‘The Rain’ on Netflix Season 2 Episode 5 Recap: I’m a Big Fan of the Cure

If a picture is worth a thousand words, I’d be out of a job and this whole website would be out of business. What is this job anyway if not an attempt to use a thousand words to determine the worth of the pictures they’ve been written about, right? And I thought we were bringing jobs back! What happened to Infrastructure Week???

Well, we soldier on, that’s all we can do. And so I’m writing four words about the following picture, taken from the pretty freaking fantastic penultimate episode of The Rain Season 2:

That’s. More. Like. It.

Titled “Keep It Together,” Episode 5 of this wobbly season appears to have taken its own titular advice. This is everything I want out of a Rain episode: tender, tense, romantic, emotional, rapidly escalating, and utilizing its sci-fi horror in its smartest and most horrifying way since the season began.

For the very first time, the bizarre powers of the rapidly mutating virus—incubated in Rasmus and then released to become a waterborne plague as the events of the story began way back when—make visual, thematic, and emotional sense. It’s not just Rasmus mugging in an incredibly handsome and Nordic way as black CGI mist coalesces around him like he’s on a SyFy Original (excluding Battlestar Galactica and Channel Zero of course). This is odd to say about a virus, but it now has a raison d’être: Survive at all costs, by any means necessary. We were told at the beginning of the season that each time scientists attempt to attack and cure it, it strikes back and shifts to an even more impregnable form (like the Borg!); this time we’re really shown what that means.

It’s not just the horrifying Virus Man who Patrick and Martin discover in the bowels of a nearly abandoned Apollon house of horrors, loaded with viral pig corpses and toxic black plants that have shattered through their greenhouses and broken through the concrete ceilings. It’s not even the psychological effect it’s had on the lone scientist still attempting to find a cure there, failing so miserably that he barely even reacts to the presence of two total strangers and winds up begging them to kill him after his attempt to cure the Virus Man kills the poor guy in an explosion of black goo. (Though looking at and listening to him, he may be better off dead.)

It’s also the hallucinations plaguing Rasmus, in which he appears to himself as a little boy, warning him that Simone is out to kill him with this cure, and that he can be more powerful than anyone else can imagine. At first this feels like an out-of-nowhere addition to the show’s ever-growing pile of sci-fi clichés—related, perhaps, to a suddenly revealed memory of Rasmus meeting Apollon head honcho Sten while in the hospital as a kid years ago.

But even before Fie explains what’s going on, it clicks: The virus doesn’t just look like Venom when it emerges from his body, it acts like Venom when it’s hidden within. Its instinct for self-preservation is causing it to weaken Rasmus’s mind, convincing him that the cure will be lethal, that he and the virus are inextricable, that even living like a pariah is better than what awaits him if they attempt to set him free. “But it feels real,” he argues when Fie lays this down on him. “Yes,” she replies. “Feelings do.” I don’t care whether you have a world-ending virus or not—that’s a big mood, man, a big mood indeed.

Outside all the viral fooferaw, which we’ll return to in a moment, this thing is stuffed with the character moments that made Season One so worth watching. In addition to that great exchange between Fie and Rasmus, Simone emotes beautifully to Lea over Rasmus’s desire to have some autonomy, and her own fear that she may have to kill him herself before this is all over.

Simone and Jean share a moment too, when he (quite embarrassed about it) interrupts her as she gets out of the shower to ask for advice on how to remain close to Lea while being constantly terrified of losing her. Lea and Jean have a moment of their own when, in response to the chapel he built her last time, she builds him a little monument to all the good times they’ve shared, complete with adorable drawings of the two of them throughout their history together. They wind up dancing the night away afterwards, and it’s rhapsodic stuff no matter how shopworn it may seem. In their case, heavy-handed gestures of love and closeness are all they can do to break down the barriers of fear and mistrust anyway.

Even Patrick and Martin, who start the episode being lone-wolf dickheads, earn some moments of grace. I love their laughing banter after Martin confronts Patrick about how half-assed his plan to find this facility, locate the capsule-destroying magnets they supposedly have, and use them really is. I love how Patrick can hear the sounds of children laughing when he looks inside a dead family’s house, then admits all he wants if he gets out of quarantine is to have the normal life with a wife and a job he was never able to procure even before the apocalypse. I love the tension of their infiltration of the facility, and their open, guileless horror about what they find.

In the end, Martin and Patrick decide that they have to run back to the original base and warn the group not to try to cure Rasmus, since it will only make the virus more lethal and kill them all. Unfortunately, they don’t make it in time.

Fie and Simone drug Rasmus’s food so he’ll fall asleep and they’ll be able to cure him despite his objections, but apparently they miscalculate the dose—or, given the super-strength he displays when he breaks free of his restraints, the virus defeats the sleeping agent. He freaks out so badly that he can’t control the viral cloud that emerges. Lea, seeing all this, decides to martyr herself in the ultimate gesture of the togetherness and trust she’s sought all season. She walks into the lab and places herself in harm’s way, drawing the virus into herself so that Simone can run up behind Rasmus and inject him with the cure.

This is the perfect payoff for the Lea and Jean storyline, for Lea herself, for Lea and Simone, for Simone and Rasmus, for the entire group dynamic. It makes the viral-cloud thing work for the first time since it began showing up, since this is the first time it has a real purpose from an emotional perspective aside from being an ersatz Dr. Jekyll/Bruce Banner thing. It looks good. It makes me sad.

And the whole thing is wonderfully acted by the whole cast: Alba August as Simone, Mikkel Boe Følsgaard as Martin, Lucas Lynggaard Tønnesen as Rasmus, Clara Rosager as Sarah (I hope they both get better, because if they survive and have kids those kids will be so beautiful they’ll be invislbe to the naked eye), Jessica Dinnage as Lea, all the way on down. Despite all the missteps along the way, the whole thing seems worth it all of a sudden. Talk about a miracle cure.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.

Stream The Rain Season 2 Episode 5 ("Keep It Together") on Netflix