The Lottery: Episode Four – “Genie”

WARNING: This article contains spoilers.

Do you realize that someone dies every episode? Is that the real lottery? Who’s going to die this week? I’m not complaining. I love a good murder—this is Lifetime after all—just making an observation.

Last episode, Vanessa was a bottle of broken glass and rain. Just a mess walking around pretending to be sane. This episode the facade has hardened. It’s safe to say that Lifetime can give us strong, independent female characters to lead this show. I’m beginning to like Nessa more and more and even Alison is growing on me. We discover that Vanessa’s tough exterior comes from an abusive childhood, where she and her brother bounced around foster homes. The magnitude of her success is heightened. While Vanessa is dying emotionally and mentally from the loss of Nathan, our girl is, on the outside, all business, and now I can understand why she’s the way she is. She gave herself almost no time to mourn, and quickly began to deal with the aftermath of the murders, trying to answer some of the major questions circling around the White House. Why weren’t the delegates protected? Who gave up their location? How did highly secured information get leaked when only seven people held onto it? There’s a rat in the White House.

All fingers point to Nathan’s bestie, Connor, who has been self-destructing ever since the news of Nathan’s death. He refuses a polygraph, which makes everyone more suspicious, and then he gets drunk. Someone tell this man that innocent people don’t act this way! Grief-stricken people do, but accusers never take that into consideration, especially when one of them is trying to frame you. He made it entirely too easy for Darius to swoop in and pin the crime on him. It doesn’t help either that Connor goes a little nuts and threatens to kill himself. He ends up getting shot by an officer as he tries to tell Vanessa—well, for now we won’t know what he was going to say. Vanessa believes he’s the one responsible for Nathan’s demise.

But she’s not completely wrapped around Darius’ finger. They knocked heads several times. Darius is pulling to get the Department of Humanity  in control of the Lottery. Why not take that Nessa too? Everyone is already saying it sucks and it’s become clearer that the decision to host a lottery was a bad idea. At first, she was indifferent, but after visiting Elvis in a DoH facility, she knows she can’t let Darius get control of her project.

President Westwood has a decision to make and Vanessa and Darius argue each other down to sway his opinion. Vanessa entices Westwood with another term in office if he makes the Lottery an actual lottery and lets the American people choose the 200 surrogate mothers. She says that all demographics will get behind him and, in turn, get them to the polls to show their support.

If only things were going that well for Kyle.

They’ve quarantined him. I mean, it’s not like he has the flu. This dude has the freaking Bubonic plague. After some testing, however, Alison and her sidekick, James, discover that there are no active parts of the Plague virus.

The first thing Kyle wants to do when he’s set free is see Elvis. In fact, that’s his only purpose this entire episode. He has two major meetings, technically three if we want to count Vanessa. One is with a lawyer, paid by the DoH, who basically tells him that he is going to lose custody of his child. The other is Trish, his ex-drug addict baby mama. She’s sober and has been waiting to get back into contact with Elvis. Kyle does the unthinkable, an act purely out of desperation, and asks Trish to fight to get custody of Elvis instead of him. That’s a huge risk to take, but what does that say about those creepy DoH people if an ex-crackhead is the best option. I mean, what if Trish decides to take Elvis away from Kyle? She’d be within her rights to do so.

The meeting Kyle has with Vanessa is obviously through his connection with Alison. She talks to Vanessa again about using her pull in the White House to help Kyle at least get a meeting with Elvis. They travel to a DoH facility, where Kyle is completely rejected access to see Elvis but Vanessa is let through. The Department of Inhumanity is an autonomous entity within the government, so even the Chief of Staff has very little power when it comes to them.

Vanessa mostly lies about Elvis’ conditions and rightfully so. Kyle is a bit of a loose cannon when it comes to Elvis, as any parent would be. She tells him everything is fine, but that he should hurry up and get a lawyer to fight for custody. What she doesn’t tell him is that DoH is running tests on Elvis to see if there are ties to cure infertility. A DoH doctor tells her that they’re planning to not only bring more children there to be tested, but also induce early puberty and house the Lottery surrogate mothers there. Woah. Wait. Woah. Can you say concentration camp? Where are the human rights in this situation? Experimentation on children. Woah. Calm your breaks. Where’s Superman when you need him? It becomes clear to Nessa that DoH is nothing but low down and she has to use the weight of her job to play against Darius deftly.

You know, this basically tells me that it was already planned to take Elvis away, or at least that, now that they have him, they plan on keeping him. I feel like it doesn’t matter how hard Kyle fights for custody because the DoH has orchestrated this plan to use him as a guinea pig regardless. Sucks. How are we going to get out of this?!

Eight years ago, during a vaccination, Kyle was injected with the Bubonic virus, but the cell carriers were hollowed to make them simply efficient vehicles of transportation. This might have kept Kyle fertile during the crisis. After some detective work breaking and entering a dead woman’s house, Alison discovers that Brooke, the woman whose eggs were fertilized, was injected with the same hollowed out version of the Bubonic virus.

It’s like Sylar sawed my brain open.

Questions are literally just falling right out of my skull. So, this has to mean that someone either anticipated the infertility crisis or freaking caused it. Under the close, watchful eyes and protection of the strangely attractive, older Irishman who has been assigned as her bodyguard from the secret service, Alison locates Dr. Mark Kesler Sr., an out of practice OB/GYN, researching fertility. He’s the man behind the “infertility vaccinations,” but el numero uno problemo is that the man died eight years ago, a week after injecting Kyle, Brooke, and who knows how many others with the Plague virus. Which brings on another question: couldn’t Alison and James pull up a list of everyone vaccinated that day to see if those were the donors whose eggs were fertilized? Right? Are you—are we really about to get these kinds of answers this early in the season?! I’m not used to these kind of privileges. I’ve been abused for so long by television. It’s not often that there’s a good show willing to give me some answers! (You guys should go talk to the producers of The Leftovers over at HBO, because they’re merciless).

Anyway, James connects Daddy Kesler with a zoologist named Karl Beaman. What in this galaxy is an OB/GYN hanging out with a zoologist for?

For the first time in a long time, I find myself rooting for multiple good guys. I want Alison and James to discover a cure, but more importantly, I want them to find out who’s behind this and why. I want Nathan to still be alive, and Nessa to become president. Haha, kidding. But I do want her to outsmart Darius and kick him out of a position of power. It’d also be good if she could dismember the DoH completely. Last but not least, I want Elvis to come home!

Let’s end this one with a quote from Vanessa. She says this to Fake Anderson Cooper:

“Despite the enormous challenges ahead of us, we can’t forsake our own humanity in the name of preserving it.”

If you enjoyed Keyoka’s review, you can find the rest of her work right HERE on Sci-Fi Bloggers. You can also follow her on Twitter @keyokakinzy.

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