Alcatraz Recap: Guards Gone Wild

Not like THAT, dirty-bird. Sheesh.

Hiya, Gasmii! Are you all ready to dive into episode 5 of Alcatraz? Do you have a snack handy? Did you go to the bathroom already? ‘Cuz I am NOT turning this car around once we get started.

This week, we were treated to a bit more back story on the whole over-arcing mystery of the show…though with those tidbits of information came even more questions, so I sincerely hope no one’s getting too discouraged out there in Gasm-Land. I know some of you are afraid this will end up disappointing you like that other J.J. Abrams show set on a mysterious island – but Alcatraz is much more straight-forward and less esoteric than Lost was (for now, at least), so I’ve gotta believe they’ll have a much easier time of tying up all of the loose ends whenever the show ends its run. But we shall see…onward!

Episode 5, “Guy Hastings,” starts off on present day Alcatraz, where a man stands in a dilapidated room, staring out at the ocean. This Thoughtful Man wanders around forlornly, looking like he’s trying to remember something.

Like, ‘Who farted?’

After finishing his scan of the room, he bends down to pull a loose baseboard away from the wall. From the cubbyhole that’s revealed, the dude removes three pictures – old black and white photos of a gentleman with his wife and daughter…and that gentleman just happens to look an AWFUL LOT like our Thoughtful Man.

And if Thoughtful Man has photos of himself from many years ago, looking the same age as he does now…well, it’s gotta be safe to say that we’ve just met our reappeared Alcatraz fella of the week, Guy Hastings.

Just then, a cop of some sort walks in and tells Guy that he’s not supposed to be here – double meaning, everybody! Guy, without hesitation, strides toward the cop and precedes to beat the living daylights out of him. On closer inspection, it looks like the cop is actually a park ranger, which makes sense if we are indeed on Alcatraz.

Once the ranger is out cold, Guy heads back to the cubby, reaches in, and pulls out – a gun. Oh great. Who the hell keeps leaving those weapons around for these reappeared dudes to find?? All part of the evil scheme, I guess.

After replacing the baseboard – leaving a bloody smear behind that I’m sure won’t come in handy at ALL – Guy stops on his way out of the room to touch some old markings on a doorway – markings which sure do look like a kid’s height measurements. Probably his daughter from the pictures, if our hunch is correct.

CLANK-RATTLE-SLAM! Back in the past, Guy Hastings is sitting by a window as an alarm clock goes off, waking up a woman lying in bed – WAIT A SECOND. A woman?? In every other episode, we’ve only seen the ’63s ON Alcatraz – we never get a flashback of someone living their everyday life OFF the island. So if this ep is playing by the same rules, then Guy Hastings must be…a GUARD!! A guard living on Alcatraz with his wife and child, nonetheless. Me likey where this is going!

The aforementioned child runs into the room to inform her daddy that mommy measured her – and sure enough, there are those markings on the doorway, so we’re in the same room Guy Hastings was visiting in present day – his home from the 1960′s.

Sure enough, when Guy heads out the door to go to work, we see that he’s living in the guard barracks on Alcatraz – and on top of that, he’s not just an ordinary guard, but an upper level guard in charge of training new recruits.

(Oh, and by the way…for anyone who’s wondering where they’ve seen Mr. Guy Hastings before – and hasn’t read the minicap – that’s one Mr. Jim Parrack, otherwise known as Hoyt Fortenberry from HBO’s True Blood.)

Remember? He used to date Vamp Tramp Jessica.

Guy Hastings is welcoming a handful of prison guard newbies, and they call out their names one by one…and the final noob is…Ray Archer!!

Dun-dun-DUNNNN!!!

Ray Archer is, of course, Detective Rebecca Madsen’s not-actual Uncle Ray – he was friends with Tommy Madsen (Becky’s grandfather) back in the day, and when Tommy was left to rot on Alcatraz, Ray chose to raise Tommy’s son – Rebecca’s father – in his absence. Years later, the son and his wife died, leaving their little girl behind – and Ray raised her, as well. Whew – got all that? Dag, yo.

CLANK-RATTLE-SLAM! Present day San Fran, and Uncle Ray and Rebecca are sharing some of her favorite cuisine – dim sum. Except that, even though she’s been at a dim sum restaurant twice now during the course of this show, and always orders a SHIT TON of food, she’s never actually eaten anything. LOL. Figures.

Ray shows a picture to Rebecca – it’s him with her grandfather, Tommy, when they were little kids. So Rebecca now knows that Ray didn’t meet Tommy on Alcatraz, but rather long before. She asks Ray if he believes Tommy killed her grandmother (the crime for which he was sent to the Rock)…Ray says that he didn’t think so – but then he did. Hrm.

Before she can DARE put any food near her mouth hole, Rebecca’s phone beeps, and that’s her sign to shake a leg. She heads out the door, telling Ray to box up any leftovers so she can eat them later, cuz we all know there’s nothing better than reheated dim sum.

Does this really look like something you wanna toss in the microwave??

I mean, there’s a REASON dim sum is cooked & served in those delicate little bamboo baskets, y’all. Reheated dim sum. BLECH.

Anyway, Rebecca shows up at Alcatraz Central, where Emerson Hauser shows her and Doc a surveillance video of Building 64 – the barracks where Guy Hastings beat the living shit out of that park ranger. Doc, of course, immediately recognizes the face of Mr. Hastings on the video feed. Rebecca asks what he did to end up on the Rock, and Doc informs her that Hastings wasn’t an inmate, but a guard. “Our first guard,” as Emerson puts it.

Rebecca wonders why a former prison guard – a good guy – would attack an innocent park ranger – Emerson thinks someone put him up to it. Another brainwashing victim, friends! Remember – Jack Sylvane, while no saint, wasn’t that bad of a dude himself, back in the day – but when he showed up in 2012, he had one hell of a temper. Seems the inmates weren’t the only ones programmed with dark assignments – I wonder if Lucy and Dr. Beauregard also had some sort of agenda when they first reappeared?

The Justice League ponders what exactly Guy Hastings might have been sent to do…meanwhile, somewhere across town, there’s the man himself  – clenching his bloody fists outside Ray Archer’s bar. Uh oh.

The Justice League does some snooping around Guy’s old, dilapidated digs in Building 64. Doc tells Emerson and Madsen that Guy was in the Navy before becoming a guard in 1957. Guy supposedly died in a chemical fire in 1963, along with eight other guards – all of whom are probably alive and well and just itching to pop back into existence.

Emerson notices the blood smear that Guy left by the loose baseboard – SCORE!! Madsen quickly pops the board off the wall, revealing two gun clips – so now they know that Guy’s got a gun. Try saying THAT ten times fast!

The gang isn’t sure how to proceed, seeing as how Guy Hastings – unlike the other reappeared dudes thus far – was never a criminal and therefore doesn’t have some sort of M.O. they can use to track him down. Just then, Hurley notices the growth chart on the doorway – and it’s time for a visit to Hastings’ now 57-year-old daughter, Annie.

Wrong Annie. Bummer.

Outside Annie’s house, Rebecca instructs Doc to pretend that he’s working on a new Alcatraz book – and she’ll pretend to be his research assistant. When they present Annie with this information, she quickly welcomes them into her home.

Annie tells them that growing up on Alcatraz was an amazing experience, so it must have been a hell of a lot nicer than it is now (trust me, take the tour and you’ll have trouble believing her, too). She says that she loved her father and used to climb him ‘like he was furniture.’ The last time she saw him, he had taken her to the dock to send her off to school for the day.

When she got out of school, she headed for the dock – only to find her mother there, who told her that there had been a chemical spill on the island and they weren’t allowed to go back. Now, here’s where I’m confused – when we saw the young Emerson Hauser and that other guard arrive on the island on March 19th, 1963, only to find all of the prisoners had vanished into mid-air…didn’t it look like it was the dead of night? Not mid-afternoon, that’s for damn sure…yet to hear Annie’s story, someone knew something was happening on Alcatraz in the middle of the day (or early evening, at most).

So this leads me to wonder…if the guards arriving on the island for the night shift had no clue what they were going to find…then who was on the island to make those phone calls to keep other folks away? Clearly, someone orchestrated this mass disappearance, and they knew full well what they were about to do (or they at least knew that SOMETHING was going to happen).

ANYWHOO, Annie and her mother were told that her father died, and a box of his possessions was sent to them, which she still has. Doc asks if they can borrow the box, and she obliges.

CLANK-RATTLE-SLAM! Back in the past – hey, have you noticed that they haven’t given us a year yet? Guy Hastings came to Alcatraz in 1957, so it’s certainly a bit of time later, as he’s worked his way up to training officer. I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess that we’re in 1960, just like every other flashback this season (except for the very first one, of course, when the guards discover the island is empty).

Guy is leading his new recruits – including Ray Archer – through the mess hall of Alcatraz, dubbed ‘the gas chamber’ for its 14 tear gas canisters hidden in the ceiling. This, Guy tells the guards, is the most dangerous room in the most dangerous prison in America, because the prisoners are allowed to move freely – not a handcuff or shackle in sight.

Guy tells the dudes a story about a prisoner named Red Stevens (perhaps the same Red that was buddies with New Guy from the Cal Sweeney episode?) who opened up someone’s throat with a steak bone, a guy named Billy Haskins (who we’ll probably never meet because I’m pretty sure a steak bone through the throat makes you pretty dead.)

As Guy is telling this story, Ray looks over and notices a particular prisoner in the food line – Tommy Madsen. He smiles at Tommy, but once Tommy realizes it’s Ray, he shouts “NO!” and thwacks him upside the head with his mess tray.

So you’re not happy to see me, then?

When Ray falls to the floor, Madsen quickly jumps on top of him, leaning down quickly to whisper in his ear, ‘you shouldn’t have come here.’ Before he can make another move, Guy Hastings pulls him off of the bleeding Ray and tells him he’s headed for the Hole.

CLANK-RATTLE-SLAM! Present day San Fran, and Ray Archer is at his bar, about to take out the trash. Of course, we know who’s waiting outside, so it’s no surprise when a gun is cocked near Ray’s head and he’s told not to move.

Ray doesn’t look too surprised, either. Maybe he gets trash-mugged a lot.

Guy tells Ray to put his hands up and turn around. Once he does, he recognizes his former training officer – who quickly knocks him out with a sharp blow to the temple with the butt of his gun. Dude, they better not kill off Ray – Robert Forster is one of the best parts of this show.

A commercial break, then we’re back in the past, where a young Ray Archer is getting the gash in his head sewn up by our lovable psycho Dr. Beauregard. Warden James and Deputy Warden Tiller show up, and the head warden is none too happy that he was drawn away from picking flowers with his kid just to watch some noob get his brain-case stitched up.

Dr. B tells him that he only called for Tiller – apparently, Tiller is the one who decided that the head warden needed to be involved. Tiller is convinced that Archer must know Tommy Madsen, that Madsen wouldn’t have gone after ‘the new screw’ so venomously unless he knew who he was.

Warden James doesn’t seem to be buying this, even when Tiller insists that Ray Archer might be on Alcatraz to break Tommy Madsen out. Guy Hastings doesn’t agree, saying that prisoners attack new guards all the time.

Damn, that Guy Hastings is one TALL-ASS drink of water!!

Warden James leaves the decision up to Guy – does Archer stay or go? Hastings says that Archer’s green, but that most dudes would run for the hills after getting a beating like he did – if Archer wants to stay, Hastings is more than happy to have him. Warden James says it’s settled, and that any resulting problems will fall on Hastings’ head. D’oh.

CLANK-RATTLE-SLAM! In 2012, Doc is going through Guy Hastings’ box of ‘good guy’ personal belongings as Rebecca scans the day’s crime reports in an attempt to make a connection to Hastings – no dice. So our gang’s at a dead end…until Rebecca’s cell rings.

Ray is missing, so Rebecca and Emerson start to head out the door to investigate. Before they can reach the door, however, Doc pipes up – he’s found something interesting in Hastings’ box.

Um, they haven’t already MADE this connection? Jeez.

So now that they have come to the brilliant realization that Ray and Guy knew each other, Rebecca and Emerson decide they definitely need to high-tail it to Ray’s place.

And…over at Ray’s house, a bloody-headed Archer is slowly coming to full consciousness – dude, this guy gets hit in the noggin a LOT. He should probably have some sort of scan. He sees Guy ransacking the house, obviously searching for something.

Ray asks Guy what happened – he was supposed to be dead, after all. Instead of answering, Guy demands to know where Tommy Madsen is. Ray is confused, and tells Guy that he only knew Tommy Madsen from Alcatraz, same as Guy himself.

Ray asks Guy how it’s possible that he still looks the same as he did 50 years ago – but he doesn’t seem all that flabbergasted by it. Interesting – I think I’d be shitting my pants.

Guy doesn’t answer – he’s pissed that Ray got a chance to live his life normally and raise a family. He picks up a picture of Ray with Rebecca to make his point.

Boy, looks pretty recent, doesn’t it?

(By the by…I looked up the name of the ship in this picture – the Chief Skugaid. It’s the oldest fishing vessel in British Columbia, currently working as a fish packer out of New Westminster. Don’t have any connections for y’all, just thought it was an interesting tidbit.)

Guy spies another picture on Ray’s shelf, and this one really gets his goat. It’s a picture of Ray with Tommy, clearly taken before Tommy got shipped off to Alcatraz. So now Ray’s cover is blown – Guy knows he’s been lying.

Ray insists that Tommy is dead, but Guy says that’s a lie – that Tommy is hanging around modern day San Francisco just like he is. Then Guy remembers something – Tommy Madsen had a son. He tells Ray that if he can’t lead him to Tommy, he’s gotta lead him to the son. Ray tells him he can’t (he’s dead, after all), but Guy insists.

Over at Ray’s bar, Rebecca and Emerson show up, asking the bartender if anyone suspicious was hanging out in the bar before Ray disappeared. He says no – but when Emerson shows him a photo of Guy Hastings, he quickly ID’s him as a dude that was standing across the street for a while earlier in the day. So not suspicious at all, huh? [rolls eyes]

Rebecca and Hauser head over to Ray’s apartment, where they find the absolute mess that Guy left behind when he took off with Ray. After looking around a bit, Rebecca finds something – Ray’s watch, tucked into the cushions of the chair where he’d been sitting. It’s a watch that she gave to him when she was 13, one that he’s worn every day since, so she knows that his leaving it behind was his way of trying to tell her something.

Like, ‘how about you buy me a new freaking watch??’

She can’t figure out why Guy would come after Ray, and then Emerson makes his own discovery – the broken picture of Ray with Tommy Madsen that had made Guy so gosh-darn angry. Hauser and Rebecca do a little heavy thinking and come to the realization that perhaps Guy is actually after Tommy, and that he’s just using Ray to find him.

Rebecca wonders aloud why the people who took the ’63s would be after Tommy Madsen – Hauser claims not to know, either. We know that Tommy had some sort of inside information as to what was going down at Alcatraz back in the day – somehow, all of this seems to be revolving around him. Hey – maybe he DIDN’T kill his wife after all – maybe the powers that be knew that they needed him on Alcatraz, for whatever reason, so they set him up. Possible, right?

Commercials! And then back to the past, where we’re finally clued in to the fact that this is, indeed, 1960 as we suspected. Since we know that Ray left Alcatraz before it officially closed down, that means he didn’t work there for all that long – three years at most. Did he leave after changing his mind about Tommy? Remember, Ray said that he thought Tommy was innocent at first, then thought differently later.

So anyway, back in 1960, Guy asks Ray if he knows Tommy Madsen – of course, Ray says no. Guy says he needs to prove it – respect is the most important aspect of keeping control at Alcatraz, and right now, Ray ain’t got it. 100 prisoners saw Madsen beat the crap out of him…so something needs to be done.

CLANK-RATTLE-SLAM! Emerson and Rebecca show up back at Alcatraz Central, where Hauser quickly picks up a mysterious red phone. He tells whoever is on the other end (IMMEDIATELY on the other end – there’s no wait for ringing) that he needs to see them right away, and that he needs everyone in the room. He then heads for the handle-less metal door, which opens of its own accord, and disappears inside ‘the room’ – presumably to hold a pow-wow with his geeky scientist crew.

Doc tells Rebecca that he’s found something interesting in Guy’s old log books – Ray Archer was attacked his first week on the Rock – by none other than Tommy Madsen. Rebecca is confused – they were best friends, why would they fight?

Gazing at the broken photo of Ray with Tommy, she realizes that she recognizes the house they’re standing in front of – it’s the same house from the picture Ray gave her back at the dim sum restaurant – the picture of him with Tommy when they were little kids. So apparently neither family moved over the course of several intervening years. She and Doc guess that this house is probably where Guy will force Ray to take him next in his effort to find Tommy Madsen…but how to find the house themselves? They’ve got a street number, but no street.

BESTIES!!!

Doc has an idea – they can build out the rest of the picture based on the house’s architecture, and use that information to figure out what neighborhood it’s in. Damn, we sure do have some crazy technology these days.

Elsewhere in the city, Ray has brought Guy to a cemetery – the cemetery where Tommy’s son is buried with his wife.

They both died in 1995, soooooo…

…that would be almost exactly 17 years of so – making Rebecca approximately 11 years old when she went to live with her Uncle Ray (I’m guessing she’s supposed to be about 28 now). Interesting…Rebecca was about 11 when a monumental event changed her life, as was Doc, who was kidnapped at 11 (we still have yet to hear many of the details). And many of our inmates had life-altering events occur in their childhoods – Ernest Cobb was sent off to live in an orphanage, Cal Sweeney’s entire family was killed in a fire when he was 10, Kit Nelson killed his brother when he was 11. Coincidence?

Ray wants to know why Guy’s looking for Tommy. Guy tells him, ‘that’s what they told me.’ When Ray asks, ‘who?’ Guy doesn’t answer, turning the tables on Ray instead. He says, ‘you were there, you saw what they were doing to him – all that blood, weeks in the infirmary. Did Tommy tell you, is that why you left?

Intriguing – we certainly knew there was something fishy about the docs taking all that blood from Tommy Madsen…it definitely sounds like it was connected to our bigger mystery somehow.

Ray says he left Alcatraz to raise Tommy’s son, gesturing to the nearby grave. This proves to be a mistake, as Guy takes a closer look – realizing that the marker says ‘father’ – he puts two and two together and figures out that the blonde in the picture (Rebecca) must be Tommy Madsen’s granddaughter. He thinks that maybe Rebecca can lead him to Tommy – Ray clearly doesn’t want to get her involved, so he tells Guy, ‘ok, ok, I’ll take you to Tommy.’ Whoa – does he really know where Tommy is, or is this a ploy?

We head back over to Doc’s comic book shop, which is chock full of imagery that I can’t make out – any suggestions?

Hm.

Doc’s assistant Chet has succeeded in expanding the photos to show a jaw-dropping amount of detail, including the San Mateo Bridge. That means it’s either China Basin – which Doc says can’t be right because it doesn’t have street numbers in the 100′s – or Daly City. DING DING!! They decide to look up any Archers and/or Madsens with former addresses in that area.

At the Alcatraz labs, Emerson is instructing his minions to look for evidence of seismic activity connected to the reappearance of Guy Hastings. It would be a ‘connection to our existing model,’ so have earthquakes been connected to inmates’ reappearances before now?

One of the dweebs asks Hauser if he believes that the keys, Tommy Madsen, and the jump were all related – um, of course they are, right??? One of the other dudes pipes up and says the seismic activity from the day Guy Hastings showed up was insignificant. Dead end.

Hauser ponders aloud…if the guard is looking for Madsen, perhaps Madsen is unaccounted for – or, as the dweeb mentions, LOST. Heh heh. Hauser seems to latch on to this idea. Yep, Madsen is definitely special.

Back at the comic shop, Doc is having trouble finding any Archers in the Daly City area census records, though he has found a Madsen family from the ’50s. Upon closer inspection, Rebecca makes a startling discovery…

RAY AND TOMMY WERE BROTHERS!!!

Doc guesses that Ray changed his last name so that he could work as a prison guard at Alcatraz, since he’d never be hired if they knew he was related to an inmate. Rebecca realizes that this makes Ray her REAL Uncle Ray, which is pretty hilarious.

Stupid ad break, then we’re back in 1960, where Ray Archer is getting ready to prove himself to Guy Hastings. He shows Hastings that he knows how to work all of the levers which open the cell doors…Hastings then tells him to open all of the doors except for 112 – Tommy Madsen’s door.

Ray follows orders, and the cell doors open for the prisoners who are waiting to enter…leaving one prisoner left standing in the hall – Tommy Madsen. Madsen clearly knows what’s coming next. And sure enough, Ray walks up to him and proceeds to give him a whole plateful of fist sandwiches. In fact, he gets so into his task that Hastings actually has to physically pull him away from the bleeding Madsen. Really wanted to prove his point, I guess.

CLANK-RATTLE-SLAM! Ray and Guy have shown up at Tommy Madsen’s old house, which the years have not treated kindly – doesn’t look like anyone’s lived there in about, oh, 50 years.

Must not be in a very good school district.

They enter the house, but Tommy’s nowhere to be seen. Guy is pissed that Ray lied to him, but Ray tells him that this is where he and Tommy grew up together, and if there’s any place in the city he’s gonna show up, it’d be here.

Meanwhile, Doc and Rebecca are speeding toward Daly City when Rebecca’s cell rings – it’s Emerson, wanting to know why the hell they’re headed toward Daly City. Shocked that he knows exactly where they’re at, Doc and Rebecca realize that Hauser is tracking them somehow – dude, it is SO not cool to put a tracking device on your BFF’s.

Emerson tells them he’s on his way, which should take a while since he’s still on Alcatraz, but I’m betting he’ll show up amazingly fast.

Back at Tommy’s house, Ray tells Guy that he’s the only thing that kept him from jumping on the first ship back to the mainland – he was just that inspiring of a training officer, I guess. Ray then asks Guy what happened to him, where has he been?

(At this point, seeing that Guy was about to spill what could possibly be some MAJORLY IMPORTANT INFO, I started paying VERY close attention. I even stopped eating my Americone Dream for, like, three whole minutes.)

Guy says he hasn’t been anywhere. He took his daughter to the Alcatraz dock one day, and then later that night, he was stationed on the north tower. Wait a second – so he was still working that NIGHT? But Annie and her mother were notified that he had an accident that AFTERNOON, right? Again…someone was pre-planning this whole thing, methinks.

Anyway, he was on the tower when suddenly ‘the fog took all the stars away.’ He woke the next morning in the infirmary, where he was told there had been an accident – all of the guards’ families were dead. Most of the guards were there in the infirmary, and they were told that they were sick, contaminated, and couldn’t leave. And then…it wasn’t 1963 anymore.

WHOA. So…let’s call the day that Guy took his daughter to the dock, Day One. Day One seemed like an ordinary day to everyone on the island, all the way up until that evening. But the families who were on the mainland were told that there had been a chemical spill on the afternoon of Day One, effectively keeping them off the island. Guy blacks out on the night of Day One, wakes up on Day Two in the infirmary, where he wasn’t allowed to leave. But when do young Emerson Hauser and the other off-duty guard show up to discover that everyone had disappeared? It was nighttime, but it couldn’t have been Day One, right? Because everyone was still there and working the night of Day One – unless when they blacked out is the moment they ‘jumped’ to another time or dimension. In which case, when they woke up in the infirmary, it was NOT the 1963 Alcatraz infirmary.

It seems to me that this must be the case, because I can’t imagine they would go an entire day without a change of guards or a visit from the ferry – but I guess it’s possible that young Hauser & friend didn’t show up until the night of Day Two. But why weren’t they aware of the supposed ‘chemical spill’ themselves? My head is spinning.

Back on the show, Rebecca has just shown up at Tommy and Ray’s old house. She enters, and Guy gets the drop on her because she never seems to take a very good look around when she goes barging into dangerous places. Dummy.

Guy holds his gun to Rebecca’s head – she tries to tell him that he’s a good man, a family man, but he says his family’s dead. Becky tells him that Annie’s still alive, but he’s not buying it – he’s convinced that his wife and daughter died back in 1963, even though nothing else he’s been told by the mysterious powers that be makes much sense.

He finally believes Rebecca when she adds in that piece of information that Annie gave her, that she used to climb on her daddy like he was a piece of furniture. But before he can let her go, Hauser bursts onto the scene, telling Guy that he’s going to shoot him in the head on the count of three, if he doesn’t release Becky.

Guy’s not budging, so once Hauser reaches three, Becky takes matters into her own hands. She elbows Guy in the gut, whipping around and pulling a gun out of her boot, which she uses to shoot him in the leg. A geyser of blood fountains out.

SQUIRT.

Guy is down for the count. A look passes between Emerson and Ray – looks to me like they know each other…of course, both were guards on Alcatraz, but we’ve yet to hear if their time there overlapped or not. Emerson must have been there when GUY was there, however – wonder why they don’t seem to recognize each other at all.

CLANK-RATTLE-SLAM! Back in 1960, prison guard Ray pays a visit to his brother Tommy, who’s laid up in the infirmary from the beating Ray doled out. Ray tells Tommy that he knows he doesn’t want him here, but that Tommy doesn’t deserve to be here – and Ray’s not gonna leave him alone to rot on Alcatraz. So obviously, he’s still under the impression that Tommy is innocent.

Ray tells Tommy that they’re in this together. Hearing this, Tommy finally makes a move – he grabs Ray’s hand and holds on like a drowning man grabbing at a rope. He doesn’t speak a word – the gesture does enough to show how he feels.

After holding Tommy’s hand for a moment, Ray departs…and off in the shadows, we see someone watching him leave – Guy Hastings. D’oh. Guess this is how he knew that Ray was lying to him in 2012.

CLANK-RATTLE-SLAM! Speaking of 2012, we’re here again. Guy is subdued and wants to know if Annie is really alive – Rebecca tells him that indeed she is. To prove it, Emerson drives Guy to her house, where he can see her greeting her own children and grandchildren. He wants to go talk to her, but of course Hauser won’t let him – no one can know about the ’63s, after all.

Guy asks Hauser why he’s brought him here, and Hauser responds, ‘you were a casualty in this – you don’t deserve what happened to you.’ Guy realizes he’s never going to see Annie and her family again, and Hauser confirms this. Well, at least he knows she’s alive, anyway.

Over at Alcatraz Central, Rebecca has made a discovery that she approaches Hauser with – she’s not the first Madsen he invited to be on his Alcatraz task force. So THAT’S why he and Ray looked like they knew each other, then. That’s also why Ray wasn’t too thrown when Guy Hastings showed up…he already knew that something like this was going on.

She figures Emerson wanted to use Ray to find Tommy Madsen, much like Guy did. He admits that he offered Ray a position 16 years prior, but was turned down…16 YEARS?!? Has this reappearance stuff been going on for THAT long, or has Emerson just been investigating the DISappearances all that time? I’m gonna go with the latter, because I can’t believe that they hadn’t caught any reappeared Alcatraz peeps for 16 entire years. I think they’re just now popping back into existence, for some reason.

Rebecca guesses that Emerson wanted her on the task force so that he had SOMEBODY with ties to Tommy Madsen – she thinks that Tommy means more to Emerson Hauser than she ever guessed…and therefore, he needs her. She’s all smirky as she lays this stuff out, pretty proud of herself for her detective work.

Yeah, well, that’s sort of what you do for a living, isn’t it, Sir Smirks-a-lot.

Hauser doesn’t confirm or deny this, but he does look SUPER annoyed. Once Rebecca smirks her way out of the room, he strolls over to Tommy Madsen’s picture to take a long stare at the missing baddie.

Is that a rosary? A curtain tie? WTF?

Time for the tag! After last week’s, it better be a good one – don’t wanna lose that momentum, after all. We’re at Ray’s bar, where he’s closing up shop. Someone wanders in – Ray tosses a ‘we’re closed’ over his shoulder, but the unseen dude answers with, ‘one last call for an old friend?’

Ray whips around, and who’s standing there but the man of the hour, Tommy Madsen.

Heeeeeeeere’s TOMMY!

And what does Ray have to say about this? Is he shocked, stunned, horrified? NO – he reminds Tommy that he told him never to come back here to his bar. WHAAAA? So Ray knew all along that Tommy was indeed back from 1963? Man, this guy can keep a secret!

Tommy’s a little ticked that Ray gave up the old house, since that means he can’t crash there anymore…Ray, however, doesn’t seem to care – he’s all about protecting Rebecca. Tommy says it’s weird to be a grandfather at his age, to which Ray replies angrily, ‘you’re nobody’s grandfather.’ So I think we can assume that however tight they were back on Alcatraz, there’s bad blood between the brothers now. The question is whether that’s due to something Ray found out about Tommy while they were at the prison, or something that’s happened since Tommy showed back up in present day.

We still don’t know when it was that Ray changed his mind about Tommy’s guilt – was it on Alcatraz? Tommy did seem like kind of a dick when he was there…or was it once Tommy popped up in 2012, possibly toting along some evil pre-programmed agenda? Cuz one thing’s for sure – everyone that has shown up in 2012 seems to be a hell of a lot more bad-ass than they were back in the day.

Whatever the case, Ray’s not a huge fan of Tommy these days. He tells him to get the hell out of his bar, but Tommy tells him that ‘this isn’t over.’ Ray says that every time Tommy is near, he puts Rebecca in harm’s way – so if he ever sees him again, he’ll kill him. G’damn, that’s harsh.

That’s it, guys! What’d ya think? I love that Ray had some foreknowledge of what’s been going on…Robert Forster is bomb-diggity, so any opportunity this show has to utilize him more, the better.

And what about the superb question Pikey brought up in the minicap…where the heck are Hauser & Co. gonna stow Guy Hastings?? It’s clear he doesn’t belong in quasi-Alcatraz with the baddies – do they also happen to have a quasi-barracks in their underground lair? Or will they simply relocate him and give him a new identity? I would think they’d want to keep him close, to prevent him from spilling the beans about the ’63s…

Sorry to be so long-winded, gang! Thanks as always for sticking with me, and with the show…see you cats next week!

To get the funniest quotes from TVgasm recaps as they’re posted, follow us on Twitter or like our Facebook page! You can post your favorite lines right back at us. Thanks for being here!