In this episode entitled “Alienation”, Dr. Pierce deals with a woman who thinks that her husband has been replaced with an alien impostor. Donnie and Kate fake being together and Daniel is torn over Natalie and Caroline.
The episode starts in the lecture hall. Daniel Pierce is discussing the science behind love. He says that it rewires the brain. We fall in love with our idea of the person not the actual person. We love what we want the person to be not who they really are. This opening sums up the episode entirely.
Daniel takes a lunch break to make love to Caroline. Afterwards, she hands him a phone. Then Natalie interrupts their conversation. Donnie asks Kate to go visit his grandmother. She agrees only if Donnie signs the divorce papers. Then Kate meets up with Daniel to ask for his help on a case where a sci-fi author’s wife thinks that her husband is an alien.
The woman (Ellen) is taken to the hospital because she suffers from capgras delusion. This disorder makes her believe that her love ones are not who they say they are. The events leading up to the mistaken identity of her husband explains everything. Preston, her husband, did not know that his friend Jerry was stalking Ellen. Jerry rented a Hyndai and accidentally ran her off the road into a telephone pole. That event led to a benign aneurysm.
Ellen escapes the hospital after talking to Preston on the phone and is found over her dead husband’s body giving him an alien autopsy. However, there was a gunshot wound to his heart. Daniel gets a call from Lewicki during dinner with Caroline and heads over to Ellen’s home. He sees all of this unfold. Now Daniel and Kate must find Preston’s killer.
The prime suspects are all innocent and mentioning all of them is pointless. However, the one innocent suspect was a man named A.E. Whalen that claimed to be abducted by aliens. Kate and Daniel go to a sci-fi convention and bring him in for questioning. While there, Daniel is haunted by a hallucination that claims to be a shape-shifting space alien. This hallucination helps him solve the murder. Jerry killed Preston because he loved Ellen. He tried to pen the murder on Whalen (Preston’s rival) because he had motive.
In the end of this episode, Caroline decides to break up with Daniel because Daniel isn’t taking his meds and he loves Natalie, the imaginary woman. Donnie tells Kate that he wanted to come back to town to get back with her.
Overall, this episode was fantastic. Perception is show about what is real and what we think is real. All of the cases deal with mental disorders that most people, including myself, have not heard of. This is a different angle to the cop-crime-drama that has dominated TV for ages. Eric McCormack is awesome as Daniel Pierce and pulling off the complexities of his mental illness.
Perception airs on TNT.
Image: TNT