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Directed by: Gregg Fienberg
Written by: Kem Nunn
Synopsis
Mitch rides out another sunrise on his long board at Imperial Beach, but Kai, coasting in from farther north, interrupts his private ritual as he exits the water. Trying to mask his irritation, Mitch offers Kai a ride back. A young woman named Cass approaches Mitch, explaining that she wants to shoot him for a film she's making. "I like vintage," she tells him when he notices her classic Porsche next to his wagon. Kai is not impressed.
Butchie wakes up at the Snug Harbor, surprised that heroin withdrawal hasn't started gnawing at him. Giving John first crack at the bathroom, Butchie notes, "I haven't seen you dump or take a leak since you got here." Later, on the pier, Butchie and John come across Vietnam Joe, who tells Butchie the kid makes him uneasy. Muttering to himself, Butchie starts to add up John's arrival, Mitch's levitation and his own lack of dope-sickness, but he pushes the mystery aside to go test-drive John's platinum card at the liquor store. Loaded down with Chivas Regal and cardboard cutouts of bikini girls, the pair head back to the hotel, where Butchie's angry dealer, Freddy, has already started looking for him.
At home with Cissy, Shaun follows his friend's progress at Huntington on a laptop. Sniffing for the kill, Linc appears at the screen door, asking Cissy for two minutes to explain "what I can do." She lets him in and, when Mitch comes home, tells her husband, "You need to hear him." Linc says he re-entered Shaun at Huntington, which only sends Mitch on a tirade about string-pulling money men. Linc turns to Shaun, launching into a speech about bringing the rush of surfing to the masses while apologizing for letting his lust for a marketable icon suck Butchie down the drain. "I'd like to compete," Shaun says. "I like it." Mitch finally gives in, glaring at Linc. "No image," he tells the promoter.
Ramon and Dickstein wait for Barry to arrive at the Snug Harbor, curious to see how the new owner will follow up the previous day's life-threatening performance. Plopping bags of lunch down on the counter, Barry announces he's had a vision: He'll renovate the hotel, learn to surf and face his fear of Room 24, for which he immediately embarks. Opening the ominous door, Barry lasts a few seconds before high-tailing it back to the office and declaring, "Room 24 is haunted. This morning I woke up happy. I mistook that freedom for power ..." He squeezes out a prayer, forgiving the ghost of Gilbert Rollins along with the childhood transgressions of Butchie Yost. Ramon and Dickstein add an uncomfortable "Amen."
Kai calls to tell Butchie about Shaun's heat in the afternoon but ends up leaving a rambling voicemail. As she hangs up, Cass - on Linc's orders - makes an unwelcome visit to the surf shop, hoping to convince Kai of her honorable intentions with Mitch. The surfer chick's not buying it. When Cass adds that she might go watch Shaun, Kai replies, "Maybe I'll go up too. That family's got their own problems, but can't we all still do our little parts to make them worse?"
Shaun, Cissy and Mitch stop by Bill's house on their way to Huntington, but Bill declines their invitation, saying he has no business on a family outing. At the contest, Shaun ducks through a pipeline to blow the other surfers away. But, on his second run, a tremor strikes, distracting the judges and giving Shaun the wave of the day. Killing that one just as easily, Shaun bails on an impossible move at the end. While spectators glance around following the brief quake, Kai waits a few painful moments before running toward the surf yelling, "He never came up!"
Butchie and John return to the Snug Harbor to find Freddy waiting, and he promptly belts Butchie in the face, asking, "You gonna 'drown me in a cop tsunami?'" Butchie tries to talk his way out of the voicemail he left after Freddy's subordinate rolled him on a dope deal, but Ramon interrupts the exchange with a phone call for Butchie. "Shaun broke his neck," Mitch tells his son. When Butchie asks why no one came to tell him about the competition, Mitch slaps him with the answer: "When you've never been anywhere for anybody? Why waste the gas?" Butchie shares the news with Freddy, who forces him and John into his car at gunpoint. Instead of killing them, he drives them to the hospital.
The doctor tells Cissy and Mitch that lack of oxygen has rendered Shaun brain-dead, and the couple's reactions, predictably, differ. Mitch wants Shaun immediately removed from machines, and Cissy refuses to let her grandson go. "Take Shaunie off that machine Mitch, you'd better not get in our bed again," she says. "I'll murder you in your sleep." As Mitch leaves, he passes Butchie in the hall and says Cissy will explain Shaun's injuries. She tells Butchie how the water sucked out at the end of the wave, leaving Shaun to snap his neck on the bare ocean floor. "They asked about donating his organs," she says.
Butchie stands at the bedside, holding his son's hand and lamenting that they never had a chance to "square things," while Bill, having heard about the accident on the news, enters the room. Butchie pats Bill on the shoulder and leaves him alone with the boy. Anxiety-ridden, Bill reaches into his jacket and pulls out Zippy, his miraculously healed bird. Lowering the creature to Shaun's slack face, he repeats his words from the previous day to Zippy, "And kiss Shaunie too, as long as we're being stupid ..." As the bird's beak touches his cheek, Shaun opens his eyes.
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"His Visit: Day Two"
