"Power Hungry"  VITALS
Episode #: 1.05
| Season: 1
| Original Air Date: October 7
| | Writer: Julia Cho, Jason Cahill | Director: Christopher Misiano | | Special guest(s): Ebon Moss-Bacharach (Joseph Meegar), Max Baker (Jacob Fischer), MaryLouise Burke (Flora Meegar) | | Featured song(s): REO Speedwagon "Can't Fight This Feeling" | Episode synopsis:A young man, Joseph Meegar, is late again. His bedside clock and watch have both stopped. Getting up he takes his temp and heartrate,heart rate, noting both on a pad beside his bed. His mother is harassing him, and he leaves for work where he's shown contemplating an ad promising to "increase your confidence" in his locker. Out on the package sorting floor Joseph is harassed by a supervisor who snatches Meegar's phone to look at the pictures of an attractive young woman on it. Joe becomes flustered and fails to produce an explanation for who she is, and denies being her stalker. The supervisor is about to walk off when Joseph's package scanner shorts, the second one in one week. His supervisor threatens him if he wrecks another to find another job.
Things are looking up for Joseph when he arrives at the pretty woman's office to deliver a package. He seems to be working up the courage to ask her out, but he is terribly awkward and isn't making a good impression. The screen of her computer monitor begins to flicker and distort when her co-worker drops by her desk and makes a date for later that evening. Joseph makes a hasty departure, but she jumps in the elevator with him to go to IT about her fried screen. She knocks a visibly uncomfortable Joseph's phone out of his hand when she reaches for the elevator's buttons. She sees her photo on his phone as she picks it up and he is mortified, then the elevator lurches, people losing their footing etc. He tries to help her and she screams at him to get away from her, and the elevator plummets to the ground floor.
A terrified Joseph gets up and walks away from the debris; all the other passengers are dead. All the cars in the underground car park start their engines and their lights and alarms come on as he screams at them to stop and runs from the building.
Olivia and Charlie are walking along street, Olivia telling Charlie about seeing John in her kitchen and Charlie telling her to stop beating herself up over it all, that it's only been a few weeks and next time John stops by for a nightcap? To give him one.
Walter and Peter are in the lab, Peter playing the piano as they discuss not getting much sleep, and then the torture from the previous eps. BroyleBroyles and Olivia enter, BroyleBroyles telling the Bishops of the 'massive electrical surge' that hit the building causing the elevator to crash and kill the passengers. It is compared to a train crash in Japan the previous year, theorists saying it could be a new weapon of some sort. The team are given their brief - to find out "what happened, how it happened, and who's behind it."
At the location Walter uses a pendant Olivia is wearing to show that there is incredible amounts of electromagnetic energy still residual in the elevator car, summising car,summerizing that the passengers were all dead before the car drove itself into the ground. Back in the lab Walter tells them of a government project that was looking at whether it was possible to make humans trackable by homing pigeons, something they managed to achieve back then, but the side effects were too detrimental. "There was one subject, every time she hiccuped the lights would dim." His tests confirmed his theory that someone has pursued this path of reasearchresearch and has magnified a person's electromagnetic field to the point where they are affecting the electrical fields around them.
A rumpled and dusty Joseph returns to work where he is confronted by his boss again, this time for being so long on his run. Joseph tries to explain that he has had a bad day, but the boss fires him and then promptly gets his arm mangled by the sorting machine he was trying to fix.
Late that night Olivia is working in her office and BroyleBroyles brings her coffee, asking her what she's working on. She tells him Walter's theory and BroyleBroyles sits down. He tells Olivia of a series of clinics that get their test subjects by advertising things like weight loss, or confidence boosting, and about a man, Jacob Fisccher, a doctor of biotechnology, wanted in four states and three countries for illegal experimentation on humans, including surgical alterations and radical hormone therapy. Olivia asks to look at the files on Fischer and BroyleBroyles tells her he will transfer the files to her terminal, but warns her "it is not easy stuff to look at." Later, as she is studying an Interpol file on Fischer the lights go out. When Olivia searches the level for anyone the lift opens and John Scott walks out. He tells her he did not try to kill her, that he loved her and that she knows it. He also says that she is on the right track, that she's looking for a person and that they need to get to the man before Jacob Fischer can use him. John leaves in the elevator, Liv runs to the ground floor to see if he's still in it, which he isn't and notices on the back wall of the elevator the weight limit warning sign.
She wakes up Peter and Walter with the information that the weight sensors had the car weighing 1440 pounds just before impact but the combined weight of the victims is only 1275 pounds, "... leaving a discrepancy of 165 pounds." They realise the person might not realise their capabilitescapabilities and the team is woken to look into anomolies.anomalies.
Joseph arrives home and tries to tell his mother that he's scared, that he had been to this place that said they could help him 'tap into his hidden potential' and that they did some things to him 'to realign the electrical impulses of his brain'. His mother is constantly derisive, not helping and he gets angry, the lights go, mother collapses (pacemaker?) and he runs away. As he's leaving his building Fischer and a sidekick walk in and dart him after telling they want to help him, to adjust his medication.
Back in the office they learn of another small 'event' the mangling of the supervisor's arm in a machine at Bicoastal Parcel - Charlie remembers that a Bicoastal Parcel worker signed in to that building and finds Joseph's name on the register. Olivia goes to Joseph's to find mother dead from pacemaker failure and time of death is around 1.15am. Walter comes up with the idea of getting Joseph's electromagnetic signature off the Walkman found in the elevator and once Olivia procures him two dozen pigeons, programs them to track Meegar and he and Astrid insert GPS tracker chips into the pigeons to follow them.
Olivia goes outside and John pays her another visit, telling her she did the right thing by listening to him, then kisses her and tells her he did not betray her, and that she knows it, in her heart. Peter comes out and John disappears.
Peter, Olivia, Charlie and team track the pigeons as Joseph is being tortured, Fischer telling him, "It is unfair, and I appreciate that. The position you find yourself in now must be so surreal for you." He tells him he is special but Joseph says he just wants to be what he was before.
The teams pull up at the building, Olivia telling Peter to stay in the car, which he does. Charlie, Olivia and two other agents go to the door, one of Fischer's assistants comes in and tells him they have visitors and Fischer tells him to take Joseph to 'the depot', and that Joseph is the priority. As team enters front, Joseph escapes the driver and runs out the back, Olivia taking chase. Heavy plant equipment starts up as he runs, Olivia trying to call out to him, but Peter finally gets him with a tyre iron. Fisher is arrested and Joseph is shipped off to hospital.
Back at the lab later on Olivia talks to Walter and he guesses she is having visions of John, and he explains that her hallucinations are actually a residual effect of being linked with John Scott's consciousness in the tank, and her brain is trying to exorcise him.
That night, driving home, she follows John, and finds a secret cellar full of case files John was working on before he died.The FBI go througthrough h them and discover that John Scott knew a lot more about 'Pattern' cases than they did, including Joseph Fischer and seven more potential 'Josephs', all of who were found and helped. Among the files the investigators also found a box of personal effects including photographs and dogtagsdog tags. BroyleBroyles gives them to Olivia, telling her there appeared to be 'some things meant for you' - she discovers a diamond engagement ring engraved with the word "ALWAYS" inside it - and John's voice says, "I love you Liv, always."
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