Tru Calling/Recap/S1/E02 Putting Out Fires

Tru Calling Season 1, Episode 2: Putting Out Fires
Synopsis: Tru's boyfriend is screwing around on her, but that's OK, since the new corpse in her life can take his place. But only if she saves him from a burning building.

Analysis of the episode is below the recap. Recap by Korval.

Recap
The episode opens with Tru showing her best-friend-we-barely-met-last-episode Lindsay around her new job being a morgue attendant. She is suitably squicked out about the whole "dead bodies" thing and suggests that Tru can get a better job. Or move off the graveyard shift. Tru makes an allusion to her abilities by talking about the people she can help, but Lindsay (not knowing about them, of course) says that they don't need help: they're dead. Good job, Lindsay; let's just assume everyone who dies does so of natural causes, not investigate the death at all, and throw them in a ditch.

Yeah, Lindsay isn't exactly bright.

Davis appears. Wait, if Tru is on the graveyard shift, what's Davis doing here? We're going to find out that Davis is a near-magical figure that can appear and disappear from the morgue when the plot needs him to. The plot doesn't need him to, but a poor attempt at humor does, so he appears.

He talks about fishing a tennis ball out of someone's large intestine. Damn, someone's got a hell of a serve. Tru introduces them, Davis extends his bloodcovered hand which Lindsay naturally refuses. Cause, you know, the blood covering it.

Lindsay takes the opportunity to flee in terror (politely). Davis makes an odd comment about how business in the morgue will pick up. Um, Davis? Business in the morgue means someone's dead. And while I'm not with Lindsay's philosophy of "screw dead people," that's still not someone we should be looking forward to.

Oh, but it was a precient statement, as we cut to a building on fire. A firetruck arrives on the scene, firemen disembark, and there's general chaos and confusion around the building. A stereotypical concerned mother carrying groceries appears, screaming at a fireman that her children are upstairs.

Cut to inside the building, where a child is hiding behind a table that he turned over. A man, not a fireman, bursts through the door. He grabs the kid and carries him out the door into the hall. He tries to sooth the kid's panic by talking about the Giants being on a 7-game win streak. I hope the kid is a Giants fan, since otherwise it's a total non-requiter.

Unfortunately, he ends this comforting though with talking about them being "really on fire." Which totally screws up his intended effect, but he is in the middle of a burning, collapsing building, so I'll cut him some slack. The building doesn't, as his foot falls through some loose floorboards, sending the kid to the ground.

Oh look, the good Samaritan is trapped. He tells the kid to get out of the building without him. The kid is understandably concerned, but he gets him to leave.

Cue the title sequence. I didn't talk about this before in my last recap, because it wouldn't have made sense (since the show hadn't really been defined yet). I kinda like the title song, and it's done reasonably well. The sequence does a good job of introducing everyone to Tru's life. But it is short. Very short. Like 15 seconds. Which is perfectly fine from my perspective, but it makes it rather difficult to connect the actor's names to the characters they play. See, the sequence has to show stuff about Tru while overlaying the various names on screen, so they didn't make any real effort to tell us which character is played by which actor. That is, they will show you an actor's name, but it'll be on a face shot of Tru, a shot of a building, or whatever. Basically, it's functional, but not informative.

We open the first act with Tru in bed. The clock says it's 7:59, but it's very dark, and she works graveyard, so I'm guessing that's PM. Her boyfriend, Professor Evans, is sitting on the edge of the bed. He mentions that he's having breakfast with the Dean, looking to kiss up and get Tenure. Wait, breakfast? At 8PM?

Yeah, it's actually 8AM. Despite the fact that Tru works the graveyard shift, the producers of the show avoid trying to tell us exactly when she works. See, her time-travel powers (as we'll find out) key off of when she wakes up. That is, a "day" starts when she last woke up, so her sleep schedule is kinda important to the whole plot (in future episodes, her day will restart in places where she took a nap in the middle of the afternoon). However, they didn't quite understand something about the graveyard shift. Their idea was that having her work graveyard meant that she would encounter bodies late in the day, and thus get a pretty long jump when time rewound. But her days always seem to start in the morning, as though she were working a regular shift, which if you've ever worked graveyard you know is total BS. You either get home between 6-8AM and go to sleep immediately, or you do stuff after work and go to sleep at around 12 noon. Either way, the earliest you're going to be waking up is maybe 4PM.

It's not unexplainable, but it is suspect. And this scene really shows it off. Especially considering that the juxtiposition between this bedroom scene and the scene before the title makes it seem like this scene happens later. Unfortunately, the writers clearly intended the "8AM" scenario.

Back to the show. Evans asks for Tru's opinion on what suit jacket to wear. After picking one out, he asks how work was, to which Tru answers "pretty dead". Ha. He tells her to go back to sleep.

We cut to Tru and Harrison at a diner having breakfast. Harrison asks how she's doing, since the last time they spoke, she said dead people talked to her. Wait, he was fine with that just last episode. This will unfortunately not be the last time Harrison's ideas about Tru's talents will dramatically change from episode to episode.

She says everything's fine. He tries to pry some information out of her. So she goes back to crazy-ville and tells him. Harrison exposits how Tru's power works, and Tru informs us that it only happened once so far. So the little montage at the end of the pilot where she's clearly saving other people was, what exactly? A montage of things that she thinks that she might do if the magical thing that happened to her happens again?

Tru admits that it sounds a bit crazy as Harrison tries to pour some sugar into his coffee. Apparently, someone loosened the lid of it and it all comes pouring out. Yeah, that won't be referenced again.

Harrison goes on about how crazy it sounds, and then asks for proof. Proof in the form of a question about who wins the "Tigers' game." Tru rolls her eyes in disgust.

Cut to them walking out of the diner, and a car crashed into a fire hydrant. It's caused a traffic jam, which Harrison comments on. Harrison heads off to presumably get stuck in traffic, and Tru turns a corner to find... Professor Evans sharing a kiss with someone. Looks like his "breakfast with the Dean" was a little romantic rendezvous. Well, unless the Dean is actually a young, hot brunette. And while he did mention last episode that the Dean was a woman, I'm guessing that's not what's going on here.

Cut to Tru and Lindsay shopping for clothes. Lindsay is hurt that Tru didn't tell her that she was dating a professor, harping on the whole "not telling her best friend important stuff" thing. Tru says that she doesn't fall for guys often (remember this line, as this episode and the show for that matter will show that it's a blatant lie), to which Lindsay points out that when she does, she falls hard.

A random woman executes a little rudeness, snatching a dress from between the two of them without asking permission to voilate their personal space. Anyway, Lindsay is non-plussed by the fact that Tru did nothing when she caught Evans in the act of cheating on her. She says that she would have humiliated him on the spot. Tru heads off to...

See Meredith. They're in a spacious apartment, into which Meredith just moved, one assumes. Since they're unpacking stuff. Meredith starts asking about this "morgue thing" that Tru's doing now. Man, does anyone in her life realize that morgues are kinda important? Oh, but Meredith isn't executing her typical "callous bitch" behavior; she exposits that the morgue that Tru happened to get into is the same one that their mother went to after her murder. DUN DUN DUNN!!!

Meredith continues her uncharacteristically helpful demeanor by telling Tru that she can't bring their mother back. This ends the scene.

Cut to Tru in the morgue, looking up her mother's morgue records. Davis appears as if from nowhere over her shoulder, asking what she's looking at. Tru quickly scrolls the screen to something else, saying that it's nothing (yeah, totally not suspicious), but not before Davis sees what year it was. Davis ignores this behavior (it will make sense why in a few episodes), instead saying that 1993 was a bad year. You see, the death rate in the city before 1993 was quite low, and afterward it spiked. DUN DUN DUNN!!! Or something.

Interrupting this infodumping of apparently meaningless statistics that will definitely have no impact in the future, our friendly-neighborhood corpse bringer Gardez brings in a young girl, who died of smoke inhalation. Gardez drops a number of facts about the fire (started due to a gas explosion, the child was on the fourth floor, etc). He also uncovers a second body, the man from before the intro sequence.

Davis does a quick examination of the man, pointing out that he has a broken ankle, that he might have inhaled a chemical compound from the smoke (I'll assume he means an unusual or unexpected one, cause its hard not to inhale some kind of chemical). Davis takes a guess that the compound was dimethyl benzene.

Gardez takes the opportunity to tell us that the Tigers win the aforementioned game, while Davis points to cotten fibres that have been burned into the girl's skin.

Anyway, the bodies get stored in the crypt. Tru isn't pleased about seeing young children come through. Gardez tries to offer comfort, saying that they're in a better place. Tru asks if he really believes it and he says you have to to work there. Oh really? Gardez then points out that the living have it harder, since they have to go through the pain. Hmm, feeling suicidal, anyone?

A note on Gardez. Don't get too attached to him, as he isn't going to be making it through the series. Towards the middle of season one, he'll be disappearing for greener pastures. Fortunately, he'll be replaced by someone who's actually interesting, rather than deadpan comedy relief.

Cut to Tru reading while Gardez tells Davis that he's not getting set up with any of his sister's friends. He's apparently something of a stalker, sending lots of emails and so forth. Tru interrupts the banality as she hears a voice. She heads back to crazy-ville when she asks them if they hear it, which they did not. Gardez tries to bring Tru into the conversation, but she's more interested in the voices she's hearing.

She heads down the once again needlessly dimly lit corridor to the crypt. The music once again clashes with the visual mood as Tru approaches the crypt door. I'd like to take the time to point out that we already know what's going to happen, so there's no point in driving up the suspense about it. So this is just a time killer.

So she opens the door, the man's body asks for help, and we cut back to Tru in bed with her professor.

Of course, this time she knows the truth about his little "meeting with the Dean." She's slightly snide to him at first, then she tries to wreck his plans by inviting him to stay for some sex. He turns her down.

Then she heads to the morgue for a very needless repetition of the scene from the first episode where she opens the crypt door and finds no one inside it. Really, the show gets a lot better at making Tru not look like a complete and utter moron, but it isn't hard to see why these early episodes didn't work well for audiences.

Davis appears behind her, possibly in a puff of smoke, pointing out that she was hired for the night shift. She makes up for the stupidity of her even being here by asking if he ever goes home. Of course, Davis turns it right back around on her, which once again makes her look all kinds of stupid. She gives a lame excuse about wanting to "know the system," and then asks to look at the database.

She looks up the man's name, Nick Kelly, and finds that, lo and behold, he's an actual firefighter.

Cut to Tru arriving at the firehouse. She apparently learned something from her last few visits to crazy-ville as she hides the reasons why she thinks the building is a firehazard. Instead, she plays it off as an architecture assignment. He suggests going down there around 5PM, but since the fire started around that time, it would be too late. She convinces him to go there now instead, saying that she will fail her class if she doesn't get it done by 2PM. He buys into it, saying that things are slow currently.

Yeah, I hope there wasn't another fire that Nick was needed for between then and 5, one where he helped save people. Otherwise she just got someone killed.

Anyway, they flirt with each other a bit before heading to the building. They meet with the building manager who has his left hand and forearm heavily bandaged. He spins a yarn about how he tried to rescue his wife's wedding ring from the garbage disposal and cut his hand up. On their way down, Tru sees the mother from the intro, the boy from the intro (her son), and the girl from the intro (her daughter). The boy is complaining about a shirt that he doesn't like, and the mother exposits that it was a gift from his father.

The basement is not well lit. They poke around the various gas pipes, and they flirt around a bit. They eventually find a small leak, which he fixes with some duct tape. And he asks her out on a date, which reminds her of Professor Evans's cheating.

Cut to Evans and the unknown woman at a restaurant. She heads to the restroom, and Tru shows up in her seat. He looks suitably nervous at her presence, and she simply said that she wanted to see more of him. Then, the woman comes back.

Hm. Awkward.

Tru's revenge is effective, as the woman gets the whole "I'm the other woman in his life" thing, but her dialog is really oblique about it. She does make a comment about him missing her much more than she'll miss him.

Cut to Lindsay and Tru back in the store. Lindsay is surprised that Tru had the stones to do what she did. Indeed, Lindsay points out that she would never have been able to do something like that. Tru gets this look on her face, the same one the audience is wearing. It clearly says, "Wow, Lindsay is such a poser."

Tru gets some petty revenge on the random rude woman, as she picks up the dress the woman wanted a split second before she takes it. The woman fires Tru a look, the departs.

Tru then confesses that she "met someone new," to which Lindsay calls her, very sexilly, a "little slut." Um, OK? Is there something going on between these two that I should know about?

Cut to Tru and Harrison having breakfast. Or lunch. Coffee. Something. Wait, didn't this happen the other way around before? Anyway, she talks to him about the morgue where she worked being the same place their mother was taken. As Harrison reaches to pour some sugar, Tru stops him, showing him the loose lid.

Harrison goes back to being suspicious. This time she remembers the better part of valor, simply saying that she knows things from the future.

Cut to Tru and Nick on a date. I guess Tru doesn't fall very hard for people, since she replaced her boyfriend in less than 24 hours. They banter for a bit, during which Nick points out that Tru's story about her homework assignment was a lie. After all, if it were true, she would be in the professor's office right now. It's funny how the woman named "Tru" goes through her life telling one lie after another.

Nick is surprisingly accepting of the fact that Tru asks him to ignore any reasoning behind the purpose of the lie. Their banter eventually returns to the leak, which he points out wasn't dangerous enough at the time to actually have caused an explosion that day. DUN DUN DUNNNN!!!

Cut to Tru and Davis in the morgue. She apparently told him a story about a hypothetical fire to ask how it might have started. He's suspicious, but not enough to stop rattling off useful facts. When she asks about dimethyl benzene, he says that it would be a good accelerant, and whatever rag it was dipped in would be seared into the skin of anyone in the blast radius, but it would also cause burns if you get it on your skin. She remembers the bandages on the hand of the building manager, and fingers him for the crime.

Davis also cryptically offers his services for any other "hypothetical" questions she might have. He also asks who the guy she brought with her was, since she apparently brought Nick along for the ride. Davis gets about 3 steps from coming out of the closet when he recognizes Nick from a calendar he posed for for charity.

Tru starts inching towards crazy-ville again, as she floats her whole arson theory. But of course, Nick has no reason to expect a fire in that building. She looks up the manager's file in the morgue computer, finding that he has an indictment for insurance fraud. When he starts getting argumentative about where all of this is coming from, she starts using their budding romance against him. She tells him that she'll explain everything tonight, but only if he goes home and stays there. He decides to play along.

So she heads back to the building, into a dark maintenance area of the building. She runs into the manager and warns him that the police suspect that the building will be targeted for arson. She intimates that they suspect him of starting it, to which he is not pleased about.

She stands watch outside the building, when she sees the family from before. She tries to talk to them, but her running over to them makes the mother suspicious, and they quickly enter the building without listening to her.

Harrison calls her up, saying that her prediction about the game was correct. He concocts a scheme where they daily go over the scores for the game, when Tru sees the building manager. She ducks around a corner and hangs up on Harrison before he can finish detailing his plan.

Seeing that the building manager left, she decides to break into the manager's office. As she snoops around, the manager realized he left something and starts coming back. Tru finds dimethyl benzene as one of the chemicals on a shelf, but she hears a noise and hides. After a few tense moments, the door opens to reveal... the boy. She offers to buy him a drink and they leave.

They talk for a while. He talks about his parent's divorce, and then asks why she broke into the office. She claims she knocked too hard and broke the glass, but he isn't convinced (out-smarted by a 12 year old), as he points out the lock can be easily picked. Tru ignores the fact that this kid could possibly know that, instead going back to crazy-ville and asks him to get his family out of the building by 5.

She is interrupted by a call from Nick, whom she meets. Apparently, her story didn't mean much to him, as he isn't home. They meet, and he asks for a real explanation. She goes back to her arson theory, pointing out the chemicals. He says that they're for cleaning, which Tru has no retort for save "something's going on with him." Yeah, that's proof.

Tru knows that she has nothing, but tries to get him to trust her anyway. He says he does trust her and they start to kiss. Tru shugs him off, saying that if they kiss, she'll fall for him. In her moment of indecision, she sees someone dropping a blanket for a picnic. The pattern of the blanket matches the pattern of the shirt she saw the boy wearing, which jogs her memory of what Davis said about the cotton fibers found on the girl's body.

And now she finally realizes that the boy started the fire. She remembers the comment about the manager's lock that the kid made. And she tells Nick all of this, then tells him to go home instead of doing something about it. When he hesitates, she immediately recants, saying that there won't be a fire, that she's crazy, and that he should go home. Yeah, that won't make him suspicious. She promises him answers, and even the aforementioned kiss, but only if he goes home.

Then she runs off.

Cut to a match striking, as Tru starts banging on doors to get people out of the building. The match lighting the shirt is intercut with more scenes of Tru pulling the fire alarm.

Tru is completely surprised when Nick shows up. Yeah, like that pack of lies and deception was going to convince anyone. As she tries to get him out, a massive explosion rocks the building. Which makes him unwilling to leave, as he's now on the job. As she tells him that the real fire fighters will be there any minute, she remembers the car accident from the day before. They're going to be late.

Oops.

As she says this, he goes upstairs to check on other people. We have a replay of the scene from before, where he saves the boy, but Tru follows them. She points out the weak patch of the floor that got him killed before. At this point, he readily accepts her prescience and carries the boy to safety. And all is well, right? The boy is reunited with his mother, coughing, but no worse for wear. Tru and Nick finally kiss.

Well, except that Tru forgot someone: the little girl. Nick goes in after her, despite the availability of firefighters in gear. Tru tells him how to find her, and he goes in.

Cut to the morgue, where Tru is running to somewhere. Professor Evans appears behind her. She's crying, and he naturally assumes it is because of him. He actually says that he wishes he could rewind the day and have it to do over again, that he would do things differently. She of course says that he wouldn't, that he had his day, and that he only gets one.

Nick is back in the morgue, Tru standing over the body. She talks to him, realizing that he wasn't asking for help for himself, but for the girl. He saved the girl apparently, but not himself. Tru says how much she wanted both of them. She begs him to ask her for help again, saying that she's not going to leave until he asks.

Fade out.

Analysis
Well, that was different. The pacing in this episode was a lot less frantic than the first. There is character building, dialog, etc.

However, it still feels a bit rushed. That mostly comes from how Tru's relationship with Evans and Nick plays out.

Then there's the fact that this episode is a strong indicator that Tru's whole "doesn't fall for guys that often" line is a blatant fabrication. Yes, it was a rebound hookup, but it was still an entirely unnecessary line that could have been excised to avoid a bit of Fridge Logic.

Fortunately, the episode ended well enough to make all of these oddities meaningless. I mean, the guy dies. And stays that way; he's not coming back next episode.

It points to one of the strengths of this particular Applied Phlebotinum: Tru can't control it. She can't game it to save anyone she cares about. In fact, this episode reveals an interesting part of the ability: that the person who asks for help isn't even necessarily the one that needs to be saved. That people can ask for help on behalf of others.

This will come up again in the future. Actually, quite a few times. There's even an episode in season 2 where... well, we'll get to that in due time ;)

There are two interesting things to note in this episode. The double-exchange between Lindsay and Tru is particularly interesting. The fact that Lindsay suggests a course of action that she herself couldn't do was very telling of her character. But the important point here is that Lindsay lied about how she said that she would have done it. Tru learned a little something about Lindsay that double-day.

The other interesting thing is structurally with regard to Tru's powers. Because she can't control it, there is usually a very short time between encountering a body and jumping back a day. Which means that Tru is often given very few clues to work with. In this particular episode, the writers basically have Gardez and Davis Info Dump a bunch of facts on Tru in about 5 minutes. It's kind of crudely done, but it's effective enough in this episode. Later episodes will be a bit more circumspect about what information Tru gets to work with. They'll also play with just how much info Tru gets before her "Calling" kicks in.