Well, I listened to the opening this week, since I thought it might include some background on the story like it did last week, but the guy mentioned, “He’ll find out nothing is what it seems to be,” which was the crux of the twist in the story. Still, I can’t say that it spoiled it as there were many other clues along the way starting at the beginning.
We begin with a man named Walter Hertz saying he’s going to leave the “corporate spooks” he’s been a part of. Before he goes, they want a list of names he has. He knows they’ll use it to blackmail those people a second time and so he refuses. “You’ll get those names over my dead body,” he declares and then he storms out. The leader doesn’t need to resort to those tactics. He tells his heavy to go get the names first, and then kill him. Walter tries to run but the heavy armed with a weaponized finger quickly starts to catch up. But then a man calling himself Pablo Manheim pulls him through a loose fence slot and tells him he can help him escape permanently. I was reminded of an episode of NIGHT GALLERY where Mickey Rooney played a mobster trying to find an escape and ended up in the collection of a rich man, who has a block of cells containing everyone from Amelia Earhart to Adolph Hitler. But this wouldn’t be as sinister as that.
Next, we meet the central character of the story, one Rasheed Kay who calls himself an inquiry agent, saying that’s what used to be referred to as a private detective. He is the typical tough private eye of the 40’s or 50’s, even narrating his tale as he goes along. The location printed on the screen reads “Club Foot VR.” Now the only VR I know is Virtual Reality. So I was expecting that shortly he would step out of the club and into a modern setting, and we’d find out that this was all just a holographic simulation. A man named Victor Lazarre comes in and wants him to find Walter, claiming Walt’s wife is looking for him to settle some property issues. Rasheed takes the case, but suspects the whole thing. “Something didn’t seem right about this guy – maybe it was all the lies he was telling me.” He knows the property issues could be handled easier without the husband present, so obviously the whole story is bogus. He leaves the bar, but it’s still all 1940’s or 1950’s outside. When he asks about Walter’s work, the term software is bandied about by Kay and the man he talks to which doesn’t wash with the time period. He checks out Walter’s place and finds paintings by a local artist named Claudia. He goes to visit her and just like in the movies the two instantly fall for each other. But Kay also notices a lot of cabs that have weird graffiti on them and Claudia says Walter was obsessed with checking them out. Since Claudia also tells him Walter was never married, he goes back to Victor Lazarre and returns his check. I freeze-framed the check and saw that it was dated August 9, 1952. Since Betaville is not in that time setting, this whole thing absolutely had to be an elaborate fraud of some kind – VR, hologram, what-have-you - and connected to that "escape" that Pablo had talked about..
Kay is picked up by a guy he saw in the newspaper name Hugo Burns - a mob boss who’s just been released for lack of evidence again. Hugo tells Kay that if he finds Walter, he wants Rasheed to tell him first – for triple what he’s getting paid. Later, Rasheed finds out that Hugo is a guy nicknamed Codeman. When he locates Walter, he finds out the truth. Like Walter, he is in a stasis tank and this whole scenario is an imaginary world. When Walter spotted someone from the real world chasing him, he remembered the truth about the place. Hugo Burns (aka Codeman, aka Pablo Manheim) is actually the man who runs the stasis tanks and occasionally comes in to visit. Walter remembered arriving in a D Street cab, and is trying to find the right one so that he can get back to the real world before his old colleague finds him. Unfortunately, the colleague does just that and drags him away in a D Street cab. Rasheed and Claudia give chase only to see the cab drive into a wall and vanish. They decide to help Walter and they steal another D Street cab and emerge from their tanks and tried to help Walter, who’s being tortured for the names on the list. In the fight, the hood's finger weapon goes off killing him and injuring Rasheed. Rather than going to a hospital, he wants to go “home.” He’s returned to the stasis tank where he resumes his private eye career and is visited by his latest client Claudia. He says he was an accountant in his real life, and never wanted to go back to that endless boredom of numbers. Meanwhile, off in another corner, Codeman assures Walter the programming is circular – no yesterday or tomorrow just endless todays.
It didn’t all make sense (like the guy hiring other people to paint the cabs to say things like “Not this one” so that he could find the right cab to get back), but I liked it. The bad guys lose out, the good guys are saved and everything works out okay. The good characters were very likeable too. I’ve long admired A Martinez, who can play good and bad guys with equal skill. He’s currently on LONGMIRE playing a complex character named Jacob Nighthorse – a bad guy, but with a sense of honor about him. I’ll give this one 9 cab tops that read “D Street”, which was all Walter really needed to look for in the first place.
By the way, as an accountant myself I have to object to Rasheed’s characterization of accounting as endless boredom with numbers. What he fails to realize is that the accountants always end up with the cop’s hot-looking ex-wives. There’s always a scene where the cop goes to see his ex-wife and then asks her, “How could you be happy married now to this accountant?” to which she replies, “Well, he may not be much, but at least he’s home nights.” That’s our motto, in fact: “Accountants - We may not be much, but at least we’re home nights.”
