OMG! Underground has no chill, and I'm loving this new slave narrative like none I've ever seen on tv! Roots better come with it Memorial Day! Just when Underground has me wondering how they can top the last episode, they hit me with another great episode! You never know what WGN is going to serve on Wednesday nights!
So the morning after Rosalee and Noah ran away, Cato finds the overseer lying on the ground in his house with a bottle lodged in the side of his throat! But it turns out he's not dead. He starts coughing up blood. Cato pulls the bottle out of his neck and then looks like he's about to choke him to death, until he hears someone coming into the house looking for the overseer. So Cato disappointingly gets up to get something to stop the bleeding and yells out for someone to help. Sure enough the overseer doesn't die, and when Tom has Ernestine come to doctor him up he somehow manages to repeatedly say Rosalee's name, after he hears them all assuming it was Noah who did it to him!
Meanwhile, let us not forget that Josey (Jussie Smollett) is getting ready to kill John Hawkes for allegedly selling his wife. There is also a second runaway with him, the seemingly more rational one of the pair who's tired and hungry and believes the Hawkes when they say they've never sold slaves. Josey on the other hand has no "you know what" to give! When the other runaway tells him the Hawkes probably have some food they can eat, Josey decides he has always wanted to "eat like the White folk." O but no...he doesn't intend to let the Hawkes off the hook in exchange for sharing a meal with them. He ties John up on the other end of the table, and has Elizabeth serving Josey and the other runaway. He yells at her not to look at him, in the same fashion a slave owner would expect his slave not to make eye contact with him. He even purposefully spills a glass of wine just to make her clean it up! The other runaway tells him he doesn't have to be like that, but this was only the beginning. Josey then ties John up by his arms and tells Elizabeth that she has to whip him with a whip! The other runaway leaves thinking Josey's going too far. Elizabeth refuses to whip John until Josey warns she'll be next, and John tells her to do it. So she whips him, with Josey telling her to whip him again and harder, as he continues to tell John to tell the truth and admit he sold his wife. When Elizabeth begs to stop, Josey goes to slap her, but before he does John confesses that he did sell Josey's wife. He explains that what Josey saw was John handling the probating of his owner's estate, which included him giving Josey's wife to a tobacco plantation owner that Josey's owner was in debt to. He tells Josey he went with them to Kentucky where the plantation was, but he's busted in his lie when he says Josey's wife was in the back wrapped in a blanket to get warm. Womp, womp! Josey says his wife was sold during the summer! Which John should have known after the other runaway asked him at the dinner table where he was a few summers back to try to show Josey it wasn't John who sold his wife. But who can keep track of details like that when you and your wife are being tortured. Now, though he wasn't remembering details, John was maneuvering himself out of being hung by his arms. So when Josey tried to stab him, John was able to get loose and a fight ensued. The other runaway came back and knocked Josey out with a blunt object. He then goes to Elizabeth and apologizes. He says he shouldn't have ever left and that they were good folks. Then...BANG!! He gets shot in the head right in front of Elizabeth's face while talking. It looks like it's there friend who's the recently promoted marshall. Either way, he saw the runaway going along the side of the house, which is why he came in. And of course they can't tell him the runaway was saving their lives, because then they'd have to admit they are allowing runaways to come to their house. And you would think after this encounter they'd rethink helping runaways, but that isn't the case. After Elizabeth tells John she knows even if it wasn't Josey's wife, she could tell the story was true, John admits it was and that he didn't think anything of it when he was doing it to impress the law firm in his first year. Elizabeth tells him they'll make up for it, and they put the lamp out for runaway slaves to know it's a safe house.
Meanwhile, Rosalee and Noah are still on the run, and the dogs are hunting them down. Noah gets Rosalee a change of clothes, and the two escape from a shed just before the dogs arrive. They go through the swamp, but the dogs follow after them. Noah tries to send Rosalee on ahead, but she stops to pick some flowers. When the dogs make it on shore Noah yells they have to go, while she's still trying to get the flowers out with bloodied hands. Turns out these weren't just any type of flowers. The flowers were poisonous, and when the dogs got a hold of them they killed the dogs! So the men who were after Noah and Rosalee couldn't catch them, because the dogs were leading them to Rosalee and Noah. Later that evening, while Noah is going over the lyrics to the song with Rosalee, Rosalee asks him why he's going over the song. He reveals to her he's going back for Henry and all of them, and wants her to know the song in case she has to go ahead without him. He explains to her how he's never been the same since he heard about free Black men, and that Henry's fire reignited his desire to be a free man. After listening to him share this part of his story and talk about having to go back for the others, Rosalee kisses Noah before he departs to go back to the plantation.
Back at the Pullman's, Ben talks to Peter (my name for Clarke Peters' character) about Peter having lived with Native Americans before coming into August's life. They talk about Peter learning how to hunt and trap from the Native Americans and how Peter taught those things to August. Ben then asks Peter if he knows what August does with those skills now, to which Peter tells Ben the story of the two wolves that live inside of everyone (essentially one is a good wolf and the other is bad...they are battling each other, but only one can win...the one we choose to feed). Later, Ben's teacher tells August Ben fought a little boy and that it may be related to August always being gone. So August tells her she won't have to worry about Ben anymore. He tells Peter he intends to take Ben with him to learn a trade, the trade of capturing runaways!
Now back on the plantation, Henry is still optimistic that Noah is coming back for them, but Sam tells him Noah already left them all behind. Ernestine goes to see Sam to find out what he knows about Noah and Rosalee, but instead of telling her what he knows he lightweight goes in on her for having left him behind and going into the big house. But he slips up when he tells Ernestine Rosalee wasn't supposed to runaway anyway! Ernestine caught the "supposed to" part and realized there was some type of plan to runaway.
Back in the big house cellar, Tom offers Cato a glass of rum (or was it vodka...I digress). After asking Cato how long he's worked for him (which I found to be an interesting choice of words...had me thinking for a second that Cato was an employee not a slave...but then I remembered Cato claimed to need to runaway too...so he was indeed a slave). Cato said 11 years, and then Tom told him he was going to be the new overseer and gave him the whip. When Tom walked away, Cato had a smile on his face that threw me off. Was he excited to be the overseer or excited to be in an even better position to help the rest of them runaway. It would be hard to get away anyway, because the plantation was on lockdown.
August and Ben came to the plantation for the job of getting Noah and Rosalee back, though Tom decided they would only get the job if his men didn't capture them first before the next morning. August went to pay Ernestine a visit, where he did two things. First, he got Ernestine to confirm that her husband passed away before Rosalee was born and that all of Rosalee's family was on the plantation (further implying my notion that Tom is Rosalee's father, or perhaps Tom's father-in-law is??). He also threatened Rosalee with a knife he used to show Ernestine a better way to cut the pig she was cutting up. He did this by saying he knows what kind of person Rosalee is after seeing what she did to the overseer with the bottle, after Ernestine tried to describe her to him as delicate, as he wiped the pig blood off of his knife on Ernestine's apron. But no worries, you know Ernestine is a mastermind when it comes to her children. When Suzanna was talking with a tailor about making a garment for her baby, and the tailor said it would take six weeks (time Suzanna said she didn't have before the baby would be born), Ernestine suggested a train would be faster. To which Suzanna agreed, and the tailor said it could then get done by the end of the week. Ernestine then took news of the train time to Cato, assuming he was in on the plan Sam let slip out and could some how get word about the train to Rosalee (who surely can't come back to the plantation). But Cato tells her plans change!!
Now prior to this scene between Ernestine and Cato, the plans indeed seemed to change. Cato, as the new overseer, went out into the fields and told the field slaves he expected them to pull double the amount of cotton that they usually pulled. And when Zeke tried to tell Cato that Cato's canister was leaking water as he walked through the fields, Cato angrily took the water bucket for the field slaves, poured the water out of it, and stepped in it, declaring no water for them until they pulled double the amount of cotton. A bit later in the field, Moses and Pearly Mae's daughter came to them and told them she couldn't find the papers Pearly Mae made for everyone. Pearly Mae was convinced Cato took them and planned to use it against them, even though Moses said he would look and find the papers that night. Pearly Mae insisted instead that they all had to leave that night, before Cato used the papers against them.
Well that night, after Cato's conversation with Ernestine, he and two other White overseers line up Henry, Sam, Zeke, Moses, Boo, and Pearly Mae. Cato tells them he knows they were planning on running away with Noah, and then proceeds to tell them a cautionary tale about a slave who kept running away even though he kept getting dragged back and burned with oil. And right when I started thinking to myself, wait, is he talking about himself, he says the slave burned half his face off!! Then he sets one of the overseers on fire, stabs the other, and then throws the fire on the field. And the field catches into crazy flames, because it turns out that "water" that was leaking out of his canister earlier was actually gasoline!!! He then yells for them all to run!!
Now Tom comes out telling everyone to get a bucket and the slaves to put water on the fields. But August tells him this is a distraction for more slaves to get away. Why you ask? Well because as August showed Tom, the bucket didn't have a bottom and therefore couldn't hold water (and here I thought Cato only stepped in the bucket to make it dirty!!) So Tom tells him he's got the job, and August and Ben set out to get the runaways. Then we see Cato, Henry, and Zeke running out, followed by Moses, Boo, and Pearly Mae...with August and Ben not far behind them on their horses. Now my first instinct was, wait, do they have time to get the contraption for Moses to hold Boo. And then when I saw her running on her own, I was like, ummm this is certainly not the time for that. She can walk on her own when you aren't being chased! And sure enough, Boo's foot gets caught right outside the plantation gate! Pearly Mae stops to try to get her out, as Boo calls out for Moses (for someone who said Pearly Mae and Boo was coming with him, he sure was running on ahead of them, I'm just saying). He turns around, and when he sees she's stuck goes back to help pull her foot out. But now August and Ben are at the gate right behind them. Pearly Mae tells Moses to get Boo to freedom no matter what, and then turns towards August and puts herself in front of the gun, only asking that he doesn't shoot her in front of her daughter...as Moses runs away with Boo in his arm. Now I get it, perhaps in the moment they both realized Boo would have a better chance of surviving the journey with Moses, as opposed to with Pearly Mae, but really it just felt like Moses too easily kept leaving Pearly Mae behind. Anyway, though he had the gun aimed at her head, when Pearly Mae asked August not to shoot her in front of her daughter, he looked back at Ben. He did't shoot her, but he did take her back to the plantation, where the other slaves, including Sam (who for some reason didn't run with them) was passing buckets of water to stop the fire in the fields.
While the others are running, one of Tom's men on a horse stops Henry and points a gun at him. Then...BANG! The man is shot, and Henry looks in the direction of the shooter and smiles. It's obviously Noah. Then Noah, Cato, Henry, Moses, and Boo come to where Rosalee was waiting! And so the Macon 7 begins (well almost...more like Macon 6)!!