Sense and Antisense

Season:

2

MLM Code:

#MLM-203

Production Code:

5C03

Original Airdate:

1997-10-03

Written by Chip Johannessen
Directed by Thomas J. Wright
Edited by James Coblentz

An African-American man, Patient Zero, attempts to hail a taxi cab on a city street, but is passed by time and again. Only an African-American cabbie, Gerome Knox, bothers to stop. Without warning, Zero has a seizure in the back of the cab, foaming at the mouth and screaming about the "trucks" that are trying to kill him. Knox rushes his passenger to a nearby hospital, where doctors attribute his symptom to illicit drug usage. After receiving a shot, Zero's convulsions subside, but Zero again grows agitated when two mysterious men, Wright and Patterson, enter the hospital lobby. "They want to kill me," he tells Knox, terrified. Fearing for Zero's safety, Knox helps him escape.

Meanwhile, Wright and Patterson quarantine the entire area, as the missing Zero is infected with a highly contagious virus.

Giebelhouse contacts Frank and asks for his help in finding the missing Patient Zero. The men attend a medical briefing at the Center for Infectious Diseases. There, Dr. Pettey explains that Patient Zero is infected with a pathogen normally seen only in the Congo. Eventually, police locate Zero and Knox inside the offices of the Afro-Sentinel newspaper (where Zero was attempting to convince an editor to print his story by referencing racially driven medical tests in the past such as Tuskegee). Before he is taken into custody, Zero intentionally smears the back of Frank's shirt with blood.

Later, a lab test reveals that Zero's blood is not, in fact, contaminated with the rare virus. And even more mysteriously, the government-run Center for Infectious Diseases vanishes without a trace. Frank and Giebelhouse realize they were tricked into locating Zero for an unknown group, but many questions remain unanswered. Frank slowly realizes that the conspirators use transients to conduct their experiments and then involves the Millennium Group.

Within a homeless escarpment, an infected transient armed only with a small stick threatens two policeman. The officers open fire, killing the man. Frank and Watts investigate the incident, though their presence is an unwanted one. Secretly, Frank slips by patrol officers and manages to obtain a blood sample from the deceased. He also makes off with a stretcher tag marked with the letters "D.O.E.," which Frank believes is an abbreviation for the Department of Energy. Frank and Watts conclude that the government is developing a new breed of unconventional weapon that would incite erratic and violent behavior in its victims. The weapon is being developed within the Human Genome Project, an effort to produce a blueprint of the "functional and evolutionary history of the human species."

Watts compares the DNA makeup of Patient Zero with that of the homeless man killed by police. The gene sites of both men match identically... meaning their state of insanity was genetically induced. Frank and Watts speculate that a rogue facility outside of the Department of Energy may have discovered the secret to behavior control, and now is conducting experiments on untraceable subjects under the guise of homeless assistance. Later, Gerome Knox's corpse is discovered at the morgue.

Watts, Frank and a group of officers storm a nondescript office building, that owns and operates soup trucks, in hopes of finding Patient Zero. Inside, they do indeed find Zero -- in the form of Dr. William R. Kramer. Kramer feigns ignorance about his delusional episode, prompting Frank to wonder aloud if he experimented on himself, or was somehow accidentally infected. But he then notices a photograph of Kramer, in uniform, taken in Rowanda in 1994, where thousands of people were senselessly slaughtered.