Zero hour: 1 x 02 "Face"

"One is the number of man. One is the number of you. But sometimes one is not one. Sometimes one is two."

Well, I'm glad to see that the principles of basic mathematics are out the window in this show. That's probably going to explain a lot.

[consider this your warning about spoilers, except that it's hard to call them 'spoilers' when the show's plot progresses in exactly the most convenient and predictable way possible, however illogical that may be]

So, then the FBI Agent and Our Hero are in the sub with Vincent, having found a Nazi that looks just like Our Hero, a fob watch, and a cryptic journal. The FBI Agent points out that it's best to kill Vincent now before he can wreak more chaos. Our Hero points out that if he's killed, he won't be able to say where Leila (Our Hero's wife/motivation) is, and Vincent understandably sides with him, so they convince the agent to back down. Then, Our Hero starts pestering Vincent about what the frozen bodies in the sub are, and why this random pocket watch is important, and what he knows, and he takes cell phone photos of the pocket watch, and in the process Vincent makes himself the most relatable character in all of this show by being annoyed at him.

Then, Vincent somehow blows up his SUV, hijacks the FBI's seaplane, and sinks the Nazi sub all at once. But, the FBI Agent and Our Hero somehow manage to get back to NY, where they start bickering again and Our Hero insists that his wife is still alive because he believes it.

The assistant is wondering why he can call the local police, the FBI, and INTERPOL, and they'll still tell them that they haven't made any progress in the case and they don't have any new information. I, personally, am wondering why he can just call up the FBI and INTERPOL and expect to get any information about one of their cases in the first place.

Now, we're back with Vincent, and he threatens to kill Leila and dissolve her body in lye. Which will totally work, because people do it on crime shows, right? Anyways, he then asks her to prove why she's valuable to him in order to save her life. She says she can't, presumably dooming her.

Back at the magazine offices, the priest walks in, and everyone starts talking about how people always think that it's the End Times. Then, the priest goes on about how, in Revelation 16, the first angel pours out his "bowl", and "painful sores" break out on people. He explains that some people, although not him, believe that it refers to AIDS. Then, he says, "Next angel comes, pours out his bowl on the rivers, they became as blood."

Hang on, let's look at that: Revelation 16 is where angels pour out bowls on things, so that's one point for the writers. But...

• The first bowl is "...ugly, festering sores broke out on the people who had the mark of the beast and worshiped its image." So if you consider that the show seems to be referring to this as HIV/AIDS, that creates some major unfortunate implications.  
• The second bowl is the seas becoming like blood, whereas the rivers being like blood is the third bowl, so they got those mixed up. It may seem like a minor mistake, and maybe could even be easily retconned, if it wasn't for the fact that a priest said it.

So then they open up this other pocket watch, and observe that the gears are soldered together. "This clock was never meant to work!" they say. "Who makes a clock that's not supposed to tell time?" Well, aside from the Doctor and the Master and a bunch of other Time Lords, I'd put shadowy secret organizations that a fake CIA division is involved with pretty high on the list.

At least not all of the clocks will have hidden diamond treasure maps in them. But, they have a brilliant idea: Maybe it's a celestial map! Of course it's a celestial map, because the characters' massive leaps to conclusions are always correct if they're necessary to keep the plot moving. So then they look at the time and date that the watch is stopped at, and pull out some kind of book, and somehow manage to figure out that the constellation needs to be viewed in Chennai, India.

Our Hero decides that more clues to this might be in the cryptic journal, but refuses to try to chase down the journal because the FBI Agent has it. The girl assistant agrees to, tracks down the FBI agent, they chat, and the FBI agent hands over the journal saying it's not of any value to the FBI so our protagonists can have it. The guy assistant sends a previously unseen flunky to go online and research plagues and AIDS and rivers of blood, and them him and the girl translate the journal from German.

Anyways, the assistants translate the journal, discover that some guy named Corben or something was a Nazi doing field research on this "Zero Hour" thing (isn't it so convenient how everyone used the same code name for it?) and that a private collector had more information. They track down the collector, and he's conveniently a fan of the magazine, so he's happy to help them out. Super uncomfortably, he's got an entire room decked out in a ton of Nazi paraphenalia, where he shows them a filmstrip kind of thing from the Nazis. It's about their expedition to India to talk to a girl who could reportedly talk to the dead, and this Corben guy looks suspiciously like Our Hero, which manages to make things even more uncomfortable.

Somewhere in here, we're shown a shot of a bathtub with a lot of empty jugs of lye. We can't see the interior of the tub so it's unclear whether this is meant to be a red herring in the classic vein of "No body, no proof," or whether the producers have simply decided that showing the body would be too much for an otherwise very PG-rated show, or perhaps if the producers simply could not be bothered to figure out what it would actually look like (much less have the effects department try to recreate it) if someone decided to attempt to dissolve a body in lye. 

In the meantime, Our Hero and the FBI Agent have made their way to Chennai. They sort of make peace and agree not to kill Vincent when they find him. Just as they're about to have nothing to talk about, Our Hero gets a call from the assistants informing them of everything they've figured out. So they go to find this woman, and the FBI agent mentions that the ideal of a Hindu woman being an apostle might be offensive enough for people to kill over it.

Back at the office, the assistants find a letter in a secret pocket in the journal. It's a letter from Corben to his wife, and it's going on and on like some kind of inanely mushy love letter. I think this guy is supposed to be the Rosicrucian/Nazi double agent? During this voiceover, we have a bizarre scene of the Nazi who looks like Our Hero giving a young Hindu girl something, and his Rosicrucian cross, and she puts a Bindi on his forehead. And I suppose it supposed to promote happiness and harmony and "we're all humans inside" but it just comes off as weird and extremely uncomfortable, although I'm not educated enough on Hinduism to know if that scene is flat-out wrong or just unlikely.

So Our Hero and the FBI Agent find this "Hindu holy woman," as they describe her, and bring her an "offering" of something. She tells them that Our Hero had told her to destroy the clock if she ever saw his face. Our Hero goes off on the but-I-KNOW-my-wife-is-alive tangent and so it's very important that she tell him her secrets anyways. She refuses, saying that his return would prophesy "the coming of the angel of death." I'm trying to decide whether this would be more entertaining with Terry Pratchett's version of Death or the Supernatural version.

As our protagonists leave, someone starts shooting up the area, and unsurprisingly, Vincent shows up. The holy woman willingly moves away from where she's standing, and Vincent steals the clock, then shoots her. So he's attacked on Catholic priest, killed another just a moment ago, and now has shot a Hindu holy woman. Not only is he on his way to becoming a serial killer (or perhaps a spree killer?), but a good DA could have a field day with hate crimes legislation after the next few victims. Anyways, as Vincent drives off, we're treated to a frankly hilarious scene of Our Hero reaching his hand through the fence towards the car and yelling "Leila! I'll find you!" as if he believes that Vincent is toting her around in the trunk of his car or something.

Then, Our Hero returns to where the Hindu holy woman is, and she's dying. Because this episode hasn't had enough awkward moments yet, the woman says with her last breath that she was wrong, and something about the darkness of the coming apocalypse, and that Our Hero alone holds the key to something (despite the fact that Vincent always seems to be one step ahead?) and if he continues chasing Vincent across the planet, he'll bring about the end of the world.

So, I'm not sure what I just watched. Lots of plot threads have been left dangling, and now I'm curious to see if this is a revelation-style apocalypse, and even more curious to see what the writers have decided that the secret that triggers it would be.