 |
Directed by: Dan Minahan
Written by: Zack Whedon
Synopsis
Eyes around Imperial Beach open to a range of strange circumstances. Butchie and Kai, asleep on the beach, narrowly avoid a roaring beach comber, while back at home Mitch watches Cissy rest peacefully. Cass lays sprawled across her Porsche's interior, and Dickstein wakes up to find Daphne under the covers, doing some very un-Daphne-like things to him. Back on the beach, Butchie gazes out over the water, noticing two figures gliding toward him on the waves. Above, Cass films from the pier. Butchie sees that John and Shaun have returned and calls Linc, prompting the promoter to throw Tina a thumbs-up from across their bed.
Dwayne arrives at the café to find Jerri sitting in front of the computer. She asks, "Haven't I told you not leave your f**king machine on to spew incomprehensibility at passersby like a road-side f**king bomb?" He swears he turned off the PC but then sees the footage playing across its screen: Butchie's van rumbles into the Snug Harbor with John and Shaun in tow. Cass has followed them there, and it appears her footage is beaming to Dwayne's computer as if via satellite. Butchie leads Shaun and John, still dressed in strange camo-patterned wetsuits from whatever journey they'd taken, into his room at the Snug Harbor and forages for some clothes to dress them in. Kai asks John if Shaun is ok, and he answers in the affirmative, adding that the pair had traveled to Cincinnati. Palaka steps outside his room just long enough to catch Linc and Tina driving up, and he scurries off to alert his boss to the goings on.
Shaun is glad to see his mother, and she accompanies them when Butchie tells him he needs to go to his grandparents. "I want to stay with John," the boy tells them, but that's not an option at this point. When they get to the house, Shaun asks Cissy for a peanut-butter-and-butter sandwich. Miffed, she replies, "Not tuna?" Shaun explains to Cissy and Mitch that it's time for him to move in with his father and John at the Snug Harbor. Cissy balks at the idea, but Mitch tells her that it's pointless to try to fight this strange new power at work in their lives. After Shaun hops the fence to head back to the Snug Harbor, Mitch begins to levitate in the living room – higher than ever before. Cissy, witnessing this for the first time yells at him, "Get down from there!" Powerless to stop it, Mitch nods toward the ceiling: "Can you turn off the fan?"
With John cornered at the Snug Harbor, Linc tries to finally get some answers from the stranger, but of course a straightforward conversation is out of the question. "If I listen right, I can hear your father," Linc poses tentatively. John affirms the promoter's statement but tells him his father's words will be clearer through Cass's camera, giving Linc the impression that Cass's camera will somehow save them from disaster. "You're all going to be toast," John tells him. "We're coming nine-eleven-fourteen." Butchie walks up amidst this strange conversation just as Linc asks John whether he has a mother. "Your mother," John turns to Butchie and says, "has turned herself into the worst ball-buster known to man." Going on, John alludes that Mitch's behavior led to the handjob Cissy gave her son, which resulted in Butchie hitting Barry, sending him into the room of Gilbert Rollins. "We are all frail vessels," John tells them.
John walks into Butchie's room as Shaun rolls up on his skateboard with a backpack slung over his shoulder and a surfboard under his arm. Shaun has started to sound a little more like John than himself, and though he can't say where he went exactly, Shaun tells Butchie, "They want to sponsor us. The waves were good." More and more frustrated Butchie asks Shaun where he went, and his son points to the sky and replies, "Cincinnati." John steps outside with the camouflage wetsuits he and Shaun arrived in – each branded with the strange stick figure logo – and Linc advises that the combination of mentioning 9-11, heralding "the end" and sporting camo might make some people nervous. John leads him to the shuffleboard court, where the painted numbers have rearranged themselves to read: 9-11-14-10-Off. Cissy arrives in her Miata declaring, "Your father's on the f**king ceiling." Butchie and Shaun pile into the car to investigate, and Linc dials Jake to recruit some help. "Bring the tailor," Linc says.
When Jake arrives, John proves his otherworldliness by repeating a snippet from one of Jake's previous conversations that the stranger could not possibly have heard. Linc orders the tailor to print the stick-figure symbol on T-shirts and add the Stinkweed logo to the odd wetsuits. John interrupts: "We need an El Camino." He refers Linc and Jake to a specific used-car dealership, and as the three leave to find it, Linc tells Cass that Jake wants to buy her film. He also announces to Barry, Ramon, Freddy and Palaka that he's hosting a parade at the pier in the afternoon and wants them to participate.
John's El Camino dealer is clearly not your typical used-car salesman; he comes off more like John's supervisor, repeatedly telling him, "I took you offline, Country." His interactions with Linc and Jake probe similarly bizarre territory, referring to the Yosts' family problems and warning, "Not one damn minute to waste." John produces $15,000 in cash to pay for the El Camino.
Cissy et al make it back to the house, where Bill and the Chemist have already arrived to watch Mitch float helplessly in the living room. Butchie suggests they pull him back down to the floor, but Mitch wards them off, saying he doesn't want to complicate things. "Get out of here," he tells them. "Don't look at me."
While everyone else struggles with existential and metaphysical quandaries, Freddy has a real-world problem to deal with. The Chinaman, a drug kingpin from Hawaii, has sent Freddy's associate Moana in a gambit to take the dealer out and usurp his business. Freddy sees the move coming from an ocean away, though, and tells Moana that, in order to get out of the business, he's willing to hand over the keys to the castle. "If you eat some strange f**king food that puts a brain in your head Moana," Freddy says, "tell the Chinaman to f**k himself and ask me for the keys on your own." Moana leaves Freddy to talk to his boss in a car outside, sending the Chinaman back to Hawaii so he can "find out what is really going on" in I.B.
Linc's parade on the pier starts to draw a crowd after a brief hitch ends with Bill in handcuffs for overzealously managing traffic. Doling out free T-shirts and pointing at bikini models, Jake revs up the onlookers for Linc's speech. Announcing that the Yosts have been signed to Stinkweed, along with Butchie's student John, Linc delivers a long oration to the crowd, recounting his mistakes with Butchie and copping to committing new sins with Shaun. "The leopard does not change his spots," Linc says, telling the crowd that Shaun's "miracle" and "disappearance" had been concocted as a marketing scheme by that same leopard. Pinning all the week's strange happenings to himself in order to give the Yosts cover, Linc tells the crowd he's ceding control of the company to Jake. As Linc finishes his speech, Moana sidles up to Freddy in the crowd, telling him, "Give me the keys," and pounding his fist collegially.
Back at Bill's quiet house, the ex-cop finally climbs the spiral staircase to the room where his wife, Lois, died. He speaks out to Lois, sharing the story of Shaun's departure and delivering the bad news that Zippy is gone. Almost immediately, he starts fretting over entering the room: "This is why I don't come up here. Where do you start and stop, every event an incident? 'Oh, if she could've seen this, wouldn't she have loved that ...'" Overcome by the whole experience, he prepares to descend the stairs, telling his wife he loves her. With a jolting flutter, Zippy sails in through the window and settles on Bill's shoulder. "Lo'," he says. "Look at this!"
Discuss this episode in the John From Cincinnati Bulletin Board.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
"His Visit: Day Nine"
