'Zero Hour' Season 1, Episode 2: 'Pendulum' Recap

Beck and Hank race into an abandoned building. Hank sees his wife draped over a table and runs to her. She tells him he has to stop, he is coming back. She tells him he doesn’t understand—on the window, loci begin to thud against the glass. The swarm gets worse.

“He’s coming back,” Laila whispers.

Hank wakes from his dream. He is on an airplane, descending into NYC. He looks beside him and sees Beck, looking nervous. He tells her once they find his wife, she can do whatever she wants with Vincent.

They go over their information… clocks, with maps. Leading to? Hank just wants to know where he is keeping her. Beck says the better question is why—Vincent has never kept a hostage alive.

Vincent sets a clock in front of Laila and tells her to fix it. He tells her the pieces are all loose. They have numbers and letters on them. He needs her to put it together and make it work. He gives her a new dress to wear since she has taken on “a colorful odor.” He tells her when they are out, they must appear as a happy couple.

She asks if he will return her to her husband if she cooperates. He tells her he finds Hank interesting, but doesn’t truly answer.

Hank speaks to the priest about his time in India. He asks him to look into the Rosicruciate priest who tried to kill him.

Hank, the priest, Rachel, and Arron arrive at work. The door is cracked. When they get inside, a woman points a gun at them. Beck steps in and stops her. She tells Hank that to have people with guns watching his back might be a good idea.

The female agent shows them that they have facial recognition set up globally—if they appear outside, the cameras will alert them.

Laila asks why Vincent is interested in Hank. He tells her he saw someone who looks just like her husband, and that he had written an article on doppelgangers. Laila tells him Hank doesn’t believe in things he can’t see—and the clock is fixed.

P-R-6-4-2.

He tells Laila it means they know where they’re headed next.

Hank hugs his mother and father. He thanks them for coming, and asks them if they had any family in Germany. As he talks, he is called to the computer, which has picked up Laila’s face in a Paris hotel. He pauses the tape, and tells them to find their room and look under everything.

Four years earlier, Laila gives Hank a pep talk before a conference. She touches her tongue—the same gesture on the tape. It was a reminder to Hank to take out his gum and stick it under the desk.

The French police investigate the room. They find the code Laila has left for them. Hank’s father tells them it’s the old way of writing a phone number. Princeton, NJ. As Hank prepares to leave, the priest tells him he will speak to some people about the Rosicruciates.

Hank goes to find the phone records from 1938. At the public library in Princeton, Vincent leads Laila around the same place, finding the records. Vincent rips out the page. Laila pulls out a book from an opposite shelf so it is more obvious.

Hank’s parents speak to the priest about what is going on, but he tells them not to take things personally.

“What do we tell them?” his mother asks when the priest leaves.

“Nothing, yet,” his father replies, looking over old photos.

In front of a television store, a creepy kid watches the news about forest fires.

At the library, Beck realizes Vincent has the page. He sees the book pulled out. Flashback to Laila and Hank playing a library game, where they pull out random books to make the titles into something funny. He kisses her. He tells her he can’t help but wait for the other shoe to drop. She pulls off her shoe and makes him as well, and they drop them, showing him nothing happened—they are still there together.

“IAS” are the encyclopedias she has arranged. “Institute for Advanced Studies.”

Vincent gets to the office where the phone number has led them. On the campus, police show passer-by photos of Laila and Vincent. Beck gets a call where they were sighted, and they run off. However, there is only one man in the office. He tells them he saw them about ten minutes ago, looking for the guy who used to work there—Albert Einstein.

They hit the computer. Good thing Rachel finds where they were planning to display Einstein’s possessions. Hank tells her to find where they were stored.

The priest plays a card game with other priests and asks them about any actively operating Rosicruciates. They think that anyone the Rosicruciates are after may not be as “good” as his thinks.

At the museum, Beck and Hank find guards shot, and Einstein’s belongings missing. Vincent apologizes to the creepy child outside. He tells him he has the first three clocks. H tells him to tell her it is just a matter of time until she has the object she seeks. The child writes in strange script on a notepad.

Arron talks to the female cop and they talk about Einstein, both Einstein geeks. He shows her the picture of his blackboard, in the corner where something has been erased. There was a theory that he believed the world wasn’t ready and erased the information before he died. He gets a call, and tells Rachel to stop researching, Vincent already found it.

She tells him he didn’t. He tells her the clock that Vincent took was in Einstein’s family for generations, it couldn’t have been the one made for him. Einstein hid the clock in the only place he knew it would not fall into the wrong hands—his mind.

Beck sets up an electromagnetic spectrometer to take a picture of the blackboard. It should show them what was erased.

Laila works on the clock. Vincent accuses her of stalling. He touches her hair. He asks if she put Hank back together again.

The erased writing from the board appears. It is more math. The female agent tells them she thinks it’s not a math problem—it’s a solution. Maybe it will decode all the other writing, Rachel points out.

Outside, Hank finds clues Laila has left for him on the ground, bread-crumb style. The agent works on the code as the computer goes through options.

“Battlefield Park, Mercer Oak.” Mercer Oak is a tree between Einstein’s house and office. Hank calls Beck to tell her about the trail. It leads him to the abandoned building from his dream. He races in. He finds Vincent, who rattles the tacks he has been leaving to bring Hank to him. He calls Hank ‘brother.’

Hank tells them they found the next clock. Vincent says he wants to get to know Hank better. How he and Laila met. Hank laughs and Vincent punches him. Hank tells him they met four years ago at the unveiling of the corpus clock—with the locus on top that eats time, Vincent recalls.

Beck enters the building.

Hank tells Vincent to stop calling him brother. Vincent says he comes to offer him deliverance. He says “I want to see them.”

“The flaw.” He rips at Hank’s eyelids, examining his eyes, yelling. Hank shoves him off, and Vincent’s contact comes out, revealing his white eye. Beck shoots, distrupting them. She pursues Vincent. He hides behind a grated door and bars it. She tries to shoot him but her gun is out of bullets. She tells him about the 270 people he killed on the plane crash, and her husband Theo Riley, but he wouldn’t know that. He was just collateral damage.

“Theo Riley? Seat 17A. Maybe he wasn’t just collateral damage. Maybe everyone else was.”

Vincent walks off, leaving Beck shocked.

At Mercer Oak, police move aside the marker. Underneath there is a hole, and Hank finds the clock in a box.

Arron and Rachel examine the clock. They find a piece of paper inside it—is it Einstein’s final thoughts, written on his death bed when he asked for a pen and paper? It is in code, of course.

At church, Hank’s parents hold hands.

The priest goes to a bar, meeting one of the other priests from his game. He tells him the sect is called “The Shepherds.” Their mission is to protect the holiest of relics. Those touched by God himself. They are protecting them from “The Great Pyrates.”

The creepy kid goes to a woman, and gives her the paper he has written on. In a glass tank, loci flit about.

The computer cracks Einstein’s code.

“I have always regretted the role I played in the development of the atomic bomb. However I have a chance to atone for that now. To stop something even more destructive. The line has been crossed. The line that once separated man from his creator. We have found a way to destroy not only man, but God.”