A distraught young Asian man hurries down a bustling street in Boston's Chinatown, looking panicky and in pain. It's not raining, but his hair and clothes are wet. He asks a woman in Cantonese for directions to Ping-on Street. She seems a little taken aback by his disheveled appearance, but she points him in the right direction. He rings a doorbell and is then buzzed into a building, where he's met by a calm, kindly middle-aged Asian man, who ushers him into his living room and asks him if any of the others made it. The young man tells him they're all dead. The older man (we won't find out until much later that his name is Ming Che, but I'm saving us a few steps and calling him that from here on out) invites him to stay with him. He leads him into what looks like a warehouse filled with cots.
When the young man complains of stomach pains, Che instructs him to lie down on a cot. The young man begs for help and asks what's happening to him, then starts to scream in pain. Che puts on rubber gloves, picks up a pair of shears, and cuts off the man's shirt. The man's chest starts to bulge, like something is threatening to burst out of his stomach, Aliens-style. Long, thin tentacles emerge from his mouth. I'm pretty sure I saw an anime version of this, only it centered around pretty young girls in school uniforms.
Dorchester Bay Inlet: Peter drives up in the station wagon, sans Walter, and meets up with Olivia. Walter arrives immediately thereafter in a taxi. When Olivia asks why the Bishops are traveling separately these days, Peter rolls his eyes and tells her Walter is practicing self-actualization in an attempt to be more independent. Walter stiffly accuses Peter of following him, while Peter calmly argues that they were, in fact, headed to the same location.
They join Broyles (and a bunch of soggy corpses) by the waterfront, who gives them the rundown on their newest crisis: A merchant ship registered in Hong Kong ran aground and caught fire four hours ago. The passengers tried to swim to shore in the freezing water. They've found 27 bodies thus far. At first, the deaths were attributed to hypothermia, and then they noticed the GIGANTIC MULTI-TENTACLED CREATURES bursting out of their mouths and scrapped the "well, it's really cold out here" theory.
Walter crouches next to one of the victims and examines the tentacles. He notes that the creature seems similar to, though much larger than, a parasite found in livestock. He grabs the tentacles and yanks the creature out of the victim's blood-smeared mouth. The creature has a sleek, narrow body maybe a meter long with another foot or two of tentacles at the end. Walter hands the creature off to Peter, who accepts it with great reluctance.
An agent on the scene shouts that one of the victims is still breathing. Peter helps drag a young Asian woman out of the shallow water. Walter crouches next to her and insists they get her to the hospital immediately, before the creature inside her emerges.
Back at the warehouse, Che places a living tentacled creature into a bucket of water. It shrieks and squirms. The cots, which were empty in the first scene, now hold several bloody-mouthed corpses.
At the sound of a door buzzer, Che leaves the warehouse and enters his connecting living quarters. He ushers in another young Asian man who, like his first visitor, appears sick and soaked and miserable. Che wraps him in a blanket and speaks to him gently in Cantonese, urging him to come inside before he gets sick. The new arrival says there was a boat accident. He asks if any of the others came. Che benevolently assures him, "No, you're the first."
At the hospital, Peter and Olivia talk to Tao Chen, a fine-boned, floppy-haired representative from the Chinese consulate, who tells them the woman they pulled from the water, Mai Lin, is now awake. She's suffering from dehydration, but she didn't have one of the worms inside her.
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Comments (1)
amen! all i could think during this episode was please oh please let Noble win an Emmy or 5. What an amazing actor...i cried right along with him!
1 of 1 | Posted by shelldw24 | Posted on December 11, 2009 3:52 PM