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"Veritas" is the seventh episode of the second season of Sanctuary, and the twentieth episode overall in the series.

Synopsis[]

When Helen Magnus is charged with murder, Will Zimmerman steps in to defend her innocence. However, the evidence he finds does nothing but incriminate her further.

Plot[]

Cold Open[]

An upset Will Zimmerman follows Declan MacRae to the Sanctuary's morgue, where Declan reveals the body of Bigfoot. Will demands to know who is responsible for his friend's death, to which Declan answers that all evidence points to Helen Magnus.

Act I[]

Declan tells Will that Bigfoot contacted him two days ago about Magnus behaving strangely, and that combined with the physical evidence -- the weapon used in the killing belonged to Magnus -- he had to invoke Article 9 of the Sanctuary charter. Will visits Magnus in isolation, who tells him that she has no memory of the past week. She believes someone deliberately erased her memories to set her up, and begs Will to help her.

Henry Foss mourns at the foot of Bigfoot's sarcophagus. Kate Freelander joins him and tells him that Will wants to see them. In his office, Will explains to Kate that according to Article 9, the apparent wrongdoing has to be reviewed by the other heads of house of the Sanctuary Network. They begin to investigate the crime scene and Magnus's encrypted files.

At the crime scene, Will and Kate discuss Magnus's behavior; Kate remembers receiving irrational orders from Magnus per e-mail, which Magnus later denied to ever have sent. Moments later, Will discovers what seems to be the remains of a removed surveillance camera.

Back at the Sanctuary, Henry has finished hacking Magnus's computer and found a number of brain scans she made of herself. He shows them to Declan, who concludes that she knew her condition was getting worse, and brought Will into the Network to replace her. The heads of house have charged Declan with collecting evidence in the case, and sent a triad of telepaths to check Magnus's mind.

Act II[]

The triad has arrived at the Sanctuary: Emma Correia, the only female of the telepaths, is led to her room by Will. She unwittingly reads his mind and is flattered by his obvious attraction to her. She also explains that she and her colleagues will scan Magnus in the afternoon.

Henry informs Will that the surveillance video from the removed camera had been deleted from the police network by the Chief of the Old City Police Department at Magnus's request.

Kate meets with one of her informants, who informs her that Magnus recently bought a bunch of red-list abnormal material, but does not know what exactly it was.

At the Sanctuary, Magnus is scanned by the triad in the presence of Will and Declan. They ask her a number of questions, but Magnus cannot remember anything. The telepaths try to talk to her calmly, but she is very upset and shows signs of dementia and paranoia. Will ends the session and reconvenes with Henry, who shows him another email.

Will angrily confronts Declan, who asked the heads of house to put him in charge of the Old City Sanctuary. He explains that he only wants to be in charge so that everyone can continue their work the way Magnus would want them to. At that point, Henry calls: he has found a backup copy of the surveillance video.

It shows Bigfoot being shot by Magnus.

Act III[]

Will is informed that Magnus is being declared unfit to lead the Sanctuary, and will be transferred. Declan is put in charge of the facility. Will talks to Magnus, who is becoming increasingly paranoid, accusing everyone around of conspiring against her. Realizing that something is indeed wrong with Magnus, he wants to leave her room, but she knocks him out.

Henry continues to go through Magnus's files, while Will and Kate try to find Magnus in an abandoned storage facility. Meanwhile, Henry finds a suspicious encrypted file in the Network's computer systems and calls Will. They have to meet somewhere safe, as Will cannot return to the Sanctuary with the knowledge of Magnus's whereabouts.

At Dead Bridge, Henry explains that he has found some kind of encrypted ghost drive on a project called "Big Bertha" in the Network's system. Will then returns to Magnus, but is followed by Declan, who arrests Magnus.

Act IV[]

Later, Emma explains that "Big Bertha" was an extremely powerful abnormal, who was able to alter the magnetic resonance in her own body to manipulate tectonic plates. Magnus tracked, captured and killed her, or so it was thought; there are indications that she is still alive.

Declan makes Henry open the Big Bertha file, which reveals that the abnormal is indeed alive and currently transferred to a new location. While the Network makes preparations to retrieve her, Will decides to quit. Emma tries to talk him out of it, but he is unwilling to believe in Magnus's mysterious "degenerative brain disease". Afterwards, he visits the sedated Magnus one more time to say goodbye. Just when he wants to leave, Magnus begins to shake violently with a seizure, and Will calls for help.

Act V[]

Magnus is drugged in order to stop her seizures. News arrive that Big Bertha has been stolen by mercenaries off the African coast.

Will visits Bigfoot's sarcophagus, and opens it, only to discover that it is empty. He suddenly realizes that all the events are part of a scheme by Magnus: she faked her brain scans and used an ozone beetle to manipulate her own thoughts in order to hide her knowledge of the fact that Big Bertha is actually dead. The other evidence was planted to bring the traitor in the triad to the conclusion that she was still alive.

Some time later, at a port in Djibouti, East Africa Emma meets with the mercenaries she paid to steal Big Bertha. However, the container they took only holds a tracking device: Sanctuary intervention forces led by Will and Declan arrive and arrest Emma and the mercenaries.

Magnus recovers and tells them how Bigfoot's death was faked (his skin can handle a few bullets) and that the whole plan was worked out in order to frame Emma, who had been leaking information from the Network for some time.

In the end, Bigfoot and Henry, who is still a little mad at his best friend for pulling the whole stunt, meet in the elevator. Henry declares that if Bigfoot does anything like this ever again, he will personally shoot him.

Cast[]

Series regulars
Guest starring
Featuring
Mentioned

Quotes[]

to be added

Extras[]

  • This episode has a DVD commentary track. Commentators: Martin Wood, Amanda Tapping, and Gordon Rempel.
  • This episode has a podcast commentary track. Commentators: Jaclyn MacRae, Amanda Tapping, and Martin Wood.
  • Making-Of Featurette - Amanda Tapping Directs "Veritas"

Notes[]


*SEND TO*
ADDRESS BOOK
KATE
*SUBJECT* RETREVE AN ABNORMAL

Kate,

I need you to do me a favor and go to old city to retreve an abnormal. The abnormal is
located at the old border town train station across from the town center, 122 12th street.

Please be aware this is of the utmost importance and you need to arrive on Tuesday at 3pm.
Inform me of the pick up as soon as you have returned.

Sincerely,
Helen
  • Character Error: During the investigation, and again near the end of the episode, Kate Freelander mentions that Helen Magnus sent her an email to retrieve an abnormal for her. Communicating via email for this type of request does not make sense. It would either be done via speaking in person, a telephone call/voicemail, or text message sent to Kate's cellphone.
  • Character Error: When Will Zimmerman asks Kate Freelander to show him the email message Helen Magnus sent her, Kate accesses Helen Magnus's email account via Magnus's personal files that Henry Foss gained access to. Kate does not access her own personal email account to show Will the message that she received from Magnus. This is a weird decision, as there is no guarantee that the sender would still have the sent message in their email, as it could have been deleted at some point afterwards. This is very relevant, considering that Kate had already told Will earlier that Magnus denied having ever sent the email message when Kate asked her about it.
    • Factual Error: When Kate Freelander loads Helen Magnus's email account to show the email message that Magnus sent to Kate, the email message is instead loaded as a draft message based on the monitor showing it under the "New" selection tab, and "SEND TO" instead of "SENT TO". It's not possible for a sent email message to still be in composition like this.
      • Speculation: This may have been intentionally done by the prop department, as another technological error is the fact that sent / received email messages cannot be edited. The subject line of an email message can only be changed either in draft mode presubmission, or in a subsequent reply message. In order for Will Zimmerman to correct the typo in the email's subject line, it would have to be an email message that's currently being composed.
  • Character Error: In the email Helen Magnus sends Kate Freelander, the typed message asks Kate "to go to Old City to retrieve an abnormal". Kate lives at the Old City Sanctuary which is located within Old City. It's very odd and completely redundant to tell someone to go to an area that they are already currently in. If Kate were elsewhere outside of the city, Magnus would have appropriately asked her "to return to Old City to retrieve an abnormal", however, there is no mention of Kate being away at the time she received the email.
  • Factual Error: It is not possible for the corrected word "Retrieve" in the subject line of an email to open a hidden link. To accomplish this would require an external widget to be installed on the device accessing the file (a bot program monitoring that specific save file for that specific program) or modification made to the source code of the email system program itself, to where typing the word "RETRIEVE" would trigger a command to open a tracking program. Either way, it would have to be incredibly specific.
  • Factual Error: When Will Zimmerman corrects the typo in the subject line from "RETREVE" to "RETRIEVE", he places both hands on the keyboard and presses some random keys. On the monitor the cursor then moves to highlight "RETREVE". This is not possible as input to move the cursor is needed from either a mouse or a mousepad, neither of which are used.
  • Character Error: When Will Zimmerman corrects the typo in the subject line from ""RETREVE" to "RETRIEVE", he highlights the entire word "RETREVE" and to replace it then types the entire word "RETRIEVE". All that Will actually had to do to correct the typo was to use a mouse to simply place the cursor between the letters "R" and "E", left click, and type on the keyboard the single letter "I".
    • There is another issue with this, as "retrieve" was spelled wrong twice in the email: once in the subject line, and once in the body of the message.

  • Plot Issue: [[Helen Magnus] placing a hidden link (to the container's tracking beacon) in the subject line of an unrelated email sent to Kate Freelander a week prior and expecting her team to figure it out is astronomically absurd. It hinges heavily on Kate mentioning the double sent email to be included as part of her brief about if she noticed Magnus displaying any weird behavior lately, someone to consider that action important enough to want to actually see and scrutinize the email like a piece of evidence, and to do so, someone hacking into her personal email, searching for that singular unrelated email, notice a single letter typo in the subject line, load the email as a draft, then correcting the typo in the subject line of a draft. One top of this, there is a massive stretch between someone seeing a typo (knowing it's not usual character behavior) and to take the initiative to correct the typo. Normal behavior would be to think "I wonder why they did that" / notice it or overlook it as being insignificant; No one would be like "Let me unnecessarily fix this". It would have been a lot easier and way more realistic to have the tracker program located on an external USB drive hidden away in a desk drawer locked behind a passcode (just like how the other encrypted Big Bertha files were found by Henry Foss).
    • Plot Issue: Helen Magnus set her plan in motion a week prior by sending Kate Freelander the same email twice. She then puts an ozone beetle up her nose and fakes murdering Bigfoot to call in the triad. At the end of the episode, Magnus explains that she left careful instructions for the whole thing to be called off in two days time (it's unknown if it's two days from when she shot Bigfoot or two days after the current day) if the plan went badly. It's unknown how long the effects of the Chilean shepard frog secretions last, and Bigfoot is very lucky that an autopsy wasn't performed on his still living body. Magnus had no control over the timing of the investigation. The whole plan would have been for nought, had the triad left before Henry Foss found the files on Big Bertha. Also, the Sanctuary would have been at a severe disadvantage if they never found the tracking beacon signal as soon as they did (or ever) in order to arrive in time to wait and ambush Emma Correia and the pirates on the dock in Djibouti, Africa. Had the investigation gone very slowly and Bigfoot returned alive before the triad left, it would have ruined the entire plan and alerted Emma to Magnus trying to catch her.
  • Plot Issue / Anachronism: At the end of the episode, it's explained that Helen Magnus had noticed over the past few years information leaks that couldn't be traced back to the Cabal. The Sanctuary Network only found out about the Cabal and had their first encounter with them just over a year prior and both organizations seem to keep to their own respective domains. Also, why would the Cabal have anything to do with leaks of Sanctuary Network information? Did the Network hire spies and or were hacked? The Network deals seemingly with many contracted individuals, many of whom who could have easily let some information slip during conversation.
  • Plot Issue: Helen Magnus's plan was to use Big Bertha to figure out the traitor, however, it's wouldn't identify a singular person, just someone potentially in the group, as too many people were involved; Declan MacRae, all three triad members, plus the entire retrieval team Declan sent to the ship. Any of them (even if they themselves weren't a traitor) could have said something to another person they trusted, and that other person could be the one at actual fault.
    • Plot Issue: The only way the Sanctuary Network figured out that Emma Correia was the mole was due to her being caught physically present on the dock with the pirates as the massive container is unloaded and immediately opened. Had she had practiced delayed gratification, waiting to see the container until the container was i.e. taken to a warehouse, she would never have been caught in the raid at the dock. Also, Emma could have easily never showed up at all, had she simply orchestrated everything by telephone/text/email from another location.
    • Plot Issue: It's a very bold and dumb move for Emma Correia to have initiated an immediate heist of Big Bertha right after learning about her existence. The timing is very obvious that someone within a group of less than a handful of people is responsible for the theft. She should have wisely waited until a later date to steal the abnormal. She and the pirates are also dumb enough to not think that a tracker would be placed on such a valuable asset; believing that only the cargo ship was being tracked.
  • Factual Error: The cargo ship carrying the container that supposedly held Big Bertha inside was tracked and boarded by pirates. The pirates then stole the container from that ship, placing it onto their own ship. This ship was then docked in Djibouti, East Africa and unloaded the container. Stealing the container would realistically be impossible to do. Even during planned resupply missions conducted by military operations, open seas operations such as this are very difficult, dangerous, and time consuming as a pallet system is used to transfer materials between vessels. A standard cargo container may be possible to knock off the top row on the edge into the ocean then collected, however the container for Big Bertha was epically gargantuan. There's no feasible way that container could have been stolen off the ship. It would have been infinitely easier to hijack the steal the entire ship that was carrying it.

Gallery[]

References[]

SanctuarySeason 2
● 01 End of Nights, Part I ● 02 End of Nights, Part II ● 03 Eulogy ● 04 Hero ● 05 Pavor Nocturnus ● 06 Fragments ● 07 Veritas ● 08 Next Tuesday ● 09 Penance ● 10 Sleepers ● 11 Haunted ● 12 Kali, Part I ● 13 Kali, Part II
Story Arc   :   Big Bertha
● 2x07 Veritas ● 2x12 Kali, Part I ● 2x13 Kali, Part II ● 3x01 Kali, Part III ● 3x02 Firewall
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