Photo Credit: SyFy
Power tends to corrupt. And, absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely.
Besides being all-knowing, a God is often characterized as all-powerful. Unfortunately, as the above saying warns, unless closely guarded, immense power can quickly lead to abuse of power, and good can morph to evil. Before you know it, the honorable God becomes the treacherous monster. Hence, we have the title of tonight’s episode, “Gods and Monsters”.
The episode begins with a very good drawback to the episode “Gaslight” where we are introduced to the mysterious alpha Jason Miller (Connor Price). A comatose drowning victim, Jason quickly earns our sympathy vote, even after we learn his therapy included the use of a strange photic-stimulator device created by Stanton Parish (John Pyper-Ferguson). We only know that it stimulates and/or alters the brain somehow, and even after a visit with our resident tech-genius, Skylar Adams (Summer Glau), Dr. Rosen (David Strathairn) knows very little more about the device. Dr. Rosen underestimates Jason and the effect the stimulator has on his brain, and he is painfully reminded tonight that that was his biggest mistake.
After being exposed to the device, Jason now appears to have the ability to obtain control of anyone and everyone he touches. Each person becomes a member of Jason’s own mental “collective”, and he has 100% control of them – they do what he says, says what he wants them to say. This is a far cry of his life before his newfound ability. His ability still existed before his accident, but back then, it worked only on Alphas; whereas, now it worked on everyone. Jason now has control over the very people who made fun of him and ostracized him in the past, and as you can imagine, he’s relishing every minute and has no intention of giving that power up.
Jason is in effect a creation of Stanton Parish, and like every creation, he has his flaws, the biggest one being the hold he has on each person in his “collective” damages the person’s brain and will, in the end, kill him. Parish, not being a physician himself, reaches out to someone he thinks can help, Dr. Rosen – or, so we are led to believe. This is where things get weird, and we get, for the first time, a glimpse into the mind of Stanton Parish, what his plans are, and why Dr. Rosen has every right to fear him so much.
From this point on, we are not sure what is a lie and what is the truth with each utterance out of Parish’s mouth. The terrible physical side affect of Parish’s experiments is, no doubt, truthful, but Parish’s concern for Jason and all of his victims? Very doubtful. I must say that John Pyper-Ferguson did an excellent job with his role in this episode, because he had me believing his hype too, almost to the end. Heck, I even had sympathy for the guy when he is betrayed by Dr. Rosen and locked into a guarded cell, after being promised by Rosen that he would be set free after they help Jason.
But, as Parish breaks free after feigning death (as we know, Parish can’t die) and gaining control of Jason, we see his plan, full-circle. And, we see that Jason isn’t the real “monster” here – it’s Stanton Parish himself.
Do you actually think I would have created something that I couldn’t control – Stanton Parish to Dr. Rosen
With Parish becoming a part of Jason’s collective, we see Parish gaining control of everyone in Jason’s group, thus creating his own “drone” army and effectively abandoning Jason. Jason was just a “pawn” for Parish to forcibly gain an unlimited number of followers, and the scary part is we have no idea how many “Jasons” are out there. Dr. Rosen finally convinces Jason to release everyone in his group, but thousands and thousands of patients used Parish’s photic-stimulator device, which could create for Parish hundreds of thousands – maybe millions – recruits for his own personal army.
This episode was superbly written, neatly tying back to a previous episode and revealing enough about Parish to understand the true threat behind this man – but leaving enough unsaid to make us start racking our brains on how in the hell this all is going to end. And, it certainly raised enough questions (like where in the hell is Skylar Adams now, and is she working for Parish?) to keep us guessing for quite some time.
Do you actually think I would have created something that I couldn’t control – Stanton Parish
While Parish may have created a “monster” in Jason with his experiments, Parish is the biggest monster of them all. And, the biggest question is – who is going to control Stanton Parish? At this time, I can see no answer to this question anywhere near in sight.
Some random quotes and observations:
