Sanctuary: “Edward” (recap)

By Julia Diddy
Fancast.com

Corpse on the floor. Woman hovering over corpse on the floor, crying. Teenage boy sitting nearby in semi-catatonic state, rendering particularly vivid sketch of corpse on floor. As we pan out and behold a veritable gallery of the boy’s work, the heavy emphasis upon mongoloid creatures and fanged gothic mutants of the night reminds us that this is Sanctuary, not CSI…….

Will meets up with Joe, a cop pal from his days of walking a more conventional beat. Joe remembers Will has a penchant for weirdness, and brandishes the Outer Limits-styled etchings of the creepy teenage boy, whose father apparently offed himself. Is Will interested? Heck, is the Pope Catholic, and more to the point, do werewolves order their filet mignon extra-rare? For clarification on the latter, let’s turn to our resident computer whiz……

Henry’s a bit reclusive these days, what with that recent problem he’s had with accelerated hair growth and spontaneous fang eruption. Flashbacks to his youth indicate that this may have been a pre-existing condition. Heck, even Bigfoot’s culinary flourishes aren’t enough to entice poor Henry to snap out of his dour mood, or open his bedroom door.

As Helen and Ashley are blowing off some steam at the firing range, it seems Ashley may be working out a few lingering father issues as she plugs a man-shaped paper target full of lead. Then again, that’s how she likes to pass time on a good day too, so who knows? Helen apologizes for not telling Ashley sooner….it was just a bit awkward bringing up the fact that her baby daddy was a time-traveling Victorian serial killer. Ashley insists she’s over it. The bullet-ridden practice dummy suggests otherwise.

Helen and Will visit Ruth Meyers – the mother of Edward, that teenage Picasso-as-played-by-Dustin-Hoffman-in-Rainman. Ruth is insisting her husband’s death was a suicide. While talking, she discreetly tries to cover the bruises along her arms. Will asks how long the abuse had been going on, though Ruth does her best to breathe new life into that whole “Oh, these bruises? I walked into a wall! Silly me!” excuse. We also learn that Edward has a brother named Robbie who is missing in action. In the background of this discussion, Edward is drawing gargoyles, but not just any old gargoyles….more like angry gargoyles perched upon the festering black pits of despair. Will tries to engage the kid in casual conversation, but Edward’s not much for small talk. He’s not keen on the idea of going to stay at the Sanctuary for a few days while Mom tends to the funeral arrangements, either, but sometimes you have to do as your folks say.

Helen and Bigfoot are worried about Henry and how he’s dealing with the fact that his days as a “normal” are clearly numbered. We then cut to Henry laying in bed as his tortured screams echo throughout the hallways. He’s soon in the library, reading up on subjects like wolfbane and Lon Chaney Jr.. Helen pops by and tries to offer up some light-hearted encouragement, only Henry’s not having it. During this exchange, we learn that Helen’s propensity for taking in strays brought Henry into the fold at an early age - seems she found the young pup….or rather, boy….wandering the moors. Better that than having found him peeing on a hydrant in the inner-city, which might have seemed less remarkable, or at least less gothic…….

Will wanders into Edward’s room where the young man is again sketching – this time his subjects are the haunted halls and heroes of the Sanctuary. Will tries to engage Edward in conversation again, though the kid still doesn’t want to share his feelings….at least not verbally. But if a picture is indeed worth a thousand words, Eddie’s drawings are providing an encyclopedia’s worth of tortured confessions, and maybe even Marilyn Manson’s next album cover…….

Helen has just the machine to get to the bottom of this……Edward is soon wired up to a contraption that measures his eye movements. As if Ed’s eerily lifelike works in charcoal aren’t already evidence of this, we learn that his peepers are basically souped-up digital scanners with a capacity for spotting abnormals.

Nope - Will can’t leave well enough alone, in case you were wondering. He goes to visit Edward in his room yet again that evening. In trying to force Edward to recall the night of his father’s death, Edward abruptly takes the blame and insists he shot his father, albeit accidentally, sort of…..

Meanwhile, Helen is consulting Henry in the lab. Seeing as how he might eventually have an uncontrollable urge to one day eat his esteemed friends and co-workers, Henry wants to know what his medical options are in terms of opting out of the whole werewolf lifestyle. Helen mentions an experimental brain surgery without calling it a “lobotomy” per se…..though she warns him that such a drastic measure might alter his entire personality and outlook on life.

Will is pouring over crime scene evidence, and he’s not sure he’s buying either Edward’s confession, or his mother’s. Field trip! Helen and Will pay Mrs. Meyers another visit in her home, and when Will uncovers a trap door in the floor of the living room – which leads to a cozy dungeon-like bonus room, complete with shackles and the stench of fear wafting up through the floorboards – the lady of the house becomes emotional as Will envisions Edward chained to the walls and pleading to be set free. Also noteworthy is the fact that on the wall opposite the restraints, the brickwork is punctuated with burn marks – how the heck did those get there? Eh, no matter……Ruth confesses she never went to the police because she says her husband threatened to take the boys away from her if she did. This is looking more and more like a case in which a raving bully got his just desserts….or is it….? Will thinks they should go to the police, whereas Helen is adamant that the authorities are never a safe first bet when trying to deal with abnormals in a sensitive manner. They do agree that they need to find Edward’s missing brother Robbie if they hope to figure out exactly what was going on in this dysfunctional household…….

Back at the Sanctuary, Edward and Henry share a particularly awkward elevator ride, seeing as how Edward has those souped-up eyeballs that can spot abnormals lurking beneath the surface of otherwise “normal” men, and Henry is a werewolf-in-training. Indeed, the fact that Edward was all but crying like a baby when confronted with Henry’s toothsome alter ego has convinced Henry that he should have that “brain surgery.” Ashley meets up with him and tries to talk him out of it. Hey, maybe there will be cool upsides to abnormality! Only Henry thinks maybe this is a bit more serious than trying to convince a girlfriend that her awful haircut doesn’t look so bad……as if.

Helen has Edward draw exactly what he saw on the night of his father’s death. As the picture is drawn from Edward’s perspective, our team catches onto the fact that the hand in the foreground to Edward’s left is, in fact, a right hand…..with a scar on it. Say, Robbie’s right hand had a scar on it…….he must have been there that night! And Edward and his mother must be covering up for Robbie! Robbie must have killed his dad!

Only the very suggestion sends Edward into an epileptic fit……if epileptics had laser beams shooting out of their eyes during seizures. Helen escapes with just a few singed eyebrows to show for it, and Edward passes out. In light of the fact that the dungeon beneath the living room floor at Chez Meyers had burn marks on the wall, our gang ponder the possibility that maybe Mr. Meyers was an abnormal himself, and that he chained himself up in order to spare his family. Could Edward’s condition be not only incendiary, but also hereditary?

On the subject of cursed gene pools, we return to Henry. Where neither Helen nor Ashley could come up with the right words to comfort a fledgling computer-geek-turned-maneater, Bigfoot is now weighing in on his friend’s condition. Despite Henry making a few careless comments about how hard it must suck to be abnormal, Bigfoot waxes poetic about how Henry is only seeing the curse of his condition, and not the gift……he even suggests that, with a little practice, Henry might figure out a way to not eat his friends when the urge strikes under the light of a full moon…..

Edward is back at the easel, and his pictures of the crime scene reveal that Robbie crawled in through the living room window on that fateful night. Helen has a special gizmo that will fill in the blanks between the images that Edward is drawing, so as the story unfolds, we learn that Robbie was coaxing Edward to run away with him and experience life on the outside – or at least outside the dungeon he has called home so far. Mr. Meyers is protesting, based on firsthand experience – life as a freak, he has concluded, is best done behind closed (trap)doors. He brandishes a gun in an effort to keep Robbie from luring Edward out into the world, where discrimination and fear await. As Robbie and his father argue over where Edward belongs – and struggle with the gun – Mr. Meyers decides he’s had enough, and uses his burning eyeball trick to warm up the gunpowder in the chamber. Suicide via flaming eyeball – who could have seen that one coming?

Will’s friend Joe informs Will that this case has disappeared – or, more specifically, Mr. Meyers’ body, and all accompanying evidence, has since been commandeered by some mysterious and important and powerful men. Perhaps Helen’s idea to keep the Meyers boys under wraps was the better approach, in hindsight…..speaking of the Meyers boys, as in plural……

Team Magnus decides to review the evidence to backtrack and determine where Robbie might be hiding. Henry catches a whiff of an article of clothing belonging to Robbie………and his supercharged sniffer soon leads him, and the rest of the gang, to Robbie’s secret hideout, where the wayward brother had stashed himself securely within some dark abandoned ruins beneath the city streets. Turns out that Edward’s not the only family member with artistic merit, as Robbie has been whiling away his time on the lam by replicating Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel painting on the ceiling of his mysterious underground hideaway. The brothers Meyers reunite, and Edward looks slightly less creepy with a smile on his face as he and Robbie hug.

The warm fuzzy feeling that results from this happy family reunion inspires Henry to change his mind about that whole elective lobotomy thing. For now, he’ll take his chances with the future….even if it might involve some extra shaving in his new morning routine.