Alcatraz recap: Keeping Your Guard Up

The more I watch Alcatraz, the more invested I become in the series: So far I’ve found the characters inviting, the tone convincing and the pacing top-notch. Which makes it doubly frustrating that the last few “reveals” haven’t been the most bone-chilling twists.

Spoiler Alert: Last night we found out that Tommy Madsen—Det. Rebecca Madsen’s former-inmate grandfather—had a brother in Alcatraz with him who was a guard. And brace yourselves, that guard was Rebecca’s Uncle Ray. So what did this change? Well, up until now, Rebecca thought Ray Archer was her legal guardian, but not a blood relative—a surrogate uncle. But now she’s knows that the “Uncle” Ray who raised her is actually Uncle Ray, no quotation marks. Wow, right? That changes… nothing.

I’m not saying each episode has to feature a game-changing reveal, but it would be nice to learn a bit more about the overall conspiracy, even if it’s information that leads to more questions.

That being said, last night’s episode was still very enjoyable, focusing on a time-traveling guard instead of an inmate. The former guard was rummaging through his abandoned apartment on the Rock, looking for a hidden gun and some family photos. A present-day Alcatraz patrolman stumbled upon the guard from 1963, but instead of swapping cross-generational stories, the time-traveling guard just mercilessly whaled on his successor.

Later in the Batcave, Emerson Hauser showed Madsen and Dr. Soto on-camera footage of the latest ‘63 on the loose. Soto correctly identified the objective of the week as Guy Hastings, one of the guards, which made Madsen wonder why a guard would be just as violent as the inmates they’ve encountered thus far.

“The guards were good men,” Hauser assured her (though given his amorality, it’s hard to put too much salt in that assertion). “Someone put him up to it,” Hauser concluded, implying that the man wasn’t operating entirely under his own willpower, much like the returning criminals.

The best part of this episode just might have been the atmospheric jail drama that took place in the flashbacks. We watched Ray Archer—who raised Rebecca and runs that bar in the present day—endure his first day as a guard on Alcatraz, where “training day” resembled military boot camp more than orientation.

Furthermore, Ray knew one of the inmates from his childhood—and not just any inmate, but Rebecca’s grandfather, Tommy Madsen (the same bad dude who killed her police partner in the pilot).

The complicated connection between Ray and Tommy was established when Tommy used his lunch tray to flatten Ray’s face, telling him “he shouldn’t have come.”

When we jumped ahead to the present day, the still young and virile Guy Hastings had abducted the wrinkled and aged Ray, who looked surprised to see his former fellow Alcatraz guard suddenly reappear un-aged, but hardly as surprised as you might think…

Madsen and Soto, meanwhile, were wasting their time interviewing Hastings’ still-living daughter, who told them that her father died in Alcatraz in a shady, not-fully-explained contamination accident. After reopening the middle-aged woman’s traumatic childhood wounds, they left her to wallow in sorrow and soon learned that Ray had disappeared.

NEXT: Hastings’ eerie, vague description of what happened when the guards and inmates disappeared

Ray, meanwhile, was slowly coming back to consciousness after being pistol-whipped by his former colleague (kudos to the director for the effectively disorienting camera work). Already tearing his home apart, Hastings demanded Ray tell him the whereabouts of Tommy Madsen’s son.

After some evasion on Ray’s part and some roughing up from Hastings, Ray agreed to take him to see Tommy Madsen’s son… next stop, the graveyard! Yep, Uncle Ray burned Hastings one that one. Hard.

But Hastings wasn’t actually as dim-witted as he looked. Noting that the grave read, “Beloved husband and father,” Hastings put two and two together: He recalled a a picture of Rebecca in Ray’s house and correctly deduced she was Tommy Madsen’s granddaughter.

Apparently, it was his goal the whole time to find a living Madsen in hopes that they would eventually lead him to Tommy. Why was this time traveling guard so obsessed with hunting down Grandpa Madsen? Fortunately, Ray asked this question on our behalf, but unfortunately, all Hastings offered was, “It’s what they told me to do.” Sounds a lot like what we’ve been hearing for about four weeks now without any further explanation.

We did learn a bit more about the disappearance of the ‘63s from Hastings, although it was more poetic and vague than informative. “A fog took all the stars away” he told us. “In the morning I was in the infirmary and they told us there had been an accident… our families were dead… they told us we were sick, contaminated and we couldn’t leave. And then… it wasn’t 1963 anymore.” Throw in a bongo drum, and he could have recited that monologue in a university coffee shop.

Back in detective land, Soto and Madsen were using photos, that one computer nerd and good ole fashioned elbow grease to uncover the aforementioned secret: Uncle Ray was Tommy Madsen’s brother. Shocker! He’s not actually her fake uncle, he’s her real great-uncle. (Ray changed his name to Archer so he could work at Alcatraz and secretly protect his brother.)

That less-than-shattering realization brought Rebecca and Soto to the childhood home of Ray and Tommy Madsen, where Hastings had Uncle Ray at gunpoint.

NEXT: Rebecca makes a good hostage, and what Uncle Ray knows that she doesn’t

Hastings was waiting for Tommy Madsen, but granddaughter arrived on the scene instead. Before you could say, “police academy graduate,” Rebecca was taken hostage. Always Johnny-on-the-spot, Emerson Hauser showed up and offered Hastings an offer he couldn’t refuse: “On the count of three I’m going to shoot you in the head.”

Not willing to let a potential source of information die (and probably not wanting to ruin that awesome leather jacket of hers with brain matter), Madsen succeeded in wounding Hastings and they took him alive.

At this point, I thought the captured guard might offer some clues as to what was going on. After all, he’s sort of a good guy, right? And if “they” told him to hunt down Tommy Madsen, he might be able to provide some info about who “they” are. Oddly enough, no one seemed to ask him, or if they did, no one let the Alcatraz camera crew know about it.

Considering Hastings is a guard, not a former inmate, one can’t help but wondering where Hauser will keep him, if not in that whitewashed Alcatraz 2.0 hidden in the forest. Hopefully, this will be addressed in another episode: It’s becoming strange that they have several time-travelers in custody and yet we’ve barely seen Hauser interrogate any of them.

Before the episode wrapped, we did learn two important bits of information.

One: Sixteen years ago, Hauser offered Ray Archer the job Rebecca now has. It seems that Hauser needs at least one Madsen on his team since Tommy Madsen is somehow the key to this whole enigma, (which is thus far so enigmatic we can’t even begin to describe what it is we don’t know). Realizing she now has some serious job security, Rebecca shoved her importance in Hauser’s face. From here on, she’ll probably stop showing up to work on time and start stealing pens and key chains from the Alcatraz gift shop.

Two: Ray Archer has been in regular contact with Tommy Madsen. Although Ray warned Tommy to stay away from his granddaughter, it was interesting to note that Ray didn’t seem afraid of Tommy. Yes, he was worried that Tommy would endanger her but he didn’t treat Tommy like a psychotic killer.

So perhaps we’ll discover Tommy isn’t such a bad guy after all and he had some pretty good reasons for killing his wife and Rebecca’s cop partner.

What did you think of last night’s episode? Are you happy with how the series is progressing? How much longer can you wait until we get a seriously meaty reveal?