I am the Eggman. They are the Eggmen. I am the Walrus, goo goo g’joob.

Is this the future Lennon had in mind?

Synopsis

While playing basketball in London, a youth is pulled into a sewer grate that is mysteriously flooded.

Cutter and team trace the sewers to a lock, which is closed and secured. While searching the lock, Jenny is nearly eaten by a “future shark”, but Cutter manages to save her and Stephen kills it.

Back at the ARC, they determine that the shark didn’t eat the missing boy. There must be another creature.

Cutter tries to widen the search, but is overruled. He searches anyway and encounters the mystery soldier that Conner was suspicious of from earlier episodes. Cutter is knocked unconscious. When he awakes, he hears the creatures and takes the team out on an unauthorized search. Abby is swept off the boat by the giant walrus-like creature, and given up for dead.

Cutter is fired, despite his insistence that the creature is no longer in the lock. Stephen is put in charge and chooses to search in the lock.

Meanwhile, Abby is trapped in a small makeshift cage along with the boy who was taken.

Cutter calls Conner, who was devastated by the death of Abby, and convinces him to help him find the creatures. They do find them – a family of the walrus creatures. The team fight them off and just as things look darkest, Stephen arrives with a machine gun. However, Abby is gone again, this time taken back through the anomaly, which has re-opened.

Conner follows her to a rocky shore somewhere in the future. To escape, Abby must climb a cliff where Conner is waiting. She nearly makes it but is starting to fall. Conner tells her of his love for her, and, just as she slips, Cutter pulls Conner back. Stephen does some indiscriminate killing.

In the end, we see that Leek, who has not only planted Conner’s fake girlfriend, but is also the mystery soldier’s boss, is working for Helen Cutter.

Analysis

At least they brought out the troops this week.

Despite that, there’s not much going on here except the opportunity to pick it apart a bit.

Let’s start with Helen. In my last review, I pointed out there’s not much reason for anyone to be working against Cutter. I failed to associate these actions with Helen Cutter because, from all we’d seen in the first series, she’s living hand-to-mouth, surviving in the past worlds. How she could command resources enough to have allies or indeed why she would want them and to what purpose are questions that have no obvious answer.

If the goal is as simple as to have the anomalies to herself as it seemed to be in the first series… well, that isn’t going to happen no matter what she does, is it? The whole conspiracy seems to be to isolate Cutter from his team. Is this just a case of “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned?”

Could it be that she’s far more powerful than we’ve been lead to believe? It’s impossible to believe that leaving a future predator in the Permian lead to a virtually identical present, except that Claudia became Jenny. Could it be that Helen did something more recently to remove Claudia from the picture? It was strange that she helped save Claudia’s life near the end of series 1. Could there be something more?

In this episode, we also see that Cutter is considered the expert on the anomalies. That might make sense for a few minutes, until we consider that he’s a paleontologist – not a physicist. While he would be an expert on what might be coming through the anomalies, or where they came from, he certainly wouldn’t have anything useful to add about their nature. Presumably, the ARC has some scientists around that work on that aspect of it.

Speaking of anomalies in the anomalies. They originally said it must have been an underwater anomaly to have caused the sewer to fill up. If that were true, why was the anomaly so high-and-dry at the end of the episode? Did it move? It was well above the water-lvel on both sides of the anomaly.

If it was below the tide level on the other side, that still doesn’t really excuse the future shark from passing though. It would have been in dangerously shallow water. Even so, how did it get out of the basement on this side? At the end of the episode, they decide the cement the whole thing up, as if it were stationary. Either the logic of the underwater anomaly fails, or the cement scheme won’t work.

Were the walruses intelligent? They seemed to be as they were “collecting” Abby and the boy, but why? Certainly their behavior on their own side of the anomaly was nothing more than animals.

The episode raises too many questions. It would be the wildest aspiration of hope to believe these questions have been presented intentionally. I fear they will never lead to satisfactory answers.

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