REPORT: INDY SHOW
FILE #: 210

Jarod gets himself assigned to a speed racing team under the guise of Jarod Jones in order to find out who was responsible for an accident that left his predecessor in the hospital with a broken leg and other injuries.

AT HOME, SYDNEY is disturbed by a nightmare in which he is confronted by three incarnations of Jarod (as an adult, a twelve-year-old and a four-year-old) who all demand from Sydney answers to their questions about their identity. Sydney is also met by a black-and-white incarnation of his twin brother Jacob, who tells Sydney — as bright red blood stains his black-and-white skin — that he doesn’t have much time left. Sydney leaves an e-mail message for Miss Parker which reads, “Our suffocated friend is awake. I’ll be away fishing,” and departs for the Ferren Hospital, Button Grove, Maryland where he has been secretly keeping Jacob.

Doctors at the hospital inform Sydney that Jacob has been affected by a brain-invading virus. The good news is: Jacob is no longer in his coma. The bad news is: Jacob isn’t lucid, and mentally drifts from one time period to another… and the virus that awakened him is also killing him very swiftly.

Sydney removes Jacob from the hospital just as a sweeper team arrives to kill them both. (Mr. Raines found out that Jacob was alive through a tap on Sydney’s home telephone, and sicced the sweepers on them). In the hospital, when the sweepers split up to search for Sydney and Jacob, Sydney manages to elude one of them and brains the other with a housekeeper’s bucket, then escapes with Jacob in a wheelchair. He secrets his brother off to a cabin on Whitecloud Lake (where the two them used to go fishing).

AT THE CENTRE , Miss Parker receives Sydney’s note, and demands that Broots figure out where Sydney is so she can meet with him and Jacob. After some searching, Broots is able to give her directions to the cabin, and she hurries off to that location.

MEANWHILE , in Fontana, California, Jarod becomes part of the Roemer Racing Team when he’s able to manage laps around the California Speedway at a near-record 31.48 seconds per lap. Jarod will be taking the place of the #3 car driver, Jimmy Roemer, whose father, Grant, owns the cars and the team, and whose brother, RJ, drives car #2. The #1 car is driven by Nigel Brinkman.

It was Jimmy who was injured during test laps on a track in Milwaukee. His car went into super-acceleration and he was unable to stop it no matter how hard he pushed on the brake. His car smashed into a retaining wall and left him hospitalized. Jarod goes with RJ to St. Abramitis Memorial Hospital where Jimmy is recuperating, and discovers that the brothers have been very competitive all of their lives but still have a great deal of love and respect for one another. Jarod also notices that RJ seems to be suffering from hand tremors that often make it impossible for him to hold onto anything at times.

With some more sleuthing, Jarod finds several video tapes that give him clues to Jimmy’s accident. One video is of the crash itself. On the tape, Jarod can hear the race car’s engine roaring even after the car crashes into the retaining wall. He also confirms that Jimmy was driving the #2 car — RJ’s car — and not the #3 car to which he was normally assigned. The second video shows the Team’s chief mechanic, Hawks, letting Nigel Brinkman into the #2 car garage the night before the accident.

Going through boxes of the debris from the crash, Jarod discovers that the throttle cable to Jimmy’s car had been tampered with. There were visible scrapes on the cable that seemed to have been made by the grip of a pair of pliers. Jarod takes the cable to Hawks and asks him his opinion of the damage. Hawks insists that the damage was done during the crash, not before it.

Unconvinced, Jarod goes through the tool supply at the garage where the Roemers’ cars are kept, and takes every pair of pliers he can find from there. Going through each pair of pliers, one at a time, Jarod determines that the characteristic scratching on the damaged throttle cable could only have been made by a special pair of Odekirk pliers… like the pliers RJ had, at the age of seven, won from his father in a wood-chopping competition with his brother. Jarod at first believes that RJ was somehow responsible for Jimmy’s accident, but can’t understand why RJ would want to injure his own brother.

Jarod later learns that RJ had lost his pliers, about a year earlier, to Nigel Brinkman on a bet. Jarod deduces that Brinkman was the one who must’ve tampered with the #2 car in Milwaukee. Nigel had the tools and the opportunity (when Hawks let him into the #2 garage the night before the crash)… But what could his motive be? And why would Hawks help him?

Jarod confronts Hawks with what he already knows about the damage to the throttle cable of Jimmy’s car, and what he’s seen on the videos… and Hawks admits that he did, indeed, help Nigel Brinkman to tamper with the #2 car at the Milwaukee speedway, but, he insists, he never thought Jimmy would be driving the car. Both he and Nigel had assumed that RJ would drive the #2 car that day, as he normally did. It was RJ they wanted out of the picture, not Jimmy. RJ was becoming a good enough driver that he could have eventually taken the #1 car spot from Nigel, and Nigel didn’t want that to happen: he’d be out of a job and a career. And Hawks wanted RJ dead, because RJ kept hinting that he was going to see to it that the aging and increasingly inept Hawks was fired from his position as chief mechanic on the Roemer Racing Team.

The day of the test drive in Milwaukee, however, RJ was suffering so badly from hand tremors that he was unable to drive the race car. He didn’t tell anyone but Jimmy, though, and told everyone else he was letting Jimmy drive the #2 car because he wanted his younger brother to get a taste of the power driving in that racer could give him. Both Hawks and Nigel knew Jimmy was going to crash, but didn’t dare say anything for fear of revealing what they had intended to do to RJ.

After hearing Hawks’ confession, both Jarod and RJ convince Hawks to help them expose Nigel, and a repentant Hawks agrees.

AT WHITECLOUD LAKE , Miss Parker arrives at the cabin where Sydney is keeping Jacob. At first, Sydney is furious with her because he believes it was she who sicced the sweepers on them in the hospital. Miss Parker reminds Sydney that she was the one who had helped him to fake Jacob’s death the last time Rainessent sweepers after Jacob. If Raines had found out that she had willfully failed to dispose of Jacob, he would have killed her on the spot. Sydney, believing her to be innocent of the attack at the hospital, relaxes and allows her to stay.

Jacob is not in good health, however… and only has about twelve hours left to live. Sydney tries to get him to talk about Jarod and Miss Parker’s mother in the hopes that Jacob can help to shed some light on the truth about Jarod’s abduction and Catherine Parker’s death, but Jacob isn’t lucid enough to stay on-topic for more than a few seconds. Distraught, Sydney breaks down in tears, and Miss Parker embraces him, letting him cry out his anguish and frustration on her shoulder. Later, Sydney also reveals to Jacob *and to an eaves-dropping Miss Parker) that he was the one who had attempted to kill Raines in Boston when Raines and the Sweepers tried to kill Jarod and his family; but the bullet hit Raines’ oxygen tank instead of the man himself.

AT THE CENTRE , enraged by the fact that his sweepers were unable to find and kill Jacob, Mr.Raines goes after Broots. Binding him into a chair, Raines threatens to torture Broots with an acetylene torch unless he tells him where Miss Parker and Sydney are. Broots stalls for as long as he can, then relents, and gives Mr. Raines the information he wants.

BACK AT THE RACEWAY , Jarod invites Nigel to take a test drive in the #1 car. He tells Nigel he’s made some modifications to the vehicle that will make it faster and easier to handle, and he wants Nigel to try the car out before they use the modifications in actual racing situations. Excited by the prospect of a suped-up car, Nigel gets into the modified vehicle and takes it out onto the track. What he doesn’t know is: Jarod has remote-control of the #1 car, has topped the tank off with gasoline, and put bad tires on it (creating a crash situation similar to that which almost cost Jimmy Roemer his life). Jarod had also modified the microphone in Nigel’s crash helmet (used to talk with the pit crew during racing) so that everything he says while wearing the helmet is broadcast over the PA system at the racetrack, so everyone there can hear him.

Jarod allows Nigel to take a lap in the modified car without interfering with it, then, chasing Nigel in the #2 car himself, Jarod announces to Nigel over his headset that he knows what Nigel did to Jimmy’s car in Milwaukee. At first, Nigel refuses to acknowledge his crime, so Jarod takes control of the #1 car by remote, and forces it into the same throttle-sticking super-speed mode that had forced Jimmy’s car to crash. Nigel tries to brake, and tries to steer, but Jarod keeps the car speeding and nearly uncontrollable until Nigel, in fear for his life, confesses that he DID sabotage the #2 car in Milwaukee in the hopes of killing RJ. Satisfied with the confession, Jarod releases the remote control over Nigel’s car, and when Nigel slows it down and drives it into the pit, the police are waiting there. They arrest him on the spot and drag him away.

IN WHITECLOUD , Syndey persists in questioning Jacob about Jarod. In a slim moment of lucidity, Jacob says and scribbles the word “GENE” on a piece of paper, but before he can tell Syndey what the word means, Jacob dies.

The next morning, Mr. Raines arrives at Sydney’s cabin with a sweeper team, and demands to know where Jacob is. Sydney tells him succinctly, “My brother is dead,” and leaves the room. When Raines makes a move to follow him, Miss Parker intervenes and warns, “I wouldn’t push him. A man with a temper to match his marksmanship: dangerous combo.” As Miss Parker also leaves the room, brushing aside a burly sweeper, Mr. Raines pauses to take in what she said. His eyes go wide with realization.

Later in the day, Sydney goes to the make-shift grave he’s made for Jacob in the woods near the cabin. There is a simple wooden marker over the grave which reads: JACOB, A BROTHER MISSED. Sydney kneels to put some flowers on the grave, and is surprised and gladdened when Jarod walks out of the woods to approach the grave himself. He tells Sydney that Broots told him where he might find him, “He said you’d be away from The Centre for several days, so I took a chance…” Jarod then asks if Jacob’s passing was an easy one. Sydney tells him, “I believe it was, yes.” Rising, Syndey then hands Jarod the slip of paper with the word GENE on it. Jarod asks what the note means, and Sydney suggests that “GENE” might be Jarod’s real name, or his father’s real name. He’s not certain, but, he says, “I hope it helps you find your own peace in the world.”

The episode ends with Sydney and Jarod standing on opposite sides of Jacob’s grave. The camera pans skyward as the background is filled with the music of bagpipes playing, “Amazing Grace.”