PROJECT BLUE BOOK – Season 2 Episode 8 – SPOILERS

Quinn and Hynek return to the Project Blue Book offices after the events in Washington at the end of Season One, and someone named John (Daryl Sabara) surprises them with a visit. “Hangar 18,” he says. “That’s what they call it but it’s not really a hangar. It looks like a storage building. The real lab is six floors below. That’s where I work; I’m a mechanical engineer. When the Air Force hired me they told me I was working for something called the Technical Air Intelligence Unit. I was supposed to be analyzing, breaking down, and reverse engineering Soviet technology. but the craft we’ve been working on, it’s not Russian.” Hynek asks if he believes it’s of extraterrestrial origin, and John says, “The technology of these things, it’s beyond our capabilities. Way beyond.” John asks them to meet him off base and gives them evidence of his sincerity: a metallic disk just like the one that was found in the neck of Thomas Mann in “Abduction” (Episode 1.9). John is caught trying to smuggle classified materials off the base and Quinn and Hynek are called on the carpet for trying to meet with him.

Six months later, Quinn and Hynek find themselves at a similar rendezvous outside of D.C. meeting a fellow named Andrew Garner (Brian Markinson), who claims to represent someone prominent in government and hands them classified files concerning UFO incidents at military bases across the country. Garner tells them they might eventually get the chance to testify in front of a Congressional committee. When they return to Ohio they find that Project Blue Book has been shut down pending an investigation into stolen documents. Quinn tells Hynek (who has a briefcase full of classified documents he got from Garner) to go home and let him deal with the investigation.

This episode’s best scene happens after the Generals decide to work with the CIA in an attempt to figure out who Garner is working with. At Garner’s favourite brothel, the Generals watch from behind a 2-way mirror as his drink is spiked with LSD, but too high a dose is used and Garner is incoherent and uninformative afterward, claiming that he has spoken to God. This gets General Harding interested (he has been having a crisis of faith of late) and he persuades the CIA to give him a some acid for his own personal use. Let’s hope we get to see how the General’s trip works out.

Hynek goes home and finds that Mimi has stolen a file (about Hangar 18) from The Generals. The logical thing for them to do would be to destroy the file, but there’s a complication. Susie has popped in for a visit. (She has an ulterior motive. One of Daria’s men is after her, and she has no weapon. She needs that handgun Mimi bought in Season One.) Susie finds the gun and the bald guy working for Daria comes into the house after her. She shoots him, initially non-fatally. Once that happens, they sort of have to call the cops. Problem is, Mimi has a classified file she stole and Alan still has a briefcase full of classified material he’s not supposed to have, and there is a difficult-to-explain wounded Russian on the floor of the living room.

Susie solves everything. She admits to being a Soviet agent, and kills the Russian who was chasing her using Mimi’s gun. Then she proposes telling everyone that she stole the file instead of Mimi. Everybody, including Quinn, realizes that it is the only way out, and all agree to stick to the story. Susie might have done all this out of friendship for Mimi and for Quinn, but remember that her daughter might well be on the way to the US, thanks to the efforts of the late double agent Eddie and his friend in Leningrad. Since Susie will be incarcerated soon, she’ll need help from someone else, and that probably has to be Mimi. (Quinn would attract too much attention.)

Once their offices are reopened, Quinn and Hynek get a call from newly elected Senator Jack Kennedy. (He had been a Congressman during the Truman years.) It is strongly implied that Kennedy is the guy Garner represents. Michael Salla’s book “Kennedy’s Last Stand: Eisenhower, UFOs, MJ-12 & JFK’s Assassination” alleges that Kennedy (and some other US government officials) were told about UFOs and their extraterrestrial nature by James Forrestal (who was Secretary of the Navy at the time), and that was what got Forrestal fired two years later. (It is more likely that Forrestal’s vocal opposition to the creation of the state of Israel, and his generally hawkish political stance were responsible for that.)

NOTES

Brian Markinson (Andrew Garner) is Chuck “Buke” Bukansky, an experienced but damaged police detective, in TRIBAL, an eight-episode series starring Jessica Matten as Interim Tribal Chief Samantha Woodburn. Samantha is forced to work with the Metro Police after the Feds take control of the Tribal Police Force. (Bukansky is her new partner.) The show bases its First Nation crime stories on real world cases, including the pipeline controversy, healing lodge justice, and missing Indigenous Peoples. Matten told Bill Graveland of The Canadian Press: “Eerily enough, with the pipeline controversy happening now, how weird that we filmed the show last summer and now this is happening, which proves just how relevant these issues still really are.” TRIBAL airs Thursdays at 9pm on APTN. (Previous episodes are available on the APTN Lumi streaming service.)

Caspar Phillipson (Senator Kennedy) will be President Kennedy in BLONDE, a film (based on the novel of the same name by Joyce Carol Oates) that follows Norma Jeane Mortenson (Ana de Armas) as she transforms herself into film star Marilyn Monroe. After a series of failed relationships and heartbreaking tragedies, Norma Jeane spirals into drug addiction and mental instability. Jeff Sneider wrote in Collider that BLONDE will be a little more accessible than what writer/director Andrew Dominik has done before, even though the film has very little dialogue in it. He quotes Dominik as being “really excited about doing a movie that’s an avalanche of images and events.” BLONDE was filmed in Los Angeles, and should be on Netflix later this year.







