Waking The Dead : What Happened and Why in
Fugue States

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If you are new to the world of Waking the Dead, then Fugue States is probably a good episode to get you started. The mystery is not all that mysterious. You meet everyone you need to know very early on in the episode. They throw in a curve at the end but they mark the road so clearly that it should not throw you.

In 1988, five year old twins Cindy and Jason Murphy went missing from their home. The Cold Case Squad gets a call that Jason has been found. He has been admitted to the hospital after being hit by a car the night before. The problem is that Jason has no memory of his life. Not his life before his disappearance and not of his life since. Jason is unconscious and has no identification on him. He is only carrying a stolen credit card on which the only purchase is a green beret style hunting knife. Suspicious, the traffic pc runs his dna.

Retired pediatrician Donald Roper waits anxiously nearby. He brought Jason to the hospital after the accident. He appears to be very distraught. The hospital director, Tim Faulkner assures Dr. Roper that they will contact him if there is any news.

Inside Jason's room, a young medical student attends to Jason. She tells Frankie that she was the one to wash Jason after he was admitted. Frankie is grateful that she did not do a very good job. As it turns out, the medical student is Sarah Falkner. Tim's daughter, but we do not learn that connection until some time later. If during the first shot with her and Jason, you say to yourself, hey that could be Cindy, well goody goody gum drops for you but now what are you going to do for the rest of the episode.

The Cold Case Squad has no reason to believe that Cindy is right under their nose and so they proceed with the idea that if someone has been holding them all of this time, Jason's escape could jeopardize Cindy's life. They could assume that Cindy is dead but that is not a very useful working proposition.

Along those lines, the wonder twins review the original case. D.I. Carol Meyers was the lead investigator. When the case collapsed she retired from the force. Spence convinces a reluctant Mel to tap a guy she dated once in personnel to give them Meyers's current address. It is the middle of the night but they want to get a jump on the case. I cannot remember when they were last rewarded for taking initiative and rest assured this will not be one of those reward times.

Boyd notes that it is odd that the hospital director should be taking such an interest in the case. Faulkner returns the compliment to the Detective Superintendent and wants to know if they know the patient's name. Boyd and Frankie do not tell him what they know.

Former D.I. Carol Meyers arrested Cindy and Jason's father, Greg Murphy but was unable to make the case stick. Since no bodies were ever discovered it was very difficult to make a murder case against him. Meyers said that the children's mother, Christine would cheat on Greg. He would take his anger out on Jason since he was Christine's favorite. Two weeks before they disappeared, a neighbor had taken Jason to a clinic to treat him for wounds that appeared to be cigarette burns all over his body. Children services was called in, but a doctor overruled a nurse and concluded that they were not burns but instead, a skin condition. Jason was returned to his father.

Grace and Boyd go to meet Greg and Christine. They tell them that Jason has been found alive. Greg and Christine are still an odd pair, although at least now, their lifestyle has seemed to take a sharp turn for the better. Their current home is a far cry from the dilapidated flat they occupied fifteen years ago. Christine is also very pregant.

Jason is now conscious. Spence is with him. Poor Spence, still no points for taking the initiative. Boyd is annoyed that Spence did not call him when Jason woke up. Boyd did not miss much, since it seems that Jason is in what Tim Faulkner calls a fugue state.

Much to his mother's dismay, Jason does not remember her. Whether this is part of the memory loss due to the accident or something else, is unknown at this point. For those of you who have concluded that Sarah is Cindy, note that she does not recognize them either. Jason does give his father a strange look. Perhaps he is just responding to Greg's nervous gitters. Perhaps part of him remember what a creep Greg was when he was younger.

Technology maven Boyd has recorded the conversation on his cellphone. It is unclear why he is being so surreptitious about it since it is clear that they are trying to figure out where Jason has been all this time. He hopes that Jason's accent and speech patterns will yield a clue. Spence says he sounds Geordie, which Boyd thinks is obvious and not specific enough. I shudder to think what he would say to me because I decided he sounded English. Boyd swaps sim cards with Spence and tells him he will get his phone back when he traces the accent.

Mel follows up with Donald Roper, the man who hit Jason. He says he remembers the case but that he had no idea it was Jason when he brought him into the hospital. He claims not to read newspapers or watch the crap television news. If Roper is merely the man who had the unfortunate bad luck to run into Jason, why does Mel spend so much time with him? What possible information could this guy have beyond saying that he saw Jason running out of the park but could not stop in time? Three things could be happening here, either 1) Mel is a bad detective, 2) this Roper guy must play a big part of the mystery or 3) he is being used to flesh out Mel's backstory. Note, none of these are mutually exclusive.

Grace and Boyd brainstorm. They start by asking themselves if Jason is faking the amnesia, why would he do it. Grace says that he may want to protect his abductors because they were better parents than his real ones. However, even if his parents were the worst parents in the world, it would not explain why he was abducted. For some reason they do not take into account that a good samaritan had already intervened on Jason's behalf when he was taken to the emergency clinic by a neighbor.

Roper tells Mel that shortly after getting his medical license he became interested in pediatrics. Soon he was involved in a crusade to remove at-risk children from abusive homes. Mel snoops around Roper's home and discovers a newspaper in his overcoat pocket with a front page story on Jason's reappearance. Roper said he had no idea that the guy he hit was Jason. It is unlikely that he put the newspaper in his pocket and never noticed the front page. Inspired, Mel snoops around some more but only finds a locked door in the basement. Don't worry, it doesn't sound like probable cause to me either. Maybe it is exigent circumstance since there is still a person missing. Who am I kidding, she should not be snooping around in his house.

Mel does some digging into Roper's past and learns that Roper has been involved in high profile cases including one in which a child was returned to an allegedly abusive father. In 1985, Daniel Green was accused of abusing his child. Roper testified in hearings to have the child removed from the home. The Greens proved that Roper's evidence was worthless. A short while later, Daniel Green and his family were dead. The police concluded that Daniel killed his wife and child and then himself. The murders served to validate Roper's conclusions.

Grace is familiar with Dr. Roper's work. She feels he has done a good service for many children. Mel disagrees. Following the school of holding onto relevant information until the last second, Mel finally gets around to saying that Roper was the doctor who decided that five year old Jason's wounds were not cigarette burns.

The Roper-Jason connection is too much of a coincidence to ignore. The squad returns in force to Roper's home for a look around his cellar. Roper gives them permission to search. The only thing they find is a locked closet full of checkered napkins and linen. All handmade by children in an orphanage he established in Zaire. Fortunately, mass market clothing manufacturers have yet to call their sweatshops charitable projects for orphans.

Frankie says Thingee! Woo Hee!

Roper explains that fear of being a scapegoat kept him silent about treating Jason. He refers to the Green case as ruining his career. He was reinstated but he said he always felt as if he could not really act as he would like. He did not want to say that the marks on Jason's skin were the product of abuse because he feared being considered an alarmist. It is plausible. He says when Cindy and Jason went missing he was in Romania; a nice little alibi that holds up for awhile. So despite all the coincidences, there is nothing to show that Roper is the person who snatched the twins.

Frankie delivers a forensic bombshell. Trace evidence has found a hair on Jason's clothes belonging to a female who shares Jason's mitochondrial dna. Jason must have seen his sister sometime since he has owned the shirt he was wearing. Seemingly at a dead end, they decide to give Jason a serum to shake loose his memories.

Surprisingly, neither Frankie nor Grace are qualified to administer the drug to Jason. Still Grace does question him. A sketch artist tries to capture in pictures what Jason recalls in words. Jason can only recall eating porridge while in a room with a black and white cat. It is near the sea. He says he remembers an old air raid shelter but he cannot remember any more. Jason becomes agitated and Boyd ends the session.

Did you know that Mel was adopted? She was removed from her home after her mother was declared unfit. Mel uses her inside connnections to track down her birth mother who is now known as Jane Glover. She goes to visit her. It is a nice little visit. Her mother is very motherly towards her, even as she prepares for her other daughter's 7th birthday party. Mel does not tell her mother that she is her daughter. Mel is getting to be more like Boyd. It is nice that she is able to interject her own family drama into a case. Should she have told Jane who she really was? It might be good for Jane to learn what became of her daugher. If it is true that Jane was an unfit parent to Mel, she has certainly turned her life around now and she might benefit from being absolved of some of her guilt.

Jason and Sarah share some bonding time during a cigarette break. Jason catches Sarah by surprise when he grabs a fire extinguisher and smashes through a window. He hits Sarah by accident and knocks her out. Jason escapes through the window along with her cellphone.

They are able to deduce a likely location where Jason has lived. Based on the air raid shelter and the dirt on his shoes. They team up with the local cops and stage a late night raid on the nursery to find Cindy. Maybe people who investigate cold cases should stay away from SWAT-like missions. Mel is alone in one section of the nursery when someone drives up. She follows the figure and confronts them in a dark shed. She shouts for the person to drop what they are holding but the person does not comply. She shoots the man. A woman comes running in from the car. She cries out that the man is deaf. Ooops. Mel thought the man had a gun but really all he had was a crank for the generator.

Mel is off the case. Fortunately, for us, the chief inspector Internal Affairs investigator assigned to her case is tall, dark and handsome. Unfortunately, the BBCA only treats us to a quick shot. I'm not sure how that's fair.

Cindy was not at the nursery. The man Mel shot is in critical condition. His wife, Sheila Mason is deaf and speaks primarily through a sign language interpreter. She identifies Jason as her son Liam. Sheila claims to know nothing of Cindy. They adopted Liam. The Masons had been trying to adopt for awhile. They were unsuccessful until a social worker from London contacted them and said they had been approved to adopt Liam. Unfortunately, there is no record of a social worker fitting the description or with the name, Martha Jenkins, as Sheila described.

As Jason wanders through the streets he is beginning to piece together his life. At the hospital, Spence interviews Sarah. Sarah's mother, Ingrid arrives to support her daughter. Ingrid is angry that her husband has let someone like Jason near their daughter. For the Sarah is Cindy folks, you must be wondering what to make of Ingrid since she must know that she did not give birth to Sarah.

Grace and Boyd return to Cindy and Jason's childhood home. The rat feces on Jason's shoes suggests that he was there recently. Nothing explains how they knew which floorboard to pull up to find Jason's adoption records. Included in the records are letters from the one and only Dr. Donald Roper to the Masons.

It is time for another visit to Donald Roper. Actually it is past time for a visit because the last person to visit Roper stabbed him to death. Spence and Boyd find Roper's blood soaked corpse lying on his kitchen floor. Fortunately, forensically speaking of course, the killer seemed to have cut himself in the process of cutting up Roper. Some of the killer's blood is on Roper and the countertop. As for suspects, remember the knife Jason bought with that stolen credit card. It is not the same knife but it could be his weapon of choice. Earlier they discovered that marks on Jason's jeans prove that he was in Roper's car at the time of the accident. Jason could be trying to finish what he started that first night.

Jason shows up at the Murphy household. He confronts Greg and asks him why he is afraid of him. Greg confesses that he was mean to Jason and beat him. He says that he even burned him with cigarettes. Christine overhears and leaves Greg to go to her mother's. Jason runs away.

Tim Faulkner was part of the Daniel Green inquiry on the opposite side from Roper. That was then. Faulkner switched sides after the Green murders. Faulkner tells Boyd that the guilt over helping return Rosie Green to her father led him to help Roper. After the car accident with Jason, Roper called Faulkner for assistance. Faulkner arranged for the ambulance to deliver Jason to Cavendish hospital and then lied to the police. It seems like a lot for expert testimony he gave over 15 years ago.

Jason, the guy with the head injury and in a fugue state, is the first to realize that Sarah is Cindy. Sarah is unconvinced. The idea wafts its way into the cold case squad room. They were watching film of the Daniel Green hearings where Roper accuses Faulkner of being biased since Roper had a hand in denying Faulkner's bid to adopt a child. They were turned down because Ingrid had tried to commit suicide after a miscarriage in 1985. During the pregnancy she had developed aplastic anemia which led to her losing the baby and a subsequent hysterectomy. It also makes it easy to identify her if she ever drips blood at a murder scene.

It is time to pull all the pieces together. In 1988, Roper identified Jason as an at risk child. He met Jason after a neighbor brought him in to be treated for cigarette burns. Roper knew that the Faulkners were desperate for a child. Roper also knew he could guilt Faulkner into helping. What I cannot figure is why Roper would even chance working with Faulkner. Is it possible that he did not know anyone else who could help. The plan was to grab Jason. Cindy surprised them when she returned home to look for her princess wand. The twins had to be separated since everyone would be looking for two kids. The Faulkners kept Cindy and Ingrid posed as the social worker who arranged for Jason to be adopted by the Masons. Not sure why no one recognized Cindy as a child in the middle of London but no one did. Ingrid does not say why she murdered Roper but if she were trying to keep her secret she would need to keep anyone who knew about it quiet. It appears to be a crime of opportunity since she just grabbed a handy knife so perhaps she only went to his house to talk. Not sure why Roper would be a threat to Ingrid since he was interested in keeping the secret as well. She also seems to have taken Roper's key and locked the door behind herself.

Ingrid is in a bit of a panic because she realizes that it is only a matter of time before Sarah remembers being Cindy. She tries to trick Sarah into leaving town. Sarah does not go for it. Instead she meets up with Jason at the old apartment. She still does not remember or rather she does not want to remember. Ingrid arrives and tries to continue the lie. No such luck this time. The setting, Jason's insistence, Boyd's confirmation and finally her mother's confession combine to bring forth Cindy's memories.

Remember that final twist I said you would see coming. It involves the Daniel Green case. Dr. Roper was discredited during the hearing when he said that Daniel Green was abusive. Roper's reputation was rehabilitated only after it appeared that Daniel snapped and murderd his wife and child. Looking at a photograph of the murder scene, Frankie notices a checkered hankerchief made by orphans in Zaire. There could be an innocent explanation for the napkin being there but innocent explanations are not all that interesting. More interesting would be if Roper killed the Green family in a sick attempt to show that he was right all along. The sad part is that Roper was right about the Murphy family. Jason and Cindy should have been removed from Greg and Christine. While it was wrong for Roper to do what he did, the consolation is that at least now Cindy/Sarah and Jason/Liam know the truth and can decide for themselves what to do with their lives in the future.

Still have nibbling questions. Do you agree or disagree with my take on events? Drop into the forum to add your opinion Fugue States. You can start by explaining why it is called Fugue States rather than Fugue State.