'Project Blue Book' Season 2 Episode 5 Review: Mimi is the unlikely hero who saves Hynek from the Men in Black
Spoiler alert for Season 2 Episode 5 — 'The Men in Black'
Ever since its first season, History's aliens and UFOs drama 'Project Blue Book' has been about tastefully debunking claims of alien sightings that saw a massive spurt back in the '50s, while showing nuanced portrayal of relationships evolving between its characters to add the much-needed drama.
Even though the show was very much a Dr J Allen Hynek and Captain Michael Quinn show — the two main men in the titular investigation — there was also the prominent presence of Hynek's wife Mimi, as not only his romantic partner but also an active participant in the ever murky plot of the show.
And now, in Season 2, as Mimi treads into the territory of close encounters of the third kind, it is pretty much her involvement that saves Hynek's life in Episode 5.
Titled 'The Men in Black', the episode sees Hynek and Quinn separated for the first time in the course of their investigation. It begins with the eponymous man in black — William, FKA Unseen, who pretty much kidnaps Hynek at the end of the previous episode.
As we find out soon enough, he wants him to dig deeper into the Maury Island sightings. The group hunts down a man called Earnest Reed who had claimed in the past that while on a regular day out on the lake, he had witnessed flying saucers that zoomed across the sky without making a single sound.
The giant saucers allegedly had giant holes in the middle, which itself were bigger than the size of Reed's entire boat, and things were fine until mayhem stuck and suddenly, the saucers started pelting metallic shrapnel into the lake. They lit ablaze underneath the ships and Reed's boat as well.
The episode shows Reed suffering a wound on his arm due to the fiery pellets the saucer ejected, but in real life, the whole Maury Island incident was nothing but an elaborate hoax.
However, that's a story the show doesn't aim on debunking as much as it does in trying to explain just why Reed might have been confused about what he saw, and moreover, why when William and Hynek finally catch up to him, he totally denied the entire incident ever happening until his life was under threat.
As the conspiracy surrounding the government's involvement in shutting up these claims begin whiffing off the episode, back home in Ohio, Mimi is on to a whole other conspiracy as she slowly figures out just what happened to her husband.
It begins when Hynek calls Mimi after getting kidnapped by William, to let her know of his whereabouts. Hynek doesn't spill much and he insists on that throughout the call which is being overheard by William on a parallel line.
Almost as if speaking codes to notify Mimi that he wasn't entirely voluntarily indulging in whatever is keeping him away from home, Hynek asks Mimi to kiss their son goodnight and that single request is enough for Mimi to have a full-blown outrage at Quinn, asserting why she needs to be on the case when her husband's life is in danger.
Mimi's devotion to helping out Allan lands her in the Air Base and in Quinn's office where the captain's assistant is asked to make arrangements for her to stay the night.
It is pretty much this whole overnight stint that sees Mimi dissect the little clues Quinn gathers from Rebecca — the MK-Ultra subject from last week, to put two and two together and figure out that Hynek might be off doing something related to the alien object he had stolen.
The other big help in Hynek's case proves to be CIA agent Daniel Banks who is still very much wrapped in the UFO investigation, three episodes later.
In their hunt for Hynek, the episode also sees Quinn teaming up with Banks to look for Hynek at Maury Island, and eventually, in a physical altercation between the men in black and him and Quinn, Banks is the one who ends up saving Hynek from getting shot.
The episode also devotes a significant amount of time in trying to debunk the claims of blazing shrapnel that the spaceship allegedly ejected in a very shark-nightmare-meets-he-pirate-genre fashion where Hynek and William head out to the middle of the lake where glowing green debris attracts them under.
When divers try retrieving the object, one of them isn't able to resurface, and the other one that does is beyond shaken and terrified. He claims there's something down there and this same thing also grabs on to their gigantic boat and almost topples it over.
Hynek believes this is all volcanic ash — pit stone if you will, and glad as we are for the mindblowing scientific explanations Hynek can always come up with, especially when trying to save the lives of those the men in black take hostage in their search for truth, this debunking somehow leaves more to the desire.
For some reason, Hynek's explanations don't really set in this time.
'Project Blue Book' Season 2 airs on Tuesdays at 10 pm only on History.