Glimpse:
Written by: Ed Fowler
Directed by: Michael Robison
Original airdate: July 25, 2011
Synopsis:
Fargo, with Holly’s help, begins interviews for people wanting to go to the Mars moon, Titan, for a special mission with everyone in GD vying for a spot.
Meanwhile, Jack plans a summer trip to the baseball hall of fame for him, Alison, Kevin and Jenna, with Alison loving the idea aside from her continuing headache. Zane walks downstairs, which reveals to Jack and Allison that he and Jo seem to be getting… closer. Later at work, Jo tells Zane that last night was the last time they will be together but she is clearly not sticking to that as she has said that exact thing to him several times over the last few weeks.
Zane introduces Jo and Jack to his PALS, Predictive Algorithm Lenses, a type of contact lens that has the technology embedded into them to scan the surroundings and predict where possible security issues could happen. Jo tries them out and it shows her issues with Zane, his past criminal history, history of aliases, and his narcissistic tendencies. Zane proudly shows off the giant well that acts as the data processing center for the PALS.
Jo and Jack head to Parrish’s lab where she sees with her PALS that ipe is going to burst, and lets Jack try and fix it, allowing the goo inside to break through and cover Jack as revenge for saying that he was a real cop and didn’t want the PALS.
Holly asks why Alison hasn’t put in her application for the trip to space, seeing as how she wrote the book The Blake which created and set the standard for space medicine. She declines, but Jack can tell she does want to try out.
Fargo and Holly begin their interviews but Fargo is super quick to cut people off and deny them access, especially Parrish, but gladly pushes Henry through to the next round. Holly and Fargo begin bonding and he asks her out for dinner and while at first she thought it was a working dinner, he clarifies it’s more of a date and she agrees.
Talking with Jack, Jo, via her PALS, sees Parrish and another scientist named Dillon arguing and causing an explosion when Dillon’s experiment falls. She quickly jumps in and catches the canister as the arguing scientists get out of control. The experience convinces Jack that he should give the PALS a try.
Henry checks in on Alison who is experiencing another headache. She drops some lore about how Kevin’s father died in their original timeline and wanted to turn her dissertation into a book. When Jack comes by and Allison says she really doesn’t want to go to space, he can tell, via his own PALS, that she is lying and wants to.
At Cafe Diem, Jo’s PALS predict Parrish choking on one of his banana slugs, and Jack intervenes to swipe the slug out of the air before it can happen. Next however, Jack and Jo see a prediction of Zane walking into the cafe followed by a huge explosion due to happen within hours. The PALS go offline and Jo quickly goes to Zane and asks why the PALS aren’t working, without telling him that it’s him in the prediction. Zane mentions that the PALS seem to be overtaxing his system for some reason. Jack goes to Parrish to find out if he’s responsible for the explosion due to his mention of nitroglycerin earlier but he manages to rule him out. His talk of the project however, makes Jack realize that it’s in her best interest if Alison goes on the mission to space.
Fargo and Holly ask what’s going on, seeing Jack and Jo’s distress, but Holly lets it drop that Fargo has been doing the interviews very quickly, almost like he has a sixth sense about people. That leads Jack to realize that Fargo also has installed PALS Into himself, and Zane explains that it’s Fargo’s unauthorized use of them that is now overtaxing the system. As they argue about what Fargo did, Jo accidentally lets it drop that Zane could die and he bumps his head, causing the injury that they saw in the PALS.
Alison suggests using the recorded information with Henry’s holographic projection project to better inspect the footage the PALS recorded. Jack tells Alison that she should go to space and says he will take care of her kids so she can have this chance at her dream. She promises to think about it.
Holly tells Fargo she’s really liking the way he took control of the interviews, and that it even helped her to get more comfortable with doing the interviews herself. Fargo tells Holly about his use of the PALS, that he wanted to impress her, but she gets upset because the project is very important to her and using experimental technology was not the way to go about preparing for the mission, leaving her to storm off.
With Henry’s help, they investigate the explosion and determine that the explosion actually didn’t start at the cafe, but farther away at GD. Fargo steps up and orders immediate evacuation for all personnel, working with Jo to make sure whine will get out safe, and puts Holly in charge of transferring the FTL drive. Fargo’s decisiveness impresses Holly who tells him she knew he had it in him, leaving him feeling much better after their earlier conversation.
Jo apologizes to Zane about not telling him about his impending death and when he tells her he wishes she could just see where things go with them, she reminds him that she knows they don’t work together. They’re interrupted by Zane’s system powering back on, but then it quickly starts to overheat to dangerous levels.
Back at Henry’s holographic recreation, they find Dillon’s canister amongst the wreckage. They ask Dillon about it and he looks at the flames of the explosion and tells them that his canister wouldn’t have produced these particular types of flames and they realize that the flames could be produced by Zane’s PAL storage and processing core.
Fargo tries to get Parrish to leave but he insists he needs to save his banana slugs as they argue. Fargo promises to give him another interview and Jack comes in to find out why they haven’t left yet. Jack realizes that Parrish’s dormancy gel could be used to help cool down Zane’s processing core. Fargo begins the work of diverging the gel to the core, taking command again as he did earlier. Unfortunately the valve in the core isn’t responding and Jo climbs down into it to activate it manually. The core begins to collapse slowly but Jo can’t get back up because of the steam popping up around her, but Zane reaches down and helps pull her up to safety.
Later Jack advises Jo should let things just be whatever they are, without worrying about labels, since she obviously enjoys being with Zane. Holly and Fargo talk about the day's events and says he’d still like to take her to dinner and she agrees, revealing she’s fine with it being a date and not a working dinner. He confesses though that he saw a prediction with the PALS of her kissing him and she freaks out because it is obviously a security risk he saw and she leaves. Back at the bunker, Alison reveals that she isn’t going to go to Titan because she enjoys her life together with Jack and her children, that this is her new dream.
Jack then gets a call from Henry and he calls him down to the lab to show him one other prediction that popped up that they missed, a prediction that Allison is a 99.08% security threat.
Advanced Research:
Ed Fowler only has a very small handful of writing credits, however, he did write a TV mini series called 30 Days of Night: Dust to Dust that follows a nurse being bitten by a vampire and slowly turning. It stars Shawnee Smith (The Blob and Saw), Ted Raimi (brother of Sam Raimi and Seaquest regular), and Ken Foree (Dawn of the Dead). It also features Mimi Michaels and Christopher Allen Nelson who we were just discussing in ChromeSkull: Laid to Rest 2.
Stan Lee played Generalissimo. Born Stanley Martin Lieber, 1922, died in 2018. Worked at Timely Comics which would later become Marvel Comics. First used Stan Lee in 1941 for Captain America Comics #3 so that he could use his real name later on writing the great American novel.
He worked with Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko to create the great heroes. Made heroes human like with flaws and money troubles and anxieties. He would outline a story, the artist drew the pages, and then Lee would later add the dialogue and captions. In the 40’s he was in the army and wrote training films with Dr Seuss and Charles Addams and Frank Capra.
Up in the Air:
Written by: Kira Snyder
Directed by: Alexandra La Roche
Original airdate: August 1, 2011
Synopsis:
The tryouts for the Titan mission continue with the candidates now going through their physical fitness training. Henry shows Carter his jeep, newly repaired and now coated with a special super-protective polymer that will stop it from being destroyed. Meanwhile, Jo begins her part of the training which is to put the candidates through rigorous exercises, including Zane who wants to be part of the mission.
Allison, doing her part of the checkups, suddenly experiences missing time, finding herself blanking out after seeing her supplies arrive only to wake up hours later, with all the supplies put away, with the staff swearing that she put them away herself.
Jack receives a call that somebody robbed a bank and while Jack is excited for an old fashioned bank robbery, he is soon disappointed as it seems that someone literally robbed the bank and the entire bank building is missing. Henry tells him that the bank is basically a block of osmium, the densest, heaviest material in town.
Fargo goes through his training, trying to get closer to Holly but discovers that she ended up having dinner with his rival, Parrish, who is also going through the training and taking every opportunity to one up Fargo. Jo talks with Holly about Zane who is trying out in each of the fitness groups and she reveals that Zane’s criminal record takes him out of the running for the mission.
Allison confides in Grace about how she seems to have lost part of her memory and Grace suggests it might just be because she’s overworked as a working mother.
As Jack investigates the back disappearance, he learns that one of the safety deposit boxes had a vial of antimatter in it, realizing that it could potentially be used as a bomb.
Fargo has to postpone his physical training to take care of GD administration items and talks with Alison. As she talks, she experiences another case of memory loss as suddenly Fargo is thanking her for coming up with the idea of putting her in temporary charge. Later, Fargo and Parrosh get into it again with Parrish throwing a medicine ball at him and causing Fargo to go flying away somehow.
Grace feels like she may not qualify for the Titan mission, but Henry assures her they’ll figure it out. Andy, having saved Fargo, now searches for the medicine balls that have floated away, and Henry theorizes that if the osmium medicine balls floated away, perhaps the bank somehow did as well. At the same time, Jack finally tracks down the antimatter with Henry’s gizmo and finds the bank right in front of him. However when he gets out of the jeep, he finds out that the bank and his jeep are floating up in the air and he falls 50 feet down into the water.
Jo talks with Zane about his criminal record and he tells her he knows but is going through the training anyway to show people what they’re missing.
Back at home, Alison talks with Kevin and Jenna as she gets ready and goes outside to look for her tablet but suddenly loses memory again and finds herself walking in the middle of the street, almost being hit by a car. When she gets back to the bunker, Kevin says she’s been missing for hours.
Fargo discovers that the bank is gaining altitude, and that something is making their signals bounce around, with Holly theorizing it could be a disruption in the Higgs Field, the pervasive universal field that gives things mass. Jack tells them there was a Higgs Field Disrupter listed as being in one of the safety deposit boxes in the bank.
Jack talks with Alison and she talks about how she seems to be losing time. He’s concerned but they’re interrupted by Holly who has found out who owns the disrupter, Parrish. He maintains it is safe and inert, and should still be unless there was a source of antiparticle energy nearby which Jack reveals there is, the aforementioned antimatter.
Alison scans her brains and discovers the manmade implant inside of her.
Jack uses one of the medicine balls to float up to the back and get inside. He manages to get to the vault, secure the antimatter, which turns off the disrupter. However, as everything starts floating back to the ground, the bank is falling faster. Henry, Holly, Fargo, and Jo manage to discover a device in another safety deposit box that could be used to slow it down, successfully saving the bank and Jack from crashing.
Henry tells Grace that Alison discovered that Henry’s heart has an atrial septal defect which disqualifies him from the mission but Grace says that they make the impossible happen every day in Eureka and they’ll figure this out too.
Fargo takes up Holly’s suggestion that she would help him train and get caught up with the physical fitness he missed earlier, much to Parrish’s chagrin.
Jo and Zane talk and he tells her that she should be trying to be part of the mission too but she tries to play it off, thinking she’s not smart enough but he counters her arguments. She comments that her and the original timeline Zane never really talked like they are, as friends.
Jack and Alison talk at home and she suddenly reveals that she feels all better now. Elsewhere, Beverly is lying on a medical bed, hooked up to wires and machines, watching Jack on a monitor, as an assistant tells her that the Higgs disruptor is no longer causing issues. Beverly begins speaking, as her words come out of Allison’s mouth, revealing that she has control over her, as she tells Jack that she is feeling just fine and there’s no cause to worry.
Advanced Research:
Alexandra La Roche had a lot of TV directing credits to her name, but also has just as many credits as a script supervisor.
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