The search for Nate continues, though I’ve got to say, I don’t feel like a whole lot of substantial progress has been made.
But hey, they managed to find someone else who fell into the Cult obsession and went missing. Jeff contacts a woman named Ama, whose husband Rami is missing, and they meet, but she doesn’t come alone. Terrence Ross, a finder and “deprogrammer” of people lost to cults, accompanies her to ensure her safety.
Ama shows Jeff and Skye Rami’s notebook, which bears a striking resemblance to the notebook Nate left behind. Inside, they find a disc, like the one that grabbed all of Jeff’s information off of his laptop. But Ama had put the disc into a work computer, so there was no personal information to steal, and it just flashed images from the show. Who you gonna call when you have a bit of technology to analyze? E.J., of course.
E.J. is able to pull the IP address of the computer the disc was burned on, and that computer’s location – a hacker hostel. Jeff, Skye, and Terrence pay a visit and spot a hacker with a Cult tattoo. Sensing trouble, the hackers all scatter, resulting in a tussle that ends in the hacker, Sean, being shot by Terrence with rock salt. The Winchesters would be so proud, but Jeff and Skye weren’t amused. To be fair, Detective Sakelik did warn them that Terrence is constantly on the radar of the police. But of course, we know not to trust Sakelik’s motives.
Terrence injects Sean with drugs in order to get him to talk. While he does not explicitly name Nate or Rami, Skye manages to sift through his drug induced babble and figure out that the “ranch” he mentions is Guthrie Ranch, the location known on the show as Billy’s compound. Skye, Jeff, and Terrence go to the ranch that night and find a hatch that leads down to old sewage tunnels. There, they find Rami in a tunnel covered in writing that can only be read with ultraviolet light. But before they have time to make sense of it, they hear people approaching and have to flee the scene.
Rami had stated that he was trying to get to the “next level,” which Jeff and Skye interpret as a challenge set by True Believers, for those who want to become True Believers. This gives Jeff hope that, while they still have no idea where Nate is, he might still be alive if he’s still in the game.
As for the bits of Cult that were shown in this episode of Cult, they reveal a little more about the character of Billy Grimm – namely that he had a son named Michael who died. He discusses this Dr. Hayden Patrick, who he has had his people kidnap. Patrick is Billy’s unauthorized biographer, and a deprogrammer of people who have been in cults. He was the one who broke the spell of Billy’s family for Kelly. Though Billy stresses the importance of family, he also uses family as a weapon, in the sense that he threatens Patrick into silence by threatening Patrick’s family. And as if that isn’t bad enough, Patrick’s hand has been nailed to the table for the duration of his conversation with Billy.
While I’m mildly interested in what else there is to know about Billy, we’re at episode four and things are feeling really slow. I need to know more about any character at this point, even if it makes me trust them less. In fact, that’s what I’m hoping for. Hopefully there are some big surprises in store for us in the upcoming episodes. I will give credit to Terrence for delivering my favorite line of the episode. Why, despite his work bringing people back from cults, do the events surrounding this TV show freak him out?
“There’s a TV in every home.”
(If you found any hidden messages in this week’s episode, don’t hesitate to tell us in the comments below!)
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