Intruders - S1E1 - She Was Provisional
I’m not sure what the hell is going on in this show, but I like it.
It opens in Barstow, California in 1990. A young girl named Donna is celebrating her birthday with a group of friends. Later that night, she climbs into bed alone and stares at pictures of two boys in a yearbook: Gary Fischer and Jack Whelan. Then she falls asleep. She’s awakened by two men Frank and Richard Shepard (Robert Forster and James Fain) who tell her that they’re there to give her a secret just like she asked them to many years ago. They show her one of those plastic discs you used to put in the middle of the record player (you young folk have no idea what I’m talking about, I’m sure). This signals some sort of trance and she spends the rest of the night mumbling and rolling around on the floor as the two men watch. In the morning, she’s lying on the grass in the fetal position. She goes into the house, runs a bath, writes a letter addressed to Gary and then slits her wrists in the tub.
Present Day; Seattle - Richard Shepard arrives at the home of the Andersons. He flashes an FBI badge and the wife lets him in. He starts asking about the whereabouts of her husband, Bill, but she swears she doesn’t know where he is. He kills her and the teenage son who’d already called 911.
In a town in Washington, ex-cop/current author Jack Whelan is celebrating his wife Amy’s (Mira Sorvino) birthday. Amy is a weirdo. Jack catches her dancing alone to jazz, music that she hates. She seems really pissed that he caught her and tries to cover. After dinner, they have sex on the kitchen counter which isn’t at all sanitary. The next morning she goes out of town on business. Jack gets a visit from a fellow ex-cop, now lawyer, Gary Fischer. Gary doesn’t want to talk in Jack’s house so they go for a walk in the woods. There, Gary tells Jack about the murder of the Anderson mother and son and asks for his assistance in looking into it.
In Finley Beach, Oregon, Madison is celebrating her 9th birthday with her mom who takes a phone call before Madison can blow out the candle on her cake. She suddenly rushes out as her mother calls after her to stay away from the water. As Madison stares out into the ocean, Richard appears and holds up a white seashell. She stares at it and watches as she places it on the ground and walks away. Later that night she is mumbling in her sleep. The next day, Richard approaches Madison on the beach again and this time he hands her a black card with a gold 9 on it. She’s afraid of him. When he says, “Nine years goes fast, doesn’t it, Marcus?” and pulls a gun on her, she insists that she’s not Marcus and begs for her life. It works because he lets her run home.
Meanwhile, back in Washington, Amy is missing, probably on purpose. A cabbie calls Jack to say that he found her phone in his taxi and when Jack can’t reach Amy at the hotel, he asks the stranger to leave the phone at the hotel. Jack tries the hotel again, this time calling the front desk, but they have no record of Amy checking in or ever staying there. When Jack goes through Amy’s calendar on the computer, he notices that after her birthday there is nothing scheduled for after her Seattle trip.
Jack borrows a car and heads to Seattle. He retrieves Amy’s phone from the hotel and notices some weird text conversations between Amy and an unknown caller. One of the text messages reads, “We’ll have to wait until he’s dead.” Oh, Jack. That doesn’t look good at all! At a bar, Jack finally gets up the courage to call the number and is greeting by jazz music.
Madison is still having disturbing dreams. She wakes up in the middle of the night and stares at the card Richard gave her and suddenly she’s a different person. She stares at her reflection in the mirror, happy with what she sees. Madison is preparing to take a bath and is writing a note on the bathroom sink when her cat enters the room. She pets him, but then suddenly drowns him in the tub. When she’s done, she freaks out and cries.
What.the.fuck?
In Reno, Nevada Richard is tracking down a podcaster who talks of conspiracy theories and things that can inhabit the bodies of living people. He had a connection to Bill Anderson, the man whose family Richard killed. Bill told him about these frequencies that are so low, people can’t hear them. If you could hear them, you’d learn the secret of never dying. Richard goes along with this like he’s a conspiracy nut too, but later Richard shows up at the man’s house and tells him his theories are right just before he blows the guy’s head off.
As Richard is getting into his car he gets a call from Madison who is all packed up and ready to leave home in the dead of night. She asks Richard if he knows who it is and then tells him, “What goes around comes around.”
I’m guessing that’s Marcus.
Questions:
- Why did Donna stare at photos of Gary and Jack 24 years ago?
- What’s with the birthdays? Donna, Madison, and Amy all celebrated one before acting strange.
- Is the jazz music a trigger of some sort?
- It seems as though something/someone is possessing the Donna, Madison, and Amy, but what?
- Why didn’t Richard kill Madison?
- What happened to Frank? And does he have the same last name as Richard because they were actually related or because they have the same job?
