Friday, December 5, 2008

Eleventh Hour - Recap & Review - Titans”

Eleventh Hour
Titans

Original Air Date: 4 Dec 2008

Nicola – TwoCents Staff Writer
Nicola@thetwocentscorp.com

It's Eleventh Hour – The Musical! Only not really. A gospel choir spreads their joy and love on a plane while a couple of young people spread their love, er, on the emergency room exit. After they are finished with their dalliance, they return to the choir. But for the girl, that return is short lived, because she falls to the ground and begins seizing. A short while later, she's dead.

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[photo: CBS.com]

2 comments:

  1. It's Eleventh Hour – The Musical! Only not really. A gospel choir spreads their joy and love on a plane while a couple of young people spread their love, er, on the emergency room exit. After they are finished with their dalliance, they return to the choir. But for the girl, that return is short lived, because she falls to the ground and begins seizing. A short while later, she's dead.

    Meanwhile, Jacob and Rachel are having a much better day. They are at Jacob's nephew's birthday party, where they are playing every bit the perfect balanced couple – Uncle Jacob gives him a nerdy science book and Auntie Rachel gives him a manly football. But the domestic bliss can't last, of course. Rachel receives a call that sends them off to investigate the death of two college students from the bends – though none of them had been diving.

    Jacob and Rachel head to Tulsa, Oklahoma. They view the body of Tara Bingham, the girl who died on the plane. Hood notices bubbles in her blood, which he finds out is nitric oxide. A drop in pressure causes carbonation in the blood, just like in a soda. They visit the plane to see if any malfunction in the plane could have caused the problem. The oxygen masks are working, so the plane isn't the problem. The flight attendant informs them that Tara had been having sex with her boyfriend Wade in the galley just before she collapses.

    Searching for more clues, Jacob and Rachel head to Tulsa State College where they talk to Tara's sister Vivian and her boyfriend Wade. Wade may be a good student, but that doesn't stop him from dabbling in drugs. Evidently he picked up a drug called Pearl that’s supposed to make sex great. Well, it obviously wasn’t so great for Tara.

    On the track at Tulsa State College, AKA Bends Central, a kid named Issac Richmond collapse when on a run with his superstar football player brother Laurence. Rachel immediately orders a decompression chamber, which is brought in for Isaac. Has he taken Pearl? Probably – every time he eats cookies or drinks a cup of coffee. Lab results indicate that Pearl is actually just table sugar. A drug scam (but really, can it be called a scam when it works in favor of the scammed?). So that pattern is a no go.

    But Jacob finds another – all of the victims had been exerting themselves physically at the time when they went into the fits. The exercise set it off, but what was lying dormant to be set off? A look at the medical records of all the victims show that they all had flu shots recently. A bad batch, perhaps? Jacob tests the flu vaccine and finds that it’s all kosher – nothing in it that would hurt the kids. However, he also finds that there’s no trace of the flu in their bloodwork. None of them ever actually received flu vaccines. They all received something different. Something that killed them.

    A closer look at the virus that actually is in their systems shows that it’s a virus for gene therapy targeted at muscles. If this gene had been in the muscles instead of the blood, it would have made the recipient into a super athlete. There are actually two genes present – one that makes nitric oxide and one that turns on the nitric oxide when combined with lactic acid, which is produced during exercise. Because it was in the blood instead of the muscles, the little bubbles of nitric oxide proved deadly.

    Determined to get to the bottom of this, Jacob and Rachel look at the students who actually gave out the shots. One is a sports medicine major by the name of Dylan Petraneck. He’s the one who helpfully provided Jacob and Rachel with the flu vaccine to check. They pop into Dylan’s apartment and take a look around. What they find are articles about the athlete siblings of all the victims. It looks like Dylan’s using the siblings of athletes to try the gene dope before moving on to the athletes themselves. They capture Dylan and get him to spill the whole plot. It seems that the athletes actually asked Dylan to test it on their siblings first. All except for Laurence, who remains ignorant of what is going on. They get Dylan to give up his partner in crime, Ellis, and Rachel goes and hauls him away.

    And of course, Jacob saves the day by coming up with a new gene that turns the other genes off. He heroically climbs into the decompression chamber to save Isaac, and his treatment is successful. Would we expect anything less?

    Barring the déjà vu feeling I had at the beginning of the episode (wasn’t there a House episode where someone on a plane got the bends?), I enjoyed this one quite a bit. We got to see more of Rachel this time, a bit more of her human side, when she spent time with Jacob’s nephew and also when she was batting eyelashes at the school’s head of security. She’s becoming a more well-rounded character all the time.

    It was nice to see a bit of Jacob’s family as well, though the whole incident with them seemed quite random and didn’t really contribute to his character much. It would be nice to see more of them – right now I’m still getting the feeling that Jacob and Rachel are more just “occupations” rather than people. Let’s see a bit more about what makes them tick. And I don’t mean the biological processes, Jacob.

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  2. It was interesting to see Rachel liking someone and taking a little flirting action. I was kind of hoping Jacob would see it and maybe show a bit of jealousy.

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