“Crazy Eddie” is episode two of season one of First Wave.
A man and a woman are arriving at the man’s apartment. When they go in, he starts up his computer; a message says he has mail. He gets them both a drink. The woman says she doesn’t come to a man’s house on first meeting him usually. She admires his computer and he tells her he writes for the Paranoid Times. In fact, he leaked a big story this month. The woman has lured the man to his couch and is making out with him as the email arrives. It tells the man, Dean Hormeth, that whatever he stole from the cloning lab, they want back. They know where he lives and his life is in danger. He has to hide as they want to kill him. Scramble all his data and get out. An email the man never gets to read, because the woman kills him.
Cade has been on the run in the 22 days since he escaped from Wilsonville in the previous episode, “Subject 117”. He’s borrowed $5K from his Uncle Harry. Unsurprisingly, the CIA, FBI and DoD didn’t respond to him telling them about an alien invasion. Cade didn’t previously believe in little green men, but the aliens are here.
Cade is in Potomac, Maryland, and has a printout of the Paranoid Times. He’s looking for Crazy Eddie, who runs the webpage, exposing conspiracies and secrets. Cade has arrived at Eddie’s RV; he needs a believer. Eddie isn’t in the RV but, when Cade examines his car, he stands up and points a sword at Cade. Cade explains that he has a story Eddie will be interested in. Eddie tells him that he has acute paranoia; sneaking up on him is a bad idea. How did Cade find him? A hacker in Michigan spilled it after a few drinks.
Cade explains that the article on cloning has similarities to his own. He needs Eddie’s help. When a cop car passes, Cade asks if they can go inside. His wife was replaced by a clone and he was framed for her murder. Does Eddie want to hear his story?
Cade explains the experiment on 117 people and that he thinks he’s the only one who survived. Eddie does not believe aliens are behind it. ‘The Truth is Out There’ is a government scheme to hide the truth. Eddie talks about duplicate Lee Harvey Oswalds and the government cloning lab. Cade sees Dean Hormeth’s address and swipes the paper it is written on. Eddie isn’t interested in helping because aliens are not real. Cade needs to stop watching The X-Files and get a life. On the way out, Cade taps the motto of the Paranoid Times – ‘Believe the Unbelievable.’
Cade heads to Hormeth’s place and finds it trashed. The woman who killed Hormeth is currently at Crazy Eddie’s, asking to borrow his phone as her car broke down. Cade finds something hidden inside an aerosol that whoever tossed Hormeth’s place missed. Eddie is now making out with the woman – so much for paranoia – and she mentions Hormeth, and that Eddie should give her what he stole. She is choking Eddie when Cade returns with what he founds. The woman shimmers again and throws Cade aside. Outside the RV, she starts choking him, until he slashes her arm off with Eddie’s sabre. The arm falls on the ground and vaporises and she leaves.
Eddie still doesn’t believe in aliens. Cade shows him what he found; a metal ball in a container, one that shimmered slightly. Eddie thinks the woman’s shimmer was from the cloning process. The woman, Amsa, has returned somewhere and is talking to a man; the ball contains the consciousness of Joshua. The man, Anton, has prepared her a new human husk, given that her current one is missing an arm, and her consciousness will be transferred to it.
Cade tells Eddie they need to get the ball to the authorities. Eddie doesn’t think that will work. He has an idea. When the book of Nostradamus’s prophecies falls out of Cade’s bag, Eddie is interested. He doesn’t recognise the quatrains, though, and he thought he knew them all. Cade explains how Mayhew found it in Normandy. There was a rumour that Nostradamus wrote a book near the end of Nostradamus’s life he wrote a book that finished, possibly taken by the Illuminati, whose symbol is the eye in the pyramid seen on the book’s cover.
The new Amsa wants to head out again; she seems to have a connection to this Joshua. Anton has another idea; he has prepared himself a new husk, that of Dean Hormeth.
The aliens can transfer their consciousnesses to balls and then to other human husks, but it seems their bodies dissolve if killed. Presumably that means the consciousness is lost as well. That seems like a bit of a flaw.