With Rachel finally welcoming Nina back into the fold, Gods and Monsters completed the right notes with the reintroduction of the character to the team. The episode also tried to kill two birds with one stone with its main storyline, and that is where things got a bit tricky as it muddled its way through a collaboration that didn’t always raise the right kind of questions.
I was intrigued by, and was rather suspicious of Rosen’s “new approach” to Nina’s rehab which has been (for three episodes now) to basically throw her right back into the field, with himself as the watchdog. When the senator stopped in the middle of traffic, a part of me felt vindicated. I didn't care that the incident doesn't necessarily point to a rehab issue, but possibly to the broader side-effect of Nina's ability to "push" people.
Since her return to the team, Nina has often appeared to be been less "restrained" in the way she has used her ability, as if she still has some work to do to stop enjoying pushing people, and as if she got back in the game too soon. It also seems as if that she has been eager to win back her friends' trust, and that has led her to overexert herself. Her worries and her fears were visible when she rushed over to help the senator, and later when she was determined to help the doctors taking care of the member of the upper house of Congress. Laura Mennell portrayed Nina with just the right amount of insecurity to let us perceive her worries and her fears, but she also showed how personal the character took the senator's case, which is why the episode chose the perfect moment to bring Rachel to the rescue.
The case of the week revolved around Jason Miller, the high-school comatose patient who wreak havoc on the hospital in "Gaslight". Using him to bring Rosen and Parish together following Dani Rosen's intervention made sense, even though the fact that it seemed to imply she deeply cared for her father came as a surprise, at least to me. Yes, they've hugged in reconciliation and they occasionally meet and even send each other greetings through Cameron, but by showing us her conniving with Parish, the show always gave the impression that everything she did was calculated, except for Cameron.
For his part, everything Jason did was predictable enough for the initial confrontation with Rosen to be slightly irritating. I mean, in what world would the teenager have released the people part of his collective consciousness without putting up a fight? Later, the chase scene on the street properly conveyed the creepiness of the whole situation, but it also had good cinematic value, especially the part with Cameron throwing the tranquilizer dart.
With the Jason storyline, the episode tried to further establish Stanton Parish as the all-powerful villain while attempting to maintain the relevance of Rosen and his team of alphas, and it worked to a degree. Although his escape was too easy, especially considering the basic nature of his power, Parish coercing Rosen into a meeting sounded right, so was the beginning of the collaboration. Well aware of the uneven balance of power, the storytellers tried to give an advantage to Rosen by allowing him to take a peak at Parish's past while they both were in the uninspiring shared consciousness of Jason Miller. Besides allowing Rosen to be onto his daughter Dani, it gave him a wealth of knowledge from which he could potentially extract anything.
Which leads us to the relevance of Rosen's team. We have seen enough to understand that Parish could destroy them if he wanted to. In fact, at the beginning of the season, he single-handedly allowed the team to get back together. In this episode, we have learned there was a deal between Parish and Dani to that effect, a deal that has nothing to do with any kind of romance and that should arguably be profitable to both parties. We could guess that Dani's side somehow involved the protection of her father, but what about Parish's? What is it that spying on a team he helped rebuilt has helped him achieve? Beneath all the lofty statements from these two men in Gods and Monsters, there was the nagging fact that the overall confrontation doesn't make much sense at this point.
The episode included something else much more refreshing: Kat competing with Gary on the funniest lines. I found hers to be better, whether she was welcoming Stanton Parish ("What's up Stan?") while everyone else was silent, or whether she was trying to be a "probationary agent". Gods and Monsters moved the story further by allowing Rosen to acquire the means to fight back, but it did so while exposing some of the weaknesses of the overarching storyline.
