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When we last left our heroine Laurel, she had a little problem … bugs. And no exterminator was going to be able to help, at least not in the traditional sense. After a call to 911 — and even they have been infected — Gustav showed up at Laurel’s apartment to warn her about the cherry blossoms. But it was too late. Laurel did not heed his warning about covering her ears before going to sleep and she awoke to tiny visitors in her brain.
Gustav thought that cognitive memory would help Laurel fight the invasion, but after Dr. Daudier arrived he realized that it wasn’t the left brain that needed stimulation (since that’s the ear the bugs entered) but the right brain … music, dancing, nonsense, booze and sexual activity. Luckily, Gareth had been on the phone with Gustav while Laurel was moaning in pain and arrived in the nick of time. In essence, Gareth was Laurel’s exterminator. Sex, chocolate, salami (and that’s not a euphemism!) and The Partridge family’s “I Think I Love You” on constant loop did the trick and drove the bugs out of Laurel’s brain. But Gareth still has no idea what happened or why. And if Laurel could be cured, why not her friend Stacie?
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That little experiment, however, did not go quite as planned. In fact, Laurel got a little more than she bargained for in a chilling moment after trying to get Stacie to dance, drink and hook up with her ex-boyfriend. No, Stacie laid it all out on the line — there is no more government, the left side of her skull is hollow, and the bugs want everything. We saw this demonstrated in Wheatus’ crazy gerrymandering scheme that Laurel plotted out which looked like crop circles pointing at Capitol Hill, but her brother said the redistricting actually helped the Democrats. He also told her to stop with the bug thing.
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And that is because Luke and Wheatus are locked in a battle over the CDC. Daudier and Gustav turned over one of the bugs from Laurel’s head to a CDC insider (oddly, there was no mention of the sudden change in Dr. Alaimo’s looks and personality), but when Luke discovered one of the doctors at the CDC was studying a bug, the director had that thing shut down with the specimen locked away in a warehouse that could quite possibly hold Indiana Jones’ lost ark as well. With that fire put out, Wheatus certainly had no opposition to the CDC budget … but he is always one step ahead, preying on Senator Pollack’s love of animals by revealing the animal testing that still goes on at the CDC. Would she refuse to vote on humane ideals and give her sworn enemy what he wants? Well, in a way. Ella shocked everyone by proposing to double the CDC budget so they could find a way to end death! Luke is certain the panel will never agree to that, but he also doesn’t know that his colleagues are controlled by bugs that want to take over the world. Wouldn’t Wheatus also be interested in living forever?
And that brings us back to the bugs. We’ve known since the beginning that the little critters are from outer space, but no one else does. Gustav has been trying to put the idea out there but no one wants to entertain that idea because, well, that would make them all sound crazy. But too many things are adding up to ignore, specifically the crop circled voting districts and that one key piece of the puzzle that has been a nagging question from the start: why do the infected love The Cars song “You Might Think”?
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After running into a bunch of people going to wrong direction around a pond, Daudier heard that song coming from one of the runners’ ear buds. And it clicked that she may have heard that song somewhere other than MTV (when they played music videos, this one was on constant rotation). Remembering a website (pri.org, which is an actual website but not the one pictured on the show) that discussed the “music of the spheres,” or the sound that outer space makes, she found a recording of sound coming from a galaxy 140 light years away from earth, and it had the same rhythm as “You Might Think.” Playing the sounds and the song side by side convinced Rochelle that Gustav may not be as crazy as she thought.
With all this information at hand, Laurel and Gareth attempted to have a normal date, kind of resetting and trying to put the weirdness of their previous night behind them. But Laurel dropped the bomb that she thinks bugs are eating people’s brains and making them crazy, to which Gareth simply responded, “Huh.”
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Which leaves us hanging until the next episode. Will Laurel be able to convince Gareth that his boss has changed? I mean, he completely gave up drinking for kale smoothies but no one found that to be odd? Will Pollack’s outburst to double the CDC budget get the whole thing shut down? Studying death may seem like a good thing on the surface, but as the director said to Luke, the country could not survive without the CDC. No disease control, the better for the bugs to take over. And what of the artifact in the warehouse? The bugs seem to be able to move no matter how many pieces into which they’re dissected, so will it remain locked away or find a means of escape? Only time and a handful of episodes will tell.
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