Second Chance 1.09 “When You Have to Go There, They Have to Take You In”

Well, I wanted monsters and we finally got one. Or maybe three. Last week’s femme fatale was a step in the right direction, but Joan Solodar was just mundane human evil ultimately. Albert Lin is something else, a disfigured giant so strong that no survivors of his murder sprees are believed during their interviews. Nobody could be that huge, strong and fast, especially not an old man like Albert Lin. And strong enough to climb sheer walls and kill people with his bare hands? The murders are so violent that authorities just assume weapons must have been used.

Hmm, who do we know that is strong enough to kill with his bare hands, and who is much older than he appears? When forensics finds transgenic blood at the scene, we realize that Lin is like Pritchard, a dead person revived by Otto and Mary. Or maybe just Otto. Jimmy doesn’t figure out till he gets beat up by Lin in an old amusement park (it always pays off to visit an abandoned amusement park in shows like this), and he realizes only someone superhuman could hand him his ass these days.

We’ve had other clues, though, because we’ve been watching Alexa. She goes home to a much older man who calls her his wife, and now we know that she too is an experiment that failed. Seeing her crawl into her own private tank only underscores this eerie truth about a background character played usually for laughs. Otto brought her back, and discarded her after her blood didn’t help Mary. Or gave her a role in Mary’s life without telling her the truth, at any rate.

So that’s three Frankensteins, one of them on a violent rampage to find his former homes. None of them are welcome refuges anymore, and Lin is clearly a much cruder and less successful counterpart to Jimmy.

Many threads are continuing and bubbling around this week, including Jimmy’s contacts in the Chinese community, Gracie’s rebellions against her father, and Mary’s growing love for the man who saved her life. Surveillance footage of her teaching Jimmy the twins’ private language enrages Otto, so maybe he’s the worst monster of all as he trashes his office in a tantrum.

But, no, I think it really might be Conrad Graff, who is managing Alexa, detaining Lin, and playing Otto all in a pitch to get his genius and inventions away from Mary and allied with him. He’s a corporate snake striking while the Lookingglass folks are in disarray, and apparently murders and psychological health mean little to him. He knows how to play Otto, but not how to help him.

There’s a very strong scene, where Mary gives the Chinatown community Lookingglass devices and asks all his old acquaintances to record verbal histories of their friend Albert simultaneously, so computer avatar Arthur can process all the data into some answers they need. The ubiquitous surveillance and super-data parsing abilities of Lookingglass is one of the most exciting and disturbing themes of this show, which deepens its mysteries this week.