Lighters, Orbs, and Birthday Pizza
WILD CARDS – The Lorne Identity – (limited spoilers) ⁓
Cole and Max
It is Cole’s late brother Daniel’s birthday. Max (Vanessa Morgan) comes into the office without being summoned because, she says: “They’re setting up wifi in my condo, which interrupted my Deep Space Nine rewatch. Totally underrated in the Star Trek oeurve.” Detective Yates (Amy Goodmurphy) shows up late for work because her parking spot has been moved, and also because she encounters Lorne (Kris Lemche) who was looking for Cole (Giacomo Gianniotti). Yates takes a while to tell Cole that someone is looking for him.
Lorne
Lorne will speak to Cole and no one else, and, as one might expect from the episode’s title (a variant of “The Bourne Identity”), he has lost his memory. He does remember that his wife is missing, and that there is ‘danger everywhere’. “Only you can stop it,” he tells Cole. “Well, that’s what Jerry said. He told me to talk to you. Only to you. He said I would find you here, on your boat.” Aliens, led by someone called “Nevets” are behind whatever it is, and Jerry’s location is “Jupiter”. Lorne knows where Jerry lives, but not the address. He was not in the room when Max mentioned Deep Space Nine, and he knows that Cole lives on a boat.
Jenn Griffin as Marge, the editor who fired Jerry because he took his job as a reporter too seriously.
They find Jerry dead at the Jupiter Motel and discover that the deceased was an investigative journalist. In the course of their investigation, Max mentions another science fiction film, “Annihilation“. Jo Livingstone, writing for The New Republic, called that film a “brilliant splicing of Woolf and Cronenberg”, and said that it “examines the spread of trauma and grief throughout a living being. When a bear kills one of the explorers, it returns with part of her voice incorporated into it. When one being causes suffering in another, the suffering fragments and embeds within the being that caused it.”
Lorne is temporarily left in the care of Detective Yates, who is perhaps unduly worried about the loyalty of her partner. “You know, people turn on their partners all the time,” she tells Lorne. “Like Marc Zuckerberg versus those twins in that movie. Or versus his friends in that movie. Or versus that girl he dated in that movie? Man, that guy’s a real jerk.” The film she’s talking about is “The Social Network” which was based on the book “The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook: A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal” by Ben Mezrich.
Yates is distracted by her partner’s recurring need to make secretive phone calls, and he uses Yates’ hairspray and lighter to set off the fire alarms, and slips out in the ensuing confusion. (The guy who killed Cole’s brother carries a Zippo lighter, but Yates’ lighter is a Bic.)
Detectives Simmons and Yates
After Lorne escapes, he is located and sent to hospital, the location of which is kept secret. Somehow, the killer finds out where Lorne is being hospitalized, but fails to kill him. The case is finally solved after key evidence is found under an “Orb”, exactly where Lorne said it would be. This could be a reference to Deep Space Nine’s Orbs of the Prophets.
We also learn that Cole’s late brother did not like sweets, so in lieu of birthday cake, he had pizza with a candle on it. Max explains why she volunteered to help with this case. “Me and my dad have this tradition for my mom’s birthday,” she explains, “It’s called ‘no man left behind’. Every year, we spend the day together, no matter what. Some years, one of us tries to get out of it to mope alone. And then it’s up to the other one to say, ‘No. Sorry, no man left behind’. I know it’s hard, birthdays for loved ones who aren’t here anymore.”
Max, Cole, pizza, candle
After his memories return, Lorne explains why he sought out Cole and no one else for help. “It was Jerry”, he tells Cole. “He was doing a story about police corruption a while back. Came across your case from a couple of years ago. He always believed you were set up. He would always say he just knew that those weren’t your drugs in your car.” Lorne says he doesn’t know why Jerry believed that.
* Last Updated 4 months ago ago