Believe is back after a multi-week absence and cancellation notice, but damn it, we’ve been with this continuing train wreck since the beginning and we’ll stick with it to the bitter end. (Hey, the finale is only two weeks away; it’s not like we’re heroes or anything).
Still: Collapse has this sense of impending doom despite it being structured pretty much like every other post-pilot episode. Most of that may be coming from our own meta-knowledge of the show’s fate, or from the writers/producers who had to be seeing the celestial handwriting on the sky by the time they filmed this episode.
We start with one of Bo’s patented precognitive dreams, this one in a subway station (again with this program’s unnatural love of public transportation!) and featuring a dark-haired teenage girl we don’t recognize, the female FBI agent Elizabeth Ferrell that we’ve barely seen in weeks, and Tate himself turning to smoke. Bo awakens more grim than usual and doesn’t tell Tate directly about his impending smokification, but wow, where’s that eternally sunny smile?
Meanwhile, Miss Channing is writhing on a cot with an increasingly septic gunshot wound to the belly, and rather than take her to a hospital or even try to call in a sympathetic doctor, Winter decides to take out the bullet himself. ..even though he admits he’s a Ph.D., not an MD. (No problem. As we all know, once you get the bullet out, you really don’t have to worry about things like infection, organ damage, or blood loss. She’ll be just fine.) How many more hints do we need to figure out that Winter’s just as much a cold-blooded sociopathic manipulator as Roman Skouras? He’s willing to risk the death of his last true loyal follower in a filthy hovel rather than just dump her off at a hospital and take his chances with Bo. Jerk.
Bo’s off to the 30th Street subway station to help Agent Farrell…and the dark-haired teenage girl of Bo’s dreams turns out to be Ferrell’s daughter, Sasha. They’re waiting for a subway and bickering (wow, they sound just like Tate and Bo!) when Bo and Tate get off the subway and an astonished Ferrell draws down on the most obvious fugitive in America. Only then does Bo get the full vibe: it’s not about Tate or Farrell or Sasha…there’s a bomb in a duffel bag not ten feet away. RUN!!
You know, we’ve talked from the very beginning about the painfully weak-ass plotting on this show, so rife with convenient coincidences and carefully timed, completely illogical reveals that they should actually have called the show It Just Happened. And here we are again: Ferrell and Sasha just happened to be waiting at a subway stop where a bomb has been planted, completely unrelated (as far as we know) to Bo or Orchestra or anything else. (And that’s not just a suspicion: there is no connection, stated or implied, even at the end of the episode.) What, there wasn’t enough intrigue and conspiracy already? You had to go all random? AGAIN? And if we have to listen to Winter pontificate one more time about how “special” that poor little girl is, we’re gonna spit. In unison.
We awaken in the dark, in rubble. Tate’s alive, remarkably unsmoked. Bo’s alive and relatively unhurt. Ferrell’s okay, too. Only daughter Sasha, the designated red shirt for this episode, is seriously injure. And they’re trapped underground, all four of ‘em.
Back at Orchestra, Skouras is out of custody despite shooting Channing in cold blood in front of half a dozen law enforcement personnel. “I have friends in high places, “he says. Yeah. That works. He bickers with Zoe, his turncoat assistant, then goes to see Dani, the Anti-Bo. Dani actually looks a little like Jennifer Jason Leigh, and she’s going all Single White Female on Skouras, threatened by even the memory of Bo. Roman makes the fundamental mistake of lying to a telepath. “No,” he says, “I care nothing for this ‘Bo’ child. Not any longer.” How long does he think that’s gonna last?
Ah! We see that Channing, though weak, has recovered because of Winter! She IS just fine.
Back underground, it turns out Agent Ferrell is a doctor at least as much as Winter is (Quanitco training, you know), and she instantly diagnoses her daughter as having a collapsed lung. She performs the classic TV surgerical procedure the pen-case-tracheotomy (except in her lower back), though we don’t actually get to see it. Too dark. This is only the first of many key scenes that happen offstage. In this case, the reason is probably just financial: it’s filmed in near total darkness, so they don’t even have to try and be convincing.
Surprise! Tate’s phone just happens to work through tons of rubble…and Milton’s calling! What a card that man is. He has an absolutely ridiculous, non-urgent chat over the phone with four people trapped underground, then calls Channing and declares for the 10,000th time that he’s totally dedicated to “keeping Bo safe.” And yet he hasn’t even talked to the emergency workers about the four people trapped underground and how he can communicate with them, even though he’s standing directly in front of a fire truck, and even though there’s been no evidence that the first responders are even aware they exist. Yeah, he’s gonna keep Bo real safe.
Oh, never mind. The trapped ones found a conveniently large storm drain with an easily removable grate that just happened to be hidden until a second, harmless cave-in revealed it at exactly the right moment. How…fortuitous. Now they can save themselves! Tate even calls back Winter to tell him (but at no point even tries to call 911? With a critically wounded girl right in front of him? Jeez.)
They get to a vertical manhole, but it has a grate (and Bo, for the first time, tries to use her psychokinesis, but of course it doesn’t work. If it did, this would be a very short episode. It would have been even shorter if she’s tried to use it back when they thought they were actually trapped. But nooo… instead she makes the dust motes glow so they can see just how much trouble they’re in. Ooh, it’s magical! And pointless!)
Of course Winter knows exactly where they are. (How? And if it’s just a few hundred yards to the exit, as he says, why not just walk to where they are and open the frigging grate?). Nope, they still have ten minutes to fill: tell them they have to go to another opening a hundred yards away…and oh, they’ll have to jump over unmarked vertical drop-shafts along the way.
Not that we get to see that. We’re going back to Orchestra, to discover that another key scene – Dani telling Skouras about his assistant’s betrayal – already happened off-screen. We just get to see Roman’s cold-blooded reaction to the revelation. Which is so much…better?
Oh, and never mind all that crap about drop shafts and stuff: they get to the next grate without any help (or coverage), and even get the injured girl to the street, all off-camera. And once above ground, the semi-conscious Sasha just happens to spot the bomber in the red jacket, whom she just happens to recognize even though no on else does.
Just happens.
Okay – more chasing! Tate and Ferrell go after Red jacket the Bomber (Why Tate, exactly? Why should he care? Why not just take Bo and get the hell outta Dodge, or at least 30th Street? We dunno.) Tate and Ferrell pause long enough to bicker, then continue to chase Red Jacket into a conveniently deserted multi-story building under construction. Red Jacket fights Ferrell, who may have learned field medicine at Quanitco but apparently didn’t learn self-defense there. Tate saves her, with his usual really inept, grope-y hand-to-hand combat skills (see earlier recaps; this guy is the worse fighter on TV) but somehow beats the guy, immediately after which, of course, Ferrell draws on him…for a second.
One last commercial, and we pause to point out two things: between Winter’s endless succession of crappy ‘safe houses’ and HQ’s and just about every other location, you’d think every city of the Northeast is made up of building under construction or abandoned, separated only by public transit stations. VERY strange vision of the U.S. And the other thing: the writers don’t even try to explain why Bo, who has lifted cars into the air and blown out stained glass windows from across a crowded room in earlier adventures, doesn’t even try to shift the rubble, even when it threatens to collapse and crush them. It’s all covered, apparently, by Winter’s statement “Sometimes you can, and sometimes you can’t. There will always be mysteries.”) Right. So why, why bother trying to make sense?
Skouras lectures Zoe the traitor a little – apparently for our benefit alone, ‘cause he’s already decided to to have Anti-Bo Dani wipe her mind. But we cut away before the real Wipealooza.
And of course Ferrell lets Tate go. Off-camera. Next time we see either rof them, they’re separated by an unknown amount of time and distance. Wow, that’s like three major scenes that happened off-camera this time: Sasha’s field surgery, Bo-Tate-Ferrell-Channing’s harrowing escape from the sewers and climb to the surface with a semi-comatose girl, Dani’s devastating revelation of Zoe’s betrayal to Skouras, and Dani’s subsequent mind-scrub of Zoe (assuming she did it). Not to mention the dramatic moment when Ferrell decides not to take Tate into custody, though she’s got him dead to rights. Apparently none of these crucial moments are important enough to actually film.
But at the end even the writers must know this particular episode was as riddled with discontinuities as Swiss cheese, because they fill the last two minutes with a final bedtime scene where Bo reminds us that her powers – including precognition – are entirely inconsistent, she can’t turn them on and off, and she doesn’t know how they work. So don’t complain. Everything will be fine because…you know. Bo.
