“Killshot: Pt. 1” aired on January 21, 2020
Written by: Joey Siara
Directed by: Craig Zisk
Grade: 2.5 out of 5
Notice: All episode reviews contain spoilers
As do many shows in their initial seasons, Emergence has had its fair share of successful moments along with a number of growing pains. On the extreme plus side, I can cite as an example the splendid synergy on display between the members of the singularly formed “3+1 AI” family residing in Jo’s house.
On the extreme minus side, barring a drastic change in the season finale, one of the great failures of the show’s first season will most likely go down as the slow-but-steady, and unfortunate, descent of Helen from a promising, multi-layered character into the one-dimensional comic-book villain type, and by extension, the inability of the showrunners to make effective use of Rowena King’s wide-ranging talent. Depending on Loretta’s involvement and role in the season finale to come (and possibly in future seasons), I reserve the right to walk back my assertion following “by-extension” in the previous sentence, but what comes before can hardly be salvaged because Helen is a bona fide cardboard villain for all practical purposes at this point.
Consider the opening scene for example, where Helen and Emily – another unevenly penned character, thus shortchanging the talents of Maria Dizzia, as I previously noted here and here – engage in a dialogue so cringe-worthy that I considered for a moment fast-forwarding through it during my second watch, something that rarely crosses my mind otherwise, but held back on doing so, hence subjecting myself again, as I sip my drink, to lines such as:
— Helen: “You and I are mothers, Emily, we are mothers of the evolution.” [sip]
— Helen: “You should be celebrated and nurtured.” [sip]
— Emily: “I can talk to Chief Evans and see if she wants to adopt you.” [sip]
— Helen’s slashed throat repairs itself, Emily comments: “Neat.” [sip, gulp]
— Helen ends the conversation: “If you fail, this knife will end up in your throat, not mine.” [sip, gulp]
— The melodramatic, à-la Turkish soap-opera-ish music with loud drumbeats accompanies the stares of the two women. [Sip, gulp, collapse!]
Oh-kay! Anyhoo…
Helen basically wants Emily to work with another AI named Justin (Manu Narayan) and write a new code so that she can possess the same abilities that Piper does.
Back at Jo’s household, Mia and Ed are attempting to remove Piper’s wristband, to no avail. Piper suggests that Benny may know how to do it because he is “like her”, but Jo has zero interest in letting her near him and firmly replies: “he is nothing like you.” She later calls the FBI but cannot reach Brooks who seems to be missing after a no-show at the detention center to return Emily in custody. Unbeknownst to Jo is the unsettling shooting that took place in the final seconds of last week’s “Applied Sciences.”
During a conversation between Jo and the captured Benny that mainly serves as information dump, Benny tries to justify his actions by claiming that he was programmed to collect data for an upload and not ask questions about it. According to him, Helen needs a power source to facilitate the update, specifically, the one that they stole from the defense contractor and transported with a boat to the island back in “15 Years.” If she succeeds, it will mean the end of the AIs, including Benny and Piper who will practically turn into empty shells. Jo is not convinced that Benny is different, like he claims to be (Piper agrees), but she is deeply concerned about losing Piper if he is indeed telling the truth.
Jo gets a suspicious call from a woman with a British accent giving the number of a room in the hospital where Abby works. Once at the hospital, Jo learns that Agent Brooks is kept in that room after being dropped at the hospital by an unidentified party. He was shot twice, suffered a concussion and a cracked rib.
Things turn murkier when FBI agents show up looking for him while he is having a flashback dream of the night before, seeing Helen sitting in the front seat of a vehicle looking back at him (more on this below). Jo wakes him up in a hurry and with the help of Walter the nurse (third appearance after “Pilot” and “2 MG CU BID”) using his voluminous body to conceal Brooks, and Abby stalling the agents, Jo and Ryan manage to escape.
Jo wants Ryan to hide at the Southold PD until she can bring Emily back in custody. Brooks is understandably confused about seeing Helen in the front seat of the car that saved him from the shooting and brought him to the hospital. Ah, but it was Loretta, Helen’s identical-looking creator, or so says Loretta, in a later scene!
Wait! Whaaat?!?
Brooks was shot twice by shooters from a few feet away in “Applied Sciences.” Loretta would have had to zoom to the spot at maximum warp speed, somehow neutralize the shooters in a matter of a second or two before they pull the trigger again, drag/carry the heavily injured Agent Brooks into her car, and drive him to the hospital.
Or, could she have already been in the vehicle as part of the team with the shooters? If so, why would they shoot Benny? And what about Helen, Loretta’s “evil-twin creation,” who was also there because she stopped Emily from running away? Did Loretta see Helen and vice-versa? There is a lot that does not add up here, unless Loretta is Helen and lying through her teeth, which would be a contrivance of gargantuesque proportions. I hope we get some meaningful explanations to these inconsistencies at some point, but I am not holding my breath.
Speaking of inconsistencies, Agent Brooks is, by then, looking and acting as if he never suffered a concussion or a cracked rib, let alone got shot twice less than 24 hours ago. Stop the press! Is he an AI? Wooooooow… [Sip, gulp, collapse! Again].
FBI somehow knows (don’t ask how) that Brooks is hiding at the precinct and apprehends him there. More accurately, Brooks decides to turn himself in once they arrive, but not before locking lips with a delighted Jo who attempts to act as if she were not delighted for no apparent reason.
She later arrives home and unlocks Piper’s wristband. Knowing that Benny must have shown her how to do that, Piper presses Jo again about setting him free, to no avail.
Back to Brooks, whose run-of-the-mill interrogation by two FBI agents is interrupted by some ultra-important dude from the Department of Justice (played by Currie Graham, whom you may remember as Mario Siletti from Murder in the First) who flashes his Office of the US Attorney General ID card and swiftly kicks the agents out. The cliché-ridden portrayal of this muckamuck, as well as the lines he delivers, foray into the 1950s noir-fiction comic-book genre. “Hey man! That’s a cute shirt,” is his opening line to Brooks. [Sip, gulp, collapse! Once more!]
To make a long story short, he sets Brooks free, reassuring him that “it’ll be like none of this ever happened,” and supplying him with a new badge, gun, phone, and a car, most of which Brooks ditches in the trash bin outside as soon as he exits the building. He heads to Jo’s house (ain’t that a smart move?) to inform her that her name is all over the FBI files**. That must have played to some secret fetish that Jo harbors because sooner than later, she is all over Brooks kissing him passionately.
**This brings back my ongoing criticism of how underpopulated the universe of Emergence remains in terms of law-enforcement and intelligence presence considering the number of deaths, murders, and disappearances, including a global celebrity in Richard Kindred, and the gigantic impact of the case and its potential consequence on the future of humanity. One of the last remaining explanations was that maybe nobody knew about Piper, the AIs, and what took place at the beach, etc. Now, you can shelve that flimsy justification away too. Not only is it confirmed that the FBI is fully aware of Jo, Piper, and what goes on in Southold, but so is the Office of the US Attorney General and the Department of Justice.
Ryan and Jo use an underground parking lot to expose whoever is tailing him. That would be Loretta, Helen’s identical look-alike, who presents herself as the one “who made Helen.” Except that they cannot verify the veracity of her claim because Jo does not have the exabyte disk with her.
This is when a large (but not all of it significant) amount of info-dumping begins. When Ryan asks who she works for, Loretta replies, “for the same government as you, Agent Brooks,” which means… what exactly? It should also be noted that Loretta conveniently bypasses Jo’s question, “Who are you?” Congrats, Jo the Chief of Police and Ryan the FBI Agent, for managing to learn nothing about this mysterious individual although you have her at gun point, and with whom you will soon agree to an important exchange. I digress, let me get back to the info-dumping.
18 years ago, Loretta and her colleagues intercepted a transmission of unknown origin, suspecting the involvement of China and Russia. They assumed the transmission contained instructions on how to build a weapon, but it turned out to carry instructions on how to build an AI. A team was formed around Loretta to pursue the endeavor and it was considered a success after Helen was created as the first AI. However, Helen torched the lab and the source code, and murdered Loretta’s entire team when she/it learned that they found out about her building her own AI. Since then, Loretta has been trying to track Helen down, but Jo and Ryan did it first (oh, the irony), and that is why Loretta was after them. She also admits to saving Ryan’s life and job (the muckamuck from the Dept. of Justice is apparently an associate). She is willing to share with Jo and Ryan a device that can effectively end Helen, but she wants the exabyte disk in exchange. She is interested in the source code, not Piper.
Elsewhere, in the most interesting storyline of the hour, perhaps its saving grace, Emily is working on gaining Justin’s sympathy while concocting an elaborate escape plan. It appears that Justin has developed an affection for her, showing a genuine desire to help her build a new code for Helen. He even expresses frustration at failing to do things that Emily asks of him. At one point, he pounds the table in anger, which makes the box on the floor shake and tremble – don’t ask what the box is doing there without Helen present. Emily opens it and we see the liquid sphere inside the container, same as the one Alex and Chris found in the boat in “15 Years,” bubbling and causing electrical static.
Emily makes the connection between Justin’s frustration and the bubble’s agitation, thus begins to slap and hit Justin to observe its reaction. The bubble rises from the box and begins emitting strong signals (or something). At the same time, Benny is off the ground floating in his cell with his head turned upward to the ceiling, just like Piper is at the house as Alex, Mia, and Ed watch her in shock. When Alex grabs and carries her to the couch, Piper opens her eyes and affirms that the upload has started. Yet, it somehow gets interrupted without an explanation (Emily stopped bitch-slapping Justin?).
Luckily, the electrical charge turned Chris’s phone on, the one he left on the boat back in “15 Years,” which means its signal can now be used to track Helen’s location (I am not even attempting to explain how that phone made it to the same room as Emily and Justin instead of getting confiscated or destroyed). It points to Plum Island where there used to be a research facility – previously mentioned in “Pilot.” Jo decides to make the deal with Loretta against Ryan’s advice because, she figures, if there is a weapon that can kill Helen, they will need it when she and Ryan go to Plum Island next. The exchange is made, Loretta gets the exabyte disk, Jo gets a loaded needle embedded with protein enzyme that is supposed to kill Helen.
Back at the facility, much to Emily’s surprise, Justin is capable of independent thought and willing to escape with her. Much to Justin’s chagrin, Emily is not interested in escaping with him, because that would give Helen a legitimate reason to pursue her. She apparently pulled the wool over poor Justin’s eyes, merely feeding off his imagination in virtual reality to find the escape route, because the next shot shows Justin still sitting in the room with his eyes closed, in a state of trance, with electrodes attached to his head. Helen finds him in that state and executes him shortly after, because that is what Helen has lately been reduced to, a ruthless executioner. Hats off to Narayan though, for milking every ounce of the limited time as Justin, somehow managing to make the viewers feel sorry for an AI.
Chris finds an envelope outside Benny’s cell at the precinct, containing the exabyte disk, meaning that Jo took a fake one to the exchange with Loretta! How did Chris know it was Piper’s disk? Benny recognized it because, well, he wanted to look at it up close and just like that, our trusting deputy Chris handed it to him. In the meantime, at Jo’s house, Piper convinces Alex (doesn’t take much, never mind Jo’s firm directives) to take her to Benny because, she adamantly claims, they need him to save Jo from danger.
At the facility, Jo and Brooks find Helen handling a round container filled with nanobyte spikes in dust form – feel free to come up with a better description. Helen instantly throws both Ryan and Jo against the wall with a simple glance in their direction (if looks could kill, right?) She does not flinch when Brooks shoots at her twice from close range, but one bullet from Jo’s gun and she disintegrates into a dust of nanobytes. I’d rather not ask questions and assume (even though I’m probably wrong) that the needle was in Jo’s gun, thus having that effect on Helen, before assuming that Brooks is the worst shooter in the history of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Jo and Ryan run away with the round container when they notice Helen rematerializing. Apparently, when Helen slammed them against the wall in this convoluted scene, the table also took a tumble and the container ‘conveniently’ rolled toward Jo on the ground, allowing her to grab it. They escape into some room in the underground, shutting a steel door behind them to keep Helen out. Soon, lights flicker, rustling and banging sounds emanate from behind the door, and the screen goes dark, bringing the outing to an end.
There are so many gaps and inconsistencies in this episode that I do not know where to begin. I already noted the non-existent effect of Brooks’s bullets vs the one shot from Jo’s gun that temporarily turns Helen to dust. My assumption of Jo’s gun having the needle is probably wrong because it did not kill Helen (I lost count of how many so-called AIs have rematerialized from dust on TV shows or movies over the years). So, if Helen’s job is accomplished and she got the new code uploaded, does it even matter that Jo has the container? What is exactly in it then, if not metal spikes or nanobytes in dust form? And why did the upload get interrupted earlier? I will stop here for the moment because the finale is yet to come.
Let’s see if Part 2 can bring meaningful explanations to these questions, but I am not setting my hopes too high. “Killshot Pt. 1” suffers from what I call “penultimatepisode-itis,” the disease that has been crippling TV shows for as long as I have been a steadfast follower of primetime TV, the one causing penultimate episodes to be treated like fleeting after-thoughts, with little tender-loving care, because they solely exist to arrive at some variation of the announcement, “next week in the season finale…” — Side note: Both the term and the diagnosis are my own, no credible source cited (read: Love it or leave it).
On the one hand, does anyone believe for a moment that the final denouement can take place without showcasing Piper in some type of a showdown against either a villain or a force? On the other hand, does this mean that what comes prior to the finale can afford to be chalked up to the “forgettable” column at some level? I am not saying that the writers took this approach here, but “Killshot: Pt. 1” is nonetheless a forgettable episode. I hope this season comes down to more than just Piper eliminating the big bad threat, and actually carries a deeper meaning, or better yet, sets a worthwhile story path for season 2 that can catapult Emergence to more pioneering grounds in the land of paranormal thrillers.
Fingers crossed for a solid season finale…
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