Alcatraz Recap: A Big Ol' Stack of Mysteries With No Explanations

Dr. Sengupta: Caring psychiatrist or secret super villain?

​Alcatraz is now more than halfway through its first season, and we still don't know much. Each episode continues to play out like a comic strip: The bad guy wants to destroy the city and/or kill a lot of people, usually to avenge past wrongs, and the unlikely heroes must operate in secret to save the blissfully ignorant public from fates like land mines, cyanide poisoning, and random sniper shootings, the kind of stuff that would make my mom shudder and say, "Oh, that's just unacceptable."

But the characters are starting to feel predictable and the plots formulaic, which is problematic on a slow-moving show like Alcatraz. The tiny, fast-spinning gears that are the weekly reappearances of the old-timey inmates are struggling against the weight of the one large (and most important) gear that is the overarching mystery of why the inmates have returned and their motivation, as well as character development. And it feels like that large gear hasn't moved in awhile. In any case, it's not all bad. Let's head onward with episode seven.

What's New
The prison doc is trying to fix Dr. Sengupta, but she's still comatose. The doctor believes that if Sam Neill reads to her it will "draw her to the surface," but Neill storms out and dismisses that pansy-ass idea. (But by the end of the episode, the possibility of getting his true love back wins him over.)

Cue the bad dance music. Johnny McKee, this week's old-timey inmate (OTI), is serving as a bartender at some douchey, neon nightclub, and he's gonna poison the shit out of some entitled asshats demanding drinks. (Admit it: We all kind of wish we could do that.) Back in the 60s, it's revealed that McKee was kind of a feared and reviled poison mixologist at The Rock -- he used nightshade, the only plant that would grow on the island, to poison his victims. Landscape fail! And as the modern-day douchebags start collapsing in the club, their gelled hair sliding along the slick floor like pucks on a shuffleboard, it's obvious that those skills continue to serve him well.

Soto catches wind of the murders via viral video in the wee hours (he was up late playing computer games), and he immediately IDs the perp and calls Pixie Cop Madsen to tell her McKee killed something like 70 people in 1958 with a cyanide-based pesticide -- "He taught high school chemistry, and in his spare time, he poisoned people."

Meanwhile, McKee is interviewing for another job at a trendy health club (after smartly figuring mass murder would be grounds for dismissal at his old one). In the waiting room, he notices some dude on the couch next to him watching the video of the nightclub murders on his iPhone. "What is that, on television?" McKee asks, making him the first OTI to in any way be disconcerted by modern technology.

Oh, and did I mention yet that McKee hates douchebags, and that in high school, he wiped out the whole football team? (Admit it: Back in the day, you wished you could have done that, too.) So now he puts himself in positions of service to rich people to justify his homicidal impulses. Naturally his stint as towel boy at the health club doesn't last long: One scene shows him graciously handing a towel to a cranky, demanding old man; a few scenes later the pool is full of bodies floating as awkwardly as hot dogs in a sauce pan. He did say he loved mixing the pool chemicals.

Meanwhile, our heros discover McKee's secret lab and realize he's cooking some serious biological weaponry to poison people on BART. This is a smart twist -- few things spark such primal terror as being trapped and gassed with no way to escape, like when your brother farts in the car while going 70 MPH on the highway and then locks the windows while you sit there gagging. It also raises the question of when the crew is going to break protocol (aka Sam Neill's rules) and get law enforcement at large involved. Because come on, this isn't an inefficient nonprofit organization; it's the FBI, and they can't operate with a team of only three people for much longer. When they fuck up, people die.

Unexplained Clues: Why We're Still Curious
-- "The hole beneath the hole": There's a pit deep in the bowels of Alcatraz where inmates go when they really piss off Warden Sociopath. Two of the OTIs seem to have been sent to 2012 specifically to retrieve the keys to this cell, but we don't know why or what happened there.

-- The time travel: The OTIs themselves have no idea why they've returned to 2012, where they've been for the last 50 years, or why they haven't aged.

-- Dr. Sengupta: She acts like she wants to help the prisoners and is genuinely concerned about their mental health, which probably means she's the super villain behind the whole scheme. When she wakes up from that coma, she's gonna be pissed. Also, not even Alcatraz super nerd Doc Soto has any record of a female doctor on the island.

-- Tommy Madsen: He is allegedly healthy, so why is he always in the infirmary, and what are they doing with his blood? Also, what is the true story behind is relationship with his brother, Ray Archer, the former Alcatraz guard and the uncle who raised Pixie Cop?

-- Sam Neill: Just kind of in general, WTF is up with that guy?

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