Photo: Ben Mark Holzberg/CBS
What is Salvation?
This is where the pace starts to pick up. While Darius is being beat up and water-boarded at the Pentagon Grace heads to Tanis Ente are figuring out what happened . That electronic tag lets Grace go into everywhere Darius can. We learn this when Darius’s right-hand man Lazlo (Aaron Poole) is suspicious when Grace walks in and the security system – named “Tess,” – says “hello Darius.”
The tag lets them get into a secret control room that lets Darius see everything going on in his company. (It’s the room we saw Darius in during the last episode.) Liam cynically comments that it allows Darius to watch the world burn – like Nero.
Because the tag also logs Darius’s movements Grace and Liam are able to track where Darius was when the hack of the IO probe occurred. That leads them t0 a secret site that underground on the grounds of Tanis Industries. It’s here that they find “Salvation” – a giant spaceship! Darius is still working on a mission to Mars!
Liam immediately thinks they’ve been conned. It’s not just a mission to Mars though. Grace finds a bunch of priceless, historically significant items – including that original copy of the Bill of Rights.
Grace: Why would someone who wants to doom humanity also save its greatest works? It doesn’t make sense!”
What doesn’t make to Grace is why Darius would send her to find “Salvation.” The answer is revealed when Liam discovers the bunker is cut off from all cell service and Internet access. Since this is where he was when the IO Probe was hacked there’s no way Darius could have done it!
As Grace looks around and sees the containers of uranium she realizes that he didn’t use this alibi because it would have gotten her into trouble. Talk about a selfless gesture! (It brings to mind that Bruno Mars song about the guy willing to do things like catch grenades for a woman….)
Darius’s willingness to protect her, plus all those priceless objects, adds up to Grace’s conclusion.
Grace: All of this is to ensure that, in a worse case scenario, the best of us survives.
Liam: He’s not Nero, he’s Noah!
Liam’s outburst puts Darius into a new light. He’s not a ruler watching and trying to control everything. However, he’s not the type to stand idly by either. He’s building a space ark!
A Race Against Time
Now that Grace and Liam are convinced Darius is innocent they rush back to Tanis Industries offices to try and find the mole. When they walk into Darius’s secret quarters they find Lazlo looking at something on Darius’s computer. Grace is immediately suspicious, and truthfully, the audience has been given breadcrumbs that there’s something fishy about him.
The water-boarding of Darius is starting to really bother Harris. He wants it stopped, citing it’s low success rate of accurate information. Claire coolly tells him that he may outrank her, but if he disobeys an order from the President he’ll end up in jail. It continues.
Lazlo, Grace and Liam access all the terminals at Tanis Industries. The signal that stole the probe didn’t come from any of them. They all conclude that there must be a secret unsecured terminal on site. Lazlo says only Darius could have done that as another one of his safeguards, but there’s no time to search the grounds. Grace rushes off to the Pentagon to ask to speak to Darius. She tells Liam to go work on solving the EM Drive issue. Then she calls in to run a background check on Lazlo.
Grace arrives just in time. Claire had made the call to have Darius injected with a brutal drug to make him talk and it was about to be injected. Grace pleads with Harris to let her talk to him because she swears on her life that Darius is innocent. Harris, who wasn’t happy about using the drug to begin with, chooses to trust Grace and rescinds Claire’s order.
The Wrap Up – More Questions Than Answers
Despite being beaten to a pulp and water-boarded Darius is coherent enough to figure out where the hidden computer must be. (Just go with it.) However, he makes it clear that he didn’t put it in – it would undermine his entire security system!
Anyway, Darius gets Liam on the phone and sends him to the break room to the Asteroid game. Sure enough, they’ve rewired it so that it could be used to hack the probe! Liam is able to override the hack and the give control back to NASU.
Unfortunately, the move is too late. Even though it seems like it was within the window of time, when the activate the probe’s engines to take it out of Jupiter’s orbit they can’t Instead the pull of Jupiter’s gravity crashes the probe into the planet!
Was it Lazlo?
Grace’s background check shows Lazlo has a criminal past that makes him capable of pulling this off. However, Darius knew about that record and swears Lazlo is innocent. Harris and Grace disagree, and they go to arrest Lazlo. He’s found in Darius’s headquarters, dead due to a gunshot to the head.
It looks like a suicide. Grace and Harris take it as an admission of his guilt. Darius doesn’t buy it.
Jillian and Liam
Liam and the professor had tried every kind of substance, but nothing had worked. Liam takes a break when Jillian stops by to tell him about her realization that Darius had chosen her because she doesn’t think like the rest of the panel. He calls her “otherworldly” – which leads to his realization about the crystals from the meteorites.
After that, there’s a voice-over of Jillian telling the think-tank that you need artists and dreamers in the 160 because for humanity to truly survive you need hope. During it we see a sad Harris being observed by Grace and Liam getting the EM drive to actually work!
Now what? Well, this is only the first half of what happened this week on Salvation. It’s asked us to consider our own ethics and ideals while setting up yet another conspiracy. Even if Lazlo was the mole, the question of who he’s working for remains unanswered.
Darius is convinced it wasn’t Lazlo though. Part two is titled, “Keeping the Faith” That’s what this episode does for the series. While before it seemed to be going nowhere, with “The Human Strain” Salvation has given viewers good reasons to keep watching!
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