“For the purpose of travels, both inward and outward, is not merely to see the unseen but to bring those wishes home, to share with those we love.” The magic number tonight is 1075! Stars and the color red are embedded heavily throughout the episode. Some of my commentary is embedded in bold italics within the recap.
Lucy (Maria Bello) gets boxes from her husband sent to PO Box 457, tracking number 1Z14785, NJ–1075–CA. [I tried the QR code but it was not valid (sad face). What would have been infinitely MORE interesting would have been for it to lead to fox.com/touch or something else really cool like hidden bonus features for the episode.]
Lucy encourages Martin (Kiefer Sutherland) to send Jake (David Mazouz) to school where Soleil Friedman (Isabella Acres) goes. Jake pulls out a picture of a birthday party with Lucy and Amelia (Saxon Sharbino). Guillermo (Said Taghmaoui) is lurking in the background, but they don’t know who this man really is yet.
Martin gets a text to meet at Lebanon Street off 6th, at 10 a.m. with presumably Calvin. Martin meets with Trevor (Greg Ellis). He wants Calvin (Lukas Haas) to think he is a reporter. Martin needs a cover backstory and Trevor needs a reporter of Martin’s caliber. Martin accepts.
At the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan, it is 64.9 km to Peer Kalay, 207 to Kabul and 568 to Kandahar. Mallory Cane (Audrey Marie Anderson) tells her husband (Mackenzie Astin) on the phone that she thinks her hotel room phone has been tapped. The border guards take her into custody as her husband listens. The green flag is shown [it has a star on it]. The guard has a red circle that looks like the pattern Jake sees also like the QR code on Lucy’s package.
The color red is back! Jake has a red and gray striped shirt. Lucy’s tablet is red. Jake is drawing a pattern on a napkin of an oval with a circle in the middle, actually looks like a spaceship. There is a woman walking in the background with a red dress. [I know the picture I’m clipping looks like the umbrellas are orange, but I think that is just the quality of my picture; it was red when it aired.]
Jake hands it to a woman sitting near them (Patricia Rae). It makes the woman upset and she tries to give it back to Jake. Lucy asks her if she knows Amelia. The woman does not respond to the question and Jake hands her purse to her, not before lifting an envelope from it. It is addressed to Seaman Vicente Corliss, Bldg 1075 Port Hueneme Naval Base, Port Hueneme, CA. When Lucy sees the number matches her box, she opens it. It contains cash and a picture of a man who looks like Guillermo. The letter says, “You must find him. I no longer can.” The note looks like a suicide letter from someone to Vicente. Lucy is boiling water in a red kettle to open the envelope with the steam.
A limo pulls up for Martin and he gets in.
Jake narrates: “From the smallest amoeba to the grandest of galaxies, we define ourselves by our borders. I am me; therefore I am not you. We are safe within our territory, but borders can be places of instability, of danger. Cold fronts collide with warm; dynamic energy explodes. Yet it’s at the edges, the frontiers between us, where ideas are exchanged, where knowledge is gained. I am me but I must push past my borders if I am ever truly to know you.”
The woman looks for something on a map. Amelia draws tides in the Arabian Sea and labels Pakistan. There are red numbers on the map. She has a box decorated with butterflies [a few of them red].
Martin meets Calvin who is firing a gun at a range. He remembers Martin from the elevator. Martin says he believes Aster Corps is involved with criminal activity such as murder and kidnapping. Calvin says that the average person is lied to up to 200 times per day. Despite hating guns, Martin has some pretty awesome aim. Calvin approves.
Mallory is wearing a red scarf as she is escorted to prison. The guard thinks she is a spy but she tells him she is in sales.
The book at Amelia’s house is “To Kill A Mockingbird”. Frances (Linda Gehringer) says, “Today won’t be a workday; it’s a chance to get to know each other.” Amelia is speed reading.
Back in the limo, Calvin directs Martin to building “J” , top floor, room 1075. He will need a red-level pass card. Mallory Cane has one. Calvin wants Martin to find her. He believes she can be persuaded to give him her card. Apparently Calvin wants his research back [or so he says].
At the naval base, Lucy and Jake meet with Vicente (Alex Ruiz). His aunt wrote the note. “So you’ve been out of touch?”. [Cute line]. The portrait is of the man who killed Vicente’s mother 4 years ago by slicing her throat. [Yep. That sounds like our Guillermo.] Aunt Sofia and his mom, Claudia Corliss, were identical twins. His mother was a savant astronomer with amazing insight who did not talk much either. [Star reference there.] She predicted the trajectory of the Corliss Comet. The picture that Jake drew was the path of the comet. He asks them to find his aunt. The Corliss Comet has a cycle of 122 years but it can be viewed that evening. Lucy theorizes that Sofia will wait to see that before she tries to kill herself.
Frances gets out a red board game called Tokeekol [not a real game name]. Amelia talks about the book, about “not understanding a person until you see their point of view.” It’s on page 177, 12 lines from the bottom. Amelia moves her piece then rolls the red dice (which match, number 9). The woman asks her if she knows what she’ll roll next. Amelia moves the woman’s piece 2 moves; the woman rolls snake eyes. Amelia sees herself winning the entire game.
Mallory meets with a man who threatens she’ll be sent to Bannu prison if she is not honest.
Martin goes to Mallory’s house. Her husband tries to choke him. She has been working on a program called T1 security program that Aster Corps sold to Pakistan. She found a flaw. Innocent people would be hurt. She threatened to go public when her supervisor did not act. Martin finds a file called the Fibonacci Project. He also finds a file for a bill to Stanford House on patient Adeline Danvers. And something called The Danvers Project. There is an expense memo for August 25-28 for meals, hotel and transport for a total of 800.27. He sees a dental bill for a “cavity fill with cap”. [I wonder if she has some kind of implant.] That was the cover name for Amelia. Martin thinks she is being hidden, that Aster Corps does not know where she is because the money trail ends 3 weeks prior.
At BreakWire, Jake is trying to call locally 1-323-78 to 1-310-64. The principal of Soleil’s school (Patricia Bethune) calls Martin. Jake made the connection between the two of them. School starts at 8:50 and Jake wants to go.
T1’s sole purpose was to profile terrorists. The web says too many innocent people are being snagged. Calvin helped design it. Aster Corps is using it to set her up. Calvin is going to jam the program to give them time for her to be released but he needs a connection in Pakistan and Martin can help there–a man in LA named Nazim Farzat (Sanjay Chandani). It is the man who picks up Lucy and Sofia on the highway to bring them back to Lucy’s car in a later scene.
Lucy goes to the Astraeus Society’s observatory. The comet viewing was cancelled because of cloud cover.
Jake is typing 1075 repetitively on the laptop. Amelia is writing the same number on her map. Lucy knocks Sofia out of the way at mile marker 1075. She says she should have been killed not her sister [which makes me immediately think she is Claudia and not Sofia since they were identical.]
[Nope I was wrong.] Sofia met Guillermo at her bar and invited him home. Guillermo became violent and tried to kill her. Sofia stuck him in the side of the neck with sewing scissors, but he killed Claudia and walked out the door with the scissors still stuck in his neck. Lucy explains that this guy thought Sofia was Claudia.
The guards throw Mallory out with her Aster Corps ID badge and bags.
When dropping Jake off, he goes into the lengthy detail about what Jake likes and does not. Soleil is very excited to see Jake.
“We cross borders; we explore new frontiers, frontiers of the heart, frontiers of the soul. And if we’re lucky, we go home again having learned great lessons of our shared destiny. For the purpose of travels, both inward and outward, is not merely to see the unseen but to bring those wishes home, to share with those we love.”
Mallory goes home.
Sofia reunites with Vicente.
Lucy asks Martin if he can trust Calvin. Calvin confirms Mallory is home. He uses an access code pad and thumb-print scanner [Really? No retinal scanner?] to get into the house where he has Amelia. The code is 500# [a star instead of a pound sign would have been really cool here]. Amelia’s caregiver is Calvin’s mother! So that is what she meant about having to “go underground” in the episode “Closer”. He asks Amelia if she is ready to do some work and says, “How’s my girl today?” [I am thoroughly creeped out by this.]
Back at the house, Lucy recognizes Guillermo in the picture from 3-1/2 years ago at a park in New Jersey. She shows Martin the scar. She wants to know why he’s standing behind her daughter 6 months after he killed someone just like Amelia. Which leads us to episode 4 of season 2.
ADDITIONAL COMMENTS
See my individual comments to scenes in brackets above. The color red returns. Why red? In Chinese culture, it signifies good fortune and joy. Stars take on more significance. “To Kill A Mockingbird” was the perfect choice for a book. The symbolism in the book of the mockingbird is someone who is innocent and kind but is persecuted. I did an English paper back in grade school on this topic. Clearly, the mockingbirds in TOUCH are the 36 Righteous Ones. It is still unclear if Calvin is a good guy or bad guy or somewhere in between. Why did Guillermo not kill Amelia? Was she still on the path of righteousness and he moved on to another person?
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