Haven Episode 4.12 When the Bough Breaks

Episode Summary from syfy.com:

[i]When three Haven residents fall down dead after hearing a baby cry in the distance, Audrey and Nathan know that William is up to his old tricks again. It’s no surprise when William shows up to claim responsibility but what he’s done is even more devious than they could have imagined.

The Harker family has had a long-standing curse for years. Whenever anyone in the Harker family cries, someone else in Haven will hear the sound and die on the spot. For generations, the Harker family has taken great pains to avoid crying but William has activated the curse within the newest addition to their family: a baby.

For the first time ever, Audrey is stymied. How can she keep a baby from crying? Usually, she talks to people to help them understand their Trouble and how to push past it but, this time, she can’t.

William has a solution for Audrey but she doesn’t like it. It turns out that
William created this un-fixable Trouble specifically to force Audrey into creating a Trouble herself—a polar opposite Trouble to counteract the baby’s.
William is hoping that the process of creating a Trouble will remind Audrey who she really is and then she’ll (finally) return to him. If everything happens according to his plan, William will get Audrey back and the two of them will rip Haven to shreds.

After exhausting all other options, Audrey finally gives in and tries to create a Trouble by creating a “silence” Trouble, which Medical Examiner Gloria’s boyfriend takes on. The idea is that since Gloria’s gentleman friend is partially deaf in one ear, by giving him a silent Trouble it can create a sound barrier that will lock in the sound of the baby’s cries and spare others from hearing it and dying. She succeeds in creating the Trouble, giving credence to

William’s claim that she created all the Troubles in the first place. Sadly, her new Trouble does not balance the baby’s. She plans to try again but Duke can see that she’s starting to enjoy the power of creating Troubles. His suggestion is complicated but he thinks it’s safer, overall. Duke convinces Audrey to reactivate his family’s Trouble so that he can kill Ben Harker, the baby’s father and end their Trouble for good. It’s a grisly idea but can it work?[/i]

Episode Summary from en.wikipedia.org:

[i]People in Haven who hear a distant baby cry start collapsing dead. In a hideaway aimed at protecting Jennifer from William, she tells Duke that the Guard tattoo in the book fades in and out, making him remember that there is someone with a tattoo that fades in and out. Audrey and Nathan investigate the apparently random deaths and conclude William has something to do with it. They see William observing them and he tells them they need his help or many will die. At the Herald office Duke, Jennifer, Vince and Dave discover that Vince’s tattoo pulses in sync with the one in the book. William introduces Audrey to the Troubled person, baby Aaron Harker, telling her that if she doesn’t give someone a Trouble that compliments the crying Trouble others will continue to die. He hopes, when she gives the Trouble, she will remember who she is. She refuses and begins to find out what else she can do by talking to the father, Ben Harker, who acknowledges the family curse which normally starts at puberty, but William has triggered it. Gloria the M.E., who is Ben’s step-mother, tells Audrey and Nathan she tried to figure out the logic of the curse, but found there isn’t any. In 1901 when the Trouble was triggered it only ended when they killed the Harker who was Troubled. As the baby cries before it goes to sleep, Audrey thinks that maybe she, by holding it, can prevent any deaths, but the mother dies when the baby cries.

With the threat of the baby waking up and crying again Nathan convinces Audrey to create the Trouble. William explains that she needs three ingredients: an appropriate curse, a suitable person, and one of his black orbs. After discussing possibilities with Nathan and Duke, she thinks that a person who can hardly hear, such as Gloria’s husband Lincoln, would be suitable person for a silence Trouble. In Jennifer’s hideaway Vince’s tattoo starts rotating like a compass, when he holds Jennifer’s book, settling on pointing to the lighthouse, which they guess must be the heart of Haven. When Lincoln agrees, Audrey puts the mark on him and she feels something undescribable, but, instead of a silence Trouble, everything is suddenly very loud, the baby wakes up crying and five people die. Outside, William explains that she’ll have to try again until she gets it right, so he gives her six more orbs. Jennifer, Vince and Dave go to the lighthouse and inside she sees a trapdoor that they don’t, so she knows that’s where they have to go. Audrey talks with Duke about what to do about baby Aaron, when Ben volunteers to be killed by Duke to end the family Trouble and save the baby. Under the lighthouse Jennifer and the Teagues find a giant Guard symbol in the floor and realize they need four people to activate the door. Duke tells Ben to take the baby up to the house, then he convinces Audrey to re-Trouble him instead of giving anyone else a Trouble. She takes the orb and blackens her hand with it to touch Duke…[/i]

Please use this thread to discuss the series’ fifty-first overall and fourth season twelfth episode When the Bough Breaks. Rule: Please keep spoilers limited to those revealed during the series up to this episode only.

So this series just seems a lot darker this season. Multiple innocent people seem to die every episode. If we weren’t this close to the end with answers to questions I probably wouldn’t continue watching at this point.

Talking about answers Haven’s lighthouse, which has always seemed to be there in Haven, turns out to have the heart of Haven in it’s basement. I suspect that the room with the guard symbol on the floor will be the key to unlocking much of Haven’s troubles.

Have I mentioned what an ass William is? Colin Ferguson seems to have so much fun playing William but it unfortunately counteracts all the great Eureka work he did in my mind. Hopefully he will pick up another role sometime in the future that is somewhere more in the middle between the two extremes.

Talking about actors from other series, it was good to see Michael Hogan again (Saul Tigh from Battlestar Galactica) playing Lincoln, Gloria’s husband. The poor old guy not only has hearing problems but now has a trouble that makes it worse. Gee, thanks Audrey. I know she had little choice but to try, BUT it sure did backfire, didn’t it?

Audrey certainly is fighting becoming her original self again. Which is good. Her original self sounds like she sucks with all that evil and stuff. I suspect William will be sorely disappointed in the end.

It surprised me in this episode how much Duke and Audrey confided in each other with Jennifer and Nathan right there in the mix. It’s difficult to tell who really loves who again. I can’t imagine how difficult these relationships would be if Jordan was still alive in town.

So the series’ big reveal during the episode was that Dave Teagues was adopted. It wort of opens up the door to several interesting story arcs, doesn’t it?

Seeing Gloria more integrated into the series is nice. I enjoy her character. But it is definitely hell what she is going through.

The giving of a trouble tutorial by William was nice to hear. The unveiling of the truths of Haven a little at a time continues.

We’ll see about the next episode.

~SO