Frequency recap: Season 1, Episode 6
How convenient would it be to have a radio that allowed you to talk with the past? I could tell my younger self to avoid pixie haircuts, save more money, and never ever laugh at the idea of a Trump presidency.
Of course, I wouldn’t be dealing with life or death, like Frank and Raimy. They have been playing with the past for a few episodes now (I think it’s weeks in their timeline, but I can’t keep track), and they still have a lot to learn.
The last we saw Nightingale, he was burning his truck in the woods. The episode starts on Nov. 10, 1996, when two kids find the burnt truck in the woods, but there’s more: Carmen Salina’s body is underneath. Frank is upset he couldn’t save Carmen and let the killer get away, but Satch tells him there’s a silver lining: Nightingale is slipping and they’ll be able to catch him.
When Frank and Raimy talk on the ham next, she tells him Nightingale’s next victim, Amanda Baldwin, will be taken in two days. Using the hospital’s security footage to track the blue truck over the past few days, Frank is able to convince Satch that Amanda’s the next target. So Frank and Satch tail Amanda and — what do you know? — see the Nightingale go after her. They take him down and it’s the end of the series! JK, it turns out to be a kid selling Amanda some bootleg DVDs.
In the future, Raimy is tied up with a different part of the Nightingale case. A prisoner named Karl says he has info, but will only talk to Det. Raimy Sullivan. She thinks the man, who’s behind bars for murdering his neighbor with hedge clippers, is a nut and wasting her time. She’s about to leave the room when he says he can talk to himself in the future — that stops her in her tracks.
As an explanation, he says he wanted to prove the fact that “time is infinite,” so he created a communication device. Raimy wants him to tell her how he did it, but he only draws a tree. This is the “the idiot’s version”: Imagine the Nightingale is a tree and the branches are his victims. You can cut off the first branch — Amanda — but she or another victim will just pop up as a branch farther up the tree. To truly change the future, you have to cut off the trunk.
His time-is-a-flat-circle theatrics work on Raimy, though, so she tells the prison to give him an hour with the device. He promises to help her with the Nightingale in return.
Back in Frank’s world, he’s decided to tell Amanda about her impending murder. He wants to save her, even if it means changing the future. So he goes to her apartment and tells her she’s been targeted. As he’s explaining this to her, he sees someone in the apartment. Amanda flees for safety while Frank takes a beating from the Nightingale — the serial killer lets him off easy, though. He just leafs through Frank’s wallet and throws it back at him.
NEXT: Could you cut off the trunk?
In 2016, Raimy sees Amanda’s case file change to “abduction prevented,” but Julie’s file is still the same. Raimy then finds Amanda’s Facebook page and sees she’s led a long and happy life…until now. Raimy is called to her apartment, where she’s been murdered. Apparently she’d lived in India for the past 20 years, and as soon as she came back stateside, the Nightingale killer took her out — thereby sending a message to Raimy. Satch says Frank thought Nightingale sent messages to him, too, but Satch never thought it was true until now.
In prison, our friend Karl has killed again. “I had to cut off the trunk,” he’s muttering while standing over a prisoner’s body. Raimy wants to know why he’d kill a man who was in prison for life, but Karl said his future self knew he was going to escape and kill more people.
In a day full of bad news, Raimy has to tell her dad about Amanda dying 20 years later. Then she explains Karl’s tree philosophy. She says the only way to truly protect her mother is to cut off Nightingale at the trunk. Frank says he can’t do that as a police officer, but what happens next might change his mind: A lab tech takes a piece of paper found on Amanda’s body and soaks the blood off it. It’s a photo of Julie, Raimy, and Frank. The Nightingale took it from Frank’s wallet and held onto it for 20 years.
So is it crazy to kill people as a preventative measure when you have access to a time-bridging radio? Is it wrong? Or is it the right thing to do? Frequency basically has gone all “Could you kill Hitler’s baby?” on us.
Timeline tidbits:
Frank talks to his adult daughter about her sex life… It’s weird.
Speaking of Raimy’s sex life, she spent the night with Kyle, who made her breakfast and left a snack on her stoop the next day. Don’t let this one go, Raims!
Because Kyle drove her to her house and she wanted to flee from him, she took the subway to work — and, of course, she’s in the same car as Daniel. She says it’s just kismet. He doesn’t believe it UNTIL they bump into each other on his block, where she’s investigating a murder. How romantic. But they properly exchange names and she tells him how to call her in case he wants to take a chance on destiny. BUT WHAT ABOUT KYLE AND HIS SNACK DROP-OFFS?!
Moreno tells Frank he hears Little J’s drugs are back on the streets, but Frank doesn’t want anything to do with it. So then, Moreno drops off a folder for him at Julie’s house. When she hands it off to Frank and he opens it, we see images of Frank kissing another woman.
This doesn’t bode well for his future with Julie, which was starting to improve when she asked him to take part in the security detail outside her home.
