Eleventh Hour“Agro”
Original Air Date: Oct 23rd, 2008
Nicola – TwoCents Reviewer
Nicola@thetwocentscorp.com
Ah, a quiet Californian neighborhood. Peaceful and serene in the early morning light. But what’s this? Police cars? Ambulances? Has there been a robbery? A shooting?!
No. Just breakfast.
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[photo: Sonja Flemming/CBS]
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Eleventh Hour
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Original Air Date: Oct 23rd, 2008
Nicola – TwoCents Reviewer
Nicola@thetwocentscorp.com
Ah, a quiet Californian neighborhood. Peaceful and serene in the early morning light. But what’s this? Police cars? Ambulances? Has there been a robbery? A shooting?!
No. Just breakfast.
A typical morning in San Jose ends with a paralyzed family, all except for the daughter, Emily. Testing for toxins and poisons turns up negative, and the stumped authorities call in Dr. Jacob Hood.
Meanwhile, Dr. Hood is making a house call. He is at an air force base in Meade County, South Dakota, investigating the cause of a plane crash. After a request for what sounds like Dr. Hood’s choice of breakfast, he illustrates how ultra-hot landing gear touching down on freezing ground can result in the breaking down of the tires, simply by heating up his watch band and dipping it into ice cream. Ingenious. If nothing else, Jacob’s science experiments are wicked cool and make me want to try them at home. But I don’t have any watches I want to get rid of, and I certainly don’t have any ice cream I’m willing to sacrifice to the cause.
Agent Rachel Young comes to drag Jacob away before he starts making soda bottle tornados or popping eggs out of bottles, and she brings him up to speed on the situation. They go to the hospital to see the paralyzed family as well as the asymptomatic daughter, who is being harassed by the authorities to see if she poisoned her family. Poor girl. Jacob rescues her and questions her (nicely), but she can’t think of anything she did differently.
Jacob and Rachel turn to the scene of the crime to look for evidence. Jacob proceeds to terrify Rachel and everyone in the audience about the dangers of average household objects. They discover that the family had a dog with a passion for human food and a high enough metabolism that he’s killed right out rather than paralyzed. A quick root around in doggie’s mouth revels a lovely lump of mold. Huh.
Meanwhile, in another seemingly innocuous area of California, small family farm owners discover that they have finally paid off their farm. They rejoice. Everyone watching knows that this family that just “bought the farm” is significant.
Jacob runs lightening-speed computer tests on the fungus to determine that it is a strain of Botrytis cinerea, a type of mold that grows on grapes used in very expensive wine. But it’s a genetically engineered strain, one Jacob has never seen before (so it must be rare!).
I swear, my Wikipedia searching skills are getting so great after watching this show. So many new and interesting scientific names I have to creatively spell to find what I’m looking for.
They go to a vineyard that sells this particular wine and grab some grapes for analysis. It’s not the same strain of the mold that paralyzed the family, but it’s a start!
Another family is affected by the mystery paralysis, much to the concern of our friendly farming family. The son dumps their fruit and looks worried.
In order to track down this genetically altered mold, Young ACTUALLY DOES SOMETHING USEFUL and gets ahold of the vineyard’s financial records. She discovers that the vineyard gave a large sum of money to a company called Aeonium Agritech just before their profits skyrocketed. This sounds suspicious, so our intrepid investigators go to find out.
They speak with Jason Cooper, a representative for the company, who of course claims complete innocence and goes on a spiel about how genetic engineering saves starving children in third world countries. Jacob takes this as an opening to discuss scientific politics and Cooper basically shows him the door. Rachel then lectures Jacob about his interrogation techniques. I suppose we all have our strong points.
A researcher for Aeonium by the name of Dr. Altschuler comes in to confront Cooper, railing at him about how his name is all over the research and it should have been destroyed years ago, basic confession for the viewers who didn’t figure out that the agritech company was the bad guy. Cooper waves him away and Altschuler proceeds to commit suicide by scorpion bite.
You see, as Jacob explains helpfully to all of us when he and Rachel find Dr. Altschuler’s body, scorpion venom can be used as a pesticide. It attacks insects, so when combined with the mold used in the produce, the insects leave it alone and die. The crops are therefore allowed to flourish and, because the scorpion venom only goes after insects, it should be harmless. But it’s obviously not…
However, Altschuler’s atonement has allowed an antivenom to be made from his blood that might save the families. Hooray!
As the antivenom is synthesized, Rachel pesters Jacob to eat some candy-coated monstrosity and Jacob has a House moment (for those of you who don’t watch House or similar shows, this is when the genius protagonist cues off of some innocent comment that a bumbling side character makes and proceeds to solve the whole mystery). After all, a common red food coloring is carmite, which is made from certain kinds of beetles. Add a little carmite to some juice or cake, and you’ll have the scorpion venom from your tasty veggies attacking left and right.
Jacob and Rachel confront Jason Cooper again, and he admits to dumping batches of the pesticide in a waste disposal field. A quick trip reveals ten of the fourteen barrels that are supposed to be there, and also the son of a very successful small farmer. A quick car chase and our heroes stand in burning fields, hearing the sad story of a small family farmer run nearly out of business by big corporations. He was just trying to get ahead. And he almost got whole bodies!
I thought this episode was a great improvement over the last few. The concept of a scorpion’s DNA waging a battle against a beetle’s DNA inside unknowing human hosts was fascinating. Mind you, I have absolutely no idea if this is actually possible, but it’s a creative idea and one not entirely difficult to follow.
Jacob, at least, is gaining personality. I look at him now as the science teacher you always wanted to have in high school, the one who let you do cool experiments instead of boring flow charts and theory work. I’m glad the science in this show is backed up by actual examples instead of non-stop fancy computer analysis.
Rachel, meanwhile, is still in remedial science class, and Jacob is her private tutor. Of course the show needs her character to function. Jacob needs someone to explain this to or else he’d just be explaining all of this in layman’s terms to himself out loud, which wouldn’t lend much credit to the whole “genius” idea. But at the same time, I feel that they could give her more to do. She did, at least, get to call in a favor in this episode, allowing them to gain information that Jacob couldn’t garner by simply doing the math, but it still wasn’t any example of “skill.” Just connection.
Jacob’s back story expanded a little with more mention of his dead wife and her experimental cancer treatment, but we’re not getting much insight into Jacob’s psyche with this. Just the idea that he must be damaged in some way from this. But we don’t see that. Where, dear readers, will the dead wife scenario go from here?
Hubs & I were conflicted on the Dr. Altschuler section ~ I thought he was trying to commit suicide while Hubs thinks he was trying to get stung in order to make his own blood the antivenom so that he could help the victims. It ended up working either way he wanted to go ~ but if the genius scientist hadn't been the one to find him then no one would have known about the scorpions. I'm thinking he should have left a letter so that people would know what he was doing ... just in case.
ReplyDeleteThe Air Force Base (Ellsworth AFB) is in Pennington County not Meade County. About the scorpions, I took it that he just took scorpions from his lab to commit suicide.
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