Summary
“You Are Like the Sun” side-lined the action and intrigue to deliver a surprisingly emotional hour as The Passage rockets towards its conclusion.
The Passage is a breakneck show about vampires, sure, but on some level it’s also a show about love, and loss, and what drives people to extremes. I suppose all shows – all stories, really – are about those things in some way, especially the first two, but “You Are Like the Sun” helped to reinforce these emotional undercurrents by suddenly killing off a character without whom none of this fun genre stuff would even exist.
That character was Elizabeth Lear (Jennifer Ferrin), the Alzheimer’s-afflicted wife of Jonah and the object of Tim Fanning’s (Jamie McShane) affection and obsession. The desire to save her has always been at the root of Project Noah, and a component of Fanning’s psychic master plan. But she chose death, and in doing so reminded everyone – including the audience – that The Passage is just a little bit more than a genre show about vampires.
Wolgast (Mark-Paul Gosselaar), too, is driven by loss; his daughter, Ava, was tragically shot and killed in a stick-up, as we also learned in “You Are Like the Sun”. These segments seem a little redundant to me – does Wolgast really need this much of a reason to care for a kid as cute as Amy (Saniyya Sidney)? – but still surprising in the sense that “the agent” went through with his revenge plan. It also deepened his relationship with Clark (Vincent Piazza) and complicated his relationship with his ex-wife, Lila (Emmanuelle Chriqui), with whom he was knocked out and removed from Project Noah last week. (Even his gravitation towards the shady project is a bit more understandable now, thanks to this episode’s flashbacks.)
Do we trust Clark’s sudden face-turn? Not entirely. Then again, do we trust the good-guy shtick of Carter (McKinley Belcher III) either? He keeps appearing to Amy, ostensibly to prepare her for what Fanning has in mind. He believes he’ll use Amy’s unresolved guilt around her mother’s overdose – there’s that theme of loss again! – to manipulate her, so he encourages her to confront that guilt head-on. “You Are Like the Sun” certainly didn’t skimp on the emotion.
There are still some things about The Passage that remain unclear. What is Horace Guilder’s endgame? Why is Fanning so intent on recruiting exactly 12 people? Do we really even know who we can trust at this point? We’re approaching the finale now, so hopefully all will be revealed soon enough.
