Carter Jones (Ally Sheedy) is a reporter, one of the few like Sheryl Attkisson who will actually do something other than put on the knee pads and suck up to power.  While stuck in traffic, her cell phone picks up a call from a nearby car and she hears “Krieger is scheduled for removal this afternoon.  There will be no witnesses.”

She looks around and stares eye-to-violet-eye with Michael Sarrazin.  Rather than go home to prepare for a cocktail party at the home of some cabinet official, she shockingly pursues the story.

Her editor is old school, though, and wants her to cover the garbage strike.  He says Joeseph Krieger’s name gets “thrown around a lot.  He’s this country’s Salmon Rushdie.”

I kinda think of Salmon Rushdie as this country’s Salmon Rushdie (even if he is a British citizen).  Nothing to see here, move along.

She goes to Krieger’s house and sees the police taking photos of man-shaped purple ash residue on the driveway.  They throw her off the scene.  In her SUV, she gets a call from Sarrazin who says he knows her name, her address and warns her that she could suffer the same fate as Krieger.

In the archives, she finds a story from 2 weeks ago about a hiker that disappeared from a boat trip.  Purple ashes in the shape of a man were found on the dock.  She gets the world’s most intrusive email notification that tells here, “Do not pursue this.”

She goes to the dock, to speak to the captain of the boat, but learns that he hasn’t been heard from in 2 weeks.  The dockmaster tells her that Krieger was also on that boat. There was also a married couple on that boat.  Jones goes to their house and sees Sarrazin reduce them to purple ashes.

Since Sarrazin knows where she lives, she goes to her father’s house.  They don’t get along because, like Samantha Marsh, she has exposed environmental problems at her father’s employer that resulted in the loss of jobs.  Even if she did the right thing, she is really an asshole about the lives she disrupted.

She goes back to see the dockmaster, but he is now missing.  His sister is there also looking for him.  She says another odd-looking man was just there looking for her brother.  Jones is able to track him to a hotel  Sarrazin has followed her and also reduces him to purple ashes.

Turns out, Sarrazin is an alien.  One of his scouts had a virus which infected the people whom he has been eliminated.  He was merely preventing a massive outbreak on Earth. The last infected person: Carter Jones.

The good news is the people he zapped to purple ashes did not actually die, they were just transported to Sarrazin’s planet where the the virus is not a danger.  Which sounds suspiciously like my dog Skippy “going to live on a farm” when he got old.

Good episode and nice twist on the killer aliens.

Post-Post:

• This would have been a much better title for the episode starring Marlee Matlin which had the blah title The Message.  It barely makes sense for this episode.
• Hulu Sucks.  However, their beautiful IHOP commercials are mouth-watering. New: Caramel Bon-Bon Pancakes.