Tonight’s episode starts very poignantly, with the exact dates of events in the last century that affected the whole world. Dates like D-Day, the deaths of JFK, MLK and Elvis. The moon landing. Woodstock. Rock and roll, the cola wars, I can’t take it anymore! (Sorry, couldn’t resist.) Allison explains in voice over that whatever deep emotional highs and lows the world in general is feeling, she tends to feel the brunt of that emotion. She dreads the day that something so terrible happens, she won’t be able to survive the impact. Wow, worse than 9/11? That’s a scary thought indeed.
A normal morning at the DuBois household; Bridgette and Marie watching cartoons over cereal while Mom packs their lunches for school. The clock ominously clicks to 9:18 am, and just like that, the TV picture is replaced by a message from the EBS. Allison turns, clutches her head with her hands and screams, and then… wakes up. She looks even more visibly shaken than normal post-dream; she looks as if Armageddon itself is coming a-knocking, and no well-placed phone call or hasty spring to action will be sufficient to prevent it. That’s gotta suck.
The next morning’s newscast shows that there was indeed an earthquake the night before in Sedona, Arizona. (I’m a native, so I can tell you that Sedona is a beautiful community in the mountains, about two hours drive north of Phoenix. It has beautiful scenery, a terrific art community, and a lot of classic American charm. You could certainly do a lot worse than to spend a weekend’s vacation there. Ahem.) The shockwaves were not strong enough to be felt in Phoenix; however, Allison is still leery that Disaster Day is not far away.
Lee is in a jovial mood as Allison meets him in the morgue. A body was discovered earlier that morning… actually, not so much a body as a severed hand with a prominent birthmark. Lee is hopeful that Allison can discern who the hand may have belonged to, but she is unable to get any vibes from it. What she does seem to have this week, however, is a recurring theme: whenever she touches people, she flashes on what they will be doing at 9:18 am on Disaster Day. Bridgette and Marie, for example will both be in school, while Lee will be cleaning a coffee stain off his shirt in a restroom. Obviously, this means something that will be relevant later.
This episode’s B-story begins with Joe being approached by one of his neighbors, who warns him that the house across the street, one of many that got foreclosed upon, has been frequently targeted by vandals with spray cans. The neighbor, who apparently wants out of the neighborhood himself, warns Joe to keep an eye out for the miscreants, because graffiti in the wrong place has the nasty effect of driving property values down. Of course, the miscreant in question is revealed when Allison kisses Joe; it’s Joe himself. Huh?!
The next dream sequence finds a nondescript man driving into a parking garage. He calmly parks his car in a remote corner, a corner whose adjoining wall sports a very large, ugly crack in the concrete. The man grabs a sledge from his trunk, and proceeds to hammer away at the crack… and then we notice that the man’s hand is sporting a telltale birthmark.
Upon waking, Allison makes note of the building’s address, and the next morning, she and Lee visit the person the man was ostensibly there to see. That person, a construction company owner named Wolcott, is played by Clancy Brown, a veteran actor of many films like The Shawshank Redemption. He identifies a composite sketch of the man from Allison’s dream as Gavin Finch, a respectable building inspector who isn’t the type to go smashing up parking garages with sledgehammers.
However, on the way out of the building, Allison touches the hand of one of the security guards, and it would seem that on Disaster Day the guard will inspect an entering vehicle’s trunk, which, when opened, reveals (to quote Bruce Willis) “enough plastic explosives to orbit Arnold Schwarzenegger.” And then it blows up. Oh, hell, that’s not good. Devalos assures Allison that a description of the bomber will be sent immediately to the building in question. Allison gets another piece of the puzzle when she touches Devalos, who at the time of the disaster will be reading a business newspaper that outlines a bad day on Wall Street. Well, that narrows it down. Not.
That night, Allison is too worried to sleep, as she’s afraid that one car bomb may just be the tip of a very nasty iceberg, but Joe, ever the voice of reason, says that there’s no reason to believe the worst, especially given that he hasn’t discovered his penchant for vandalism just yet. God, I love Joe. The only man in the house, not to mention the only non-psychic, can you imagine how it must be to walk in his shoes? Just then, they hear the front door slam shut, and when they investigate, they find that the person spray-painting the house across the street… is Marie. Apparently, she has been doing this in her sleep for a week now. Joe vows to cover Marie’s “artwork” the next morning, while they try to figure out why she’s doing this.
The next dream sequence finds a man, clad in denims and a black jacket (and shot from the neck down, natch) disposing of poor Mr. Finch’s severed head, in a different dumpster than his hand was found in. The good news is, the dumpster gave a clear indication of its location, and Lee is able to find it the next morning. He snarks that they should have all of him assembled in three weeks at this rate. Hee hee. And then the tension ratchets up; Lee spills some coffee on his shirt, the same stain that Allison saw him cleaning at 9:18 on Disaster Day. Which is, apparently, today. In fact, it’s in twenty minutes. Gulp.
One phone call later, a bomb scare is in full effect as the downtown building they visited earlier. A man and vehicle matching Allison’s description was stopped on his way into the garage, but, strangely, there was nothing whatsoever in his trunk. Whoops. Well, better safe than sorry. But back to the case of poor Mr. Finch; the next dream is basically a rehash of the last one, except that this time we see the killer’s face: it’s Mr. Wolcott. Um, hey, writers, murder mysteries are harder to solve when there’s more than one suspect! Scooby-Doo was more complex than this!
Wolcott denies any involvement with Finch’s death, of course; however, Allison seizes the opportunity to grab his wrist, and determines that the bomb threat is still very real; in fact, Wolcott will apparently cause the bomb to explode himself, dialing in the detonation code on his cell phone from a coffee shop across the street. The results are horrible; the multi-story building collapses completely, killing hundreds inside.
Joe, meanwhile, is fast approaching Wit’s End Blvd. The next morning, Marie is apparently over her midnight artistic sojourns, but Bridgette is just getting started. She wakes up with her shirt covered in paint, and swears that she doesn’t remember any of it. This forces Allison and Joe to confine both girls to sleep in their bed, which, by the looks of things, was not designed to sleep four comfortably.
The next dream shows the motive behind Mr. Finch’s execution. Wolcott was the man behind the construction of the building in which his office now resides, and apparently he cut a lot of corners during construction in order to make a quick buck. Finch assures him that the building will never survive in a state as earthquake-prone as Arizona (which, BTW, is inherently false on its face; I’ve lived here 40+ years and can count the number of mild tremors I’ve felt, like EVER, on the fingers of one hand). He wants to come clean, but Wolcott insists that the way out is to have the building destroyed in a supposed terrorist attack. Finch refuses, and Wolcott bludgeons him to death. So that answers that.
Joe is covering up the last of Bridgette’s handiwork when the old lady who used to live across the street walks up. She informs Joe that though a nuisance, the graffiti has had one strangely beneficial side-effect; it has hampered the bank that foreclosed on her house from effectively selling it out from under her, and if her luck holds out for a few more days, she’ll be able to buy the house back. Joe smiles, ceases and desists his paint job, and returns home to break out his vandalizin’ gear. Huzzah!
Of course, this is the final clue that Disaster Day has finally arrived, and the newspaper on Devalos’s desk proves it, along with another coffee stain on Lee’s shirt. Cut to Wolcott at the coffee shop across from his building. He sees the same man from Allison’s dream drive up and enter the parking garage. He calmly gets out his cell, and dials the number to trigger the bomb. But this time, nothing happens. And then Lee, Allison and a couple of uniforms walk up and explain that the bomb squad found the C4 that Wolcott planted in the man’s car that morning. They can’t prove he murdered Finch, but they got him dead to rights on the bomb. Enjoy life without parole, you monster. (And a special bonus: I actually know the street corner they filmed this scene on... it's the corner of 9th Street and Roosevelt in downtown Phoenix. Some of the taller buildings in the background are unmistakable, though Wolcott's building is, in fact, a CGI construction. Just thought I'd point that out.)
The episode ends with Allison admiring Joe’s freshly-painted artwork on the house across the street, and gleefully celebrates the happy ending by planting a big ol’ wet one on him. Awww.
Next week: Allison develops some kind of mental condition, and it will take such a toll on Joe that their marriage might be in jeopardy. Say it ain’t so!
