“All About Eddie” is episode fourteen of season two of First Wave.
A female Gua is telling another about how they have been analysing Eddie’s writings in The Paranoid Times. Eddie himself is preparing for a high school reunion; Cade says he can go with him. The Gua have tracked Eddie’s education down to the north-eastern U.S. and that he’s a genius aged 30-35. The male Gua thinks they are looking for a needle in a haystack; Eddie has covered his footprints well. The woman says that there is an event in the past that has affected Eddie and he could be coming up on a midlife crisis. Eddie mentions driving around the country screaming about aliens; Cade tells him to join the club. The Gua thinks Eddie is likely to revisit his past, such as at a class reunion. Field units are being dispatched to the top 25 institutions; they will cover the most promising one. Eddie says he has to go; things happened to him. Cade asks if there’s an ex-girlfriend. Eddie has protection – a two shot derringer. The woman says they have tried various methods to get Cade to reveal the location of the Nostradamus book. Now, they will target his ally. As Eddie is saying no-one wants him.
Eddie arrives back at his school. A terrible personal event closed out his school years that haunts him to this day. A failure so profound he cast off his friends like obsolete software. He can reconnect with the people who were once his friends. Eddie then nearly gets run over by a limo. A man gets out and greets Eddie as Larry Slovinski; Eddie greets him as Herman. Herman now owns his own company. He’s in computer security. Eddie says they used to be hackers; Herman has sold out. Yes; to the tune of a quarter of a billion dollars. He asks how Eddie – Larry – is doing. He publishes on the web. Any money in that? No. Eddie says Marianne is going to be there. Herman knows; Eddie isn’t the only one who liked her.
At the reunion, the two Gua are interviewing one of the attendees, Burt. Eddie sees someone else, Stan, and goes over to see him. Stan says he tried to reach Eddie, but it was like he fell off the face of the Earth. Eddie erased all traces of himself; he was threatened with life in prison. Conditional probation; he couldn’t touch a computer for the rest of his life. Larry had to vanish. Stan wants to talk about that but a woman called Mimi – who Burt was talking about – arrives and Eddie sees Marianne. He is going to approach her but Herman is already there.
The Gua are in a lorry outside, analysing Burt’s responses. Burt could be Crazy Eddie.
Marianne is saying she hoped to see Larry. Herman says he saw him on the way in; he’s not too good. Eddie rings Cade to get him to do something with his computer. Which results in Herman getting a call about hackers breaking into his company’s systems and leaving hastily. Eddie walks over and Marianne tells him he has a lot of explaining to do.
Eddie says he was looking at some classified files when the feds burst in the door. To this day, he doesn’t know how they caught him. That’s not what Marianne meant; she wants to know why he never called her. He couldn’t; it was too intense. Even after 15 years? He came to the reunion because of her. Marianne says they were in love. Getting caught changed Eddie, it made him who he is, a recluse and paranoid. Losing touch was his biggest mistake. She asks if he’s married. Three times, all divorced; it’s tough being married to a paranoid. She’s single, running a computer literacy course for inner city children in Baltimore. They arrive at the computer lab; Marianne was the only female member of their group. Eddies tries picking the door’s lock and fails. Marianne tries and doesn’t. She learned from one of her pupils.
Inside the lab, they are reminiscing about computers and the past when Eddie notices Burt being bundled into the back of the truck. He asks Marianne to go back to the gym and creates a parabolic mic to eavesdrop. Burt is being questioned about Crazy Eddie. The male Gua suggests killing him; the female says no, it would arouse suspicion. They will wipe his memory and kill him later. She asks Burt if there was anyone good with computers at the school. All of them; that’s why they were there. Anyone extra special? Yes. He mentions the group Eddie and Marianne were part of, but no-one knew who they were.
This episode is, as it says, all about Eddie. Eddie has to deal with aliens at his class reunion and issues from his past. Cade seems upset to find out that Eddie isn’t Eddie’s real name. Why didn’t he tell Cade? Eddie doesn’t tell anyone.