Threshold/Trees Made of Glass (2)

Trees Made of Glass (2)
Season 1, Episode 2
Airdate	September 16, 2005
Production Number	102
Written by	Brannon Braga, David S. Goyer
Directed by	Peter Hyams
← 1x01 Trees Made of Glass (1)	1x03 → Blood of the Children
Threshold — Season One

Trees of Glass (2) is the second episode of the first season of Threshold, and the second episode overall.

Guest Stars: Mark Berry (Agent Hargrave), Seamus Dever (Agent Detoro), Tay Blessey (Young Girl), Zale Morris (Skittish Man), Larnell Stovall (Tattooed Man), Alice Lo (Chinese Woman), Ricardo J. Chacon (Blue Collar Man), Diane Venora (Angela Hatten), Kevin Durand (Crewman Sonntag), Scott MacDonald (Captain), William Mapother (Gunneson)

Plot Overview

Caffrey and her team pursue the escaped crew members exposed to the alien signal, in particular Gunneson, the first mate, while also investigating the nature of the signal itself. Caffrey and other members of her team exposed to a recording of the alien signal manifest limited symptoms.

Transcript

Gunneson, still smeared with blood from his injuries, chases Caffrey through her house and into the bathroom, where he starts to strangle her. She tries to talk him out of it and he seems receptive, slurring some strange words at her, though he doesn't stop the strangling until she sprays him in the eyes with bathroom cleanser.

Caffrey escapes through the window and once outside, lures Gunneson to the doors leading to the storm cellar, where she beans him in the head with a shovel, sending him tumbling into the cellar. NSA agents, who wear surveilling her house as security, arrive but there's no sign of Gunneson in the rather small cellar. He's disappeared.

The rest of the team arrives and take forensic samples that will hopefully lead them to Gunneson. Baylock confronts Lucas, who denies having any unusual dreams, ala Caffrey and Cavennaugh.

It turns out they also have a recording of what Gunneson was trying to say in the bathroom, because the NSA bugged Caffrey's house. Ramsey realizes that Gunneson is talking in reverse, and claims it's likely because of neurological damage due to whatever's happening to Gunneson's brain. When they play the recording backwards, Gunneson is saying 'Human something-something'. Whatever it is spooks Caffrey.

They go back to NSA headquarters to go over the new evidence. Baylock is assigned by the National Security Advisor to be the team's permanent government overseer. Baylock and Cavennaugh have confrontations with several team members unhappy with their being essentially drafted into the investigation, with no chance to back out. Baylock agrees to bring Lucas' fiancée to Washington so he can see her regularly (he's getting married in six weeks).

Blood found in Caffrey's bathroom, which had dried in the FS pattern, was assumed to come from Gunneson but is found instead to be Caffrey's. New tests still find nothing unusual about Caffrey, Lucas and Cavennaugh except for some errant brain waves. Fenway's autopsy of the dead, deformed crewmembers from the ship suggests that they were incompatible with whatever the alien signal was attempting to do to them.

Fenway and Caffrey trace mud from Gunneson's shoes to a particular type of water treatment plant, and a lifeboat from the ship is found nearby on the shore. The team goes to investigate the plant and the incredibly stupid security guard who shows them around turns out to be one of the missing crewmembers from the ship, having shaved off his signature beard.

He shoots one of the NSA agents with the team and runs off with Cavennaugh in pursuit, but then disappears while crossing a roadway outside the plant. The team finds the original security guard dead in a locker.

Back at the lab Lucas and Fenway start to dissect the alien electromagnetic signal, and discover that parts of the signal attract rats brought back from the ship, while having no effect on normal lab rats. Fenway also has a cockroach from the ship that has now grown giant, praying mantis-type claws, and when it isn't eating other cockroaches it scuttles constantly in the FS pattern.

Baylock and the team decide to try and use the rat signal at the water plant to attract some of the missing ship's crew, like a lure. While waiting at the water plant that night, Caffrey's tells Cavennaugh how her father walked out one day when she was yound and simply vanished.

Waiting in the surveillance van, Lucas has a dream that Gunneson appears and tells him that 'You're like us. We're turning you into us.', or something like that. Lucas wakes up startled in the van with Fenway and Ramsey, and suddenly Gunneson actually does pull Lucas through the side window of the van, and drags him off into the water plant.

NSA snipers wound Gunneson in the leg and he abandons Lucas, then once again disappears suddenly from the sniper night-vision scopes. In the interior of the water plant, Caffrey climbs down from her observation post and starts calling for Gunneson, hoping to lure him out. Gunneson appears in the observation post and clubs Cavennaugh again, then goes after Caffrey down below.

Caffrey lures Gunneson into a net dropped by more NSA agents, but despite stun guns Gunneson breaks free and subdues the agents instead. Cavennaugh revives and shoots Gunneson through the chest before he can go after Caffrey again. Gunneson's unconscious, but not dead despite his lethal injuries.

Caffrey, Cavennaugh and the agents walk out of the plant with Gunneson in restraints, and suddenly it's mid-morning! They conjecture whether Gunneson was attracted to the partial signal they used, or actually to the presence of Lucas, Caffrey and Cavennaugh. Suddenly they notice a large crowd of civilians wandering up the driveway of the water plant.

Baylock and more agents arrive. The team questions the civilians but none of them know why they're there. The partial signal must have attracted them, but Fenway can't find any signs of alien contamination. It's assumed that they're just people whose genetic makeup made them particularly susceptible to the partial alien signal being used to attract the ship's crew members. Caffrey tells Baylock she's going to question Gunneson at the holding facility.

Now it's night again! Caffrey, Lucas and Cavennaugh are driving in gridlock to question Gunneson. Cavennaugh can't understand why there's so much traffic on that route. Lucas admits he had the same dreams as the other two.

The camera pulls back to reveal that the traffic gridlock they're stuck in extends across Washington in the shape of the FS pattern.

Notes

This episode aired as part two of the two hour series premiere on September 16, 2005 at 10 PM.

One scene worth particular mention as it indicates the general sloppiness of these pilot episodes:

Near the end of this episode as the team is questioning the large group of civilians who were attracted to the partial alien signal the team was broadcasting, one young black man dressed in current popular style is vocally protesting being physically detained without being mirandized or even informed why he is being held. The black man is not being physically or even verbally abusive. He is merely being slightly loud in demanding his constitutional and moral rights.

The main 'hero' character for the show, Cavennaugh, a white male law enforcement character, bounces the black man's head off a card hood in simple annoyance. This is unambiguously portrayed as acceptable, even expected, behaviour.

While it is unlikely that the producers of the show are so obviously prejudiced against black people, this scene is indicative of a very low level of thought being put into the production.

Gunneson's two disappearances in this episode, in the cellar and the water plant, simply cannot be reasonably explained at this point. Given the sloppiness of the rest of this pilot, the viewer can only suspect that the writers simply threw these moments in for effect.

There is the possibility of future explanation for the disappearances. The most obvious one is that the alteration of Gunneson's DNA has given him the ability to travel in 4 or 5 dimensions, like the alien probe. However, if such as explanation is not eventually forthcoming then the entire show has been established on a foundation of BS. Hardly a good start.

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