REPORT: SILENCE
FILE #: 216

IN PADUCAH, KENTUCKY, Miss Parker, Sydney and Broots arrive at Jumbo Jim’s Carnival Equipment company, and find the place overseen by an adult dwarf. He shows them Jarod’s last lair: a carnival side-show tent set up inside the building, that’s filled with all different kinds of mirrors… including a mirror made up of fragments which, when put together properly, form a face. The proprietor tells them that Jarod made it so he could get “another look into his soul.” Sydney suggests the mirrored face may also represent Jarod’s “attempt to reconstruct a shattered personality.”

IN EL PASO, TEXAS, in a DEA safe house, Jarod — as Jarod Leary –walks through the home to make sure it’s secure. When he enters the living room, he sees a woman named Carla and her young son, Nickie. Jarod says “hi” to Nickie but before the boy can respond in any way, the house is attacked by outside gunmen. Bullets come flying through the windows and rip apart the living room area. Carla screams and drops to the floor. Jarod grabs Nickie, drags him into the kitchen, and then covers Nickie with his body until the shooting is over and the assailant’s speed away in a car. Nickie is shaken but makes no sound. Jarod tries to comfort him by telling him he’s all right; it’s all over….

The next morning, Nickie and his mother, Carla, are put into a DEA transport van, protected by agents with rifles and shotguns, and driven away to a secondary location, while other agents look over the safe house grounds for evidence of the shooters. By his car, Jarod is packing up his things. He opens one of his red notebooks, and inside it we see newspaper clippings with headlines that read: “FIVE-YEAR-OLD WITNESSES DEA MURDER” and “CHILD WITNESS REMAINS TRAUMATIZED. SILENCE ENTERS THIRD WEEK.” There is also another headline which reads: “CORRUPT DEA AGENT KILLED IN DRUG DEAL GONE BAD” and a picture of an agent named Antonio Cruz. It was Cruz’s killing that Nickie witnessed, and everyone believes the shooting was done by a drug dealer named Vasquez, but without Nickie’s testimony the Feds can’t arrest Vasquez on that charge. Nickie can’t testify yet, however, because he was so traumatized by the events that took place on the day Cruz was killed that he’s become hysterically mute.

Putting various toys into a box that he’s going to take with him to the new location, Jarod is met and confronted by two other DEA agents: Andrew Stess, and Roger Bingham. They both chastise Jarod for trying to steal their glory, and for doing their jobs for them by protecting Nickie from the shooters the night before. Jarod tries to explain that he was only doing his job, but Stess confronts him with: “You wanna be a hero? Do it on somebody else’s watch.” Stess and Bingham then walk away, and Jarod is met by another DEA agent, Commander Davis. Davis is no more supportive than Stess and Bingham were.

Looking over the toys Jarod is gathering up; Davis picks up a Slinky and asks Jarod what all the toys are for. Jarod tells him he uses them in child therapy, and hopes they’ll get Nickie to relax and to trust him. Davis mocks him with, “You think a damn slinky is gonna help him talk…” Jarod explains that the therapy isn’t that simplistic, but Davis isn’t interested. He tells Jarod he has two days to get Nickie to talk, or Davis will employ his own methods to get the traumatized boy to speak.

AT THE CENTRE, Angelo is suddenly removed from his space and put into a holding cell by the Triumvirate, and Mr. Raines is shocked to find himself under Tower review. He makes his way to Miss Parker and confronts her with accusations: he believes she is the cause of this upset and he demands to know what she’s up to. Miss Parker simply blows him off and refuses to respond to him.

AT AN UNDISCLOSED MOTEL, the DEA’s second safe house location, Jarod is let into a sealed room where Carla and Nickie are already waiting. It’s night, Nickie is ready for bed, and is playing with some toys on the mattress of one of the two full-size beds in the room. Jarod brings Nickie his box of toys and starts unpacking them: a Mr. Potato Head, a Slinky, a Magic 8-Ball, and a Wheel-O. Nickie rejects all of them, and Jarod steps away from him to give him some space.

Carla says she doesn’t understand why, if Jarod is a “shrink”, he’s wearing a gun like the other DEA agents. Jarod explains to her that he’s an agent who is also a “psychological reconstructionist”. He uses various techniques — including play therapy — to help people who are suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress syndrome to remember events that cause their trauma and then deal with their fears. For him to help Nickie, he explains to Carla, he needs to know what she remembers about the day Nickie witnessed the murder.

Carla tells Jarod that she had taken Nickie and his cat, Charlie (in a cat-carrier) to the Laundromat with her. Nickie was playing with Charlie, and Carla was having a conversation with another woman in the Laundromat. Carla lost track of time; ad didn’t realize that Nickie was gone until she heard the “popping” sound of gunfire out in the alley behind the Laundromat. She looked around to find Nickie gone and rushed out into the alley to find him. She saw the dead body of a man draped over some cardboard cartons and other trash in the alley but couldn’t find Nickie or his cat anywhere. The police were summoned, and it wasn’t until hours later, when the body was finally going to be moved, that Nickie was found. He had been hiding in the boxes when the shooting started, and the dead man had fallen on top of him. Nickie was so terrified that he had been unable to move… and was now unable to speak. “Can you imagine that kind of fear?” Carla asks Jarod.

In a flashback, Jarod remembers a time when, as a child in The Centre, he had become so fearful and disassociated from himself that he had been unable to speak for 36 hours, and had simply sat on the floor amid a scattering of ripped-apart photographs with his arms wrapped around himself, and rocked himself back and forth. Back in the present, he relates to Nickie’s fear and admits, “It must have been terrible.”

AT THE CENTRE, Mr. Raines walks across the parking lot at night to his sedan, and finds his Sweeper, Willie, lying on the ground barely conscious. Suddenly, a man comes screaming out of the shadows and attacks Raines with a straight razor. The man slices through the hoses on Raines’ oxygen tank so Raines can’t breathe, and then continues to slice and dig at Raines’ arms and body until Miss Parker arrives on the scene and scares the attacker off with a gun.

AT THE MOTEL, Stess and Bingham come into the room to check on Carla and Nickie. Bingham is busily playing the lottery, using a coin on a scratcher to see if he’s won an instant jackpot. Stess, meanwhile, berates Jarod for “playing with [his] little toys” instead of doing his job and getting Nickie to speak again. Both men then leave the room. Jarod is sitting by the beds in Carla and Nickie’s room, watching Nickie continue to play with his toys. One toy, especially, seems to keep Nickie’s attention: a small doll shaped like a woman, with its head broken off its body. Nickie tries and tries to put the toy back together but can’t make the pieces fit.

As a bedtime treat, Carla brings Nickie over a tray with a glass, a spoon, a carton of milk, and a container of chocolate powder. She pours some milk into the glass and lets Nickie add the chocolate to it with a spoon. Nickie stirs the chocolate into the milk, and Jarod is intrigued. He’s never had chocolate milk before and asks Nickie if he can try some. Nickie hands the glass over to him, as Carla walks the milk carton back to the refrigerator in the kitchenette. Just as she enters that part of the room, bullets start raining through the windows.

Carla drops to the kitchenette floor, and Jarod grabs Nickie, pushes him down between the beds in the room, and lays on top of him to protect him from stray bullets and flying shrapnel. As quickly as it started, the assault stops, and everything is silent again… except for the sound of Nickie’s mother lying on the kitchen floor as she says, “Jarod… I’ve been shot.”

An ambulance comes to take Carla to the local hospital, and Jarod promises her he will watch over Nickie until she’s able to re-join them. Commander Davis storms through the motel room, and tells everyone he wants to find out who’s leaking their safe house locations to the assassins; he even suggests that he’ll force all of his men to take polygraph (lie detector) tests if he has to. Jarod goes to Nickie and tells him they must go to another safe house. Nickie evades him, and instead searches the room from the broken doll he was playing with before the shooting started that night.

Jarod watches Nickie as he finds the doll and tries again to repair it. Jarod looks around the room and then takes to Nickie a small Tupperware container. He tells Nickie if he puts the doll inside the container it will be safe there. Jarod then shows Nickie a photograph of his own mother in an attempt, perhaps, to help Nickie appreciate the fact that Jarod understands and empathizes with Nickie’s distress over Carla’s injuries. Nickie drops the head and body of the broken doll into the Tupperware container… and takes the photograph of Jarod’s mother and slips it into the container, too, so they’ll all be “safe.” Jarod seals the lid on the container and gives it to Nickie saying, “There. Nickie, after a while it won’t be so bad, and you’ll feel strong enough to put ‘ the hurt’ in a safe place.”

Jarod then takes Nickie to a third safe house: a huge mansion. The estate was built on top of a maze of underground tunnels that connect all four corners of the property to the mansion. The tunnel system could be accessed by various locations around the grounds, including a large manhole-covered drainage vent in the main driveway. Through the tunnels, one could get into the house through a “cubby hole” in the wall under a staircase. Jarod shows Commander Davis the cubbyhole, and Davis then assigns different men to each of the tunnels’ access points so no one can get into the house via the tunnel system.

AT THE CENTRE, Raines, still bloodied and shaken from the attack in the parking lot, is getting a quick patch job from Sydney, until he demands to be seen by a “real” doctor, and has Willie take him away in a wheelchair.

With Raines gone, Sydney tells Miss Parker and Broots that while Raines was under the influence of the anesthesia he was using, Raines kept repeating an odd name: Einnad. Sydney also tells them that the attacker had been very methodical in his attack and had carved the numbers 1-5-5 into Raines’ arm with the straight razor.

Room 155, Broots reminds them, was the room in SL-27 in which Raines had carried out some of his illicit experiments before SL-27 was gutted by fire in the early ’80s. Room 155 was, for example, the place where Timmy (now Angelo) had been taken and subjected to brainwave manipulation procedures (via a neuroelectric chair). [See the second season episode FX]

BACK AT THE MANSION, it’s night, and Jarod is bringing a tray of chocolate milk to Nickie. When he arrives at the door to the bedroom where Nickie is supposed to be staying, he finds that it’s not being guarded by DEA agents Jackson and Blake like it’s supposed to be. Jarod puts down his tray and pulls out his gun. He searches through the adjacent rooms calling Nickie’s name but gets no response. When he arrives in the living room, he finds Nickie there with Stess.

Stess is trying to get Nickie to speak and manhandles the boy when he doesn’t respond. Jarod puts his gun away, steps up to Nickie and Stess, and quietly tells Nickie he should go to bed. Nickie runs off… and Jarod punches Stess in the face, bloodying the man’s nose. Shoving Stess up against a wall Jarod tells Stess he believes Stess is taking this assignment much too personally and is losing control of himself in the process. Bingham walks in and demands to know what’s going on. Jarod releases Stess, hands him a handkerchief for his bloody nose, and says, “Just a free therapy session…”

The next morning, Jarod finds Nickie playing with the broken doll again, and he offers to fix it. Nickie hands the doll over to Jarod, and Jarod sticks the doll’s head back on with some super-glue. Nickie grins. Just as the doll is repaired, Carla, back from the hospital, enters the room. Her arm is bandaged but otherwise she seems fine. Nickie is so glad to see her that he races across the room and jumps into his mother’s arms. Carla tells him that she missed him, and he says to her, “I missed you, too.” Both Carla and Jarod are astonished and gladdened that Nickie is now starting to speak again. Carla hugs her son, and Jarod smiles as he watches them interact.

Later, Jarod goes through Stess’s personnel file and finds some other reports on him through the computer internet. Stess had been a decorated officer in the past, but had been deteriorating over the past few years, since the death of his younger brother, Adam. Adam had died of an overdose of heroine, and his death was related to drugs supplied by the Vasquez Cartel: the same Vasquez who Stess believed was responsible for the murder of Antonio Cruz; the murder Nickie witnessed.

Jarod searches for and finds Stess in the mansion and tells him he’s read his file and knows about Adam. “In clinical terms,” Jarod tells Stess, “you’re losing it.” Furious, Stess attacks Jarod and pins him against a doorframe. Jarod tells him, “Save your anger for Vasquez. It was his operation that sold your little brother the heroine that killed him… I know that you miss your little brother, and you’re so hurt and you’re so angry that you can’t see straight.” Realizing that Jarod was trying to help, not insult, him, Stess lets Jarod go, and Jarod asks him for his aid and support. “I need your help. Help me bring down Cruz’s killer. Help me save that little boy’s life.” Calmer — but not by much — Stess agrees.

AT AN UNDISCLOSED LOCATION, Miss Parker, Sydney and Broots are keeping surveillance on a small warehouse from an automobile parked nearby. They’ve followed Raines’ Sweeper, Willie, to the place, and are surprised to see Willie light up a cigarette before he enters the warehouse. Willie doesn’t smoke. Only a few seconds later, Willie exits the warehouse again, minus his cigarette, and drives away. Miss Parker, Broots and Sydney rush into the warehouse to see what’s there, and find the place soaked with gasoline. There’s a fire burning in one corner of the warehouse, started by Willie’s cigarette. Broots manages to put the blaze out before its able to ignite the gasoline in the place.

With flashlights, Miss Parker, Sydney and Broots look over the insides of the small warehouse and find that the walls are literally covered with “excessive, methodical” graffiti: the word EINNAD written repeatedly, everywhere. Broots discovers a discarded identification bracelet that reads, MINOR, D.H. 552-80-4738, from the Davidson Psychiatric Hospital. Sydney finds a medicine cabinet filled with drugs, some dating back as far as the 1970s, and dispensed by a doctor called “William”. He, Miss Parker and Broots all deduce that “Dr. William” was, most likely, “Dr. William RAINES”. Miss Parker says she doesn’t understand the graffiti and suggests that the spelling of the name “Einnad” is very strange; usually, the name is spelled “Enid”. Sydney tells her that she might not be reading it properly. He shows her the name as reflected in the mirror of the medicine cabinet. It isn’t Einnad; it’s DANNIE.

BACK AT THE MANSION, Jarod is talking with Stess about the case. He notes that on the night after Antonio Cruz was murdered, $500,000.00 worth of heroine was reported missing from the DEA seizure facility… and $500,000.00 showed up in an account regularly accessed by Cruz. Cruz’s name wasn’t on the account, however. It was identified only with a numerical code, so it could belong to ANYONE. And since Cruz was already dead when the deposit was made, the account must have belonged to someone else. Cruz had been defamed in newspaper articles as a cop gone bad, but Jarod is beginning to understand, Cruz might not have been the “bad cop” after all. Maybe he was killed because he discovered who the REAL drug-dealing bad cop was.

While Jarod and Stess are talking, Nickie comes into the room. He’s been unable to sleep and is looking for some comfort from Jarod. Jarod asks him if everything is “safe” in the Tupperware container, and Nickie nods, yes. Then Nickie looks over the papers that Jarod and Stess were working with and sees a photograph of Emilio Vasquez. He recognizes the man immediately but doesn’t seem overly stressed by the sight of the photograph. Jarod asks Nickie if Vasquez was a man, he’d seen in the alley the day Cruz died, and Nickie nods again. Before Jarod can question Nickie further, Carla arrives in the room and takes Nickie back to bed. To Stess, Jarod wonders aloud, “If Vasquez is the murderer, how come his photograph didn’t traumatize Nickie?” Stess shrugs and suggests, “Maybe your Slinky-stuff is working.”

Later, alone, Jarod watches the DSA of himself as a child during the time he had gone silent for 36 hours. Although Jarod would not participate in any simulations during that period, he kept drawing picture after picture of a woman with no face. At the end of Jarod’s self-imposed silence, Sydney approached Jarod and asked him about the woman in the drawings. Jarod kept repeating to him: “I can’t see her… I can’t remember… I can’t remember anymore… She’s gone… She’s gone, Sydney.” His distress at that time had been caused by fear and a preoccupation with the loss of his mother — the faceless woman in the drawings. Maybe Nickie’s distress was somehow related to his own moms well…

AT THE CENTRE, Miss Parker, Sydney and Broots trace the information on the identification bracelet and discover that Dannie was Daniel Hilton Minor, a child who had been brought to The Centre in the early ’60’s. His file stopped in 1982: the same year the fire gutted SL-27. Miss Parker deduces that when SL-27 was burned out, Raines had been forced to move Dannie to the psychiatric clinic and then to the warehouse location in order to continue his experiments on him. Dannie had been initially diagnosed with “mild depression” (which Miss Parker calls “a crock”) and was then driven into such a distraught mental state that his condition required more medication, at higher doses. Dannie was put under such duress that his personality split — like the fragments in Jarod’s face-mirror. Two of his personalities were evident already — Dannie the child, and the aggressive razor-wielding Einnad — but Dannie may have other personalities as well, yet unseen. Miss Parker looks over Dannie’s files and says sadly, “My mother couldn’t save him.”

AT THE LAUNDROMAT where the Cruz killing took place, Jarod searches the area for more clues, and tries to re-enact the events of the day of the shooting in his mind. While he’s searching the grounds, he discovers a tiny plastic nurse’s cap in among the trash.

BACK AT THE MANSION, sitting at the dining room table, Jarod shows the hat to Nickie and asks him if he recognizes it. Nickie takes his repaired doll from the Tupperware container, and stands it on the table. He then puts the little hat on the doll’s head. It fits perfectly. Carla and Stess stand by while Jarod then engages Nickie in play therapy.

Jarod picks up a male-figure doll and walks it up to the nurse doll. Jarod’s doll tells the nurse doll that her hat is pretty and asks her what her name is. Joining in the play, Nickie responds, “Mommy!” Jarod’s doll tells Nickie’s doll that he’s glad to meet her and asks her what happened at the Laundromat where she lost her hat. Bringing other dolls and toys into the play, Nickie re-enacts the scene the day Cruz was murdered.

He was playing with his cat, Charlie, when Charlie ran outside. Nickie followed the cat and was looking for it among the boxes by the trash bins when a car drove up. TWO MEN, not just one, got out of the car and exchanged briefcases. Jarod interrupts the play for a moment to ask what the men looked like. Nickie indicates that one of the men looked like the photograph of Vasquez. When Jarod asks what the second man looked like, Nickie withdraws into partial silence again. Rather than speaking, Nickie finds a lottery scratcher-playing piece — like the ones Bingham had been playing on the night when gunmen attacked the motel room — and hands it to Jarod. Understanding that Bingham is somehow tied into Nickie’s fear, Jarod doesn’t use his name, but instead calls him “Mr. Jackpot.” Jarod then asks Nickie what Mr. Jackpot did next.

Nickie says that after Vasquez and Mr. Jackpot exchanged briefcases, the third man, Cruz, drove up in a car of his own. Cruz got out of the car and started arguing with Mr. Jackpot. Mr. Jackpot then shot Cruz repeatedly until he collapsed on top of the boxes under which Nickie was hiding and died. Nickie tells Jarod he was so scared; he’d been unable to move. Then the police found him later… and Mr. Jackpot was still there along with the other DEA agents.

Jarod looks over to Stess and they both realize that Mr. Jackpot is indeed agent Bingham — but understand that Nickie is too afraid to use Bingham’s real name. Jarod then turns back to Nickie and asks what happened next. Nickie explains that after he was found, Mr. Jackpot took him aside for a little while, and told him that if Nickie told anybody that Mr. Jackpot was involved in the shooting of Cruz, Mr. Jackpot would kill Nickie’s mommy. To emphasize his point, Mr. Jackpot had taken Nickie’s nurse doll and snapped off its head. Jarod understands that Nickie had been silent since that time to protect his mother from Bingham’s threats.

At that moment, Bingham enters the dining room and asks Jarod if he’s made any progress with Nickie. Stifling his rage, and protecting Nickie with his own silence, Jarod tells Bingham that he hasn’t learned anything from Nickie yet. Bingham then walks up to Stess and tells him that Jarod’s time with the boy is almost up; Nickie is going to be turned over to Commander Davis next. Keeping up the façade already established by Jarod, Stess, too, pretends that Nickie hasn’t told them anything.

THE NEXT MORNING, Jarod and Stess stake out an alley where Bingham is slated to meet again with Vasquez. They both see Bingham and Vasquez arrive in different cars. And Jarod and Stess listen in as Bingham tells Vasquez the location of the safe house where Nickie is being kept. Bingham then tells Vasquez to “nail the kid” so they can get on with their drug transactions; and he informs Vasquez that he’ll deliver heroine to Vasquez that evening. Vasquez warns him, “This better be primo junk, or I swear you’ll end up like Cruz.”

BACK AT EINNAD’S WAREHOUSE location, Miss Parker, Sydney and Broots search again for any clues of the whereabouts of Dannie Minor. Sydney says the warehouse clearly marks out Einnad’s territory, but they’ll need to find Dannie’s territory if they’re going to find Dannie. Miss Parker dwells on the problem for a moment then, on a hunch, turns off all the lights and flashlights in the warehouse. In the darkness, they see a stream of light coming through a small hole in the wall.

Miss Parker kicks in a part of the wall and finds that there’s a cramped living space behind it: Dannie’s space. She’s about to call Sydney and Broots to help her, when she’s attacked by Dannie in his Einnad personality. Einnad flashes a straight razor at her and slices her hand with it. Miss Parker defends herself, and kicks Einnad away from her. Einnad collapses against the bracing in the wall, and the Dannie personality emerges. Dannie starts to cry and begs Miss Parker to shoot Einnad. “Make him stop…” Dannie sobs. “Please… Please… Kill me and he’ll stop…”

BACK AT THE MANSION, as Jarod and Stess work up a plan to trap Bingham, a DEA transport van is pulled up in front of the mansion and parks directly over the manhole cover that leads to the underground tunnels. Jarod then works on the van… and watches Bingham as Bingham hides a briefcase in the trunk of his car.

That evening, Jarod escorts Carla and Nickie out to the van, and Stess and Bingham watch them as they climb inside of it. Stess says something about hoping never to have to see Nickie again, and just as he says that, the transport van explodes in a huge ball of fire. Stess feigns surprise and tells Bingham he’s going to call the bombing in to Davis; Bingham smiles slyly and tells Stess he’s going to drive around the perimeter of the grounds to look for clues.

Inside the mansion, Stess goes to the cubby hole under the staircase, and opens it so Jarod, Carla and Nickie can climb out. Jarod had rigged the bottom of the van, so they were all able to escape from it, down the manhole and into the tunnels, before the van exploded. Jarod leaves Nickie and Carla at the mansion and goes after Bingham.

Rather than driving around the perimeter of the mansion, Bingham has driven off to his meeting with Vasquez. Before Vasquez arrives, however, Jarod drives up, and, with a briefcase in hand, he tells Bingham that he knows all about the drug pushing, and the money transactions, and the murder of agent Cruz. Cruz wasn’t the corrupt agent, Bingham was.

Bingham threatens to shoot Jarod, but Jarod tells him it might be wise first to check on his “primo junk”. Curious, Bingham opens his own briefcase, and opens one of the baggies inside of it. He puts a finger into what he believes is dark, raw heroine, and tastes it only to find that it’s really nothing but chocolate powder. Jarod points to another vehicle approaching their location, and tells Bingham that it’s probably Vasquez, who will kill Bingham when he finds out the “heroine” is fake. Jarod shows Bingham his own briefcase and tells him the real heroine is inside of it. Bingham can have Jarod’s briefcase, Jarod tells him, if he’ll confess to the murder of Cruz. Believing Vasquez will, indeed, kill him if he doesn’t have the real stuff, Bingham admits to murdering Cruz and to threatening Nickie, and then demands that Jarod give him the briefcase filled with heroine.

Jarod lifts the case up in front of Bingham’s face and pops the lock, showing Bingham that the briefcase is… empty. There is no heroine for Bingham to sell to Vasquez, only chocolate powder. “Got milk?” Jarod quips.

Bingham turns to see how close the approaching car is, and Jarod uses this opportunity to smack Bingham hard with the briefcase and knock the gun from his hand. The gun goes skittering under a fence, out of reach, and then Jarod points to the approaching vehicle, which parks a few feet away. As the occupants of the newly arrived vehicle approach him, Bingham can now see that it isn’t Vasquez and his men. Instead, Bingham is now faced with Stess, Commander Davis, and some other DEA officers who are brandishing guns. They’ve heard his confession. Jarod leaves Bingham and his fate to the discretion of his co-workers and exits the scene.

AT THE CENTRE, Mr. Raines approaches Miss Parker, Sydney and Broots and tells them that he’s not at all happy about the fact that the Tower had been given new evidence of his “extracurricular activities”. He specifically threatens Miss Parker with Raines: “You remind me of someone I used to know… Someone who looked exactly like you.”

Miss Parker: “I’m not my mother. Don’t make the mistake of forgetting that.”

Raines: “We should all be careful of the mistakes we make… shouldn’t we.”

Raines leaves, and Sydney then tells Miss Parker and Broots that Dannie Minor has been hospitalized again and is now under his (Sydney’s) care. Mr. Raines won’t have access to him again. Miss Parker admits that when Dannie/Einnad attacked her in the warehouse, her first instinct had been to kill him. But then she saw in him something of herself… a person who might have had a chance at life if The Centre hadn’t gotten its claws into him.

LATER, AT A PARK, Jarod arrives in a car to find Nickie and Carla picnicking. Jarod opens the back of the car and pulls out a tabby cat: it’s Charlie, Nickie’s lost tomcat. Nickie runs up to Jarod to say “hello”, to pick up Charlie, and return to Jarod the photograph of Jarod’s mother. “Thank you for keeping her safe,” Jarod tells Nickie. In response, Nickie grins and hugs his cat.

AT THE CENTRE THAT NIGHT, Sydney receives a telephone call from Jarod. Jarod is in a telephone booth and is still distressed by this last pretend. He asks Sydney, “Do you think it’s possible to forget all the terrible things that happen to us when we’re young?” Sydney tells him that people never forget, but that some people find ways to gain strength from upsetting or traumatic episodes in their life. Jarod says, “I try to be strong… But sometimes all I see is darkness, fragments of who I am. Will I ever feel whole?” Sydney says he doesn’t know, but that he hopes that one day Jarod will be whole again. “Me, too,” Jarod says sadly, and he hangs up the phone.

The episode ends with Jarod staring mournfully at a spot of shattered glass in the side of the telephone booth. Then he scowls at it and walks away.