Episode Title: 'The Quick and the Dead'
Writer: Michael Karnow
Director: Michael Nankin
Previously on "Alphas":
Story:
A middle-aged man with super human speed (C. Thomas Howell) shows up inside a restaurant and kidnaps a doctor. Elsewhere, Hicks (Warren Christie) and Danny (Kathleen Munroe) are in bed together, after having sex. Rosen (David Strathairn) shows up at the office to find Gary (Ryan Cartwright) having a fit about his missing pudding in the kitchen. In his office, Rosen asks Clay (Mahershalalhashbaz Ali) about the train explosion. He thinks it may be related to Stanton Parish, but Clay calls Parrish "a boogeyman" and says the explosion was an accident. Bill stops in and tells the two about the kidnapping.
At the restaurant, the team learns that no one saw the kidnapper. On camera, he appears as a blur, due to moving so fast. Rosen tells Rachel (Azita Ghanizada) the man may have an accelerated metabolism and would have a strong odor. Using her ability, they track the man to a fish processing plant. There they find the doctor's dead body. Using a print off the screwdriver he used to kill the doctor, they identify the man as Eli Aquino. Records show that the rapidly aging Eli was taken to Building 7 in Binghamton after an arrest.
Bill (Malik Yoba) questions the doctor's wife but she doesn't recognize Eli. Afterwards, Gary tells Rosen that Eli has kidnapped another doctor. The team manages to catch up with him and Hicks shoots the knife out of Eli's hand before he can stab the doctor. Bill chases Eli and nearly catches him before he escapes.
Rosen questions the doctor and learns that he has been treating Eli with a controversial experimental brain wave treatment – essentially using the twenty-two-year-old Eli as a guinea pig. Both doctors had been treating Eli at a clinic in Connecticut.
Elsewhere, Danny visits Stanton Parish (John Pyper-Ferguson) and one of his elderly grandchildren in the hospital. She uses her ability to relieve some of the dying old woman's pain. Danny asks Parrish when he plans to talk to her father, but he says he is waiting for Rosen to come around. He also tells Danny he wants her to stop seeing Hicks, as her emotions will only get in the way. Afterwards, Danny meets Hicks and breaks up with him.
Back at the office, Bill and Rosen get into an argument over Rosen going public about Alphas. Bill accuses him of letting his ego get the best of him. Nina (Laura Mennell) apologizes to Hicks for using her ability on him and tells him she wants to get back together. Hicks tells her he's seeing someone else and when she pushes him, she learns it's Danny.
Rosen decides to use the doctor as bait to catch Eli. The team sets up a stake out at the doctor's apartment, but Eli is a no-show. Meanwhile, Eli finds Rosen at the office. Rosen manages to talk him out of killing him and promises to help him. Eli recognizes a picture of Stanton Parish and tells him that Parish ran the clinic. Danny then shows up at the office and calls Hicks to warn him about Eli.
Eli ties Danny and up and heads with Rosen to the clinic. However, when they arrive, the building is gone. Bill and the team show up and Eli takes Rosen inside a church. With guns trained on him, Eli holds Rosen at knifepoint, but Danny uses her ability to slow him down, providing much relief. The situation appears to be under control when Eli is shot from behind and killed.
Back at the office, Clay tells Rosen they are investigating the shooting. Irate over Clay's nonchalant treatment of the incident, Rosen tells Bill he was right about his ego and wants to make it up to the team. Elsewhere, Danny tells Parish that she wants to be with Hicks and he warns her to be careful.
Rosen meets with the team and tells them that from now on they aren't to share information with Clay and his people. He also suspects Parish may be connected to Eli's shooting.
At the hospital, Parrish suffocates the old woman. Rosen goes looking for Nina and finds her in a bar. She tells him she wants off the team and that Hicks is sleeping with his daughter. Rosen passes out and wakes up as the bar is closing.
Breakdown:
This second entry into the new season of "Alphas" certainly gave us plenty to chew on. With Doc Rosen back in the saddle, there was some obvious tension between Rosen's new-old regime and Bill's old-new regime. Rosen never really did ask the Alphas how they felt about him putting them on blast, now did he? And just marching in and taking the reigns back from Bill, straight outta the mental hospital might not have been the best transition for his team of shall we say, highly sensitive persons.
Then there's Hicks, who's gotten himself into two of the worst workplace romance scenarios – dating a co-worker and the boss's daughter. Hicks may be a sureshot with a gun but when it comes to pickin' the ladies, his aim is way off. Though I've never been a fan of the Hicks/Nina subplot, now that Danny's in the picture things are starting to get interesting.
What's also making the storyline and the show as a whole much better is the humor. Rachel and Gary's needling Hicks about Danny as he tries to keep a high-speed killer in his gunsight was amusing. Also the scene where Nina pushes the doctor's wife into admitting she stole a scarf from Bloomingdales and masturbates every day was great. When you can do the the things the Alphas can do, these moments are bound to happen and I'm glad we're getting to see them.
This week's guest star, C. Thomas Howell was great as the fast-talking hyper-progeric Eli. Once again, we saw Rosen try to help an Alpha whose gone over the edge, with tragic results. But unlike last season, we're a little more clued in to who's pulling the strings. What exactly is Danny's relationship to Stanton Parish? When will he confront Rosen? And why does he have so many damn grandkids? Oh wait, he's two-hundred-years old.
We may not know what Parish's next move is, but we did learn what Rosen's gameplan is – trust no one. That is no one outside the "circle of trust." It'll be interesting to see how that plays out as the team continues to work with Clay and his DOD muscle.
And there's the matter of Nina, who definitively told Rosen she's off the squad and that Hicks is "nailing his daughter." Apparently the doc took it so hard he passed out at the bar. Or was that something else? We'll have to wait until next week to find out.
"The Quick and the Dead" was a great push-off from last week's premiere, which felt a little slow after such a big finale cliffhanger. The team's inter-personal idiosyncrasies are as fun to watch as their astounding superhuman feats. "Alphas" may have learned a lesson from NBC's "Heroes" in that regard. What often makes superheroes fun to watch isn't what they can do, but what they can't. And this band of dysfunctional superheroes is more fun to watch with each episode.
