Summary
“You Hold It with Your Fingers. You Eat It with Your Mouth” isn’t an all-action penultimate episode, but it does begin to answer some lingering questions.
This recap of Chosen season 1, episode 5, “You Hold It with Your Fingers. You Eat It with Your Mouth”, contains spoilers.
After a brief opening casting some doubt over Emma’s parentage and her relevance to current proceedings, this wordily-titled fifth episode picks up right where we left off, with Emma telling Lukas about the marble from her neck and the giant orb at the sawmill, which seems to have been the organism’s mothership. When they get there, though, they discover it has been moved, and the orb, no longer connected to it, has become worthless — Lukas crushes it to dust in his palm.
Chosen season 1, episode 5 recap
Lukas is adamant about the fate of the world hanging in the balance, so he’s particularly interested to hear about Mads’s master list of names of those who were there during the “meteor impact”. But, of course, Emma isn’t talking to the others right now, so she goes to apologize and sweet-talk Mads. Of course, it’s a ruse, so she causes a distraction and swipes Mads’s external hard drive, but she runs into Marie on her way out, which remains awkward. (It’s nice, as a side note, that Emma is being confronted about her selfish behavior. But will anything come of it?)
Mads immediately assumes that Emma has stolen his hard drive on behalf of Astraeus, but his attempts at a big confrontation fall flat and the revelation that Astraeus seemingly really is building ships sends him topsy-turvy. He realizes that Emma has been figuring out all the things he should have been figuring out all this time, and now she has his research. He lashes out at everyone else and demands they leave, finding himself completely alone and thoroughly embarrassed.
Meanwhile, Emma and Lukas snoop around the trailer of one of the guys from the sawmill, though it’s mostly an excuse for fish-out-of-water comedy from Lukas and a bit of bonding. Lukas’s people don’t lie, Emma learns, and he doesn’t understand the concept of battered fish, since why wrap food inside food? (Good question!) He’s nonetheless determined to save the planet, though, despite the loss of his own. There’s a bit more comedy when he goes outside to fight the sawmill guy in a portable toilet while Emma and Marie have a chat inside the diner; you can see the Portaloo wobbling around from the commotion in the background while they’re chatting. But it’s a weird tonal choice since immediately afterward Emma goes outside and finds the sawmill dude dead and Lukas badly injured from the fight.
Emma takes Lukas back to her house and somehow manages to get him upstairs for medical attention without her mother seeing him. He heals under bright lights while quizzing her on why she takes her mood-stabilizing pills, a question she has apparently never considered before. She needs them; she has always taken them. It takes an outsider like Lukas to point out how ludicrous that is, especially since her prescription was written by Susan. Her clinic is where the pair of them are heading next.
In the meantime, “You Hold It with Your Fingers. You Eat It with Your Mouth” — which, by the way, is the instruction Emma gives Lukas about how to eat fried fish — begins to really solidify the connection between the extraterrestrials and Astraeus, since Mads returns to Gamborg and he reveals what Astraeus is really up to. But he wants Mads’s hard drive, and he believes Emma still has it, though, in fact, Marie does since she swiped it from the diner. Marie discovers some unsavory business on the drive — whenever you warn someone not to look at something under any circumstances, you should know they’re going to look — and tries to warn Emma, but she’s busy swiping blood samples from Susan’s clinic and following Susan to the supermarket, where she’s seemingly buying a lifetime’s supply of oranges. She bumps into Lykke, Emma’s mother, though Emma pretends she doesn’t recognize her when Lukas asks. The implication, tying into the opening scene, is that Lykke is part of the organism.
