Eleventh Hour“Cardiac”
Original Air Date: Oct 16th, 2008
Nicola – TwoCents Reviewer
Nicola@thetwocentscorp.com
Another week, another scary genius trying to kill people with science. And one slightly less scary genius trying to stop him. You all can try to guess who wins. Here’s a hint – there’s another episode coming.
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[photo: Adam Taylor/Warner Bros.]
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Another week, another scary genius trying to kill people with science. And one slightly less scary genius trying to stop him. You all can try to guess who wins. Here’s a hint – there’s another episode coming.
ReplyDeleteThis week we travel to Pooler, GA, more specifically McKinley Elementary School, where eleven-year-old boys are dropping like flies. So far there have been three in the past few weeks who have died of heart failure. Dr. Jacob Hood is on the case, bringing along Agent Rachel Young to look pretty and have someone to go hunting for frogs with. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
At first glance, none of the children who are dead seem to have anything in common. They don’t have any weird drugs in their systems and no obvious congenital defects that might cause heart attacks in younguns. Mrs. Beatrice Brown, who works at the local hospital, says that the parents are in an uproar and many are keeping their children home from school until a cause can be located. And yet she lets her son Stephen walk home alone. Go figure.
Jacob and Rachel check out the school to see if anything looks fishy there. When he climbs through the ventilation shafts like a monkey, Jacob discovers a pocket of carbon monoxide that could be doing some damage, but probably not enough to kill three kids. Good try though, Jacob. Our intrepid investigators head off to the victims’ houses to see if they can track down anything there.
Meanwhile, good kid Stephen Brown is getting caught up in the schemes of bad kid Jesse Freeman. Jesse, Stephen, and some other ne’er-do-wells decide to sit around and get high by… licking toads. A rite of passage I must have missed out on. At any rate, Stephen digs up the courage and takes a lick, wandering back to school only to collapse at Jacob and Rachel’s feet as they are headed to a parent meeting. Cardiac arrest, anyone?
Stephen’s blood tests positive for bufotenin, a powerful hallucinogen found in mushrooms, plants, and more commonly the Colorado River Toad. And what trip to a small, close-knit community in the south would be complete without some good, ol’ fashioned swamp-stomping and toad-tracking? Not this one, according to Jacob and Rachel. They head to the swamp and track down a warty beastie (but they don’t lick it).
But what, pray tell, is a Colorado River Toad doing in Georgia?
A quick trip to interrogate Jesse Freeman teaches us that they are hanging out in a tank at Lizzy Summers’ place, being raised for their use in homeopathic erectile dysfunction medication. Lizzy Summers is a homeopathic pharmacist, you see, and she raises all sort of deadly plants and animals for their use in remedies. Jesse broke into her animal house and stole the toad.
And now he’s dead. Of course.
Jesse dies in his bed, and his blood comes back negative for bufotenin. Back to square one, Jacob. Soon he’s led back to Lizzy Summers, who is straightening out her garden after a distraught parent goes haywire. It occurs to Jacob that bufotenin might not be the only toxin Lizzy uses. He learns that she also uses digitalis, more commonly known as Foxglove, in some over her homemade heart medication. But who has use for heart medication in this town?
Why, Sam Tewsbury, that’s who! The school’s math teacher, a man who knows all of the kids who have died. Is he perhaps getting revenge for the mistreatment he suffered in this small, closed-minded town years ago? Jacob and Rachel go to find out, accepting nice, sweating glasses of homemade lemonade while they’re at it. Um, guys? Never accept anything “homemade” from someone who is suspected of multiple poisonings. Seriously.
But they survive and Sam’s name is cleared. Especially when he is found dead the next day, poisoned by the digitalis glued to the pages of a book he was mysteriously delivered. There’s a good lesson for everyone: don’t lick your fingers when turning pages. You might get poisoned. That and it’s pretty gross for anyone who ever borrows your books.
Foxglove is starting to show up pretty readily. So Jacob decides to confirm this. He lets bees loose all over the items of the victims, seeing if the bees will flock to the foxglove pollen. Of course he is right, and our murder weapon is discovered.
He also orders retests on all of the victims’ blood, but this time from the Quantico labs rather than the local hospital. It seems that none of the victims are actually related to their parents! And they’re all the same kid! No, it’s not cloning (bad viewers! That was last week! Haven’t you been paying attention?). Someone has switched the blood samples! Now who would be smart enough to do that?
Jacob wants to know!
He sets a trap in the form of a math problem, attempting to see which pint-sized genius is smart enough to solve it. It turns out to be Stephen Brown, of course, and his motive is to kill off the dumb kids holding him back! With test grades falling and teachers (like Mr. Tewsbury) not pushing hard enough, smart kids like Stephen can’t realize their full potential. Of course, he’ll have plenty of brainiacs to test his mad skills in juvie.
Another week in, and still all we’ve seen of Jacob is his brain and Rachel her ability to pull her gun and break windows. Where are these people? There must be personalities locked somewhere in those heads.
Also, this episode smacked a little too much of political agenda for my taste, thank you very much. If Stephen was trying to target his rage at the people who were holding him back, why didn’t he go after the local government cutting the school’s funding? Too hard to gain access? I jest, obviously, but I’m surprised that a kid like Stephen wouldn’t be pleased to have the stupid kids around to make him look good.
And maybe that’s why Jacob has Rachel. Not that she’s an idiot. But she still is kind of a dummy, isn’t she? In the purely mannequin, place-holder sense, that is.
I'm just wondering how long this show would take in real life ~ 6 months? A year, to figure out that the blood was switched & why?
ReplyDeleteAnd what kid kills other kids for being idiots?
I like the show & the science is cool ~ it just feels like the writers are stretching to find reasons for the plots. Hopefully the reasons will catch up to the science soon.
whats funny is..... pooler georgia looks nothing like that.
ReplyDeleteI live in Pooler, ga and it looks nothing like this at all lol
ReplyDeleteYes, I agree. Pooler does not look like the background in this episode. There are no mountains within 4-5 hours of Pooler. But, there they are in the backyard of Lizzie Summers.
ReplyDeletePooler GA....i grew up their, everything in that show was F A K E....my husband was disappointed but I told him....it's "Hollywood" ... quite funny though and I thought it was pretty neat that they also mentioned Savannah and Garden City...at least they did their research on that one
ReplyDelete