On this week’s episode of Alcatraz, the search for one of the 63s shows up with a muddled past. That may sound redundant, a prisoner with a muddled past, but this is a very special case involving our first wrongly accused prisoner.
Fore!
Our episode opens with a man who looks like English musician Tricky getting a beer at a high class social event. He meets a nice young lady and the two are soon driving a stolen golf cart around the course. This is how every love story should start. The love doesn’t last long though, and soon we see our man placing the woman’s dead body on the golf course in a confused state.
The man turns out to be Clarence Montgomery. Clarence was a highly appreciated cook, and was offered the head chef position by Warden James in jail. This was a high honor for a black man in the middle of the civil rights movement. Back in the present. Clarence flees to Emmit, his old prisoner friend’s, house.
Wrongfully Accused
Doc, Madsen and Hauser appear at the scene of the murder, and Hauser is suspicious of whether Clarence was really the killer. No one at the party saw the victim with Clarence, so they are having to do some digging to find out if it is really him. At the morgue, they are told by Nikki that the murderer was not the same one of Ellen, who was the victim that put Clarence in jail.
So what really happened? It turns out that Clarence was employed as the first African-American cook at a prestigious country club. He soon fell in love with a girl, who turned up dead. Since in it was the late-50s, the murderer was clearly the black guy. Warden James offered Clarence the head chef position hoping to cure racial tensions in Alcatraz, but Tiller thought it wouldn’t work. Sadly, Tiller was right.
Old Friends
Madsen and Doc soon find out that Emmit is alive and living in Oakland. They talk to him and ask him about Clarence. Emmit is smart enough to know that snitches get stitches, so he acts like he still thinks that Clarence is dead. He does tell them that Clarence was wrongly imprisoned in the 60s. As they leave, Madsen gets a call from Nikki saying that a hair was found on the body and that the murderer suffers from a disease which causes him to retain copper. The medication used to treat this is penicillin and B6.
While the team is still on the hunt, Clarence is at another high class party. It turns out that he has a job with a catering company, which is what allows him to gain access to his victims. He is once again approached by a woman, who once again ends up dead.
Office Visit
At the scene of the second murder, Madsen notices the catering truck and the menu for the event and deduces that Clarence was the chef. They visit the caterer’s office and find Clarence. He makes a run for it and eludes Madsen. Her next step to track him down is to have Nikki look up all the prescriptions recently filled for Penicillin. It turns out that there is a hit under the name of Emmit.
So what made an innocent man start killing? I would have guessed a spiteful vengeance on the society that locked him up, but it goes a bit deeper. It turns out that Dr. Beauregard came up with the method of forcing people to watch messed up videos used in Clockwork Orange. I wonder if Dr. Beauregard gets a royalty check every month from the Kubrick estate? It turns out he brainwashed Clarence and turned him into a mindless killer trying to recreate Ellen’s death. The experiment goes so well that Clarence started killing other inmates.
Mercy Killing
Hauser and the team go to Emmit’s apartment to find Clarence, adn they are met by shotgun fire through the front door. It turns out that Emmit has had enough of being put down by the white man. Hauser uses the fire escape to talk to Clarence inside. Clarence comes out and tells Emmit that he killed the two woman, and that he can’t get locked up again. Emmit understands what he means and shoots him with the shot gun as Madsen breaks in the front door. I couldn’t help but picture the end of The Fly when this happened. Hauser finds information that posthumously proves Clarence’s involvement in his original conviction, so I guess everything turned out okay. Except for the two murder victims and their families…
Another piece of the puzzle is revealed at the end when Warden James is asked by Beauregard about what he is putting in the prisoners blood and put back into them. He gives a non-reply, which is to be suspected. However, earlier in the episode Doc shed some light on government experiments used at the time which involved poisons and drugs on unwilling participants. Hmmmmm…
Alcatraz has just passed the 10 episode mark and is settling in nicely. This was a good episode that gave a lot more background information about the inmate being chased, which I think makes the story a lot more intriguing. There are three episodes left this season, so I hope that things get ratcheted up.
Chase Gamradt
Contributing Writer
(Image courtesy of FOX)
Contributing Writer, BuddyTV
