H50 4.06 – Kupouli ‘la (Broken)

There will be a lot of screencaps in this recaps because this episode was seriously beautiful *sigh*. Thanks to bookemdanno, as usual. Mwah!

Yay, Rocky Horror! Three seconds in and I love this episode already. Max and Sabrina are at a party with lots of people who are singing ‘let’s do the Time Warp again’ while not actually… doing the Time Warp. Is doing the Time Warp not a thing anymore? I feel old.

If I didn’t already know Max was Keanu Reeves in Little Buddha I would be completely mystified and I’m not sure who Sabrina is supposed to be (um… Dorothy’s shoe? Best guess) but she looks lovely.

Then a guy covered in blood appears who is even worse at the Time Warp than the partygoers, but obviously he is Not Very Well because he starts attacking people, including Max, and then bites someone. Ew. A cop comes out of nowhere – at first I thought he was just in costume, like in Buffy but no, he really is a cop (although I like my version better) and he shoots the guy twice in the shoulder.

The credits cruelly get our hopes up because Kono is not actually in this episode at all.

Cath’s costume is ‘Woman Who Goes Out Jogging On Halloween Because Her Ex-Boyfriend Got Killed And She Thinks It Was Her Fault Even Though It Totally Wasn’t So It’s ALL TRICK YOU HEARTLESS BASTARDS’ or something.

McG thinks it could use some work. Funny! Then they have a strange conversation in the kitchen where McG tells her that she has to stop punishing herself for Billy’s death and has a point because a. it wasn’t her fault and I don’t really get why she thinks it is, and b. judging by the condition of her arm, it was months ago.

Then Cath says that she’s finding it hard because she’s missing the Navy and McG almost completely ignores this and says she has to find something to do with her time so she can move on from Billy’s death. Like she’s a widow. It’s weird.

Then Chin turns up on a motorbike wearing a leather jacket and guh, was I saying something?

OMG, Max made his own costume! And thinks the crazy guy is a zombie because he tried to bite Max when Max was giving him CPR. Chin gives this theory the side-eye, as you’d expect, but then Max comes over all funny, thinks he’s been infected, and faints.

Halloween must be very surreal for ER people.

Ah! Bitey is on drugs and Max was exposed while performing CPR. OK, that makes sense (apart from making no sense at all, because why was Max giving CPR to someone who was conscious enough to try and bite him?) and Bitey is a doctor at the hospital! He was drugged with something called scopolamine which is used in robberies because it makes its victims highly suggestible but too much of it causes violent psychosis.

Time for some completely pertinent screencaps:

Yeah, Danny, you know that’s really bad for your neck. Let me give that a rub for you ;-).

Can we just not mention the toilet paper subplot? I don’t get it. Is it supposed to be funny? I’m just going to be pretend it didn’t happen.

So they’ve found Bitey’s car in the middle of nowhere and wonder what on Earth it’s doing there but then a party bus pulls up and the driver asks if they’re there for the party, because… does he think they look like they’re there for the party? Because no.

They arrive at the party and Danny says ‘I never understood what it is about Halloween that makes girls dress the way that they dress’ and ooh! I know this one! It’s patriarchy! The system which defines roles in society along strict gender lines and peddles the message that the primary role of women is to be attractive because otherwise they have no worth! The system reinforced by the portrayal of women in popular culture such as, say… a TV show that has almost no recurring female characters at all and writes the few it does have as women who value their relationships above their careers! Just to take a totally random example.

(Seriously, was this line a piss-take, or are they genuinely this oblivious?)

Danny says he’s grateful for this, which… can we have Danny back soon please?

They get taken to the guy who’s in charge of the party:

(he’s the one in the frilly necktie. No, to the left. No, your other left) who tells them that the doc was at the party but left with a masked someone three hours before he arrived at the screening.

Chin’s at the hospital because Bitey’s keycard was used to gain access to the morgue after he left the party. The morgue guy says he asked to see the file for someone called Lisa Mills but when they go to check her body, this is happening:

Eek. The morgue guy makes Chin open the drawer. I fistbump my screen. But it’s OK! The body is there. Well, most of it, anyway.

YUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!

The masked guy attacked Bitey again when he walked out and nicked the head. Lisa Mills died two days earlier in a car accident, but previously she’d gone missing for a month before turning up with no memory of where she’d been.

Aww, Max and Sabrina are cute! Max wants Sabrina to kill him if he gets turned into a zombie but she says she wants him to zombify her so they can eat brains together forever.

Aww! Also, if anyone hasn’t seen Warm Bodies, watch it, it’s adorable.

Chin finds a hidden camera in Lisa’s car um… there might have been some words after this…

And there might have been some more words after this…

And then this happened and I forgot how to word…

And then this happened and I forgot to care that I’d forgotten how to word…

For once, clarica FTW! So, cameras in Lisa’s car and apartment, and there’s also heavy breathing on the answerphone. When they trace the call they find a tunnel, which Danny won’t go into because he’s claustrophobic. Is this a thing now, every Halloween we find out something Danny’s scared of? First it was ghosts, then birds, now confined spaces. He’s going to be a basket case by season ten at this rate.

Back at HQ, Cath’s got some information on the Yakuza from a friend in the FBI (presumably she and this friend’s boss go way back and the boss is totally cool with it).

Chin asks if Steve knows but obviously not, since he’s apparently forgotten that Kono’s even gone. It has to do with money-laundering. Whatever. I’ve lost interest in this storyline. When is Kono coming back again?

McG finds someone in the tunnel and does his usual ‘announcing presence from half a mile away to give them a good headstart’. You’d think they’d have learned by now. They catch the guy (who is the Useless Newbie from Scrubs! I can’t remember his name! Sorry) and find out that the same thing happened to him as to Lisa: kidnapped, drugged, cameras. He tried to cut an imaginary implant out of the back of his head.

Too much X-Files will do that to you.

It’s OK, I didn’t need my ovaries.

I love this scene with Max! McG’s little shake of the head after the McNerding, Danny and Chin waiting patiently for the version in English and then “covered with cysts. That’s weird” bless. The cysts were caused by toxoplasmosis which (fun fact!) is usually caught from cat poo. So if you’ve ever cleaned out a cat litter box, you might have had it (it causes mild flu-like symptoms). And if a pregnant woman catches it, it can cause birth defects, so pregnant women aren’t supposed to clean out the litter box (which is pretty much the only good thing about pregnancy. Apart from the baby at the end, obvi). But that can’t be what happened here because the level of parasites in the victims’ systems meant they must have been infected deliberately, so someone’s conducting human experiments DUN DUN DUNNNN. Just in case anyone watching is unsure of what that means, we get treated to a lovely shot of someone cutting into a brain. Show, you are so good to us *retching sounds*.

Good heavens this is a busy episode. I’m enjoying it a lot :-D.

Time for another completely pertinent screencap? I think so!

The team are trying to think of a link between Lisa and Demps (?), but Max comes up with the goods: they both had MRI scans as children which showed a smaller than average amygdala (the place in the brain where the parasites like to hang out and make cysts). Children who are aggressive and antisocial tend to have smaller amygdalae – so someone is trying to reform problem children and Max thinks he knows who it is!

It’s a guy called Dr Ellery who had been working on this very angle until just before Demps was abducted, when he moved to Hawaii. They check out his house but he’s not home.

Oh, here are the Yakuza people. And who is this in the bikini, sarong and wig? It’s Cath, exploiting her sexuality to get the information she needs instead of using her giant brain. I can’t imagine why girls dress like they do at Halloween *eyeroll*. I have to say though, this scene in the lift was tense because I kept thinking they were on to her. But no, they leave the lift and Cath gets a fingerprint off the floor button (this is rather clever, I like this).

Here is a picture of some brains:

Or, possibly, three different pictures of one brain.

Pertinent screencap time!

Back at the absent doc’s house, the boys have found that the ruffly-necktie’s son was also a delinquent whose small amygdala made him an attractive proposition – they go so see the ruffly-necktie, who is drinking from a heavy cut-crystal tumbler and when he doesn’t tell McG where his son is, McG casually knocks the glass from his hand and it breaks into a billion pieces. LOL!

What happened was: the father paid the doc to move to Hawaii to inject parasites into his son’s brain to cure his delinquency. Wow. I’d say his delinquency probably owes more to having a f/cktard for a father than it does to having a small amygdala. And it was all worthless because it doesn’t work anyway, Lisa died because a cyst burst in her head, but because the father doesn’t know that (and because the doctor is completely unethical and hasn’t actually told him) the doc’s going to inject the son RIGHT NOW!! Oh no!

But it’s OK! When they get to where the doc is, they find that the doc is not, any more. As in, he’s dead. Go Necktie Jr! Necktie Jr is freaking out – not unreasonably – and attacks McG – again, not unreasonably – but McG gets him in a headlock and says ‘shhhh it’s OK’, which I hope he doesn’t try on the baby next week.

Monkey is the toilet paper vandal, which causes Danny to make this face:

Which is about the best that can be said for that storyline from where I’m sitting.

Chin tells McG what Cath found and McG does an admirable job pretending he hadn’t forgotten about Kono completely (and Fong is back next week, so he needs the practice). And McG can’t say squat about Cath being involved because, as she reminds him, it was his idea so he just says ‘so what’s the plan?’ – which presumably means they’ll be going to Hong Kong to rescue Adam and because it’s Cath’s plan, she’s going to be in charge! Can’t wait!

Fin!