“First things first, and credit where it's due... last season, Syfy tried to use Sanctuary to anchor their Monday nights. New episodes of their shows airing at the same time the big networks were airing their big shows. Castle and Hawaii Five-0 were now trouncing Sanctuary in the ratings. Fans were livid and demanded a return to Fridays. But, you know, politely. We didn't mail calendars to their offices. We just made sure they heard about it on the internet. And now, with the arrival of the fourth season, we're back where we belong! Hooray! Welcome back, it's so nice to see you. I can't help but notice Agam Darshi is missing from the credits, but I'll hold off comment on that until we're back in the present timeline.

On with the show!

When last we saw Helen Magnus, she was standing on a street in Victorian London. The episode picks up immediately afterward, with Helen giving chase to Adam Worth. I really love Adam as a villain. He's a madman, but his goal is to save his daughter's life. World domination is just a bonus. I mean, he's already traveling in time, so why not toss in a little ruling while he's at it? Helen chases Adam through the back alleys until Adam shoots a wall and showers Helen with broken bricks. Adam flees, and Helen is taken into custody.

Fortunately, Inspector Lestrade (Holmes fans?) contacts James Watson about Helen's odd behavior. No charges are pressed, and Helen is left in the custody of her oldest, dearest, deadest friend. The look on her face when she sees him is priceless. Helen hasn't had a lot of happy moments recently, and this was joy mixed with sorrow. Helen initially tries to pass herself off as the 1898!version of herself, but James is far too sly for that. Plus the fact she's carrying weapons he's never seen, a cell phone, credit cards, a driver's license... he quickly deduces that she's not from this era and offers his assistance.

JAMES:

Time travel is actually possible. H.G. would be ecstatic.

Helen goes upstairs to change out of her "modern" clothing (which prompted the obligatory reference to the fact she's running around half-naked) and has a near-encounter with her past self. I really like the little tour Helen takes of her bedroom; a trip down memory lane. James burns everything that she brought with her so it won't fall into the wrong hands. She scolds him for trying to figure out her phone, making him promise to ask no questions about the future. She'll only tell him enough to complete her mission and stop Adam Worth.

Adam, meanwhile, visits his daughter with a Praxian cure to her illness. Unfortunately, Helen shot the case during her pursuit of him and the item is damaged. With time running out, he kidnaps Imogene and takes her someplace where he can work in privacy. 1898!Adam goes to Helen and James for help finding her in a nearly identical conversation to when he asked for their help with her illness. In the original timeline, Helen remembers Adam coming to them two months later and worries the timeline has already been changed.

After investigating, Helen accused 1898!Adam of criminal acts to pay for his daughter's care. Adam is highly offended and tells them that he'll find Imogene himself, while James is shocked at Helen's behavior.

JAMES:	Has society gone back to the dark ages? He's done nothing wrong.
HELEN:	Not yet. But he will, believe me.

He warns Helen that she has far too much information and to use it carefully. He tells her to curb her temper and sends her home while he continues investigating. Helen, aware that she crossed a line, leaves and arrives in time to see a confrontation between her past self and John Druitt. She overhears that she and James are investigating a new series of Ripper-like murders that they both fear are the work of John. John is furious at being suspected for something he insists he didn't do. He pulls a blade and presses it to Helen's throat, pinning her to the wall as he makes a case for his innocence.

I'm sure you can see the flaw in that argument.

Future!Helen fights the urge to step in. She pulls a gun from a drawer and readies it, just in case. Since this situation couldn't have been affected by either Helen or Adam's presence, we have to assume that this happened in our Helen's timeline. She surely remembers it, remembers how she felt at that moment, and it's killing her to have to live through it again. She knows she won't have to step in, but holding the gun and being prepared is just Helen's nature. She's learned a lot in the intervening years. She overhears a conversation that bears repeating here:

HELEN:	If you're innocent, then you have nothing to fear.
JOHN:	You sound just like James. How much time have you been spending together?
HELEN:	And now jealousy? For whom?

The actors who play James and John -- Peter Wingfield and Christopher Heyerdahl -- created this sexual byplay between the characters in the first season finale, and it was because of their suggestion that it was teased in “Normandy”. Now here we are with yet another undeniable indication that there's a very complicated Helen/James/John triangle going on. Here's hoping for more of that!

John buries his blade in the wall and grips Helen's arms with both hands. He orders her to look him in the face, then teleports away with a cry of anger. Helen hugs herself and walks away fighting tears, passing herself in the corridor without even noticing. This scene has added importance later, so I'll stick a pin in it.

Our Helen tells James about Druitt's visit, and reports that he's not happy they suspect him. She refuses to reveal if John is really behind it and they focus on Adam Worth. James' informants have discovered Adam Worth is expected at the Reformer Club in Pall Mall, but they don't know which version of Adam it is. Our Helen goes to meet up with him while James and 1898!Helen work on the new Ripper murder case.

Helen arrives at the club and we get a glimpse of just how difficult things once were for her. She's stopped at the door, blocked from entering as if she has a disease. The doorman puts his hand on her arm to stop her, and Helen makes him regret it instantly. It was probably a new century before he had complete use of that thumb again. The future Adam Worth, having observed Helen's attempted entrance, escorts her inside as his guest and they have a tense conversation by the fireplace.

Helen correctly deduces that something has gone wrong, and Adam is trying to get money to finish curing Imogene. She confronts him about the lives lost and the damage he caused trying to complete his plans. She threatens to kill him despite her destiny and their surroundings, at which point Adam effectively tells the club she's a prostitute and has her kicked out. Once outside, a group of small children - the Baker Street Irregulars! - arrive with a message for her telling of another Ripper murder. Helen arrives and sees herself and James already investigating.

Back at the Sanctuary, James demands answers. She knows the killer, and by telling him she could save lives. She refuses, telling him only that the murder they just came from should be the last, but he's not so certain.

JAMES:

And if your very presence here has changed the course of events, changed the course of the investigation, what then? Can you live with that? No, no, please. Spare me. I don't want to know the answer. Because apparently in the future, emotions, empathy, humanity ceases to exist.

This is an incredibly harsh -- but accurate -- account of how he sees Helen. She is a very dark person right now. She's been through so much loss, seen so much destroyed, and Adam Worth is the epicenter of that all. She can't see him objectively, not that she should. But comparing the Helen of 1898 to the one we see now, the difference is shocking. It's almost as if they're played by two separate people. By having the series set entirely in the past, we can view it from their point of view a little easier.

Future Helen is from the dark, dystopian future. The only difference is that it's our Helen we're seeing. We know why she's this dark, and it makes sense to us. We just didn't realize how dark and how intense she'd become until we saw her in the same frame as her younger, more innocent, blonde self.

Helen refuses to solve the case for James, but she gives him a clue to remember the Sanctuary's charter: to find and help unfortunate creatures to help them and keep the public safe. Only then does James notice that Helen is in the midst of some sort of science experiment. She has bottles of arsenic and strychnine, and he realizes she is making a toxin that will duplicate Imogene's illness and kill her if Adam succeeds in curing her. He is shocked, and Helen admits it's a last resort. She's uncertain if she can make it, let alone if she'll be capable of using it.

HELEN:

Humanity isn't completely dead in the future. Just so you know

She leaves, telling him only that she's going hunting. She follows Adam Worth from his gentleman's club in the hopes of finding his hideout, but she's waylaid by John Druitt. After an obligatory comment on her hair (James also made one earlier; oddly Adam Worth did not), he draws a knife and insists there's only one way to make her listen to him.

He attacks, and Helen immediately fights back. She's loaded with weapons, as usual, similar to how she armed up to fight Adam in “Breach”. She quickly gains the upper hand on him, not only showing no fear but at one point turning her back on him.

JOHN:	You're insane!
HELEN:	Oh... very much so. Fancy some more?

She goes back into the battle and takes John down. He finally questions how she is able to fight him, but she ignores the question and presses his own blade against his throat.

HELEN:	How does it feel? Cold steel against your jugular, in the hands of someone who knows how to kill you slowly and has the will to do it?
JOHN:	Helen...?
HELEN:	Are you paying attention? Stay... away... from me.

She lets him go and he immediately teleports away. Defeated, frightened, confused. Helen appears shaken but not to an extreme degree. She adds his knife to her arsenal and continues down the alley.

This is an amazing counterpoint to the earlier scene. John was a spectre, a beast, the boogeyman in the office. He was threatening and monstrous. The only move Helen made against him was verbal, and even then she winced when he fought back. Helen was meek and timid. She couldn't, and wouldn't, raise a hand against him because he was still too close to the man she loved. John owned that moment. He dominated her by pressing her into the wall and pressing the knife against her throat.

One hundred and thirteen years - or a few hours - later, the entire situation is flipped. John is the one confused, thrown up against the wall and held there with cold steel. He's the one who is frightened, who knows his life is in the hands of this frightening beast he once knew. He looks at her and doesn't know who, exactly, she is but she's not the woman he loved (hence the way he says her name while she threatens him). He's scared to death of her by the time he leaves.

I can't help but wonder how this encounter would color their interactions in the future. Would the John Druitt who had been so utterly whipped by Helen Magnus still be so smug, so confident in their future interactions? Even in the pilot, there was still a vestige of the meek and timid Helen when he appeared in her office. That Helen is long gone. John has kicked her while she was down too many times (literally... remember "Haunted"?) and anything she might have once felt for him is dead, gone and buried.

If Druitt really died at the end of “Into the Black,” I would be happy if the alley beatdown is the last thing we see of them. It's Helen taking back her power, leaving him frightened and weak. He had dominance over her for a hundred years, and she destroyed it in that moment. If he didn't die, well... it will be interesting to see.

After Helen walks away from her fight with Druitt, she encounters a towering Abnormal with a demonic countenance that she calls Jack. They know each other from when she was much younger, when her father helped Jack and got him to stop killing. Jack agreed to stop, but then humans began hunting him and he decided he would fight back by reminding them of his strength. Helen convinces him that he'll be found and killed eventually, and she offers him Sanctuary.

HELEN:

You can die like an animal or live with my protection.

He leaves without responding, and Helen reveals his full name: Spring-heeled Jack. Real urban myth. Look him up.

While it was awesome to see Helen confronting an Abnormal and convincing him to come to the Sanctuary, I have multiple, so many questions about that scene. Actually just one: how does that not affect the timeline? Helen wouldn't tell James who the killer was, but she went out and found him, and convinced him to turn himself in. She convinced him to surrender. They didn't say how James and 1898!Helen originally stopped Spring-heeled Jack, but I doubt it involved a mysterious brunette talking him into stopping his spree. James does determine the killer's true identity on his own... but with Helen nudging him in the right direction. It just seems like she interfered quite a bit while insisting she would not interfere.

The Baker Street Irregulars find Adam's lab and point Helen in the right direction, and she bursts in with her gun drawn. Adam uses his daughter as a human shield (what a peach) so Helen won't shoot him. She realizes that he's succeeded in his mission and Imogene has been cured of her illness. Helen reveals everything Adam did, the death and destruction, and insists he has to be stopped. Adam lashes out at Helen with a Praxian weapon, and she flees.

Adam gives chase, furious that Helen has "shamed him" in front of his daughter. Helen is disabled by a flashbang grenade and Adam disarms her. She uses John's blade to stab him in the leg and runs again. Imogene comes out to see what's happening and, when one of Adam's shots goes wide, he hits a brick wall and Imogene is buried (much like Helen was in the beginning). Helen's skull must be harder, because Imogene is instantly killed.

Adam rails against Helen, blaming her for what happened, and she uses a Praxian weapon she stole from his lab to kill him. Adam Worth is turned to ash, and his villainy is put to an end. Helen barely manages to escape before a crowd appears, and she watches as her past self and Watson arrive on the scene (attracted by the energy blasts of Adam's weapon). 1898!Adam arrives to find his daughter dead and instantly blames Helen and James for their part in her death.

That strikes me as a little odd. Yes, Adam Worth is a psychopath who insists there's always someone to blame. Someone who isn't him. But what exactly could Helen have done differently? Sure, he thought she was a cold bitch, but he didn't exactly have a nice opinion of her to begin with. And James was working the case, as far as Adam knew. Adam's anger was supposed to, I think, justify the timeline staying the same. But I just don't see this as the impetus for the kind of retribution he seeks in “Breach”.

Still, there are ten years between this moment and the cliff scene from “For King and Country.” Maybe he grew to hate her, and Helen became colder against him for his baseless hatred of her. Remember, 1898!Helen hasn't seen Adam Worth since Oxford. Imagine if you stumbled over a classmate ten years later, and he blamed you for his daughter's death and insisted her blood was on your hands. Might make you a little less likely to see his side of things.

Back at the Sanctuary, our Helen and James discuss the neat and tidy resolution to both cases. Spring-heeled Jack is their newest resident, and everything Adam Worth brought back with him is destroyed. Helen claims she's the only loose end.

HELEN:	I can't be here, James. We both know it. Everything I touch, everyone I meet... could ruin my future.
JAMES:	You'd best kill yourself.
HELEN:	I'm glad we both agree.
JAMES:	Helen, suicide? You're so melodramatic.

First of all, this statement needs to fully land. Helen isn't coming to this conclusion late. Her actions in this episode have been those of a woman planning to die. She fought John expecting to die. She went after Adam knowing she was going to die, either by his hand or her own. Her darkness takes on a different, bleaker light because of that.

James suggests that she find some remote part of the world and simply... wait. Take the long way around. One hundred and thirteen years of solitude, and then she can step back into her timeline moments after she went back in time. Her incredibly slow aging will make it possible. He can tell that she's more than earned a vacation, and Helen seems warm to the idea.

I don't know what to think about the idea of Helen hiding out, keeping her head down, for over a century. On the one hand, it means she'll be 273 years old from here on. She'll have a hundred year gap between the last time she saw Will, Henry, the Big Guy, Declan, etc and then she'll just step right back into things? And she's not not-aging. She's aging slowly. So adding a hundred years to her life can't just be ignored. Maybe this will be a way to explain Amanda Tapping's actual aging since the series began. Amanda aged four years, Helen aged one hundred and thirteen...? That would kind of make sense.

On the other hand, I really think she has deserved a vacation, as James said. “Out of the Blue” showed just how tired she was with her job. She was exhausted from constantly running, constantly fighting, constantly having the weight of the world on her shoulders. She wanted to paint, to help children, to take some time and relax somewhere. The idea that she not only gets to do that, but that she has one hundred years to do it, makes me really happy for her character. She was a suicidal madwoman in this episode. A hundred years could do a lot to settle her down a tad. Not that I'm complaining about her going dark. Dark!Helen scared me, and I liked it.

The episode ends with Helen and James looking out over the Thames as the sun rises, a beautiful moment of Helen and her very dear lost friend. I can't think of a more appropriate ending for the Adam Worth/Praxis saga than a quiet moment with someone she thought had been lost forever. It was sweet, and I adored it.

Just like I adored this episode. It was what Sanctuary does best: dark, moody, steampunk adventure with monsters. Dark back alleys and period dress, men with muttonchops and women who kick ass while wearing bustles ("Bustle or no," Helen tells Worth, "I'll be out that door before your head hits the table.")... If this is a sign of what Season Four has in store, I think we're in for quite a ride. I can't wait!

Helen in History: In 1898, Helen and James Watson were investigating a series of copycat Ripper killings in London. With the help of Inspector Lestrade and a group of children, they eventually tracked down Spring-heeled Jack, an Abnormal who had once made a pact with Gregory Magnus to never kill again. He was captured and became a resident of the Sanctuary.

 
   -- Geonn Cannon