PROJECT BLUE BOOK – Season 2 Episode 10 – SPOILERS

NATO’s fleet in the North Atlantic is plagued with UFO sightings which the fleet commander attributes to the Russians, causing him to set a course dangerously close to Soviet waters. Hynek and Quinn must prove the extraterrestrial (or at least non-Soviet) nature of these craft to prevent World War III. The first question that comes to mind is: What are these ETs thinking? Having observed human military activities throughout World War II, they must be aware of how people will respond to their sudden and uncommunicative appearance in such a situation. Are they trying to start a war?

A ‘ghost ship’ mysteriously appears and disappears during the sightings. Hynek and Quinn board the apparently deserted fishing trawler and discover its captain, who remained with the boat after his crew abandoned ship. Captain Turi was fishing near Shanghai when he was somehow transported to the North Atlantic. He tells a tale of a submerged triangular craft which he believes came from cities located under the sea. “Fishermen,” he tells Hynek, “they all told the stories of the cities under the sea where the triangle came from. Been here for thousands of years.”

The Admiral commanding the fleet (Colm Feore) refuses to believe that aliens are responsible for the underwater sightings. He continues to blame the Russians and is headed for a confrontation when Quinn takes the ship’s submersible to investigate and puts himself between the navy and the aliens. The Admiral attacks what he thinks are Russian submarines anyway. Then Quinn and the sub and all the alien ships and devices vanish from the sonar screen, and the depth charges are somehow neutralized. When he sees this, the Admiral realizes that the Russians cannot be responsible, and a possible war is averted.

Back in Ohio, Susie manages to communicate to Mimi that she left something in Joel’s room. That something turns out to be a letter to her daughter, and Mimi follows instructions and delivers the letter to an apartment somewhere in Columbus. (Enough of the address is visible on the envelope Mimi finds to establish that.) We learn that Susie’s real name is Lena (not Mishka), and (according to the show’s end credits) her daughter’s name is Samara (which is also the name of a Russian region just east of Moscow). Samara is living with Olga (Debra Sears), who has at least two cats.

Hynek figures out that the alien glyph that he discovered at the abandoned amusement park in Episode 1.1 corresponds to the locations of a series of UFO incidents. (He draws it on a world map by connecting UFO reports similar to what Captain Tuli described.) Interestingly, the figure he draws on the map does not reach Shanghai, so there must be more to it. He goes to Tierra del Fuego in search of The Fixer (Ian Tracey), whom he believes is the only one who might be able to help him locate Quinn. The last we see of Hynek, he is on a boat headed for Antarctia. (Hynek for some reason does not pronounce the ‘c’ when he says the name of that continent.)

At the end of the second season, Quinn is missing and presumed dead by everyone except Hynek who has gone on an antarctic quest to find him. Susie and Daria have both very likely been imprisoned for espionage. Project Blue Book has been shut down. And Mimi, having been ostracized by the local UFO group, is left alone at home. One wonders what Mimi will get up to in Season Three (should there be one) with all that time on her hands.

Did Captain Quinn find extraterrestrials under the sea, or the lost continent of Atlantis, or both?

Operation Mainbrace, NATO’s first major military exercise in the North Atlantic, began on 13 September 1952, and on the first day of the operation, Lieutenant Commander Schmidt Jensen and several members of the crew of the Danish destroyer Willemoes saw an unidentified triangular object moving southeast at high speed. It gave off a bluish glow, and its speed was estimated at over 1400 kph. UFO sightings were widespread in West Germany, Denmark, and southern Sweden during the twelve days of the operation (which was intended to reassure Scandinavian countries that they could be defended in the event of war). The actual commander of the fleet during Operation Mainbrace was Admiral Lynde Dupuy McCormick.

NOTES

Colm Feore (Admiral) is Daniel in MY SALINGER YEAR, a film adaptation of Joanna Rakoff’s 2008 memoir about the New York literati in the pre-digital late nineties. The twenty-three-year-old Rakoff (Margaret Qualley) takes a job as assistant to J.D. Salinger’s literary agent, and one of her many tasks is answering Salinger’s fan mail. Joanna, who has never read “The Catcher in the Rye” (and has no intention of doing so) gets caught up in the task, abandons the agency’s form response, and begins writing back, finding her own voice by acting as Salinger’s. Written and directed by Philippe Falardeau (who also wrote and directed the Oscar-nominated MONSIEUR LAZHAR), and filmed in Montreal, MY SALINGER YEAR premiered at the 2020 Berlinale in February. No release date has been announced.

Spencer Graham (Seaman #4) will be Noah MacAulay in STILL THE WATER, a film by prolific P.E.I. author Susan Rodgers. Hockey player Jordie MacAulay (Ry Barrett) returns home to Prince Edward Island after ten years of playing second rate hockey in an alcoholic fog in Alberta. (He’s in quite a bit of trouble for injuring a player in a dirty back-check.) With no friends, no job, and no respect, he turns to his family for help, but his return fuels jealousy and brings to the surface a long-buried, painful truth. STILL THE WATER was filmed in Prince Edward Island in the spring of 2019, and should be released later this year.







