Believe - 1.07 Bang And Blame - Review - Sorry Is Not For Tomorrow

We continue on from the previous episode with Tate now made aware that he is in fact Bo's father. The Winter team briefly stops at a gas station and we begin to see a little bit of a power play between Winter and Tate, something that I think will become a much bigger struggle for these men down the line.

Their pit stop is cut short when Skouras' henchmen arrive and Bo is shot with a tranquilizer dart, which causes Bo to go into a catatonic and feverish state. Her last words feed into her story about royalty being trapped inside a castle and a monster in the chimney gets them all!

Tate wants to take Bo to the hospital, but Winter explains that Bo is beyond their science and she needs a place to rest while he thinks about what they need to do next. They also have to contend with one of the men from the gas station, in which Tate helps Winter use their vehicle to knock him from his motorcycle and they put him in the back of the vehicle and take him captive.

Winter realizes from Bo's drawings that they are not far from a farm set in middle of forest where Bo had stayed 3 years before and decides to take her there. We are introduced to a couple named Sarah and Carl who watched over Bo before.

The rest of the episode plays out with Winter calling Zoe and having her meet him along with Tate with some medicine at a train station, while Bo in a pseudo dreamscape revisits her memories including the night Sarah and Caleb were assaulted by Channing.

Zoe pleads Winter to come to Orchestra and better explains to Tate (and the audience) that what is happening to Bo could be of her own doing and not necessarily the by product of using too much power. They need to use the drug to bring Bo's conscience to the surface in an effort to make contact and bring her back. Winter refuses to go to Orchestra after pointing out to Zoe that Skouras most likely always has her followed. They part ways and go back to the farm.

In the mean time Carl threatens Skouras' henchman to see if he was the man that assaulted them three years ago. To his disappointment, he was not the person, as he does not have a scar, but soon he starts to think about who had access to his house, as we learned that Channing was the one previously in charge of security. In Bo's dreamscape Bo also relives the assault, in which we learned Bo healed Channing and told her she doesn't need to forgiveness, or more aptly, "Forgiveness is not for tomorrow".

When Carl and Sarah discover the truth about Channing and threaten to tell Winter, Channing explains how Bo changed her that night and that Winter already knows everything. The phrase is so familiar to them, it allows them to take themselves aback and realize that she telling the truth.

When Tate and Winter return back to the farm, Bo's fever escalates, causing Tate to become furious. He goes out to the back and let's Skouras' man go on the condition he takes Bo and Tate to Orchestra, but Channing intervines and the Skouras' man escapes. Tate locks Channing in the barn. Tate gets back to house just as Skouras man holds everyone else at gunpoint, but as Tate approaches, the gunman runs out the back door.

Tate then visits Bo trying to talk, as the drug they injected seems to not of had a positive effect. Tate whispers in her ear and we see Bo back in her dreamscape where an image of Tate appears and his words from the real world transcend into Bo's reality. "Don't let me loose you to her." Bo asks, "Are you my father?" and Tate tells her, "Yes.". Bo wakes up with take holding onto her.


Team Winter again sets out for Winter's place, but Channing and Tate have a moment, where Channing in her own way says she understands why Tate did what he tried to do. At the warehouse, Tate tucks Bo in sighting that he promises he will get better and better at it.

The episode really packed in a lot of things and cleverly found a way to create a scenario that we haven't seen before in order to really test Tate while also allowing  Bo to come to know the truth that Tate was her father and was never going to leave her.


 Again we can see the problematic aspects of having a child like Bo and the drama she can create around herself. I would certainly agree with anyone who would have liked to have hung on the reveal to Bo a little longer, but given the episode had some rather dark subtext and represented Bo's own fears of being used as a weapon stemming back from her incident with Joshua and Ben, could Bo's extrapolations with the Chimney monster, Channing's past, the assault on Sarah and Carl, and with heavy themes of entrapment also be foreshadowing something rather dark around the corner!?!

And speaking of the chimney monster that entraps the royal subjects in their castle, did Bo's story and drawing tie back to the previous episode, where Bo drew Tate's near fatal boat scene in the image of the boat being attacked by a fire-breathing water dragon (water sometimes has a correlation with dreams or something temporal by sharing characteristics with something fluid, absorbing, and/or reflective) with something that clearly goes with her Medieval fairy-tale-like story. So this also emphasizes her own fears and perhaps a delayed response of knowing she could of lost Tate.

I also liked the idea of using visions, memories, and/or extrapolations not just to add a heightened state of reality in contrast to the simplistic or realist perspective of Tate's upbringings and the charming farm house, but also to show the viewers how Bo's mind and perception of reality works, as there was a nice metaphor of Bo having an out of body experience while walking through her memories and the ability to see fear, violence, or death as something near, but not quite tangible also provides contrasting limitations on her by still having fears which makes her incredibly human. It also goes along with her road not taken or alternate reality ability she presented to Ben and Taryn in the episode "White Noise". Plus there were also threads of that episode stringed through this one with the reveal that Zoe is most certainly always followed by Skouras' men, which means he knows that Zoe was the one to leak information to Ben and potentially allowing the audience to also play on fear with Zoe's life in upcoming episodes.

Additionally I also want to briefly mention that I didn't like Sarah or Carl. To me they represent something almost too zealot, possibly playing again to a contrast of grounded reality verses something extreme or fantastical. Granted I know that Bo has a way of changing people, but it still seems to me that it is characters like Channing and Tate that represent something closer to balance, where almost everyone else represents something extreme, which is way I think we also see this struggle of authority between Winter and Tate at the gas station and again later in the episode, because there are times where I think Winter's faith does him discredit, despite that everything has worked out ok so far.




Bad Robot Factor:
Each week after my review I will bring this section relating to many things Bad Robot in relationship to the episode, as I feel certain Bad Robot often makes a point to reference themselves with similar characters, subject matter, riffs, easter eggs, aesthetics, contrasting situations, & occasionally shared pop cultural references. So this section is to explore the possibility of those things, which may provide some and insight speculation and at the very least food for thought and/or trivia. I also think it's just fun to be able to reminisce!

It Killed Them, It Killed Them All!

So again I found things in this episode having rather familiar ideas seen in other Bad Robot works. The more obvious one would be the [smoke] monster that lives in the chimney that comes to get them all in Bo's story and/or dreamscape. In Lost there is the smoke monster, also known as The Man in Black (a Stephen King reference from The Dark Tower series), who seems to go along with and may be an integral part of the Islands multi-faceted temporal abilities and/or spiritual development, as the Smoke Monster could "astral project" himself in an image of another person, which could also be seen as the astral projection of consciousness and/or memory. In addition Bo mentioned that the royalty, which could be a metaphor for "special" persons given that Sarah often called her princess, were "trapped" inside of the house, -a house that was suppose to be secured previously by Channing, but wasn't exactly. The characters on Lost were often trapped on the Island and the smoke monster would often violently kill people that crossed his path at certain times. The smoke monster was also refereed to as the Island's "security system". What is different then in this small scale version, is Bo's awareness not necessarily to death, but extreme acts of violence, as it's been a very strong theme in that she wants to be a promoter of love and peace and so she's acting as something counter active to fear, violence, and painful deaths.

Note: The works and/or prophecy of Alias' Milo Rambaldi once revealed through The Passenger (Nadia Santos) messages of peace, which contradicted what characters like Arvin Sloane or Irnina Derevko often used Rambaldi's technology for, which one could argue that The Chosen One (Sydney Bristow) was meant and also prophesied as such to counter balance the misuse of technology factor. Curiously one thing that Rambadi wanted was for Sydney to have his child, which Sydney seemingly put a stop to, but one could argue given not forth coming explanations about other things (like Sydney being injected while pregnant on the boat) could pave way to her daughter's specialness, as seen in the finale episode of the series.

Note: The tranquilizer dart and the way Sarah and Carl behaved reminded me of LOST's "Others"

Extrapolating Through Memory

Additionally I was reminded of both Alias and Fringe. I often sight that Alias episode 3x09 "Conscience" may be where the initial Fringe concept may have come from given that the episode is about a wonky food obsessed, drug happy, and experimental fringe scientist named Dr. Brezzel, who tries and help Sydney Bristow retrieve her lost memories. In the episode we see Sydney go through her memories, but she actually begins to extrapolate them by meshing them all together, creating false realities, and going "outside" of them by picking up noises and feelings to try and reconstruct things she could not previously see. It seems at times this is what Bo was doing, as we saw her walk around and listen to others while we saw her lay in her bed, both in the present while in her dream, and while in her dream going back through memories. Sydney's realities, like Bo's, played heavily on fear and by extension some of Olivia Dunham's dreamscapes on Fringe also played on fear like in the episode, "Lysergic Acid Diethalymide". This is also the case with the nanites creating a virtual reality playing with Aaron Pittman's fears in the Revolution episode "Dreamcatcher".

Fringe's pilot has Olivia share conscience in a dreamscape or ethereal plane with her partner John Scott who ended up in a comma. She is able to figure out from his memories who was responsible for the events of the airplane attack and chemical blast at the storage facility, which also leads Olivia to believe that John was in on it. Through out the first season Olivia sees astral projections of John, as he tries to help her and prove his innocence, which is furthered as she makes a few more attempts to try and reach out to him in their shared dreamscape/ethereal plane.

In the third season something similar happens with Olivia, as her memories become buried by being given the alternate Olivia's memories. For some unexplained reason (which I suspect has to do with the idea that several Peters have existed and who's conscientiousness and memories are preserved inside of the wave syn devices. See comic "Peter and the Machine") sees an astral projection of Peter who tries to make her remember whom she is and save her life!

Hyper Emotive

I also thought that Bo wasn't the only character who's fears seemed heightened, and thinking about the Fringe character and coretexiphan subject Nick Lane, did it occur to me that maybe Bo infected everyone with her own emotions? Olivia's abilities were often triggered by heightened states of fear in relation to loss and other cortexiphan subjects. Nick Lane also relied on heightened emotions.

Suffering Is Natures Way of Strengthening

I also like the idea that Bo basically "cocooned" herself, playing to the butterfly motif. The need to have Tate be the one to find/reach her and reveal the truth to her plays well to things pertaining to "timing" and I was reminded of John Locke's argument to Charlie Pace about not helping the moth allowing it to struggle is natures way of strengthening and I think that is what Bo is doing, except that it heavily relies on her relationship with Tate, as opposed to going it alone. Additionally as mentioned above in the review, this hibernating concept compliments the ideas and creates a theme of  'white noise'.

So what did you think of "Bang and Blame"? Do you think Channing has changed? Do you think Tate was right to challenge and/or undermine Winter's authority? Do you think Zoe is going to make it out alive? Do you think Bo will have confront her fears all over again by eventually facing Sean? Let us know in the comments below!

About the Author - Darthlocke4

Laura Becker (Darthlocke 4) is a long time commentator, TV addict, and aspiring writer participating with other fans on SpoilerTV. She writes reviews and analytic type articles. Some of her other interests include philosophy, cultural anthropology, reading, drawing, and working with animals, as she grew up and continues to work on her family's horse farm.