In the nineteenth century, a girl was born in a man’s world. When she told the men she’d like to write books, they laughed because books were not a woman’s business. But the girl had no trouble imagining things other people couldn’t fathom: time travel and laser guns, moon landings and invisibility, so she conceived a world where literature wasn’t under the dominion of men. It turned out she was right about things like gene engineering and interplanetary communication, but wrong about the commerce of books. So she published stories under her brother’s name and went to work for a warehouse where all the mysteries of time and space were contained inside mystical artifacts.
In the twentieth century, a girl was born in a man’s world. When she told her father she’d like to sell books, he laughed because books were not a woman’s business. He named his bookstore “Bering & Sons,” though he had no sons, and the girl learned that though the commerce of books fell under the dominion men, they could claim no sovereignty over the province of knowledge. So she taught herself four languages, fencing, martial arts and went to work for a warehouse where the universe’s full enlightenment was contained inside mystical artifacts.
The girl from the nineteenth century lost her daughter to senseless murder.
The girl from the twentieth century lost her partner the same way.
One was bronzed, the other was born, and they stumbled into each other on equal footing inside the man’s world. Helena G. Wells and Myka Bering.
One wanted to destroy the world to heal her pain, the other wanted to save the world for exactly the same reason. Helena spared the world her vengeance to save Myka. Myka withheld from the world her grace to save Helena. For if the world died, so would Myka, and Helena couldn’t bear it. And if Helena died, the world would be saved, but Myka couldn’t bear it. Time twisted in on itself to make their introduction, and space stretched out to pull them together. One said, “It seems we are forever destined to meet at gunpoint,” but she only had it half right. It wasn’t gunpoint that was their destiny; it was meeting. And so they met, again and again, without colliding, suspended in perpetuity like the white, trembling promise of a first kiss. An unspoken oath as old as night.
Boone, Wisconsin. 2012. A couple of curious things are happening in the badlands of cheese country. For starters, a petty criminal runs into a police precinct and confesses to killing a guy, even though his lawyer already got the DA to drop the case against him. His eyes are wild and his hands are hairy and it’s all very frantic neanderthal. More bizarre than that, however, is the fact that heaven has apparently opened up over the Great Lakes and gifted the land with a forensic scientist whose accent is English and whose face was crafted by God on his most enthusiastic and generous day, yet the townspeople have not prostrated themselves before her in humble supplication.
Emily Lake is the forensic scientist’s name and in her professional opinion, this petty criminal is acting real weird.
In Nowhere, South Dakota, Myka’s phone rings. She’s happy to step away from the breakfast table squabble taking place at the B&B, a squabble that comes to a close in an instant when every participant whips around to face her as she breathes “Helena?” into her phone. Breathing, by the way, is something she will only be doing at half-capacity for the foreseeable future, as the presence of Helena always causes Myka’s lungs – and other none-of-your-business organs – to whiz out of whack like the navigational instruments on a freefalling propeller plane.
When Pete and Myka arrive in Boone, WI, Myka is almost too bamboozled to speak. Helena thinks she’s shocked by her ability to masquerade as a forensic scientist, so she explains that most of it is her superior intellect and extraordinary grasp of gadgetry, and also she watched a lot of CSI. But Myka’s not surprised about that part at all. She knows Helena could be a lawyer or a neurosurgeon or a intergalactic space pilot if she wanted to. No, what Myka wants to know is why? As in, “Why, when you are perfectly free to be where you want to be, are you not sharing my pajamas with me?” Helena weaves a yarn about she wanted to get far away from Warehouse artifacts after she finally returned the astrolabe to the Brotherhood of the Black Diamond even though her whole life deal is and always has been: her love of literature, her compulsion to try to rescue her dead daughter, and her borderline obsession with Warehouse artifacts.
Helena just wants to tell them about the case at hand, and Myka’s like, “Sure, one second, let me just rip my heart from my chest with my bare hands and stitch it right here on my sleeve. OK, done. Go.” But as Helena shifts gears to crime-solving, Myka just zones right out. She’s listening with her face, but her ears are still ringing with the thunderous sound of Helena’s complete silence on the unspoken question about the shared pajamas.
In fact, once she and Pete part ways with Helena, she doesn’t even pretend to care about the case. Blah blah blah guy transformed from a cave man into a regular man blah blah confessed to crimes he didn’t commit blah blah unique artifact blah whatever. She goes, “What are we missing?” And Pete starts talking about detective stuff, and Myka goes, “No, dude. What are we missing about why in God’s holy name H.G. Motherfucking Wells is working at some strip mall police station in the suburban Midwest, like some kind of … like she thinks she’s … like a regular person? OK, Helena is not regular. Helena is extraordinary. This is like if Leonardo da Vinci went to work at a Home Depot.”
Pete solves half the Helena conundrum in a second. He makes a throwaway joke about how maybe she’s exiled herself to Boone, WI because artifacts have the tendency to make her crazy or evil or dead. And hang onto that Lego piece because we’re about to snap the other half of the mystery into place in just a second.
Pete and Myka interview the mutating guy who confessed to the murder last night, but he can’t even talk about why he did it because when he’s terrified out of his noggin. They try to interview the guy’s partner in crime, but he, too, got terrified out of his noggin. Like, his noggin split open and his brains leaked out is how terrified he was. The mayor doesn’t give a crap. Criminals are criminals according to his math, and one dead criminal plus one jailed criminal equals a public opinion victory. Two solid hours of concentrating on this case is literally all Myka can handle right now. Her willpower is all used up. Finally, she acquiesces to her hammering heart and tells Pete to go interview the dead criminal’s family while she tracks down the surveillance video of the police station parking lot. And by “surveillance video” she means “the perfectly proportioned form of Helena Wells.”
In a white house with a picket fence lives HG Wells, which is weird enough by itself, but when Myka knocks on her door, Helena is immediately joined on her front porch by a dude. A boyfriend-y dude. Myka’s eyes almost pop out of her head like a cartoon wolf. And then a third person comes to the door. She’s eight years old. She’s whip smart. And she obviously regards Helena as a mother. Lego snap! Mystery solved.
What Helena is doing in Boone, Wisconsin is what she’s been doing for practically her whole life: trying to resurrect her daughter.
The pseudo-daughter – Adelaide is her name – is awesome. She has keen powers of observation, which she’s honed under HG’s tutelage, but also she’s like a second grader, so she doesn’t have much in the way of a social filter. So, for the first time ever, someone straight up calls out Myka and HG’s body language.
The camera always pushes in on Jo Kelly and Jaime Murray’s faces when Myka and HG are looking at each other, which is one of the ways directors talk to audiences, of course. It means, “The things they’re not saying are the most important. The conversation isn’t in the words.” But what’s also always fascinating, like little Adelaide just said, is the physical awareness HG and Myka always have with each other. Whatever else is going on in the room or in the world, watch how their bodies are always tuned into each other. It’s textbook. They stand too close, they mirror each other’s posture, the only time they break eye contact is to speedy-quick glance at each other’s lips. Their bodies are always turned toward each other no matter what. Adelaide’s no dummy, but she reads it as “dear old friends” because she’s a little kid and doesn’t know what the air feels like between two people who are four seconds away from climbing on top of each other.
When the dad and Adelaide walk back inside, Myka’s face goes, “Are you serious right now, HG Wells?” And Helena’s face goes, “It made a lot more sense in my head before I was forced to juxtapose it with you.”
Inside her “home,” Helena explains that she’s trying this new thing where she lives with a nice, dependable, normal man (who happens to have a daughter Christina’s age) in a very safe place in Boring, America, where the daughter (who happens to be Christina’s age) probably won’t be set upon by robbers and murdered in her sleep (like Christina was when she was Adelaide’s age). She one time lived for quite a while with her soul separated from her body. She was Emily Lake then. Maybe she can be that Emily Lake again. Myka’s face gets more bewildered by the second and when Helena tells her not to laugh at her new deal (which, again, is the same deal it’s always been with less artifact thievery and personally manufactured doomsdays), Myka makes this noise that’s just like: “Laugh? I’m about to puke. But, sure, OK. Ha. Ha. Ha.”
Helena agrees to help Pete and Myka track down the police station surveillance video. She does it by “pretending” that Myka is her “girlfriend” whom she’s trying to impress her by giving her a tour of the station. What they discover is that the guy who confessed to the crimes was quite literally a neanderthal when he was running through the parking lot last night. It’s because of this artifact that’s basically a T-Rex hologram you wear on your hand. It triggers survival instincts because it makes you think a dinosaur is about to eat your face. A fight-or-flight artifact when Helena’s pulling a runner, huh? Interesting.
The guy who’s controlling the artifact is the cop who took the guy’s confession last night, and when he shows up at Helena’s house to menace Helena’s boyfriend, Helena thrashes him with her krav maga skills and smashes his face into the dirt. The boyfriend is like, “Who are you?” And Myka is like, “Exactly.”
Myka has always been sure that HG understands her without words, but for the first time in the history of their partnership, she decides to just spell it out. Again, she has absolutely no interest in dealing with this case. Chase down the cop who stole the artifact? Nah. Get on a plane and get that thing back to the warehouse? Nah. Seek justice for the guy who is unfairly imprisoned and the other guy who died because of the hologram T-Rex head? Nah, not that either. Myka would rather stand in Helena’s kitchen and process some more. Seriously, Pete is trying to talk down Helena’s boyfriend who mutated into an actual cave man moments before, and Myka and HG are in the kitchen have a heated, whispered discussion about Helena’s life choices.
Myka finally calls her out about how she’s trying to bring her daughter back to life again, in a more socially acceptable, less homicidal kind of way than usual. HG doesn’t deny it, can’t even form the words to bat away the accusation. She just tells Myka to pack up her astute observational abilities and skedaddle back to South Dakota if she’s going to keep dropping hard truths like that. But now that Myka’s saying words, she can’t stop herself. She literally goes, “You are denying who you are to chase a ghost! This life, it’s not who you are!” Helena’s face says she knows Myka is right, but she doesn’t have time to do anything about it because they get a call that the bad cop has kidnapped Adelaide.
They rescue her, of course. Myka tries it on her own, first. But Pete and HG chase her down to an abandoned warehouse and they tag-team the bad guys. Pete tells Helena not to kill anybody or Myka’s going to be super pissed and Helena rolls her eyes because damn that woman and her perpetual correctness! Adelaide saves herself the way Christina could not and when Helena legitimately says to her, “Bravo, my girl,” she can hear – like we can hear – that she really is talking to a ghost.
Once the bad cop (and the mayor with whom he was in cahoots) are properly jailed and Adelaide is safely home, it’s time for Pete and Myka to get back to the warehouse. That T-Rex hologram head isn’t going to shelve itself. Pete and H.G. part with smiles and giggles, which is pretty remarkable considering how many times they’ve tried to kill each other, and Myka decides that since Helena one time sacrificed her happiness and her life for Myka, it’s time for her to return the favor. She tells Helena she was wrong and that she should stay here and be a mom and a girlfriend and be happy because she’s really good at all of those things. Helena thanks Myka, not for understanding, but for giving her permission to live this lie a little longer. They say the word “friend” about a dozen times, and you can practically see the mental air quotes they’re putting around the word. “I don’t want to lose my ‘friend.'” “You’ll never lose your ‘friend.'” And finally Myka throws herself into H.G.’s arms, her eyes as bright as Christmas.
They’ve never made a choice, together, to say goodbye. And they don’t really know how to do it. H.G. saw on TV that you can make coffee dates with people you love, but Myka’s sacrificed all she can today. She can pretend they’re parting as “friends,” but she can’t pretend they’re coffee buddies. She says maybe they’ll save the world together again one day, when Helena remembers she was born for endless wonder. Myka hangs out of the window as Pete drives off, refusing to look away. And Helena can’t make herself stop staring either. The camera pushes in on Helena’s face again. The words she’s not saying.
The past is the beginning of the beginning and all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn.
