This episode opens with Magnus and Will walking the halls of the Sanctuary, and Will telling Magnus about the background he’s pulled up for the visitors they’re expecting, Greg Addison and his team of analysts. Addison is a top troubleshooter for the UN’s Security Council, and he is making this visit in regards to the emergence of the Hollow Earth abnormals. Henry and Biggie come up and start filling them in on the measures they have put into place: Henry has made sure there are firewalls in place around the most secure information on their servers, and that Biggie has insured that every abnormal in the Sanctuary is on lockdown.
The doorbell rings, and everyone has a moment of panic as they imagine that Addison and his team have arrived an hour ahead of schedule, only to find out that it’s Erika, Henry’s HAP girlfriend. She tells Henry that she has news to share with him and, after a bit of rambling on Henry’s part, she manages to tell him that he’s going to be a father. Henry is in shock, and understandably so. When we last saw Erika, Henry had asked her to move into the Sanctuary and marry him, and Erika, in turn, had offered Henry a plane ticket to come back with her. Neither could stand to leave their causes, so they stayed on their respective continents.
Henry explains to Erika the situation, about how Magnus and Will had gone off to Jakarta to try and bring back the telepathic abnormal, the crixorum, who was responsible for instructing the three groups of Hollow Earth abnormals in which directions to move as they emerged from the calderas. He tells her that the mission went horribly awry and, two days later, the UN informed them that they would be coming with an investigative team. Erika offers her help with getting things in order for the UN group, and then we see Addison and his large group of analysts being shown through the halls by Will and Magnus.
Addison says he and his team are there to analyze the Sanctuary and make a decision on whether or not they will still get government funding in the future. He introduces his senior technical consultant, a young woman by the name of Cassidy Turner, and asks Will to help show them to the lab that has been prepared for them. Will obliges reluctantly and leads them on. Magnus continues the tour of the facility one-on-one with Addison, which she is none too pleased about, and finally ends up in the lab with Henry and the rest of the team of analysts.
Henry is visibly unnerved by their presence already, and then even more so when Magnus enters with Addison in tow. Addison gives them the go-ahead to begin, and they pull out their own tech peripherals. Henry protests and Magnus tells them she won’t allow them to set up their own network and possibly compromise their security protocols. Addison gives in and makes several jibes about abnormals being monsters and freaks, which it enrages Erika.
She lunges at him and starts to shift, telling him that they are not freaks. Henry and Magnus pull her back and realizes that something is wrong with her. She can’t control her ability to shift. Magnus and Henry put her into one of the isolation rooms in the infirmary where Magnus concludes that her pregnancy hormones are hindering her ability to keep herself from transforming into a wolf. She draws blood from Erika with a promise to search for a treatable chemical imbalance before she’s requested to come before Addison, along with Will.
They begin to recount the events in Jakarta. They had been put in contact with a local who pointed out the man they were looking for, and as they went in toward him, they noticed a black ops team coming in, armed to the gills. What they didn’t know was how to deal with the crixorum, and he made them turn their weapons on one another as the man made a break for it. Will accuses Addison of sending in the team to capture the crixorum, and he confesses to it, much to Magnus’ surprise.
The next act opens with us back in the lab where Henry and Cassidy are exchanging banter about their jobs. She demands blueprints for several of Henry’s weapons and just as he’s telling her he can’t give them to her because they were all last-minute builds, he gets a text message demanding that he come to the iso room where Erika is. She’s panicking because one arm has transformed into a wolf’s arm and she knows she can’t control it. She’s terrified of losing the baby.
Meanwhile, Magnus and Will are cross-examining Addison as to his intentions and lack of regards to the Sanctuary’s jurisdiction in capturing the crixorum. Will accuses him of not paying attention to the risk of collateral damage, and Magnus deduces that they wanted the crixorum for themselves. She figures out that the black ops team had tracked she and Will, and that was how they knew where to look for the abnormal. She also suspects that the death of the man they had been tracking had been what Addison wanted all along, to eliminate the threat if they couldn’t catch him. Addison tells them that there is a flaw in their reasoning and pulls out his laptop. He shows them photos of the deceased man’s brain and autopsy findings. He tells them the man that was killed was not the crixorum.
The next scene shows Henry and Biggie searching fanatically for a disappeared Erika. Henry finally catches up to her in his lab, coding a program that will track coding errors and repair the errors itself. Henry approves, and as he and Erika start to kiss…they’re interrupted by Cassidy walking in, in search of Henry, just as Addison has split up Magnus and Will to conduct separate interviews. Needless to say, Magnus isn’t pleased. He accuses her of covering up the crixorum’s true identity, just the same way that she faked Big Bertha’s demise. He threatens to cut off the Sanctuary’s funding if she doesn’t tell him where the real crixorum is. She and Will confirm that their contact in the market back in Jakarta had been the crixorum all along. They confess that he escaped them and that they were hoping to find him again and capture him then, which explains the falsified reports they submitted to the UN.
Henry is still with Cassidy as she is attempting to deconstruct his weapons to see how they work. She asks him for the power source on the stunner weapon, and he tells her that she’ll have to ask Nikola Tesla, since he built it. She accuses him of making jokes, and Henry just gives her a pointed look. She realizes then that he isn’t kidding. In the infirmary, Erika is trying to get Biggie to fill her in on Henry’s background. He sees through her ploy and tells her he has no mind to spill his information to her…and then as she’s testing the program she set up, she notices the UN team trying to break through Henry’s firewalls. They contact Henry immediately and he shuts them down.
Back in Will’s office, Addison is there trying to spin Magnus into the bad guy as he talks to Will. He asks Will if his loyalty shouldn’t be to his own kind, and then starts bringing up Will’s background. He also accuses Will of finding a replacement mother in Magnus. In Magnus’ office, Henry tells Magnus of the UN team trying to burrow in through his firewalls and begs her to kick out Addison and his team. She tells him there’s no harm done if he shut them down, and that it’s not quite time to kick them out yet.
The scene changes to Will getting onto the elevator, thinking he’s finally ditched Addison…when Addison steps onto the elevator with him at the last minute, cornering him there. Addison tries to tell Will that people were impressed by the way Will handled things in Magnus’ absence and that he could arrange for the Sanctuary’s mandate to be restored under Will’s headship, if he accepted. He tells Will that all that is required is the truth about what happened to the crixorum.
Will tells him that Magnus cornered the abnormal in question and attempted to talk him down. Magnus offered to take him home, instead of capturing him. She tells him that his people are rebuilding Hollow Earth and that they could make sure he got home safely to help them. Once back in Magnus’ office, Addison accuses Magnus of sending an abnormal terrorist back home to develop an army, and she counters, telling him that she sent him to safety. Addison informs her that what she’s done is a capital offense and as Will raises his hand to protest, Magnus and Will start to bicker over his disclosure to Addison. She blames him for spilling everything to Addison and all but accuses him of wanting the reins to the Sanctuary. Addison threatens her with funding. He tells her that if she doesn’t start to cooperate, he will shut her down and pull all of her funding…or she can accept being under the supervision of the UN Security Council.
Magnus does not approve, and demands that he take his team and get out. He tells her that she’s just signed the Sanctuary’s death warrant, and she accuses him of wanting that all along. She tells him that she would rather burn the Sanctuary to the ground than let the UN come in and turn it into some sort of prison or torture tank . She tells him to get out, and if he ever comes near again, she threatens to feed him to one of the abnormals. Biggie steps up to him, stares down at him in a threatening manner, and escorts him out. Henry has a freak out moment that Magnus has just said goodbye to everything that was keeping them in operation.
Magnus and Will crack smiles and let Henry in on the fact that all of this had been planned. They wanted to make him think that cutting off the Sanctuary was his idea…and she tells him that she’s had money stashed away for years that there is no way the governments know about. And then she takes them all to the isolation cells where she has the crixorum sedated and in a special iso cell so that he cannot transmit anything to anyone. They knew that he had set up the other man who had been killed as a decoy, and had captured him and brought him back. He had been in their cells all week long.
Back in the infirmary, Magnus is delivering news to Erika and Henry. She tells them that the pregnancy is the reason she cannot control her transformations. She offers the chance to prolong the pregnancy and give her body the chance to adjust to the hormones gradually. They accept, and then Magnus asks Henry out into the hall. She tells him that this new world they have walked into with the Sanctuary is no place to raise a baby, but that he would have about 22 months to decide whether he wanted to leave or stay.
Magnus then meets will back in her office and he asks her if this is the right move. She tells him that she spent over a hundred years planning this route and that from here on, the Sanctuary will make it’s own rules.
If you missed last week’s episode, be sure to check out our ‘Sanctuary: Uprising’ recap! The next episode is ‘Monsoon,’ which airs this coming Friday at 10/9c.
