- After a plane from Hamburg returns with no survivors, FBI agent Olivia Dunham goes after the only person that might shed some light on the incident - a scientist that has been in a mental hospital for the last 17 years.
- When a commercial flight from Germany lands at Boston's Logan Airport without a single passenger or crew member on board alive, FBI agent Olivia Dunham is assigned to the investigative team. When her partner and lover John Scott suffers severe chemical burns, she seeks help from Dr. Walter Bishop a one-time university professor who experimented in the same field but has now been institutionalized for 17 years. To get his cooperation however, she has to get Bishop's son Peter's cooperation as well. The information they gather leads to Massive Dynamic, a huge multinational founded by someone who once shared laboratory space with Dr. Bishop. Agent Dunham also learns that what happened may have been part of a much larger pattern of strange phenomena.—garykmcd
- In Boston, a flight from Hamburg lands at the Boston's Logan Airport with passengers and crew dead with decomposed corpses. FBI Agent and liaison Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv) and her partner John Scott (Mark Valley) are assigned to the investigation team by the Security Agent Phillip Broyles (Lance Reddick) and they follow a lead to a container store. Out of the blue, the find a suspect that blows up the location and Agent Scott is burned by chemicals but surprisingly survives totally burnt. Olivia has a secret love affair with Scott and they are in love with each other; so she researches who might save his life. She finds the name of the brilliant Dr. Walter Bishop (John Noble), who has been interned in a mental institution for seventeen years after killing a guinea pig of his experiments. She seeks help with his son Peter Bishop (Joshua Jackson), who is a genius but estranged to his father, and they rebuild his laboratory with the support of Agent Astrid Farnsworth (Jasika Nicole). Olivia accepts to be submitted to an experiment to find the responsible for the murders and her investigation leads them to the Massive Dynamic Corporation, where she is received by the executive Nina Sharp (Blair Brown). Now they need to find the suspect and the chemicals that have burnt Scott to save his life.—Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
- A plane flies through an electrical storm, carrying passengers with a mix of German and American accents aboard. A agitated man jumps out of his seat, and hurriedly makes his way along the aisle. When a stewardess grabs his shoulder, he turns, and looks as if his face has melted. A man in a seat tries to use a medical injector on himself.
He vomits on a woman, and other passengers start screaming and melting.
The co-pilot opens the cockpit door to see what's going on, as the captain hurriedly activates the auto-pilot.
When the co-pilot turns, his face is bubbling and oozing as well.
The plane flies silently on.
In a motel room, a couple discovers the bed creaks. Agents John Scott (Mark Valley) and Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv) sneak around because bureau policy prevents on-the-job relationships. Scott tells her he loves her, but she doesn't respond. Then they both get called to a scene at Logan Airport in Boston.
Agent Charlie Francis (Kirk Acevedo) briefs Dunham. They lost contact with a passenger plane with 147 people on board. There are no signs of life. Logan has an autopilot system. The plane landed itself. They haven't opened the plane, at the CDC's direction.
A man drives up to the gate in a work van and asks what's going on. It look like the same guy from the plane who injected himself and presumably died.
Homeland Security dude Phillip Broyles (Lance Reddick) arrives and tells everyone to suit up. He leaves out Agent Dunham and scoffs at her liaison title but then tells her to put on a suit and go in.
The inside of the plane is slimy, with decimated bodies everywhere. Dunham doesn't think it's terrorism.
At the Federal Building in Boston, the office IDs victims. Every time Dunham asks Broyles a question, he mocks and barks at her. He sends her on a wild goose chase to follow a tip about two middle Eastern men giving a white guy a brief case and something about a trash can. He also calls her "Honey".
Outside, Dunham tells Scott that Broyles doesn't like her because she caught his best friend after he sexually assaulted three Marine privates and she put him away.
She stops walking and brings up what Scott said in the motel. She tells him she loves him.
At the storage facility, Dunham finds ammonia in the trash. Scott jimmies open the storage lockers one by one until he finds a makeshift lab with hairless rats, computers, and beakers. Dunham goes outside to make a call while Scott looks around. Airplane Guy shows up and starts running. Scott chases after him, through storage containers.
Dunham sees them pass and is behind Scott when Airplane Guy makes a call on his cell phone and a huge explosion blasts both agents.
Dunham wakes up in the hospital. She gets up to go find Scott. A doctor tells her he was exposed to some synthetic chemicals. He's not contagious, but they don't know what's affecting him. They've never seen anything like it. He's in a drug-induced coma. She goes to look at him. His skin is translucent and he's nasty colors.
Duham looks in the interagency database for info on tissue hardening and finds a scientist. She runs to tell Broyles. She has a connection between the Hamburg flight and what's happening with Scott. It's Walter Bishop (John Noble), a scientist who's been in a prison mental hospital for 17 years for a lab accident killing his assistant. Broyles points out he's only allowed visits from immediate family. She has to find his son. In Baghdad. He's a high school drop out named Peter (Joshua Jackson), who has an IQ of 190. He was also a college chemistry professor, on fake credentials.
In Iraq, Peter makes a sales pitch to two Iraqi businessmen. He speaks Farsi. They make a deal. Olivia finds him. He laughs her off when she mentions the flight.
He doesn't want anything to do with his father. She begs him. He still says No. She tells him she knows why he's there. Either he goes with her or she tells certain people where he is.
On the plane back, Peter talks about his father, brilliant but difficult. He says his father did research out of the basement of Harvard for a toothpaste company.
Olivia tells him Walter was really working in fringe science, mind-control, teleportation, astral projection, reanimation.
Peter now thinks his father was Dr. Frankenstein.
At the prison's mental hospital, Olivia goes alone to talk to Dr. Bishop. He's twitchy and odd but asking questions about what Scott looks like. He says his condition can be reversed.
He looks at her and says she came with his son because he's not allowed visitors without immediate family. He wants to see him.
Peter goes in and his father's first words in 17 years are to tell him he's not as fat as he expected. Thanks, Pops.
Dr. Bishop says he needs to see Scott. He's allowed out only with a family member as a guardian. Peter tells Olivia to be careful what she wishes for.
On the car ride, Olivia asks Walter if anyone else knew what he was up to. He mentions William Bell. Olivia and Peter recognize him as the founder of the enormous Massive Dynamics super-rich company.
At the hospital, Dunham asks Charlie to set up an interview for her with William Bell.
Scott looks grosser, everything on the inside showing through hard, glassy skin.
Dr. Bishop picks up a scalpel and takes off a piece of Scott's skin. It scoops off like butter. He wants to go to his lab, but Olivia tells him it was shut down. He freaks out.
Olivia asks Broyles to reopen Bishop's lab. Broyles asks if she's trying so hard because there was something going on with her and Agent Scott.
They go to the lab at Harvard, now used for storage. Dr. Bishop rattles off the list of supplies he needs, including a cow to test on.
As he preps, Peter asks Olivia what was in his file. There was no file. She bluffed.
Dr. Bishop has identified the compound affecting Scott, but he can't treat it without knowing exactly what was in the lab. Scott was the only one who saw the guy's face. Dr. Bishop tells Olivia he's so sorry he can't offer a less dangerous solution.
He forgot to mention: he thinks it's possible for two minds to share information in an unconscious state.
Peter mocks it, but Olivia listens. Dr. Bishop says he did it once with a corpse (which you can do for up to six hours). She'd have to be immersed in a tank and on a lot of drugs including LSD - with a metal rod in her brain. Peter says it'll kill her. She agrees, because dating again is rough.
They bring John to the lab. Charlie tells Olivia that William Bell is out of the country for two weeks, and it'll take 48 hours to get a warrant. He asks surprisingly few questions about the cow.
Olivia strips to her skivvies. Dr. Bishop implants the metal rod in her neck and injects her with the drugs. As she gets in the tank, Dr. Bishop thanks her for trusting him.
He checks his machines, waiting for their brain rhythms to be in sync. Olivia starts her wild trip: She's in a junkyard, then in a house, then she sees her uncle's kayak. Then she's in a cemetery. John Scott hears her, and they see each other standing on the FBI symbol in the middle of the desert. She tells him what happened and asks him to try to remember what the guy looked like. The scene from the storage facility replays. She sees his face and then freaks out. They yank her out of the tank.
At the office, she recreates his face using a computer model. Someone in the office IDs him as a passenger on the flight. He has a twin, Richard Steig (Jason Butler Harner). Richard sacrificed his brother, putting the disease in his insulin pen. His last employer was Massive Dynamic.
The executive director, Nina Sharp (Blair Brown), meets with Olivia. She says they caught him three months ago trying to steal classified information. Sharp says she's worked there for 16 years and owes her life to the company. Bell noticed she looked odd and sent her to the hospital where they found cancer. They had to amputate her arm. She peels off her skin to reveal a mechanical arm.
Sharp asks Olivia if she thinks Steig is part of the Pattern. The Pattern? Olivia doesn't have clearance to know about whatever that is. Sharp lectures her about science advancing and tells her to be careful.
FBI agents storm Steig's apartment. The Bishops wait outside. Walter doesn't want to go back to prison. Peter sees Steig run out the back of the apartment and chases after him. They run into another apartment building and up to the roof, where Olivia has caught up. She jumps down a fire escape and gets to him just seconds after Peter tackles him and punches him, quite macho for a pretend scientist.
Olivia interviews Steig but gets nowhere. Peter watches the video. Olivia leaves the interrogation room, frustrated. Peter sneaks in. He tells Steig he could give him what John has whenever he wants. But he doesn't have the time. He smashes Steig's fingers with a coffee mug.
They all race back to the lab with the list of chemicals and start making the antidote.
Upstairs, Broyles checks in with Dunham. He tells her she's done some solid work. He says "we're impressed." What happened on the plane might just be one incidence of several other odd things that have happened. Kids reappearing after being missing, a tsunami after a high-pitched frequency, a person coming out of a coma and writing coordinates of their battlegroups. He says they're part of "the pattern." Someone is using the world as their lab for science experiments. He tells her she can have whoever she needs. She wants to go back to her normal life.
In the lab, they transfuse Scott with his treated blood. He wakes up. He tells Olivia he had a dream about her.
Back at the regular hospital, the doctor tells Olivia that John should be better in a week. Dunham visits Steig. She wants to know why he killed his own brother. He says he has a recording of a conversation in which a guy from her office threatened him.
Olivia goes to where he buried it. She finds the tape along with a passport. She plays it. It's Scott. Olivia recognizes it as the threatening call he was making as he arrived at the airport.
Scott smothers Steig in the hospital with a pillow.
Olivia races to the hospital, telling Charlie to post agents outside Scott's room and check on Steig. She pulls up as Scott is driving away. She follows him.
They race through traffic, police cars join in. She pulls alongside, and he rams her, which has got to make that whole LSD water tank thing seem like a bad idea in retrospect. John's car hits a barrier and flips. He crawls out, bloodied. She runs to him. "Ask yourself why Broyles sent you to the storage facility," he croaks out. She asks him who he's working for, but he dies without answering.
Francis drives Olivia, musing on how the government trails big corporations in knowledge. He takes her to the lab.
Olivia intercepts Peter and tells him Walter needs to stay, which means he needs to stay, too. Peter asks where John is. She says she's not going to use false threats anymore. The threats are real.
Peter says Walter told him about the work he and Bell had done and the plane is just the beginning.
In an underground corridor, a man wheels Agent Scott's body down the hallway. Nina Sharp asks how long he's been dead. Five hours. "Question him."
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What is the broadcast (satellite or terrestrial TV) release date of Pilot (2008) in the United Kingdom?
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