'Zero Hour' 'Strike' (Pilot) Recap
by Shannon Keirnan
There is also a hospital setting where it would seem experiments have been performed on humans… a baby opens his eyes, which are strangely white.
A Nazi-uniformed man warns them that the secret it out and Nazis are coming, and they remove the hidden secret from a deep pool and hustle it out on a truck.
Nazis come in, however, and begin to kill the men.
“It is up to God now.”
Laila and Hank Galliston walk down the boardwalk, where they kiss and cuddle, and shop at the tables. Hank has to go because he has a “magazine to put out,” and they tell each other they love one another, and he goes.
She sees a man with a table full of clocks. One in particular catches her eye, and she goes up to it.
Hank goes to his office to meet with his copy editors, Arron and Rachel, who want to write about edgier things like werewolf people and the skunk apes in Arkansas.
Hank gets a call from Laila. Someone’s in the shop trying to get in. She tells him to call the police. A man breaks through the window and turns the lock. Hank hears a scream.
Hank gets to her shop as the police start arriving. It is torn to shreds, and she is missing.
The police come to him to tell him they’re doing everything they can, but he argues with him. Leila repairs old time pieces, and nothing is missing… except his wife.
He goes home, to find his two young workers waiting. Rachel hugs him.
They try to work out what happens, wondering about checking subway surveillance. Hank tells them they need to not ask how, but why. Hank looks up and sees the new clock box, half wrapped, on the counter.
The doorbell rings and Hank lets the detectives in. He asks if they police have any new leads and she says no… but they do. They’ve been working on this case for a long time.
The woman shows them surveillance footage from the shop. Hank sees the kidnapper drag his wife from the shop and throw her into a car. She believes it’s White Vincent, a mercenary. The female detective pressures him about Leila, but he’s furious and shocked that Leila is being treated as if she has done something. He tells her to contact the police for his full statement. She leaves her card and they go.
Hank pulls out the clock box to examine it. He takes it apart looking for anything abnormal. He sees quartz that isn’t quite right… it’s a diamond. Hank examines it, a potential motive, but it’s small, and flawed. He shines his light on it, and it projects a map on the wall.
“If I’m not mistaken, that right there is a treasure map.”
Arron insists so, but Hank tells him there’s no treasure. They can’t read it however… they go to “the priest” at the New York Institute.
He looks at the projection on their laptop. He tells them the language is a dead strain of demonic known only be read by priestly elite, but that it died in the second century. However it’s a map of the Western hemisphere, which no one knew about in the second century.
The priest notes the symbol of the Rosecruciates, who are a secret society of Christian mystics. The spot on the map he says is New Bartholomew.
Hank gets a call. A man asks about the clock. He says that he knows he isn’t really Hank Galliston, he is a shadow thrown forward through time, but if he knew the truth he’d lose his mind as he has. The man loads a gun and threatens the terrified Laila, panicking Hank. He demands that Hank bring him the clock.
The priest advises caution—and he doesn’t think Vincent will let her go. He suggest they turn in the clock, and keep the diamond.
He goes back to the detective woman, Beck Riley, and lies that he is bringing Vincent cash. She wants to listen in on his phone call so her team can catch White as Hank goes to deliver the cash.
Hank gives the diamond to the priest to keep an eye on.
Hank goes to the rendezvous point, as the detectives listen in. White makes Hank go to multiple points as he talks to him, sending him all over. Hank bends to tie his shoe, and realizes that White can’t actually see him. The feds close in, but they’ve been misdirected.
Hank runs to find the priest, who is dying from a slit throat. The diamond is gone.
The priest is loaded into an ambulance, but Hank tells Arron and Rachel it doesn’t look good. Beck wants to know what really happened.
Rachel, Arron and Hank load into the car. Rachel tells him not to believe that Laila is going to be killed. They tell him to have faith. Rachel thinks she may have an idea.
They go home, and Rachel throws out her suggestion of where they may find Laila—New Bartholomew, which is apparently somewhere in Antarctic.
He agrees. He goes to get a plane ticket, and he tells them they’re in charge of investigating the clock. Rachel books his flight.
Beck and another FBI agent come up to him at the airport. They tell each other they don’t trust one another. Beck tells him her husband was on a flight that Vincent took down. She wants to go with him—and she has a gun, so she’s a resource.
Arron and Rachel examine the clock. Arron finds the name of the clockmaker, in Bavaria. Arron wants to go talk with him, but Rachel reminds him Hank told them to stay put.
They get a taxi and head to the airport.
In his hotel, Vincent carves a circle with a line on it in the mirror. The clock is damaged on the floor. Vincent takes out one contact, revealing his iris is almost white.
Hank gets to Canada to pick up a flight to the circle. He meets a pilot, who says a man came by the previous day asking to go to the same place. However because of the weather he couldn’t fly him out—but he thinks the man would find another way, he was so desperate.
Rachel and Arron get to Bavaria, and contact Norbert the clockmaker. They show him a picture of the clock and he crosses himself.
Beck and Hank fly out. They land at their coordinates. Hank sees a possibly shelter, and they go toward it.
Norbert is a Rosecruciate. He asks if blood has been spilled and they say yes. He tells them that they are looking for the clocks again. They ask about New Bartholomew.
“New Bartholomew isn’t a place, you fool.”
Hank wipes snow off the shelter, which has swastikas on it. He and Beck go inside.
Norbert tells Arron and Rachel there were twelve apostles, but not the originals. In 1938, 12 men we appointed. They were given a secret that not even the Pope knew… one that could bring about the end of the world. They scattered to keep the secret away from the Nazis. One clock for each apostle. Norbert made the clock for New Bartholomew.
In the shelter, Hank finds dead men, executed, frozen and unchanged. They hold Rosecruciate crosses.
Norbert tells them that they found a way to create eternal life. Flash to the baby with the strange eyes.
Hank, still running his light over the frozen men, finds one who looks exactly like himself. Cut to the man in the Nazi uniform, New Bartholomew, who looks up. It is Hank.
Real Hank runs outside to gasp, confused and alarmed.
“If those clocks have resurfaced, and blood has been spilled, then a storm is coming. It will pit science against religion, country against country… and that storm is called Zero Hour.”
Vincent drives across the tundra, coming nearer to the shelter where Beck and Hank wait.