The hunt for a mass murderer leads Cade to a town where the townsfolk have found an old way of dealing with non-stop bad weather.
Additional Credits
Zachary Ansley-- Fergus
Coco Yares -- Glynis MacDougal
Kevin McNulty -- Ryan MacDougal
Don Thompson -- Sheriff O'Connor
Rick Burgess-- Glenn Harris
written by Joseph Inglese
directed by Randy Cheveldave
Nostradamus Says
"The slayer flees to the shadow of Olympus,
Where a mother's tears wash away ties to Rome.
Fear extracts vain sacrifice,
Until the raging pyre of the deluge is quenched."
(quatrain 64, century 8)
What Happened
It is a rainy night in Athlone, a small town east of Olympia, WA. In the local lockup, prisoner Glenn Harris stirs, awakens, and scratches a mark into a wall. He gets up to ask for a blanket, and is surprised to see that the door to his cell is open.
Harris quickly seizes the opportunity to escape, only to be stopped on the street by Sheriff O'Connor, who shoots at him and drives him into the forest.
A mob of masked figures is waiting there for Harris. They overpower him, march him up a plank into some kind of structure built over the makings of a bonfire, and start begging for forgiveness from the gods.
Then they light the fire. As Harris starts screaming, the camera pulls back to reveal that he is imprisoned in a giant, burning wicker man…. (more detailed spoilers
: "Mistletoe, idols, stone circle, a crispy critter in the coals…. Based on the facts, I'd say you've stepped right into Druid Central."
Analysis
Constant, pouring rain is a wonderful image for a story, especially in a visual format like television or film. "Blade Runner" used rain brilliantly to set its film noir mood -- you can't imagine the final chase through the Bradbury Building without remembering the rain running down the walls, dripping off Harrison Ford's face.
Unfortunately, the mood set in "Deluge" never really goes anywhere, and it's probably not the right mood for a horror story anyway -- at least one of the visceral type First Wave tries to tell.
Late in the show, Eddie and
put their fingers on the mood that rain creates -- it's dark, depressing, something that sends suicide rates spiraling. Unfortunately, when it goes on too long, it can become more dreary than horrific, and while continual rain is a potentially useful weapon for the Gua, it's not a very exciting one for the viewer unless Cade and company get caught in a flood.
Who really wants to sit through an hour-long drama about aliens who depress you to death?
The plot isn't too engaging, either. "Deluge" gets off to a good start with its fiery human sacrifice, but once we learn that Glenn Harris was a mass murderer, it's hard to feel bad for him. Even Cade doesn't really manage it, figuring that the Gua have merely saved the citizens of Washington the trouble of electrocuting him.
Perhaps we're meant to be horrified by the impending sacrifice of Glynis. Unfortunately, she's a bit too resigned to the idea -- no anger, no denial, just a vague reluctance. If she doesn't care that she's going to die a horrible death, why should we?
That leaves us with a fairly obvious mystery, a gratuitous fistfight with Kieran, and a climax in which only Cade's life is at stake. Since Cade's the star of the show, and the show is set to run two more years, it's fairly obvious he's going to survive. So again, nothing is at stake.
The townspeople aren't particularly likable, and they don't even learn anything in the end. Sure, the sun's out again -- too bad we hear about it during an interior scene -- and Cade has a nice meditation on how fear creates ritual, but did we have to wade through a soggy hour for that?
Dangling Plot Threads
Sometimes the Gua seem strangely eager to have their plans foiled. Why does Fergus come to Cade's hotel room and drop vital clues in his lap? He says Kieran told him to, but the conversation isn't geared toward setting Cade up to be ambushed. What's up with Fergus?
Fergus also says he's been in town for one year, but it's been raining for two years. Is Fergus lying? Did he intend to frame Kieran from the start? But why give away an entire alien operation just to set up a rival?
There's an extra quote from Nostradamus hidden in this episode. As Cade and Eddie discuss the second half of this week's quatrain, you can see the following verse -- presumably quatrain 65, century 8 -- on Eddie's computer screen:
"The great ruin of the sacred things is not far off.
Provence, Naples, Sicily, Sez and Ponce,
In Germany toward the Rhine and Cologne,
They shall be vexed to death by those of Mogundia."
Is this a reference to an upcoming episode? Or a just a bit of trivia for obsessed reviewers with a penchant for freeze-framing?
Tune in Next Week
Cade poses as a record company executive to investigate a rock band whose music incites uncontrollable violence in "
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