Nowhere To Hide
"Haven" Plot Summary:
Though he's miserable about being confined to a wheelchair, Logan agrees to accompany Max on a planned trip out of town because he wants to track down a surviving police officer who might be able to lead Eyes Only to the brutal killers of 18 political activists. They rent a house for the weekend from a small-town doctor raising a young boy, Sage, whom she claims is her nephew. Max is suffering from increasingly bad seizures because of the implant still in her neck. When Sage witnesses her struggle to take tryptophan before the shakes overwhelm her, he confesses to Max that he, too, has a secret -- he sometimes sees Sam Gilan, a local boy who died in a fire a decade earlier.
Logan tracks down the local police officer who took part in the massacre of the activists, but he refuses to name the official responsible for the shootings. Meanwhile, several local men get nervous when they see Max and Sage poking around the charred ruins of the house where the Gilans died. Privately, they blame each other for killing the family and torching the house. One claims another said the foreign-born Gilans knew the Pulse was coming but didn't warn anyone; a third sealed their fate by raping the wife. While Max and Logan learn from Aunt Trudy that Sage is in fact Sam Gilan -- Trudy, a doctor, rescued Sam from the fire and gave him a new identity, which he accepted during his recovery -- the thugs agree that the boy must be silenced and, if necessary, killed.
The locals see a police officer approaching Trudy's house. Believing the cop wants to talk to the stranger not about a long-forgotten Seattle massacre but the Gilan murder, they shoot the officer and leave to get reinforcements. With his dying breath, the policeman admits to Logan that an entire squadron of officers shot the unarmed activists -- in the rioting and chaos following the Pulse, they believed they had to kill or be killed. Although Max can barely stand because of her seizures, Logan manages to defend Trudy's house with the help of Sage, who is tired of hiding from the men and from his memories. Afterwards Logan admits he never killed anyone before. Max tells him that sometimes there's no choice.
Analysis:
Logan gets to play hero for a change, though it's a hollow victory. Instead of learning the name of a single Lydecker-like villain on the Seattle police force whom he can blame for the slaughter of activists, he discovers that the police were overwhelmed by paranoia and fear -- just like the residents of the small town where he goes to investigate, where four men destroyed a family because they had foreign names and their lights worked after the Pulse. The words "kill or be killed" echo throughout this episode; when Max attempts to reassure Logan at the end by telling him he had no choice but to shoot first, it's chilling rather than comforting.
In addition to the parallels between the police massacre and the small-town killings, Sage's situation echoes Max's. When he admits he has a secret and says, "I'll tell you mine if you tell me yours," Max automatically assumes her secret is more private, more dangerous. But in this context, the thugs take her physical prowess in stride, and consider Sage the real threat. He feels affinity with her, thanks her for not treating him like a kid and doesn't freak out about her seizures; he's used to being around sick people, having grown up with an aunt who's a doctor. The gimmick of having a kid named Sage whose sixth sense allows him to see dead people stops being funny once the horror of his past becomes evident. It's a perverse twist when the truth turns out to be more awful than a supernatural explanation could have been.
Logan's impotent fury when Max beats up the thugs in the bar demonstrates yet again that his real problem isn't his paralysis; if his legs had worked fine, the locals probably would have been a lot rougher with him for interfering in their efforts to hit on Max, and she still would have had to rescue him, since she can whomp ten men to any one of Logan's. Yet she won't accept any help whatsoever when she's vulnerable -- won't let him make breakfast, fetch her blankets, stoke the fire -- it's no wonder he thinks she has a superhero complex. This isn't a sexual issue, it's about her fear of vulnerability, but Logan doesn't seem to see that. Or maybe he does, but his ego prevents him from giving her the same distance when she's feeling weak that he craves himself at such moments.
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