Falling Water Episode 1.08 The Well

Burton pursues the Woman in Red. Sabine has issues with Taka, who learns more about the Green. Tess and Bill meet a familiar face while following a lead about the boy.

Burton meets with Charlotte at Aeskyton Spiritual Retreat.

Going against Woody's advice, Burton has made himself at home at Aeskyton, but the comfort of trust walks and other spiritual exercises soon enough leads to a menacing meeting with Charlotte. While waiting in her office for his one-on-one session, Burton notices a photo from a group retreat hanging on her wall and standing in the middle is the Woman in Red. Charlotte comes in and sees him staring at the image, bewildered. He sits on her couch like a regular therapy session and begins telling Charlotte about these dreams he's been having that he can't shake -- dreams where there's a woman in his arms, and then she vanishes. "I was hoping to find her," he says. "Well you can't do that until you understand why she left," Charlotte responds. Charlotte admits that this woman came here and had similar sessions with her, but she assures Burton that their relationship was not real; how well does he actually know her anyway? Charlotte suggests that she may have even been married in hopes of puncturing his love, but he persists.

At the campfire later that night, Burton steals a moment alone with Charlotte once again. He won't rest until he has answers; Charlotte finally admits that she knows where the woman is, and that it isn't pretty. She says the Woman in Red was at Aeskyton to write an expose on them (as determined in Episode 107) -- did she enact some sort of punishment? "Do you really want to follow in her footsteps?" Charlotte asks. "I'd walk through fire for her," Burton insists. Per her instruction, Burton follows Charlotte and brings him to a cell in a basement, telling him to get in. Despite admitting he doesn't trust her, he enters, and Charlotte locks him in. It's all solid walls of steel and stone with a single skylight staring up at the moon some 20 feet up. Burton begins panicking and pacing, but boredom overcomes him, and he eventually falls asleep.

Burton learns how to save the Woman in Red.

Burton begins dreaming that he's on a plane with the Woman in Red, but Charlotte interrupts them and asks him to help her; apparently there's a problem with the plane. He leaves the woman and steps through the curtain to the cockpit and appears in a field of flowers, looking up at the plane he was just on as it begins crashing to the ground. "We're helpless," Charlotte tells him. "No!" he shouts, effectively waking himself up back in the cell. Later, he begins dreaming again, but doesn't know it until the gated door pops open to his touch. He exits the cell to find himself in the Woman in Red's apartment, where we've seen her before sitting at her typewriter. Only this time, he's met once again by Charlotte, who tries to convince him that there was no love between him and the Woman in Red -- that it was an illusion of intimacy built within the dream space. Again, her efforts are futile. He next dreams that he's with the Woman in Red walking outside of Marcello's, but they're quickly apprehended by a pair of black cars and men in suits who beat him to the ground, kidnap him, water board him, and strip him to his underwear.

Meanwhile, Charlotte visits him in another dream space, telling him that there's no such thing as a soul mate and that his suffering can be over if he let's go of the Woman in Red. Even beaten and broken down, tears streaming down his cheeks, Burton refuses. And with that, he appears back on the plane with the Woman in Red. "Find the boy," she tells him. "The boy can save us both."

Tess looks for answers with Bill.

With the knowledge from 107 that Taka saw a drawing of her son hanging in the Belgian Consulate, Tess convinces Bill to take her there, where we meet the same secretary that Taka interacted with at the beginning of this season. Tess asks her if she's seen her son, and she admits to having had a drawing of the boy on her wall with Taka, but a business partner stole it during the ambassador's funeral. They now have a new destination: the Belgian business partner's office. They go to the address and the office space is completely wiped clean, emptied. But in the back, they find the Belgian business partner from the episode's opening scene has hung himself; he dangles from the ceiling, dead.

Back in Bill's apartment, he and Tess conclude that the Belgian can't be the end of the road. With a quick Google search, they learn that they Belgians sold a large chunk of holdings in rare earth metals to a Malaysian buyer -- a connection to The Green's shrine that doesn't slip by Tess. Fortuitously enough, Bill knows the law firm that brokered the deal, and next thing we know, they're sitting in the White Sand offices with Woody just in the other room. Posing as an interested buyer who wants to go straight to the Malaysian source, Bill talks business while Tess, having spotted Woody in the doorway, leaves. Before she can catch him, Woody's secretary hands her a note advising her to meet him for lunch -- he says that Bill is not her friend and he should not be trusted.

Tess heeds Woody's advice.

Later that night, Tess tells Bill that Woody told her not to trust him -- an admission that implies that she does, in fact, trust him. Nonetheless, her suspicions are piqued when he insists he take his specially designed cell phone and secretly record her lunch meeting with Woody the next day. If he can't be there in person, he wants to listen in on their conversation. Telling her that he cares about her and that he can be trusted, Bill convinces Tess to let him listen in. But the next day, she changes her mind at the last minute, tossing Bill's phone back into the cab as it's driving away. She walks into the restaurant to meet Woody.

Taka talks with Kumiko.

Still looking for answers to The Green like the good detective he is, Taka goes back to square one and approaches Alice, the young girl and member of the Green who killed the Belgian ambassador, at her place of work. She's taken aback by his knowledge and still personally haunted by her actions, but she maintains that the Belgian deserved it. She says that he was one of The Green, then he left them, and people died because of it.

Sabine later gets wind of Taka's little meeting with Alice, and is understandably angry. Alice is her patient and is a minor -- he didn't have the legal authority to drag her into the effort to connect with his mother. Sabine comes to Taka's apartment to curse him out and effectively end things. Days later, Taka calls a meeting with Ann-Marie Bowen, and she takes this as him being ready to let The Green help him and his mother. Instead, he arrests her out of spite, telling her she "can't give me what I want, you never could." He brings her in for questioning despite not having the evidence for her arrest. Yes, she's somehow involved with the murders from the explosion in the beginning of the season, and yes, she's indirectly involved with the death of the Belgian ambassador -- but where's the proof? "You're talking about the law; I'm talking about the human spirit," she says. Taka ends up letting her go.

On his way home, he finds Alice waiting for him outside his apartment. She says he should reconsider accepting help from The Green to communicate with Kumiko. He joins Alice in going back to his mother's assisted living home. Alice stands beside the comatose Kumiko and begins explaining that she's in this state because she's lost in her dreams, and she went further and further into her dreams because her manic depression would have made her a burden for Taka, and she didn't want to be a burden for him. She left him because she loves him.

Next thing you know, Kumiko begins speaking on her own through Alice, who herself stands besides her, silent and catatonic. With tears in her eyes, Kumiko miraculously stands and tells Taka that it's he that has the depth and the power to allow her to speak with him; he's doing this. She says that he's finally strong enough to make it happen, and that she's been waiting a very long time for him. It seems to be shaping up here to be a battle between the mothers: Charlotte, who uses the dreams for bad, and Kumiko, who uses them for good. Only time will tell who ends up on top.