'Cult' Season 1, Episode 2: 'In the Blood' Recap

‘Cult’, season 1, episode 2, ‘In the Blood’

On the show within the show:

Detective Kelly Collins and her partner Paz find a body buried head-first in the ground, which surprises Paz, as he’s never seen anything like it before. Kelly, on the other hand…

Flashback to 7 years ago, Kelly is suspended by her feet, head-first in a hole, rain dripping around her. Billy Grimm pulls her out of the hole, and they embrace happily. He welcomes her to his family, and to the blood of the cult.

Back to now, Paz tells Kelly he knows that luck. She reveals that Billy must be behind it, and it’s a message to her. She finds a coin on the ground near the victim. Must have some meaning.

Outside the show:

Jeff pauses the episode of “Cult” he was watching, and flips through his brother’s notebook, trying to match the coin. He doesn’t see it, so he checks his brother’s desk before finally finding the exact same coin.

Skye wakes up, and notices Jeff has been watching the show. He tells her he’s trying to match the stuff in the book to the stuff on the show in hopes of finding where his brother is. Skye says that no one knows if there are actually messages in the show or not, though some fans believe there are. Including his brother.

Skye is surprised that there was nothing in the news about Merriam’s suicide the night before, and they both feel that Miriam’s husband was acting weird.

Jeff goes back to fan_dom_ain and tries to ask about his brother. The room that was dedicated to “Cult” fans has been locked up. Apparently they caught another guy in there with a concealed weapon. Jeff asks the bartender if he knows his brother, and he says no. Kirstie, a familiar face waitress overhears him asking, and she says she’s leaving.

Jeff’s phone rings with a new message. One from Billy Grimm, welcoming him to the family.

A purple-haired woman startles Jeff. E.J., a coworker of his, has met him like he asked. She is tech-smart, and he asks her to determine what the “Cult” disk had installed on his computer, and if she can trace the call from his brother the night before. She says she’ll try. And as she’s leaving, she says that one of the coworkers got information about the suicide the night before, and says Merriam’s last name with Livingston.

In the “Cult” studio offices, one of Skye’s coworkers, Peter, says that the new studio executive Mark Segal was supposed to have a meeting with series creator Steven Rae, but he never showed up. (Probably because he was kidnapped last episode). Peter is concerned that Skye is obsessing about what the fans are doing, and mentions how careful they have to be with spoilers getting out.

In some distant storage unit, we see Mark tied to a chair with his lips sewn shut. He’s being taunted by Kirstie the waitress from fan_dom_ain. She’s on the phone with someone, saying she’ll do whatever he asks. She tells another man in the room to do a good job on him, and she leaves.

Skye and Jeff meet up and decide to talk to Merriam’s husband. He shows Skye the message he got from Billy Grimm, but Skye dismisses it as something sent out by the show’s website when people sign up.

Mr. Livingston isn’t too happy to see them. He says he’s never heard of “Cult” or of Nate, Jeff’s brother. Jeff asks why Merriam was so scared, and Mr. Livingston pulls a shotgun on them, and tells them to leave.

Skye and Jeff head to the police department to concerns about Merriam’s husband to Detective Sakelik, the woman behind Jeff’s brother’s case. She tells them to back off, since they’re harassing a man who just lost his wife. They can file a complaint inside regarding the shotgun.

On the show within the show:

Billy Grimm shows up at the crime scene and confronts Detective Kelly. He says he heard about the man. Kelly asks him how the man betrayed him, since Billy used that kind of burial as punishment. Billy says he doesn’t kill, and Kelly says she knows, he uses his surrogates to do it for him. He says that Kelly’s employers would be quite interested in knowing all the stuff that she’s done for him. He tells her they’re both very alike, and that he hopes she solves the case.

Outside the show:

Skye checked out Merriam’s life via facebook, and says how normal she and her husband are. She also finds that Merriam’s funeral is set for that afternoon, and Jeff plans to crash the funeral to get some more information.

E.J. shows up, not too pleased to see Syke, another female, sitting with Jeff. E.J. tosses Jeff’s laptop at him, saying that whatever was on the disk completely destroyed his computer, and then it wiped the disk clean, replacing the data with a bunch of jibberish. She says they are micro-images, and managed to enlarge one, which seems to be three arms, linked in the center, holding swords.

Jeff asks Skye, as they approach Merriam’s funeral, if Steven Rae has used that symbol on the show, but she doesn’t recognize it. She says no one’s really met him, and he just sends in the scripts to the production office at all hours of the day.

They notice that Merriam’s husband is the only one at the funeral, aside from the priest. They watch from a distance and wonder where everyone is. Her husband gets a call and then walks away from the funeral. He grabs something from his car, and Jeff and Skye follow him.

They see the husband meet up with Detective Sakelik, with her telling him the suicide is messing with their plans. She gives him a chaste kiss, and takes the items from his hands. They part ways.

Jeff isn’t too happy that Detective Sakelik has such an obvious conflict of interest. Skye looks her up and notices she has am exemplary police record. Then she notices a notebook, which has Steven Rae’s name written in it.

Skye tells Jeff that he’ll never get to Steven. He becomes suspicious, wondering why she’s being so helpful. She tells him she’s there because she thinks Jeff can help her. She says that her father disappeared 10 years ago, and two months ago, his attorney died, so she got sent all of his work notes. The last story was the beginning of an investigation into who Steven Rae was, and there one one word that showed up the most in his notes: “Cult”. And that was 10 years before Steven created the show. She says she took the job to get as close as possible to Steven Rae. And she only tells Jeff this because she trusts him.

Jeff gets a call from E.J., saying she has an approximate location on where his brother called from the night before. She uploads a map for him, which is an area of 4 city blocks, near the studio. Skye recognizes one of the locations, because “Cult” filmed there before. Skye looks through Nate’s stuff and find the gold coin, apparently a token (the same one from the show within the show), and says that Nate must have been there before.

They go to Kidplay Fun Palace, and ask to see the surveillance footage. At 11:45, when Nate called, they see him in the footage calling Jeff. Then they see Merriam’s husband come in and yell at him. Before they see what happens to him, the surveillance footage cuts out.

At a table reading for the show within the show, the actors read the script. Roger Reeves, the man who plays Billy Grimm, complains about the script, and Marti Gerritsen, who plays Kelly Collins, urges him to just get through it. Roger tells Gale, who is filling in for Mark Segal, that he has ideas from the character of Billy, and that Mark was supposed to tell Steven Rae to be more flexible in his writing. Gale tells Roger that Mark will address it once he gets back, but until there, it’s still Steven Rae’s show. Roger backs down and says he will work with what he is given.

Jeff and Skye visit the husband again, and notice he’s gone. Jeff breaks in. Inside they notice the wallpaper is missing, and deduct that that is what be brought to Detective Sakelik. Skye sees the same symbol as the one E.J. found. They hear banging come from the kitchen.

In the kitchen, they find Mr. Livingston taped up in a cupboard. He says they couldn’t trust him. He regrets letting his wife watch the show. They see someone run past the house, and start to smell gas. They try to get him to go with them, but he says the famous line “Well, hey. These things just snap right off,” which seems to be linked to them killing themselves. Something is thrown through the window, and Jeff and Skye run before the house explodes. They see the signature car from the show drive off.

On the show within the show:

Billy Grimm entertains some children in the Kidplay Fun Palace, with some gold tokens. A man sits next to him, and Billy passes him a small package. He opens it, and it’s a severed finger wearing a large ring. He tells the man to make sure Detective Kelly gets it, as it will allow her to solve her case without getting Billy’s followers involved. He says it’s a gift on the anniversary of her initiation.

Outside the show:

Skye calls Jeff and says that the death has been covered up, and ruled an accidental propane link. They realize they can’t even go to the police, since they are involved. He mentions that the man mentioned the “true believers”, and Skye says they aren’t from “Cult”. He tells her to be careful on her way home.

Skye notices the phone ringing and hears an announcement that it’s Steven Rae. She goes to pick it up, but her coworker Peter appears just in time to stop her. He notices the soot on her face, and she says it’s nothing. Peter also notices that she was going to intercept the call from Steven Rae.

Outside of a gym, our favorite waitress Kirstie runs into Roger, the actor who plays Billy Grimm. She says she’s his biggest fan. Pan out to show the mysterious square symbol.