Summary
“Just Think of Queen Margrethe” turns the weirdness and the pace way up, as Chosen really kicks into gear.
This recap of Chosen season 1, episode 2, “Just Think of Queen Margrethe”, contains spoilers.
Emma’s biology teacher, Hans, the one who may or may not be boning her doctor, is creepy. He looks creepy, obviously, with the turtle neck and the bald head, and he acts creepy. After a monotone lecture on identity, he invites Emma to his house to talk. Alarm bells! Speaking of alarm bells, Jonas. This dude’s a scumbag, and also braindead. There’s no wonder Emma feels isolated. She’s surrounded by idiots and weirdos.
Chosen season 1, episode 2 recap
Ironically, the girl who claims to be a vampire is the most reasonable person in any room. “Have you considered not being a vampire?” Emma asks her, not realizing the significance of someone living their own truth. (I don’t think Marie is actually a vampire, by the way, but as she says, it isn’t something she chose — it’s who she feels she is.) Emma has been content to be an outsider because she sees fitting in as conformity, but in refusing to be one of the crowd, she has also been denying herself an identity. She’s beginning to see that through Marie, and by peeling away the town’s facade layer by layer. In a place where everyone is dishonest, everyone is playing a role, the best thing to be is true to yourself.
The pursuit of truth is what unites the outsider kids. That’s what leads Emma back to them. But she misinterprets their curiosity as a gossipy high-school kind, so she suggests disseminating Jonas’s private photos as revenge for him bullying Marie and they shut down the idea. They’re not interested in petty stuff. They investigate people who’re interesting because they feel they’re integral to a literal alien conspiracy. As it happens, Hans is on their list of suspects, since he was present during the initial “meteor” impact, 17 years prior. So, Emma is begrudgingly allowed to go to his house as requested, so she can snoop around, get a sense of how he lives, and bug his computer. In the meantime, maybe she’ll discover something more truthful about herself.
Hans’ house is worrying. Most of it is sterile and almost bare, like a showroom or a doctor’s waiting room. He looms behind Emma when she visits and reaches out to touch her. His bed is just a mattress; his closet is full of the same dour brown jackets and nothing else. Downstairs, there’s a room full of what looks like soil and sponges with glowing, pearl-like interiors; he cleaves them open at a lonely desk and rubs the bright blue orbs between his fingers. But it’s hidden behind a false wall, so Emma doesn’t see inside, even when she creeps downstairs while Hans is being noisily conspiratorial — even referencing her directly! — on the phone. Eventually, she gets creeped out and leaves, reporting what she has seen, or at least what she thinks she has seen, to the others.
A new plan is formed. When Hans leaves his house, Marie and Frederik follow him while Emma sneaks back inside for a better look. Hans goes straight to Susan’s to break up with her — Frederik follows him inside — and then heads back home, but Emma doesn’t know that, since she left her phone in the car; it vibrates uselessly when Marie tries to warn her. Hans catches her snooping around the creepy blue room and takes her inside, telling her “we can’t trust anyone” and “they can’t know we’re here.” He clamps a hand over Emma’s mouth when Marie comes knocking. Eventually, they’re interrupted by a black-suited figure who moves Flash-fast and attacks Hans. When Hans fights back, digging his fingers in the man’s eyes, they leak black blood. Emma tries to intervene, but Hans knocks her out, dragging her downstairs into the sponge and soil room and clipping one of the glowing blue devices into the back of her head. She’s transported to an ethereal, bright blue pocket dimension, but only briefly. When she comes to, Hans seemingly kills himself just as the black-suited attacker breaks into the room. She’s grabbed and eventually let go, left to stagger, wounded and confused, in the street until Marie finds her.
What just happened?
Let’s theorize: Judging by Hans’s “they can’t know we’re here” line, and his glowing blue face when speaking to Emma, one assumes he is one of the aliens that crash-landed seventeen years ago and has been living in secret ever since. His attacker presumably represents the “they” he mentioned, but the black blood suggests they’re not as human as they look. So, was the call-and-response signal from another alien race, or members of the same race, trying to track down those who crash-landed on Earth? Am I just talking nonsense?
As Emma, obviously inspired by her ordeal, sleeps with Marie, we see the attacker frantically searching through Hans’s den. He’s looking for something specific, though we don’t know what, and when he hears a noise he super-speeds out of there. The last shot of the episode is of Hans, body broken, leaking blue fluid onto the floor.
You can stream Chosen season 1, episode 2, “Just Think of Queen Margrethe”, exclusively on Netflix.
