#121 The White Room – Primer

Max is interrogated and tortured by Agent Pierce, but is able to keep his true identity hidden. Agent Pierce shows Max the orb communicator he has had in his possession and demands to know where the other one is.

Michael, Isabel, Nasedo and Tess join forces to save Max. Nasedo teaches Michael that he has more power than he ever knew; he just needs to learn how to channel it. Tess also reveals she has the ability to mind warp people, causing them to see what’s not really there.

Michael and Nasedo rescue Max with the help of Isabel and Tess’s powers, but Nasedo has to stay behind to let Max and Michael fully escape. Pierce shoots Nasedo, who goes down.

Meanwhile, fearing for Max’s life Liz goes to Valenti. She tells him the FBI has the real Max as he originally thought. Valenti shows up just as Michael is carrying out Max, and helps them escape by shooting Agent Pierce in the arm.

Jason Katims Commentary

“…Jonathan Frakes who directed the episode…he did a great job with it…”

Transcribed by Lena

The “White Room” I thought was one of the most effective episodes that we did and we own a lot to Jonathan Frakes who directed the episode and did a great job with. It it’s very challenging from a production point of view he really pulled it off in a great way it was really stunning and I thought in particular, there was a challenge where there were so many scenes in this white room and I thought he did a great job making all those scenes feel different and making it feel like there was a progression from one scene to the other and they actually really seemed to have a great movement to it. There’s one line in the episode that I thought Thania St. John and I co-wrote the episode and when we were going over the script, there was a scene where agent Pierce – the FBI agent . was about to cut Max open to get to the next level of torture and then we had a scene – it was about a half page of dialogue – and we realized that it was too much. That we had to try to condense the idea into a line and Thania came up with this line which is Max looks up to Pierce and he says ‘who’s human now?’ and I thought that it captured what that whole episode was about in it in a weird way, what the series is about and that’s “The White Room”.