The Crossing Season 1 Episode 8: The Long Morrow Recap

In episode 8 of The Crossing, we finally get official confirmation that Emma was fridged way back in episode 4. No one onscreen cares much about her death, but I’m pretty pissed off about it. Lindauer brings Sophie back in from the cold to help him break Reese, with the promise that she can continue her research. Naomi and Rebecca get serious about forming a cult, while Caleb tries to stay grounded amidst the madness surrounding him. Does that ever work? Paul, who is an innocent Hufflepuff, gets framed for murder, but believes everything his evil wife Greta tells him. I wonder what caused his brain damage.

And, oh look, now that we’ve for sure gotten rid of the woman who was in charge of the refugee camp, a new, powerless, nameless female character is introduced and held prisoner by Jude and Nestor, for no reason, in another male abuse of power.

Does everyone feel more comfortable, now that the powerful women are either evil or dying, and the rest are powerless and also probably either evil, crazy or stupid? Comfortable isn’t the word I’d use for my state of mind, but I’m apparently hard to please, what with expecting women to be treated like equal human beings and all.

The Long Morrow starts by giving us an update on Reese. She’s being held hostage by Lindauer and his henchmen in a well equipped and organized lab. The doctor in charge of Reese says that they can’t wake her. Reese is bound to a gurney and in a self-induced twilight state where she appears unconscious but can still hear some of the noises from the outside environment. She dreams of a combination of her work as an Apex enforcer and snippets of her history in the present day.

Jude and the mayor hold a town meeting to share information with residents. People are upset that US citizens are being held against their will just outside of town. Jude and the mayor try to defuse the situation, but Gabe pulls out the photos Hannah sent him as proof that the rumors are true. Gabe helps build the crowd up into a frenzy. They decide to start a protest for reals.

As the crowd files out, an amnesiac Dr Hahn  Brooke Smith watches from the sidelines.

Paul asks Agent Roy if he knows when Emma will be back. As far as Roy knows, Emma is still sick. They talk about love and marriage. Paul tells Roy that he’ll know when he finds “the one,” and when he does, he shouldn’t hesitate to act. He’ll want to have as much time with her as possible to look back on.

Rebecca is angsting about Leah having run off with her mother. Caleb tries to comfort her, but Rebecca won’t have it. She could never trust an Apex under any circumstances. Instead, she brings up the fact that she and Caleb left their enslaved daughter behind to come to the 21st century. She asks Caleb how he can let it go like it means nothing. He says that isn’t what he’s done, but he also knows that they didn’t have a choice about leaving their daughter. Rebecca still doesn’t understand. She can’t let the loss of their daughter go.

Did Caleb force Rebecca into the time machine, or lie to her about it? That doesn’t seem like his style. I worry about Rebecca’s mental stability.

Rebecca goes to Naomi’s cabin to talk to her about their daughter, Rachel, since both were taken by Apex. Naomi explains that the Apex were taking children who were neurodiverse:

Naomi: She was taken because she was neurodiverse, a status dismissed in this era with terms like autism. A condition Apex engineered out of their own germ line in a quest for the perfect genome. But they came to realize that these afflictions sometimes offered savant abilities not even they could match. Math, language, pattern recognition. Apex found these abilities useful…Apex knew we functioned better in groups, so I can tell you that Rachel was never alone.

The doctor explains to Greta and Lindauer that Reese’s cells self-destruct as soon as they’re harvested, so he’s been unable to get any viable DNA to study. Greta suggests bringing Leah in to talk to Reese, but Lindauer doesn’t want a Mantle’s sufferer anywhere near anything. He worries that any form of stress could cause Leah to have another relapse.

Lindauer visits Sophie at the hospital to offer threats and insincere condolences. When that’s over, he offers to let her resume her research on Reese’s immune properties if she’ll get them a viable DNA sample. Sophie responds with her dark sense of humor, but is tempted to take him up on the research offer, since it offers her a chance to cure her fatal condition.

Jude leaves Nestor in charge of managing the actual protest while he goes up to the camp to warn Bryce that there are protesters headed toward the camp. There are definitely no phones or radios that he could have used to warn Bryce. 😜

Gabe calls Marshall and urges him to join the protest, but Marshall doesn’t want anything to do with a girl who’s potentially a psycho stalker, no matter how cute she is. Gabe points out that not everything is about Marshall, but Marshall doesn’t believe him.

Agent Roy tries a little homespun interrogation methodology on Hannah. I think we can all now agree that we’re firmly on Team Roy, if only for the pie. He wants to know the truth about Hannah, starting with the locket. She tells him about the future and the story of the locket. They’re interrupted when a little boy needs to show them something he’s found in the woods.

Naomi tells Rebecca that her specialty is history. The Apex writing on her wall is all history she learned in the future. 100% of past empires eventually fell. The Apex wanted to last forever, so they had Naomi memorize historical data and analyze it for patterns.

When Naomi arrived in the present, she died in the water, but then she rose again. She was a slave in the future, but in the present, she’s a prophet. She has things to do here, so she needs to leave the camp. She needs people with her, people like Rebecca. Can she trust Rebecca?

As soon as Jude arrives at the camp, Bryce wants to show him something in the woods. It’s so perfectly timed, it’s almost like it was planned. Jude checks in with Nestor before he heads out. The protest is getting out of control.

The little boy found Emma’s body. Her car was found yesterday near the back entrance. The gun that she was shot with is missing. No one heard the shot. Jude finds that strange.

Sophie is shocked to find Reese strapped down and in a glorified cage. She agrees to try to wake Reese and get what Lindauer needs.

The refugees are rounded up and placed in the barn while the agents search their cabins. Not surprisingly, they find the murder weapon planted in Paul’s locker. Greta wasn’t going to leave Paul in the camp to talk about his missing wife and flash around a drawing that looks like her.

Naomi uses the time in the barn to recruit as many new followers as possible.

Caleb defends Paul, but the goon agents who are usually at the gate threaten him. Agent Roy tells Jude that Paul was just asking about Emma that morning, so it doesn’t make sense for him to be the murderer. A lightbulb goes on over Jude’s head. He introduces himself to Paul, tells Paul he believes Paul is innocent, and gives Paul one of his cards.

Nestor instructs the protesters to clear out, since the investigation into Emma’s death will require more vehicles using the road. If they don’t move, he’ll arrest them.

Bryce informs Lindauer that Jude has seen the body and the suspect. Lindauer says that Jude should be thrown off the property now, and kept away from any further investigations. Bryce questions whether they should be more open with local law enforcement, and Lindauer gets angry with him.

Reese wakes up for Sophie and allows her to take useful samples. She discourages Sophie’s work at the same time. Sophie tells Reese that she can create a cellular upgrade for herself and other humans with Reese’s DNA. Even if she can’t upgrade completely, she believes she can transfer specific features. Reese tries to make Sophie understand that only 7% of the human population has the gene that makes Apex possible. Anyone who doesn’t have it will be killed by Reese’s DNA and it’s derivatives.

Sophie misunderstands Reese’s motives and promises that she’ll come back for her, then leaves the lab.

Greta visits Paul in the holding room where he’s being kept. She explains to him that even though for him they’ve only been separated for 2 months, for her it’s been 10 years. She plays the loving, devoted wife with him, who only left because she had to, for the greater good. But now she knows her mission has failed, and she needs his help with her new mission.

Nestor has Dr Hahn in a holding cell, but she refuses to tell him her name, show ID, or call a friend, so he won’t let her go. He tells Jude that he thinks she’s homeless.

Gabe tells Marshall about Emma’s body. Marshall assumes that one of the refugees killed her and they should be locked up. Agent Roy knocks on Marshall’s door and asks him if he believes in destiny. Marshall says that Roy isn’t his type  “No.” Roy tells Marshall that maybe he should start, and gives him Hannah’s locket.

Lindauer and friends have attached Reese to a Clockwork Orange style machine that flashes lights in her eyeballs continuously so that she can’t go into another fugue state. It’s not an inhumane torture device at all. Still having a hard time believing that Apex were the monsters in the original scenario, rather than just defending themselves.

Sophie asks Lindauer if he intends to keep his promise to let her continue her research. He says yes, but he needs to search her bag, since all research needs to stay at the lab. Sophie allows it. Once she leaves and is safely in her car, she unscrews the handle of her cane, and pulls out a vial of Reese’s blood. Well-played, Sophie.

While he was in the woods with Bryce, Jude secretly grabbed the key fob to Emma’s rental car from her body and sent the data he downloaded from it to Martin to be analyzed and decrypted. Martin sends back a map marked with her travels during the days before she died.

Rebecca waits until she’s sure that Caleb is sound asleep, then sneaks over to Naomi’s cabin. Several other people are already there.

Paul reads a message to a video camera that claims the refugees were all from a homegrown death cult. They were trying to find death that night in the water, and the ones who didn’t find it will keep trying.

Greta records the message and explains to Paul that people in this time wouldn’t understand time travel. Some people still don’t believe in science and are superstitious, so the refugees would be feared by them, and others would turn them into a commodity.

Paul doesn’t ask her why she had him say the survivors would keep trying to die. They spend a romantic evening together, and she tells him the future is in their hands. Later, she plays the recording for Lindauer. He questions whether mass murder is necessary, and she says it is. The recording will explain the apparent mass suicide that’s going to occur at the refugee camp.

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RIP, Emma Ren. I’d really hoped to get to know you better. Hopefully Sandrine Holt will find a better job on a cable or streaming network, in a giant, long lasting franchise that doesn’t involve zombies. Maybe The Expanse or Star Trek Discovery are hiring.

This show has a bad habit of throwing in random plot devices and subplots, then dropping them again like they never existed. Remember when Jude was a pill addict? And had a son? Remember when Leah and Mantle’s Disease mattered? How about the Alpha Zulu thing? Remember when Luke and Thomas were threats to the well being of the characters we care about? Apparently one word and a broken leg from Caleb makes them disappear out of existence, instead of turning them vengeful and secretive.

Didn’t Martin tell Jude he never wanted to hear from him again the last time they saw each other?

Losing Leah to an Apex has triggered Rebecca’s trauma over losing Rachel. I suspect that it’s never far below the surface, given how quickly she latched onto Leah as a replacement child. Naomi played on Rebecca’s maternal instincts in order to recruit her to the cult. Is Naomi looking for a replacement mother, too?

Of the three female advertised series stars, one is dead (Emma), another (Sophie) is dying, and the third (Reese) is strapped to a torture table waiting to be murdered as soon as her enemies have gotten what they want from her. In case you’re keeping track, that’s two women of color and a disabled woman who have been murdered, used, abused and otherwise rendered powerless on this show. Reese’s daughter, Leah, is currently MIA.

But it’s okay, right, because they keep adding new disposable female characters all the time. A few are even women of color. Naomi the slave, for example. Some even have names. Two, the evil Greta Pryor and the bland Port Canaan mayor, seem to hold positions with some amount of influence, similar to what Agent Ren and Dr Forbin had. The rest are refugees or powerless in other ways. Or men. Emma was replaced by her male assistant, Bryce Foster. None of the individual women get much screen time.

This show hasn’t lived up to its potential as a female friendly show, to say the least.

With Emma gone and Sophie and Reese’s screentime drastically reduced, Rebecca’s role has grown in the last few episodes, as have Naomi and Greta’s. The show must have decided to make a drastic change in direction halfway through the season, and rotated female characters to help accomplish that change.

The roster of male characters has remained intact since Reese killed off Beaumont (he went from unnamed recurring character to named occasionally recurring character) and the strike teams who were trying to kill her, Caleb scared Hannah’s stalker, Luke, into occasionally recurring status instead of recurring status, and Marshall acquired his new friend, Gabe.

Other than Beaumont, the men don’t meet with the physically cataclysmic threats that the women do. The closest would be Thomas’ broken leg, which was done as punishment for his sins and in a ritualistic way. Even Marshall’s mother died, while he and his father walked away from the car accident that killed her.

In The world of The Crossing, women are disposable, easily replaceable, and subject to the violent whims of those around them. Men are in control of their environments and make decisions for themselves and the women around them. They are generally treated with respect and rarely encounter violence, usually only if they’ve crossed some kind of line.

As an example, when Emma suspected the truth about the 1st migration and the refugees, she was murdered. When Jude suspected, Lindauer created an elaborate plot to throw him off the trail. Jude was not only left alive, but physically unharmed. No double standard there. 😤😤😤😡😡😡

 

Images courtesy of ABC.