Haven‘s “Morbidity” picked up on the suggestion at the end of last week’s episode: what would happen if the outside world caught on to what’s going on in this town? The show has never really dealt with this much, and Nathan even points out that they get so concerned with day-to-day survival that they probably don’t stop to worry enough about exposure, so I’m extremely interested to see where this goes.
CDC Dr. Charlotte Cross comes to Haven because of the weird biopsy of Dave’s leg, but some quick thinking by Dave and Dwight manages to put her off that scent pretty quickly — they enlist Chris Brody and his charm Trouble to convince her, via Skype, that it’s a rare jellyfish injury. The team is pretty unified at the beginning here, working together to get Cross out of Haven: Nathan, Audrey, Dwight, Duke, Gloria, and Haven’s epidemiologist Pete, who is apparently the genius who keeps Haven’s death statistics from looking suspicious.
Unfortunately, Cross decides she’s going to stay in Haven to relax for a little while, and soon enough, a very creepy Trouble starts: dancing bear costumes appear around town, sometimes empty and sometimes with a dead man in them. Dwight takes Cross to the Gull for lobster while Nathan and Audrey try to corral the bears, but while they’re eating, a fellow diner sickens and collapses, with blisters on his lips. When she discovers a few other patients at the hospital with the same symptoms, Cross thinks it’s some kind of outbreak, and Dwight trying to play up the idea of food poisoning from the Gull only deters her for a little while. And when an infected man dies — because of his Trouble, which causes bubbles and makes one in his IV hit his brain — Cross takes over and threatens quarantine.
The bear Trouble comes from a woman named Eve — and it came out once before, when Lucy helped her. The bear suit was Eve’s father’s; he died in a boating accident when she was ten, which triggered her Trouble and made the bear costumes appear with him dead inside. They show up anywhere she went with her father, which is basically everywhere in Haven. While investigating this, Audrey discovers that Eve and her husband (also Troubled) had both had the blister sickness; it turns out that the sickness is contagious but only among Troubled people — and that it may eventually make their Troubles manifest.
Nathan rounds up the sick people to try to help Dwight keep everything under control and keep Cross from noticing what’s going on. Duke realizes this — and that Nathan’s keeping people in the morgue, of all places — when he goes to the hospital to confront Dwight. Just as Troubles are starting to activate, Cross finds them and immediately declares she’s putting Haven under quarantine. Duke delays her for a bit by having a kid with an electricity Trouble zap the cell tower (and by cutting the landlines), but obviously this isn’t a permanent solution. And our team has fallen apart; Dwight declares that he’s the police chief and head of the Guard, while Duke only thinks about himself and Nathan only cares about Audrey. “You want to know what Haven’s going to do? Whatever I decide.” Eeek. I’m interested to see how this new Dwight-in-charge dynamic goes, but I also general prefer to watch shows with the main characters working together against outside forces rather than working against each other.
Meanwhile, Mara spends the episode trying to win Duke over to her side, first by trying to seduce him and denying that she killed Jennifer. “If you’re going to continue to hate me, I just want it to be for the right reasons.” “Well, there are just so many to choose from.” When this doesn’t work, she slowly convinces him that his friends are all turning against him in order to save their own skins — and that the two of them are the ones in the most danger if the outside world discovers the Troubles. She predicts a roundup of Troubled people, which of course happens, and while Duke has amazing faith in his friends at the beginning, by the end of the episode Mara has him convinced. “We’re on our own.”
Other favorite lines and stray thoughts:
- Dave’s having more Croatoan dreams — presumably connected to the wound on his leg?
- “Nathan finally went and bought some new socks.”
- “Revealing an interdimensional injury to the CDC? Yeah, not a great idea.”
- “Caller said it’s disturbing. No further details.” Oh, Haven.
- “Charm Trouble. Gets me every time.”
- “You handle Smokey. I’ll take Yogi.”
- “Locals. They get upset when places run out of lobster.”
- Cross found a genetic marker on all the sick people, which means it may be a genetic marker for the Troubles. I hope they pursue this angle.
- “Okay. You’re on with … each other. And yes. It’s weird.”
- “I don’t know if you can afford such ontological certainty.”
- In addition to her manipulation of Duke, Mara’s clearly trying to undermine Audrey’s faith in her ability to deal with Troubles.
(Image courtesy of Syfy.)