Daniel have teamed up, it's only a matter of time before they loot Sergio's room, and discover — in with copies of Nature magazine — his comms equipment and a really ugly tablet device with all of Doreen's research on it. Oh and also, they find his poorly-hidden stash of explosives. So, yeah. Sergio wasn't exactly a brainfarm when it came to hiding his nefarious deeds. Clearly his superiors know that too, because when he reports in that he's finished his mission and is ready for extraction, they tell him to "find Dr. Hvit."
Oh and an aside — have you noticed the uneven way this show does the "gotcha grossout" scenes, like a rat climbing out of Doreen's mouth? The rat thing was just silly felt totally unnecessary. But then you get a scene like the one where Sergio lights the frozen, dead monkeys on fire and it sounds like they're screaming. Chill-inducing! Does that mean you never really die once you've been black goo zombified?
When this show tries to tart itself up with the grossouts it fails. But it's brilliant at the subtle, creepy suspense stuff.
Julia's Two Special Friends
Hiroshi has given up his My Creepy Scrapbook in favor of a hard-earned face-to-face meeting with Julia. He stabs himself in the side, faking that the Crazypants Guy did it, and limps around the quarantine level until Julia finds him and offers to help. Cue a long scene where they limp to the first aid kit on the other end of the level, past zombies and Julia's hallucinations (so sad that Jaye is just a hallucination because she is badass).
Julia's hallucination friend Jaye keeps warning her that she might have been at the facility when she was a little girl, which is why her initials are carved into the wall. Jaye also notes that Hiroshi is full of shit when he tells Julia that he got horrible burns on his back from trying to rescue his daughter in a fire.
"You remind me of her," Hiroshi says tearfully to Julia, and OK DUH we know now that Julia is either his daughter or some kind of clone of his daughter. Which is kind of nice, I guess. That means Daniel is Julia's brother, and Alan and Peter are sort of Hiroshi's sons-in-law, and I'm sure we can add just a few more people to this incestuous polygon before the show is over.
Anyway, Hiroshi has managed to get his little meeting with Julia, but we aren't sure yet what his goal is — other than to win her trust.
Sarah Please Shut Up
Meanwhile, Sarah is still covering up her brain tumor by medicating with morphine. Which is why she accidentally kisses Alan, who sort of kisses her back and sort of rebuffs her. Classy. Also, she decides to help her sick pal die with an OD on morphine, once the disease starts making roomie barf black goo.
Remember the monkeys, people! I guarantee that this "fatal" OD will not turn out to be fatal in the end.
Especially now, because we've discovered — dum dum dum! — that when Alan talks to Peter about needing hope that Peter's "neural activity" machine goes ping. Is Peter coming back online? Is he man or vector?
Visit to Futurama
Which brings us to Dr. Hvit, who is in the "white room," which we discover is a joking term that the scientists have for the arctic itself. "We're all in the white room!" Dr. Serum says helpfully. Ohhh, OK. That was kind of a dud reveal.
But it's actually not such a dud when we discover that Hiroshi and Daniel have been hiding Hvit's frozen head in a plastic bucket in some high-tech blinky light unit under the snow. When Daniel grabbed Hvit's head bucket I seriously thought it was going to start talking, like Richard Nixon in Futurama. Let's hope that happens at some point.
But then Sergio swipes the head bucket from Daniel! And then Alan stupidly decides he'll race out into the snow to find Sergio, even though Alan has absolutely no idea what he'll do and Sergio is a trained military badass dude! Which — yeah, as soon as Sergio runs into Alan, he punches Alan in the face and runs off with Hvit's head and his tablet. (Which of course Alan had in his pocket because HE'S AN IDIOT.)
But then!!! Daniel rallies and stabs Sergio just as Sergio is sending the "please fucking extract me now" signal. Daniel strips him of all his warm clothes, leaving Sergio to freeze to death at the extraction point. Without Nixon's head. At least we got to enjoy a little unwrapped Sergio, despite the fact that he and Daniel didn't make out even a little bit. Though I guess Sergio did give some head! OMG I am so funny.
So tune in next week, when Nixon's head tells everybody what's what, and Hiroshi and Julia have a tearful family reunion with a bunch of other hallucinations.
onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com It's hallucination time on Helix!