Hopefully you’re all watching Resurrection by now because it really is shaping up to be a great show. Losing a loved one is never easy, and this episode in particular touches on the specific grief that parents experience when they bury a child.
Henry Langston hasn’t quite accepted this returned version of his son Jacob. His wife Lucille has embraced the boy as if the last 32 years without him never happened. She’s taking him out to public playgrounds and to church activities as though it’s a normal occurrence for this to really be her son. On the other hand, we see Henry really struggling with this. He even experiences muscle cramps in his hands every time he’s remembering the son he lost. Maggie checks out her uncle, but he refuses any further testing to get to the bottom of this condition.
The scene that really got me crying was when Henry finally opened up to Lucille about why he just can’t bring himself to get close to this new Jacob. His memories of their son are so fresh in his mind that he really hasn’t gone a day without thinking of him after all these years. Every time he hears children playing outside, or hears an ice cream truck, he still thinks of that Jacob. When Henry not so subtly questions how it’s so easy for Lucille to have forgotten their son, she’s rightly offended. This just felt like such a private conversation in this married couple’s life, and unfortunately, it’s probably a reality to any parents who have buried their own child.
Caleb Richards is still a mystery that Agent Bellamy and Maggie are determined to crack. At the end of last week’s episode, we saw Caleb knock on a door and viciously attack the man who answered. Well, it turns out he most definitely murdered him, but Bellamy doesn’t know that part yet. All he knows is that Caleb dug up multiple holes near his shack, presumably looking for something. Add to that the strange mask that he and Maggie found in one of the holes, and the newspaper clippings that Ray gave them about a bank robbery, and we’re pretty much lead to believe that Caleb possibly robbed a bank in his previous life.
On the way to Caleb’s hunting shack, Maggie and Bellamy walk by the river where Jacob and Barbara died, and that’s when Maggie realized they also spread some of Caleb’s ashes in the same river. She proposes that maybe the river has some sort of healing power to resurrect people, but I don’t even know how they could test this theory. When you’re dealing with dead people coming back to life in almost carbon copies of their previous bodies, I really don’t think science will be much of a help.
That’s probably where faith comes in to play. Tom, the local pastor at the church, has accepted that this is really his childhood best friend Jacob come back to life. Other people in the church aren’t so trusting of this theory, and they even hold a board meeting without Tom where they come to an agreement that Lucille and the boy she calls Jacob won’t be allowed in church anymore. Tom tries to fight this, telling one particularly vocal lady named Helen that maybe God has a strange way of showing us things. She quips back, “are you sure that He’s the one behind this?” Very interesting!
At the end of the episode, Tom follows a trail of blood into the church where he finds another familiar face waiting for him. A woman he calls Rachel is visibly bleeding from her hands, which is extra creepy, and she asks him if she really died. In the preview for next week, we see that she was probably an ex-girlfriend or fiancé of Tom’s and he has to first tell his wife that this woman from his past is among the Returned.
A few other noticeable developments were made this week. Fred is playing “cops and robbers” with Jacob like he used to when he was younger, and he took this opportunity to get serious with his nephew. He asks Jacob if the man he saw with his Aunt Barbara pushed her into the river, but Jacob tells him that he was actually trying to hold onto her arms as she was caught in the current. Fred is still shaken up about the news that his wife was unfaithful to him even after all this time, so of course he would go to drink his sorrows away. He’s rambling on to a bartender that he was actually hoping the man was responsible for his wife’s death so he could have someone to blame. Cut to the end of the bar after Fred leaves, and that guy we saw Maggie confront last week about her paternity was sitting there and got handed two take-out bags. If you recall, last week he walked into his house and told someone that “she found us” meaning Maggie, so it’s only a matter of time before we learn more about his and Barbara’s history.
What do you think of Resurrection so far?
[Photo via Guy D’Alema/ABC]
