Alcatraz opens this week in Dr. Beauregard’s present day lab. He reveals to Agent Hauser that he’s tried all of Lucy’s methods but nothing has worked. The doctor explains to Hauser that Lucy is still dreaming which means there is still some brain activity. Beauregard suggests that Emerson read to her, hoping that hearing his voice will bring her back to a point where his science can reach her. He then hands him a copy of The Carpetbaggers by Harold Robbins.
Hauser suggests that the doctor contact him when a more tangible method is discovered.
This week’s Alcatraz inmate on the run is Johnny McKee (Adam Rothenberg). We first meet Johnny as a bartender at some trendy club, where he has an altercation with a rude male customer. Johnny mixes a “special” drink for the customer’s table, which kills him and his friends. Video of the men dying shows up right away on the internet which alerts the computers in the Alcatraz lair. Doc, who is occupying the computer to play some Starcraft, immediately recognizes McKee in the video and informs Madsen.
Doc meets up with Madsen and Hauser at the bar and they get his job application with an address on it. Madsen and Doc head to the address, but of course it doesn’t exist. Doc then realizes that the address refers to the cell that McKee was in, which means McKee’s cell was right next to Jack Sylvane’s. Madsen informs Hauser that she needs to interview Sylvane. Hauser won’t tell her where he’s keeping the prisoner, he just tells Madsen that he will bring Sylvane to her. As Madsen and Doc are going through Johnny McKee’s inmate box, they find books by science fiction author Jules Verne, chemistry articles and a picture of a girl with a burnt face with the name “Ginny” written on the back.
Somehow Johnny McKee ends up getting another job (in this economy???) – this time as a pool boy at a hotel or country club. McKee gets to work and immediately encounters another rude male customer. Once again, McKee gets back at him by putting something in the pool water, which kills the rude customer and everyone else in the pool.
Obviously McKee doesn’t like to be bullied. In flashbacks to Alcatraz we see that Johnny was confronted by Cullen, the big prison bully, to kill a man that he had a beef with. McKee gets a shank from his intended victim, and goes back to his cell to poison the tip. He tells Cullen his plan is to kill the man during a movie night, and instead ends up killing Cullen, the bully.
Madsen visits Sylvane to learn more about McKee. Sylvane asks what happens if he doesn’t cooperate asking if Hauser is going to send him back to Dr. Beauregard for treatment. Madsen questions this, but Hauser tells her to continue with her interview. Before getting into the discussion about McKee, Madsen asks Jack about his return to present day to find out Jack had only been in San Francisco “a few days” before he was caught and that he showed up at Alcatraz when he returned.
In a flashback to 1960, we see McKee telling Sylvane about how Jules Verne wrote about submarines years before their inception, and how he’s also written about a man on the moon. Sylvane doesn’t believe it and says it’s not possible, but McKee says that the future is coming. The entire time this conversation is going on, he is poisoning the shank he later used to kill Cullen with the same mixture he used in the bar killings. Sylvane tells Madsend that McKee had a jar for bugs that he called his “killing jar”. He explained that McKee would always land garden duty where he would collect weird plants with big yellow seeds. He would crush the seeds and drop them in the jar and watch the bugs die. He says that it was some kind of nightshade that grew all over the island. Before Sylvane gets taken away by Hauser, Rebecca finds out from Sylvane that Tommy Madsen was often in the infirmary giving blood, and that Tommy told him there is some kind of hole beneath the hole under the strip cells.
The team heads to Chinatown to see if McKee was trying to buy any nightshade and they find an address where he had the plant delivered to. The address leads them to an abandoned high school and they break into the chemistry lab, but McKee is gone. They learn that he is producing Phosgene, which is a noxious gas. On a chalk board they find “the future is now” which somehow meant he was referencing the East Bay Tub system and Jules Verne and that he was planning on poisoning the underground subway. They are right and we see McKee unleash his toxic gas through the air vent system in a subway packed with sports fans. Luckily, all trains are monitored by computers so the team learns exactly where he is.
Somehow the team sho
ws up just in time to break the glass of the subway to help everyone out. Madsen and Hauser chase McKee and after a bit of a fight Madsen throws him onto the tracks where he is electrocuted, but still alive. Back in the office, Doc tells Madsen that he learned that Ginny, the burnt girl in the picture, was burned with acid – most likely from McKee.
Flashback to 1960. Lucy is trying to help McKee and she asks more about Ginny Winters. She knows that Ginny took Johnny on a date. Afterwards he was led to a dark place where they held hands, kissed, and she got him to take off his clothes. At this point, the lights went up and the entire football team was there to laugh and ridicule him. They threw fireworks at him, one of them exploding at his genitals causing him to lose his testicles. She explains that she can make those memories go away. McKee admits that the incident happened and admits that he burnt her face with acid.
Back to present day, we see Hauser have a discussion with Jack Sylvane. Jack wants to know what is going to happen to him and says that he doesn’t dream anymore.
AMANDA’S QUESTIONS: How come Jack can’t dream anymore? Is the hole beneath the hole the same as the warden’s magical door?
NEXT WEEK:
Clarence Montgomery (guest star Mahershala Ali), the only innocent man in Alcatraz, returns to present day, but is now committing crimes.
