Monday, January 19, 2015

The Librarians 1.09: "And the City of Light"

“We’ve only got one shot at this. Let’s not take chances.”
- Cassie

Well folks, we are really in the home stretch. We’ve reached our penultimate journey was Eve, Cassie, Zeke, Jake and Jenkins. And as it turns out, Flynn seems to be back on the scene, too. I’m definitely okay with that (I know I complained that Noah was messing with the chemistry a few episodes ago but he’s just so endearing and he was meant to be slightly annoying in that episode). Plus it gives me a fix while I await the final season of Falling Skies.) This week begins with a UFO nut snooping around a creepy town when he sees some ghostly figures. He goes running through town yelling about it and then gets attacked by a bunch of townsfolk. The Librarians are on the case and Zeke insists its aliens but Jenkins rebuffs him, saying there’s no such thing. But things are definitely off in town. Jake notes that the architecture is all wrong for when the place was founded and there are gas lamps that are out of place too. He and Cassie end up talking to the head of the town, a young woman named Mable and Jake is pretty smitten. She’s kind of taken with him as well. Cassie is just annoyed by the whole thing. Elsewhere, Eve and Zeke are trying to track down the missing guy’s truck. They head out into a field and split up when they hear a noise. Zeke nearly gets run over by our missing journalist and Eve pushes him into a random lamp post. She touches the lamp post and disappears. Yeah, that can’t possibly be a good thing.

Zeke gets yelled at by the gang back at the Annex for losing Eve but at least Jenkins can confirm she is still on the planet. That’s useful anyway. But they need more information on the gas lamps. So naturally Jake offers to go back and talk to Mable. He’s really falling hard for this girl. He gets so swept up in her fanciful musings about going to other countries. When he brings up the mystery lamp post in the woods, she gets very insistent on seeing it herself. This only causes awkwardness with the rest of the team. As Jenkins is fiddling with the lamp post, we briefly see Eve but the gang tries to make Mable believe it was an optical illusion (complete with random nonsense about Colonel Baird being what they call optical illusion in Australia). Yeah, she’s not buying that for a second. Jake begs her to trust him and help do some research on the lamps just as one of the creepy townsfolk wanders by. Oh and apparently our journalist has no memory of being zapped or anything else he saw. So there’s that.

With a little tinkering by Jenkins, Zeke gets some goggles to wear that see various spectrums so he can hopefully find Eve. Meanwhile, Jake goes back to the archive and this time gets a little dramatic when Mable catches him breaking in. Out in the woods, Zeke and Cassie find Eve and Cassie figures out that the energy is a giant circuit created by the lamp posts. They split up and she discovers that the town was linked to Nikola Tesla. About the same time, Zeke realizes that people have been what he calls body snatched and they try to attack him. At the archives, Jake and Mable discover that there was a town already on site when the present one was built. It’s all very interesting and I have to say I didn’t quite see the twist coming. Mable was founder of the town back in 1915. Immortal or something else magic related.

It turns out the townsfolk aren’t quite as nefarious and evil as we originally were led to believe. While Zeke still doesn’t trust them or like it, we learn that Tesla was experimenting with wireless electricity signals but it went wrong and the town got booted out of sync with the rest of the world (I feel like this was a side plot in an episode of Eureka at some point). Anyway, Mable was made into a grounding wire of sorts and everyone else takes on bodies to interact with the world. They’ve been desperately trying to restore Tesla’s invention to restabilize the town and get it back in sync. Like it or not, the gang needs to help the town if they want to get Eve back. So Cassie tales charge and the town gets to fixing things and getting ready to use the 100 years of stored up energy. We also have a nice heart to heart between Jake and Mable where he explains he took over the family business when his father got sick and started drinking and he just didn’t leave because no one around him wanted to and he got stuck in that mentality. But he’s getting used to the change.

Things get complicated when they charge up the capacitor and it starts overloading. Cassie worries that if it goes too far, it will blow up and take out thousands of additional lives. Mable offers to hit the kill switch on one of the lamp posts but they run into an issue with the electricity going haywire. With Jake carrying her the rest of the way, they manage to cut the power just after it brings back Eve. We did get a fun sequence where she inhabited Zeke’s body for a bit to kick some ass. Unfortunately, the town is out of luck for a while. The capacitor is fried and while the lamp posts still work, the people can’t communicate. But as Zeke and Cassie go off for a drink and Jake visits Paris for the first time, Eve gets the appointment book from Jenkins so she can make notes on what needs to be done and when to help bring back the down. Overall, I enjoyed the episode and liked the twists. It was good to get some Jake backstory for sure.

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