At Dyad, Nealon is pretending to rehabilitate Rachel by showing her flash cards and waiting patiently as she verbalizes what she’s seeing. Cat. Hat. Bat. But really what he’s doing is giving her a Rorschach test. Like, are these ponies, or are they the call sign of the fleet of male clones we used to keep locked up in the basement? Is this a calculator, or is it the keypad that controls the launch sequence of our armada of privately owned intercontinental ballistic missiles, the launch codes of which you alone have been storing in your brain? He shows her a rainbow flag and she’s like “rainbow flag,” but then she goes, “Delphine? Is me now?” He nods, and her face is like, MOTHERFUCKER. And that’s when you know she’s going to will her brain to work properly again and regenerate her own eyeball like a starfish.
At Castor HQ, Rudy and Mother meet to talk about his time in the field. In addition to murdering his brother, he also filled up five Moleskines with his feelings and stole one girl’s hair. Mother tells him he’s she’s sending him back out to find Mark and either deal with his treachery or extract him back to HQ with the information he nicked from the Proletheans. But first Rudy wants to rest his head on Mother’s tummy and suck his thumb. Mother pats his wittle head and thinks about crushing his skull for giggles, but changes her mind and smokes one of her fresh ciggies from Paul. The impulse passes.
Rudy wanders over to the holding cell, where Helena is singing lullabies to her buns in the oven. She hops up and peers at him through the bars on her window and legit calls him “the ugliest Mark yet.” It’s amazing. Helena is so amazing. Her eyes light up even more when Paul walks in. She licks her hand and tells him to come on in there and make it an even four sestras he’s boned.
Paul: I know you don’t believe me, but I’m sorry it played out this way.
Helena: V. excited for the day I kill you and Mother and all the Marks.
Alison and Donnie are making soap in their garage, happy as some homicidal kittens, when Marcie shows up to try to bully and then bribe Alison into quitting the school board race. First of all, Allison has never met a challenge she was afraid to let a garbage disposal strangle. And second of all, she’s well on her way to being a millionaire. She is not backing down. Marcie is like, “Does it smell like the skeleton of a mad scientist in here, or…” And Donnie is like, “THAT’S VEGAN SEA SALT, BITCH.” And so she leaves, which is a good choice. There’s room for a lot more bodies under this floor.
Art and Sarah drive out to the Confederate farm to chat with the good ol’ boy, and he confirms that Gracie did stop by a little earlier, but he didn’t give her any super secret information or clues or anything like that, no boxes of genetic research or maps to Topside hideouts, no Ziploc bags full of DNA. She just came to share the news about her dad getting well and truly murdered to death, and they had a nice prayer for his soul and a quick shot of moonshine, and then she went on her way.
Art and Sarah leave and are discouraged, so they stop for a cheeseburger, and lo! Gracie is at the same diner, praying over a milkshake like, “And Lord, please keep Mark safe as he goes back out to that farm to get even more information than what we just got, including the key to the mystery to these clones and the coordinates of the place where Topside is keeping Helena, whose babies I have inside my womb right now, amen.” Well, Sarah slides right into her booth while she’s praying and when she opens up her eyes, Sarah goes, “Boo!”
Sarah:Â Well, your milkshake sure does bring all the clones to the yard.
Gracie: What.
Sarah: You got some clone babies in that belly, you got me, you got a clone husband.
Gracie: NO.
Sarah: Uh-huh, honey.
Gracie zooms back to the motel to pack up her shit and make a run for it, but guess who shows up carrying a sawed-off shotgun and looking pissed as balls? Oh, it’s her mom, all right. She tells Gracie she’s an idiot but that she still loves her because the Lord has a plan for them and where is Mark?
Mark is at the Confederate farm, duh. And so is Sarah. She creeps in to find that he tied up Farmer Joe to torture him, but the old codger went ahead and died of a heart attack. Mark’s not sorry. He needs that basket of DNA! Cosima picks a fine time to call and talk to Sarah about science. Specifically Castor science. Specifically-specifically, Castor clones are Leda clones’ brothers, in terms of genetics if not emotions. Sarah and Cosima seem very shocked by this for some reason, and Mark just straight up doesn’t believe either one of them. But there’s no time to convince him, because as soon as Cosima and Sarah hang up, bullets start flying through the window.
You think it’s Seth come to bring his brother home, right? Or Topside come to shut the whole thing down? Or Rachel has healed herself with her own willpower and bought a gun at a pawn shop and now here she is to settle some scores? But no. It is Gracie’s mom and she’s wielding a shotgun. She follows Mark into a cornfield where she’s trying to escape and shoots him dead in the head.
This episode is kind of what I was afraid of when the Castor guys were introduced. Way too much of them. But at least they’re the expendable ones and not the women, like the normal way stories go. (Especially sci-fi and fantasy ones.)
Sarah peeks out of one of the barn’s windows and wishes she had a protector with her right now, a hardcore motherfucker who wouldn’t mind killing someone else to save the person they love. Someone like Alison Hendrix, for example.
Next week: Alison and Donnie get busted a little bit, Seth smashes Sarah’s head into a pole, Helena meets another Castor, and a bunch of awful old white guys put their hands all over Gracie’s blessed uterus like it’s the goddamn Republican National Convention.
