“Twice Bless’d” is episode twenty-two of season three of First Wave and the season and series finale.
The finale opens how the series began back in “Subject 117” with a Corrections van arriving at Wilsonville Psychiatric Hospital. One doctor, Oldham, is thanking another, Hutchinson for coming; this is the strangest case he’s ever worked. They need an expert in deprogramming collective delusions. They were captured breaking into a medical storage facility on the South Side, claiming it was the secret headquarters of an alien invasion force.
Dr Oldham introduces Dr Hutchinson to Crazy Eddie, muttering quatrains, Jordan Radcliffe, heir to the Radcliffe fortune, Joshua Bridges, a former US Marine staff sergeant, who apparently almost broke Oldham’s neck on their first interview. Joshua doesn’t think he’s part of the human resistance, he thinks he’s an alien who sided with humanity. The scars on his chest are self-inflicted; Joshua claimed he would immediately heal. Finally, there is the man who started it all. Cade Foster, strangled his wife three years ago then went on the run to fight aliens. The others are convinced he is the saviour of mankind. The others need to be made to see the fantasy to break the collective delusion.
Cade thinks the doctors are human, because if they were Gua, he’d be dead. He’s telling Hutchinson and Oldham that 19 million will die on the first day and that day is today. Oldham says Cade said that yesterday. The precise date doesn’t seem to matter. Oldham says to tell Hutchinson about Mabus, then explains himself.
They move onto Jordan and she’s asked, if her army was destroyed by aliens, she was allowed to live. The executor of the Radcliffe estate is worried about her. Onto Joshua, who went AWOL before he was supposed to ship out with his unit. Joshua is shown a photo of him with his daughters.
Eddie tells Cade he thinks he’s found a fifth omega quatrain, coded in the others. It mentions Xevallah, the alien Cade encountered in “Beneath the Black Sky”.
The doctors move onto Eddie and tell him he hasn’t one shred of physical proof to back up his claims. Then to Jordan and her claim she was possessed by a demon named Mabus, and that she fell in love with a wife murderer. Back to Cade and asking about the Hammer, then Hannah, with photos of unsolved homicides all across the country. Cade went on a murder spree claiming he was stopping aliens. Cade swipes a paperclip from the photos (rather reminiscent of what Sarah Connor did in Terminator 2).
That night, Cade uses the paperclip to break them all out. They need to get the Hammer to stop the invasion. They take down some orderlies then Eddie grabs a hammer. An ordinary one, but he insists it’s the Hammer. Cade throws it through a sheet of glass, and the entire scene shatters.
All four are in combat gear in a Gua facility. Cade says it’s a trap and Joshua says they’ve triggered security measures. Cade smashes an ultrasonic transmitter, like the ones from “Motel California”, that show things that aren’t real. Inside the bunker are husks. Lots of husks. The Second Wave is already here. Joshua didn’t know, though Jordan doubts him. Joshua says they must have created a system to download to millions of husks at once. That would take a massive amount of energy and should be impossible; he doesn’t know what could power it. They split up to search for the power source and to stop the download.
Jordan thinks she can still feel Mabus. It doesn’t help that the hallucination of the psychiatric ward felt just as real as this. That’s the problem when dealing with an illusion that you go in and out of; ending up unsure which part of it is real. And everything comes down to this; stopping the Second Wave means dealing with Mabus once and for all. And Mabus has plans.