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When one looks in the box, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the cat.

Reactor

In the picture above, Dr. Rufus Sewell and Agent Young are bickering in the middle of a game of Chicken against a lady in a ruffly shirt, to keep her from crossing the Mexican border with a trunkful of unrefrigerated stem cells. This show just got awesome.

And by “awesome” I mean that it stopped even trying to make sense. I’m just going to cut to the chase on this.

Ten things you can learn from last week’s episode of Eleventh Hour, “Eternal”:

1. Someone had a Good Television Moment and set a country-club montage to Sinatra’s “The Good Life” as a sports car crashes into the pool and sends people scattering like roaches. Unfortunately, it’s the world’s biggest fake-out, because the rest of this episode is written and directed by totally different people with no sense of humor whatsoever.

2. You will learn exactly what a chest cavity with two hearts looks like. Repeatedly. It looks greasy. (No snacking during this one, okay? Friendly warning.)

3. The lead-outs to the show’s signature tick-tick-TICK intro have gone from clunky one-liners to surrealist masterpieces.

Rachel (looking at a corpse with two hearts): Any natural causes for something like this?
TICK
Rufus: Only man’s natural desire…
TICK
…to meddle where he shouldn’t.
TICK

At last, science provides a definitive answer to a long-standing question: there are no natural instances of duplicate organs, ever. You heard it from Nobel nominee Rufus Sewell, okay? Take that to your bio finals! SCIENCE.

4. If you are in charge of raising your teenage brother, you will have to tell him that his school shenanigans are not what Mom would have wanted, and then collapse of leukemia to show him you’re sorry.

5. A pretty woman is always guilty of something, and if she’s not sleeping around because her husband is dead, then she’s stealing the stem cells of good middle-class college students to inject into her own face.

6. We get a close-up of the corpse’s tumor-covered face and neck, just in case you, too, were thinking of trying to stay young. It’s Wrong, okay? Wrong. (Seriously, no snacking!)

7. If you decide to be an honest soul and get your cord-blood stem cells frozen, some rich jerks are going to steal it and replace it with pig’s blood. Thankfully they will also be stupid enough to replace it with extremely rare pig’s blood, so it will be easily traced and chances of recovery are quite good!

8. When our two leads get locked into a walk-in freezer, the writers will not use this ninety seconds to build suspense, or develop character, or make out, because that takes valuable chase-scene time. Never has a TV trope been utilized with so little effect. They look more ready to make out with the containers of pig blood.

9. Agent Young has played Chicken three times. She has never lost. (Chuck Norris must be crying about it in a truck-stop bathroom right now.)

10. If you are an honest middle-class college-aged soul, not only will your stem cells be returned to you, and your estranged dad put back in contact with you via a totally unnecessary subplot about how important a biological father is to a family unit, but you get to go into surgery in a full face of makeup and beam beatifically through your mascara as a single injection of stem cells totally reverses your leukemia. SCIENCE!

The biggest waste of the Locked in the Freezer trope ever:

About the Author

About Author Mobile

Genevieve Valentine

Author

Genevieve Valentine’s first novel, Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, won the 2012 Crawford Award and was nominated for the Nebula. Her short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Journal of Mythic Arts, Lightspeed, Apex, and others, and the anthologies Federations, The Living Dead 2, Running with the Pack, After, and more.

Her nonfiction has appeared at NPR.org, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, Weird Tales, Tor.com, and she is a co-author of Geek Wisdom (out from Quirk Books). She is an occasional columnist at Fantasy magazine, and sporadically updates her Twitter. Her appetite for bad movies is insatiable, a tragedy she tracks on her blog. More information can be found at www.genevievevalentine.com.

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