The Rain Season 2 Episode 4: Save Yourself Recap

Episode 4 of The Rain sends the characters off on another road trip, this time to Bakken, a Danish amusement park. But, this is the minipocalypse, so it’s not all fun and games. Klaus escapes from episode 2 and wants his $2 revenge for what happened to Johanne. Rasmus manages to frost the forest with black viral goo, like the angel of death that he is. And Sarah has plans for a perfect day out, with a very specific ending.

Let it rain.

Recap

The episode picks up where it left off, with Sarah and Rasmus following a dry creek bed away from the base. Sarah tells Rasmus that they’re headed to Bakken, the theme park,  because Jakob always promised he’d take her there when she got better.

Rasmus thinks her dreams aren’t cool enough, because they’re too grounded in reality. Sarah thinks it’s silly to dream about things that can’t come true.

They’ve both been shut ins for most of their lives, so any dream that involved leaving the house/bunker/base was unlikely to come true. They developed different strategies for dealing with that. Rasmus went with dreaming big dreams that probably wouldn’t come true even if he was out in the world, which gave him something to fantasize about and allowed him to avoid extra disappointment. Sarah went with practical, low key dreams that had a chance of coming true, which gave her something to look forward to and work toward.

Simone is about to leave the base to search for Rasmus and Sarah, when Martin informs her that he and Fie are joining her. Because he thinks Simone NEEDS him and can’t do this alone. Simone is pretty sure she can survive just fine without a superhero like him, and tells him so. Fie joins them and says that Sarah can’t walk very fast, so they should be able to catch up before long.

Martin is dealing with their fight by losing all of the character development he’s acquired since the pilot. Sadly, this has become a common plot device amongst TV writers this season. There must have been a TV writers’ seminar that suggested it as a great technique to try.

Rasmus leans his head against a tree and remembers the tragedy of the virus he carries inside him and what he believes is Simone’s betrayal. The negative emotions begin to activate the virus. Before any black smoke comes out, Sarah appears, having used a bathroom break to change into her party clothes. She’s now wearing a pink lacy dress and sweater. Rasmus is worried she’ll get cold, so he puts his jacket on her.

That’s not likely to cause any problems for the immunosuppressed girl at all, OMG.

Jean suggests he and Lea leave the base together after all, while most of the group is gone and can’t stop them. Lea is still very depressed and pondering the existential nature of group dynamics. Jean is a practical guy and doesn’t understand existentialism. Lea tells him she doesn’t know what to do, since it could be that every place and everyone is the same as this. She doesn’t know if they should stay, or if maybe they’re not supposed to be there anymore.

Patrick is still trapped behind the security door. He takes a crow bar and forces the door open enough so that he can roll under it before it closes again. He searches the former rebel prisoner’s body and finds a folder of memory chips, which he pockets.

Simone, Martin and Fie reach the spot where Sarah changed her clothes and Rasmus leaned on the tree. The black viral goo has grown on the tree and spread through the area in trails. Fie is dismayed that Sarah removed her suit, and picks it up. Simone leans in close to the tree to get a better look at the virus.

Martin puts his hand on her shoulder and tells her not to get so close. She jumps, gives him a dirty look, and pulls away.

I’m so glad they showed Simone reacting that way. He’s being all macho and treating her like a child who can’t control herself, instead of a competent adult. He wasn’t giving Fie any warnings or hovering over her. Later in the episode, he’ll pull a man away from the viral trail, and the man will pull a gun on him for daring to invade his space that way.

Women’s bodies deserve the same respect that men expect for their own.

Sten orders Kira to storm the base, capture Rasmus, and kill everyone else. She doesn’t look happy about it.

As they walk through a village, Rasmus tells Sarah that he’s still totally bewildered that Simone turned him in to Apollon. It doesn’t make sense. Sarah thinks sometimes Jakob wanted to get rid of her, too, because she’s such a burden. She notices Rasmus trying to control his emotions, and says that it must be hard, to always have to keep his temper under control.

I don’t think anyone’s ever looked at the virus from his point of view before.

(Chronic illnesses do tend to have some gifts along with the pain, even if it’s just that you spend more time thinking and become a more evolved person. The gifts don’t make the illness worth it, but people survive better when they make the best of things, one of the messages of this episode and what Sarah teaches Rasmus.)

To cheer them both up, she suggests they go in a makeup store and get dolled up so they’ll look hot at Bakken. Neither have bought makeup before.

Patrick finds a camera in one of the basement rooms, and plays back the videos from one of the memory cards. It shows Kira’s mother, a rebel, torturing captured Apollon employees. Then she fires the EMP gun at the prisoner, which pulls the nanites out of him, but leaves his body a bloody mess. She’s using the Apollon captives to test successive alterations on the gun.

Sarah gives Rasmus an extreme makeover. It’s a clown face.

He’s dreaming of finding someplace safe, where they can wait until everyone stops searching for them. He wants to create a plan for their future. Sarah wants to live for today, no plans.

They’ve switched roles. Now he wants to be practical and she wants to live freely and in the moment.

She wipes the clown face off, and tells him he’s handsome. They look at each other and have a moment that could have led to a kiss, but then they have to hide from Apollon soldiers outside the store.

They are an adorably cute couple when they are smiling and happy. That’s when their Romeo and Juliet story really grows roots.

The other three had to wait for the Apollon soldiers, too. Sarah and Rasmus run away from the store, while Simone, Fie and Martin find it. Since Romeo and Juliet are already gone, Martin goes to look out back for them, after having another run in with Simone.

Once he’s gone, Fie tries to talk to Simone about him, but she changes the subject. She tells Fie that she found the pregnancy test result, and figures the test isn’t Sarah’s or Lea’s. Simone assumes, correctly, that her pregnancy has added urgency to Fie’s desire to hand Rasmus over to Apollon. She tries to convince Fie that it’s still not the right thing to do.

They are making progress when Martin lurches back into the room. He’s being held at gunpoint by Klaus, Johanne’s husband from episode 2, part of the couple who wanted to turn Simone and Martin in to Apollon. He wants to know where Rasmus is.

Sarah and Rasmus are jogging through a grassy park. Sarah can’t stop coughing. They sit by a tree and Rasmus suggests they camp there overnight, then go to Bakken in the morning. Sarah tells him she’ll be fine, she’s just not used to running.

Rasmus tells her he can never touch her. He would kill her if he did. Sarah asks him why he’s saying that. He was just thinking about it. She doesn’t believe him, but he knows it’s true. She says he doesn’t even know if she wants him to touch her. She thinks it was a pretty creepy way to say it. They laugh.

Klaus, the surviving member of the other doomed couple, has tied up Martin, Simone and Fie. He’s monologuing about his great love for Johanne. He doesn’t care who else dies, now that he’s lost the love of his life. He fires a shot in their vicinity to prove it. He just wants to fulfill Johanne’s dying wish, to turn Rasmus in.

Martin volunteers to take him to Rasmus. They can follow the gooey black trail of death. Simone is against this plan, obviously. Klaus unties Martin and takes him away, leaving the two women tied up.

Rasmus and Sarah have found a house to camp in after all. Sarah is setting up an IV for herself. She teases Rasmus a bit, but he ends up scared and has to go outside. He realizes that the plants are all responding to him. They lean toward him, and he releases friendly smoke toward them.

Sarah comes outside to watch. She admires his power and the connection he has with other living things. He reminds her that he can’t control it, but she doesn’t care. He’s unique, and she wishes she was like him. He doesn’t have to be afraid and can do what he wants. For right now, Rasmus just wants to be with her. Sarah agrees that right now is all that counts.

Kira tells Sten that the base looks deserted and there’s some kind of trail leading away from it. He orders her to follow the trail and find Rasmus, but also to have the base searched anyway.

Simone practically panics with worry over Rasmus. She explains a little more about his life to Fie, and finally convinces her to help. Fie slides a piece of broken glass over to Simone for her to use to cut the rope she’s tied up with.

Sarah and Rasmus are on the move again, but Sarah has to make frequent stops because of her coughing fits. Rasmus super helpfully informs her that she’s not well. She brushes him off and tells him what she really wants is to get drunk, have all the kissing and sex, run as far as she wants, and not have to deal with her illness or talk about it anymore.

Since he can’t do anything to change her situation, she just wants him to leave the subject alone. But Rasmus is worried that she’ll run out of her IV bags or she’ll collapse and he won’t be able to help her, because he can’t touch her.

Sarah changes the subject by pointing out that they’re just outside of Bakken. She takes off running toward it.

Jean brings Lea into the greenhouse to show her the chapel he made for her. He wants it to be a place of peace for her amidst all of the chaos. Lea seems to like it. He’s painted a cross, flowers and rainbows on the wall and lit a grouping of candles, plus added a place for her to sit while she prays or meditates.

Jean suggests she uses the chapel to look for a new guiding star, since Simone didn’t work out. Lea sits down and looks around. She notices that the virus is attacking some of the plants, and is overwhelmed by sadness again. She tells Jean that staying there will kill them.

Apollon’s attack on the base begins. Lea and Jean run from the soldiers.

Rasmus and Sarah are surprised by how rundown Bakken has gotten. Sarah convinces Rasmus to climb to the top of the biggest roller coaster. He asks her, “Then what?” She replies, “Then, nothing?” That answer confuses him, but she tells him they should just get going. A moment later, Rasmus hears Simone calling him. Sarah tells him to ignore it. She’s determined to get to the top.

Simone walks through one of the streets of Bakken calling for Rasmus. Klaus comes up behind her and says that shouting was really stupid. She tries again to tell him that Apollon won’t be able to fix anything. He says that he’s going to kill Rasmus, not give him to Apollon.

Fie comes up behind Klaus and Martin, pointing her gun at Klaus. She tells him to put his gun down. With Klaus’s attention divided, Martin is able to grab Klaus’ gun and shoot him. Hopefully, he’s dead this time.

They resume their search for Rasmus and Sarah.

Back on the base, Lea and Jean run through the basement until they find Patrick in the control room, still watching the rebel’s videos. He has an idea for how they can escape. He leads them to the security door and has Jean help him lift it. Lea rolls under, then the guy argue over who’ll go through and who’ll be the hero and stay on the wrong side. Lea figures out what button to push so that the door opens automatically, and both are saved, just in time. The Apollon soldiers are coming down the hall.

Patrick has Lea push the alarm button that lets out deafening sirens. They are all in agony from it.

Sarah and Rasmus sit at the top of the rollercoaster and talk. Sarah asks Rasmus why he came with her. He stumbles around, then says he wants to be with her. Sarah wants him to kiss her, but he reminds her he can’t. She’ll die.

Sarah says that, no matter what, she’s not coming out of this alive. Due to her illness, she won’t survive out in the world. She wants to have a wonderfully normal day that ends with a kiss. Since she can’t have that, it’s time for option B.

She stands up, takes off Rasmus’ jacket, and climbs up to stand on the railing of the rollercoaster. She tells Rasmus he’s right. They’ll never be together and he’ll never be able to touch her.

Rasmus begs her to come down.

She leans forward and almost lets herself fall. Rasmus grabs her dress and stops her from falling, telling her she doesn’t have to settle for only one good day. He wants more good days with her.

Sarah sits back down. She tells him it will never really be good. Rasmus promises to try to get the virus out of him, so he can touch her. She says not to do it for her, but Rasmus doesn’t want superpowers if he can’t kiss her.

The kid has always been a romantic.

Simone, Fie and Martin find them in that moment and yell for them to come down. Sarah tells Rasmus, “The other days better be good.” Rasmus promises.

Just as all 5 are back together and start walking toward the base, Kira finds them. She wants Rasmus, but Simone and Martin are still arguing over whether to turn him over without a fight. Rasmus refuses to go and tells them to stop treating him like he’s not there.

Kira clutches Sarah’s hair and drags her away from the others while telling Rasmus he has no choice but to come with her. Rasmus’ eyes turn red and he tells Kira to go away, several times. He slowly walks toward her as she backs away with Sarah. The virus intensifies within him, until he sends it out in a cloud, which single mindedly moves toward Kira.

She lets Sarah go. Before Kira leaves, she asks if Rasmus knows what he can do.

The Apollon soldiers on the other side of the security door are all dead. Patrick says they had no choice, but Lea is upset the she helped kill people. She walks away from them. Patrick tells Jean that he has his hands full with Lea. Jean says he likes it, then follows her.

Lea has an opinion which differs from Patrick’s, so he decides she’s unreasonable. The thing is, Thomas, the Stranger from S1 who who was nice to them at times, was in the group that they just killed. They could have tried to isolate him and reason with him or have found a way to knock them out without killing them. They could have just negotiated with him from the other side of the door. Patrick’s way wasn’t necessarily the only way.

While they sit by the campfire that night, Fie tells Simone that she’ll help her cure Rasmus. She’s realized that Apollon isn’t the best choice.

Lea pours gasoline all over the virus-infected plants in the greenhouse, then lights them on fire. When Jean discovers her, she tells him that he was right, this could be a paradise, but they have to protect it. Everyone else wants to fight a war. But they don’t want that. They just want to make each other happy. They’ll rebuild whatever the fire burns.

Simone approaches Martin to talk about their relationship. He says he’s just trying to protect her. But she doesn’t want his protection, she wants respect. He says he does, but she explains all the ways he proves that he doesn’t believe in her abilities. She can’t continue their relationship like this.

Martin is shocked. He tries to order her not to break up with him. When that doesn’t work, he tells her she’s naive, proving her point. He takes his stuff and leaves their camp.

Simone is waiting for Rasmus when he wakes up in the morning. She tells him she wants to make sure he knows that she didn’t want to turn him over to Apollon. She’ll always help him, always. It’s the two of them, always.

Then she bursts into tears over Martin, and Rasmus puts a blanket around her so he can hug her through it.

Martin sits alone in the dining area at the base. Patrick find him and says there’s something he needs to see. He takes martin outside and shows him some of the rebel videos. They indicate that Apollon has a device that will remove the capsules. The videos stop when the rebels decide to go to Apollon to find their device. There’s no indication of whether they escaped the zone, were captured or killed. In the video, the rebel leader asks if the intel could lead to a trap, but she’s told there’s no chance of that.

Patrick and Martin decide to go out alone in search of the capsule removing device, and then leave the zone. They’re sick of dealing with everyone else. Patrick drops the camera on the ground, then they walk away. As they go, the camera snaps photos of them. Apollon is everywhere.

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Commentary

I love that twisted princess Sarah somehow has a pastel pink hazmat suit. Then she switches it out in order to wear a lace dress for her spiritual wedding and suicide. The lady’s got style.

“We Found Love in a Hopeless Place” should have played over this episode. So much doomed, hopeless love in doomed, hopeless places.

This episode shows the power of social connections and looking on the bright side of things. Several times, characters are saved from themselves by the people close to them. The people who isolate themselves, like Klaus and Patrick and hold grudges, tend to go overboard in their reactions. Fie has lost almost everyone, but the baby gives her a reason to keep moving forward and stay peaceful and reasonable. The virus forces Simone and Rasmus to take care of each other and overcome their differences.

Jean is determined to keep Lea afloat, but the hits keep coming. I think she’s the only one who understands the implications of the way the virus is spreading through the plant world. It spreads quickly and infects everything in its path. That means that the food supply will disappear before long and not just for humans. It also means that the virus will jump outside of the quarantine zone soon, and spread through the rest of the world. It’ll be the end of everything.

Just who is Kira? What did she mean when she asked if Rasmus knew what he could do? Since she has ties to both the rebels and Apollon, she must have a great deal of practical knowledge that could be very helpful to the gang. But it’s unclear where her true loyalties lie. She still works with the rebels and stalls Sten to keep him from the base. She didn’t shoot the gang on sight. But she doesn’t run away from Apollon, either.

In S1, Apollon wasn’t looking for Rasmus, since Frederik had convinced them he was dead. They were searching for others who were immune for the virus. The Strangers would capture survivors and inject them with the virus (or sometimes take them to one of the Apollon doctors in a bunker to be injected).

We’ve never been given any indication as to why Frederik and Apollon thought there might be others who were immune. I keep wondering if he knew something about the rebels’ work on the cure or if he thought that a compromised immune system wouldn’t fight the virus. Without a negative response from the body, the virus might not turn lethal inside that person, and would coexist peacefully instead, the way it did in Rasmus for so many years.

Over the course of this episode, everyone got ridiculously close to the virus, as they usually do. In the real world, there’s no way they wouldn’t all be infected. Either they aren’t becoming infected because Rasmus doesn’t want them to and he has instinctive control over the virus as we saw when he attacked Kira, they have their own immunity and ability to tell the virus to back off, or the show is doing a poor job of showing how the virus works.

Sarah was very into her Romeo and Juliet fantasy this episode, and was ready to die at the end of a perfect day. But Rasmus has already lived out that scenario with Beatrice, who also died at the end of a perfect day (and was potentially a suicide). He isn’t interested in reliving it. Rasmus is more Terminator or Frankenstein, a manufactured killer with a need for company and to reproduce. Sarah put herself in a dress that could pass as a wedding gown and they promised themselves to each other. She’s now the metaphorical Bride of Frankenstein.

We saw several stages of relationships in this episode. Rasmus and Sarah had the impulsive marriage between two young people who think they otherwise have no future together. Jean and Lea are best friends evolving into romantic partners. Jean made the chapel as part of a proposal. At first Lea rejected him, but later she thought it through more and decided to accept.

Martin and Simone broke up because of an argument, but they still love each other and will probably work it out eventually. Fie lost Jakob, though it’s not certain how romantic they were, or if they were together out of convenience. Either way, she’s got her pregnancy help her through the grief and has continued with Jakob’s causes, caring for Sarah and searching for a cure for the virus. Klaus also lost his partner, Johanne, but took the extreme approach of seeking murderous revenge. That energy was turned back on him, and he was dispatched to join Johanne in death.

As always, Patrick was the odd man out, depending on his friendship with Martin for emotional gratification. This time, he got lucky and found Martin at a low moment. Martin decided to bail on the complications of group life and leadership and go back to the days when it was just him and Patrick. Those memories are distant enough that he’s forgotten the downsides of that arrangement.

The women are also forming important friendships that could lead to them becoming a community. Lea hasn’t decided what to do about Simone’s betrayal, but it seems most have already decided to move on. Simone and Fie are bonding over parenthood and their research. They are both willing to take care of Rasmus and Sarah, and Simone is now keeping Fie’s secret about her baby, as is Sarah. Sarah has natural ties to both women, as she’s dating Simone’s brother, and Fie is having Sarah’s brother’s baby.

This leads to Lea feeling like the odd woman out. She is religious, while Simone and Fie are scientists, and Sarah is a cynical romantic. She’s wise, and speaks from her heart, but she doesn’t have the scientific knowledge or family connections to give her opinions weight according to the new dynamic the group has developed. Jean has the same issue, but he doesn’t struggle with depression the way that Lea does.

Images courtesy of Netflix.