The Tomorrow People - Episode 9 - Recap - Death's Door
The Tomorrow People - Episode 9 - Recap - Death's Door
This is the last episode of The CW's The Tomorrow People until the middle of January, so expecting plots twists is reasonable. The episode certainly delivers! This show, for those who haven't been following, is about a group of teens with a group of powers (telekinesis, telepathy, teleportation) who fight an evil organization called Ultra. The main kid, Stephen Jameson (Robbie Amell), can also stop time. Stephen is a double agent, working for Ultra while secretly reporting back to an underground resistance movement. The big wrinkle? Stephen's boss at Ultra is also his long-lost father's brother, Jedikiah Price (Mark Pellegrino)!
John is still captured by Ultra, of course, and gets to go through some, ahem, enhanced interrogation with the boss man. Things get a bit heated, so Jedikiah and Stephen burst in to end the fighting/torture, and John's secret is revealed. See, last episode, we found out that Stephen secretly killed Stephen's dad, thus making the season's arc about finding him a big farce! Also, Jedikiah has just now gotten suspicious about Cara having powers. He's caught a small moment on the security cam of the switch Stephen made when injecting her. Anyway, John escapes, taking Stephen as a hostage.
Back at Tomorrow People Sewer Base, the crew is trying to find some leverage against Jedikiah and Ultra. They're trying to figure out where Jedikiah's superpowered girlfriend Morgan has run off to, and they track her down via a photo in Jed's house (...have I mentioned these sewer teens have a super computer that lets them do stuff like find real-world landmarks based on scanning a photo?), so Cara and Russell go get her. She resists, but it's two-on-one. Then it's time to clue Jedikiah in, which is Cara's job. She demands the return of John in exchange for Morgan.
So it turns out Jedikiah freed John, slipping him a key and telling him to wait for Stephen. The pair escapes, bringing Jedikiah to the meet-up point, where he tells the Tomorrow People to take Morgan into hiding with them. She doesn't like it, but he has is mind made up. Poor dude. I'd almost feel bad for Jedikiah, except he ordered a bunch of defenseless kids gunned down just a few episodes ago. Morgan gets out and comes to visit Jedikiah, who is fresh off a scolding from his boss about exactly this little love affair. They spend one last night together before Jedikiah quietly apologizes to the sleeping Morgan before putting a bullet through her head. Cripes! Well, actually, he faked it for the mind-reading boss's benefit. I thought he'd really done it until Morgan showed up in the sewer to reveal the ruse! The rest of this paragraph had been angry protestations about Jedikiah's morality and forgiveness and blah blah blah, but now it's fine because he didn't really do it.
The kids get back to base and back to the business of finding Thanatos, the secret paradise place Stephen's dad promised all The Tomorrow People as their... homeland, I suppose? That's probably the best word for it. Anyway, Stephen's trying to stop time while teleported, which isn't working. Instead of continuing to fail, he visits Mom to ask some questions about probably-dead daddy. She gives him a box of dad's things when Stephen asks about Thanatos (her thoughts reveal she knows what Thanatos is, somehow). There's a video camera chip showing Dad and Aldus Crick trying the same experiment dozens of times until Stephen's dad suggests "the alternate method", which Crick decries as too dangerous. Well, Stephen obviously has to know, so it's time to visit. Crick gets gunned down at a very incomvenient moment, but Stephen learned what he needed to: Limbo can only be reached if he stops time at the moment of his own death!
Before the potentially deadly attempt, Stephen has a little party to say goodbye to all of his friends, all five of them. The Tomorrow People set up a little lab in their sewer where they can kill Stephen in a controlled manner and have him activate his powers just as he's dying. They inject him, and the special effects seem to indicate that he has indeed used his time stop power just as he loses conciousness, but nobody else in the room can notice that. They wait until just before the brain damage time limit before injecting him with the... whatever the other thing is that brings him back. It doesn't work. Everything is all weird and tense as the timer goes over, but Stephen springs awake and announces that they must find his father's body! That's all well and good, Stephen, but six years of rot might not be a welcome sight to your dad's lost soul!
This show is finally finding its legs! It's been a bit shaky to start, not knowing whether to follow teen drama or superpowered espionage, but now it's struck a balance where the Ultra operations don't form the main plot, but instead provide complications for the teen angst plots. I like that! I wish there were more shenanigans, but the show is getting into a nice plot twist territory that I also like quite a bit. Check out the preview for this mid-season finale below!