Contributor: Henry T.
Written by Ron Fitzgerald
Directed by Christopher Misiano
I really don’t get why this episode needed to tell its story in a fractured time format. Showing the plot in a linear fashion would have cut down on some of the confusion, I think. You don’t have to think about where a certain event goes in the timeline as you’re watching it. There was a point in the middle of the episode where I was asking myself whether the scene being shown was either from the “3 hours after chemical attack” point or the “1 hour after chemical attack” point.
The characters generally act in similar fashions no matter what timeframe it really was, and much of the thematic material was similar as well. That also didn’t help things. It lent a choppy feel to the entire episode, as if the editor and director decided in post-production that it would look cool to mix everything up and hope the audience can follow along. Sam’s storyline is mostly repetitive thoughts swirling around in his head and manifesting as hallucinations wherever he goes. Worse, the hallucinations don’t tell the audience anything new about the relationship he has with Christine. Just as Captain Chaplin’s hallucination about his young son doesn’t tell us much about the relationship either. This was a mess of an episode that only incrementally advanced certain aspects of the island plot, and just ignores whatever is happening on the mainland.
The episode does begin with a sense of mystery in regards to what’s happening on Sainte Marina. Nearly everyone seems to be dead and the island hastily abandoned in a panic. Usually if the title cards involve the words “chemical attack”, that would have been my first thought. That sense of mystery and tension dissipates as the episode goes along. We find out through flashbacks that an experimental hallucinogenic drug called “BZ” or “Buzz” has been dispersed throughout the island. It’s not a fatal attack (which, again, defuses the tension of the episode), but there’s a time element in place: Recovery will occur after eight hours and some adrenaline or epinephrin shots are administered to those affected by the toxin. The focus of the episode is on Sam, and so we spend more time inside his head than others. Only, it just isn’t interesting in any way. Christine keeps showing up everywhere he goes and asking why he abandons her and if he’s ever coming home.
I think it would be more effective to viewers who are involved in military relationships, but this is not new material. Sam is stuck on Sainte Marina for however long it takes to figure out exactly what’s going on in this world, and so we know he won’t be coming home any time soon. There are precious few payoffs to the storyline because the reason for all of these events is explained near the end: Julian apparently hired some mercenaries to dose everyone with the toxin so that he can re-take the island for himself without committing mass murder. It strikes me as something a weak-willed coward would do, and kind of reduces Julian’s danger factor on this series. I don’t know if I’ll take any of his threats seriously in the future. All of Sam’s hallucinations were apparently a substitution for a long makeout session with Sophie. Again, this is nothing new since we have already seen Sophie and Sam’s apparent chemistry in their brief time on the island. Whether the writers can go anywhere with that relationship is questionable.
Captain Chaplin does get a little subplot of his own, manning the sub with COB, Lt. Shepard, and a skeleton crew. They have all been dosed so it’s a struggle to keep the Colorado up and running. Again, there’s no real sense of danger present. A fire on a sensitive part of the sub means that Captain Chaplin has to shut off the oxygen, but the fire is never shown. That makes me think that it was a ploy to get Chaplin unconscious so a mysterious person can swipe his captain’s missile key. Since it is now missing, they cannot launch their nuclear weapons. That’s the lone payoff for the subplot. Surely, there could have been easier methods to do that. It’s clear that Chaplin misses his son, and his little story told to the hallucination of Jeffrey as a boy was poignant and heartbreaking, but the audience already knows that his now-dead son is one of his weak points. There was no need to repeat the same thing in another episode.
The toxin plot also seems to be targeting the Navy SEALs who were recuperating on the island. As with the rest of the subplots in this episode, it is only advanced incrementally, as we find out that they had to kill the person they were sent in to rescue in Pakistan. There have been suspicions since the pilot episode that there was something fishy about the Pakistan mission, but this episode doesn’t take the opportunity to elaborate.
This was all some kind of transition episode to lead to the next big events in the overall arc. I have to admit that I’m still puzzled as to why the show avoided a simple linear progression of events. Cutting everything up was so unnecessary.
Score: 6/10