Posted by SH
This week’s episode brought a double dose of nostalgic glee. There was the presence of not one, not two, but three former Wire stars, and the plot line brought back the brain-melting joy of a criminally underrated horrorshow from my childhood, Halloween III: Season of the Witch a.k.a The One Without Michael Myers.
We start out with a teenager who finds something more dangerous on the Internet than even Dateline has discovered, a program that gets you into a trance and turns your brain into goo. The last thing you see before you die is a cheesy CGI hand reaching out from your monitor to grab your noggin. No suspects emerge until a strange link is found between two of the victims, even though one lives near Boston and the other near Chicago. A man named Brian Dempsey (Frank Sobotka — er, Chris Bauer), was once fired by the father of the teen in Massachusetts, and his ex-wife was married to the Illinois victim. He also happens to be a cutting-edge computer programmer. Hmmmm …
Things get personal for Olivia, before she knows who she’s dealing with, when the deadly program is sent to a laptop in her apartment that’s being used by her adorable little niece, Ella. It’s a race home to make sure they can save the tot’s gray matter. What I don’t get, though, is she’s rushing home because a computer program is being sent to her house, yet when she gets there, she draws her gun. To stop what exactly? Night of the living spam? And even after she sees Ella using a computer — remember, deadly computer program in the room!!! — she moves around the rest of the apartment to make sure it’s clear. WITHOUT taking the laptop away.
Happily, Ella is saved, and Rachel later makes goo-goo eyes at Peter while he bounces the little girl on his knee. Could this be what finally makes Olivia make a move for Peter? Will she get jealous that Lil Sis is interested in him? Who knows? But Anna Torv and Joshua Jackson don’t have much in the way of romantic chemistry — she seems much older than he, even though they’re the same age — so I’m not exactly foaming at the mouth for them to hook up.
Olivia and Peter track Dempsey down to an abandoned warehouse where he falls victim to his own creation, willingly looking into the program as it flashes on several monitors before he blows his own brains out. Kind of an odd storyline in that it seems to have no connection whatsoever with The Pattern. Dempsey appears to have been a loose cannon, though that might prove not to be the case in the following weeks.
Meanwhile, Peter has been shielding Walter from a woman who wants to speak with him. She’s the mother of the lab assistant who was killed in the accident that led to Walter being institutionalized. He feels the old man couldn’t handle it, but later confides to Olivia that he was afraid of losing the hard-fought relationship with his father that he had never had. But eventually he gets them together and Walter pulls through just fine, sharing a nice moment with the woman.
As for those other Wire alums I mentioned, there’s series regular Broyles (Lance Reddick), who stands up to Harris, saying if he goes after Olivia, he’ll have to get through him first. Way to go, boss! And when Peter needs help cracking the deadly computer program, he goes to visit a past associate, a hacker played by Chris Partlow — er, Gbenga Akkinagbe.
Comic highlight: When Walter can’t remember why he ordered baboon seminal fluid. We’ve all been there, right?