Episode Recap: Base Pair

After weeks of wondering, we finally learn where that mysterious helicopter whisked Vanessa off to. She wakes up in a room inside a large facility. There’s a strange voice in the next room and a very nice nurse here to offer Vanessa some food. Naturally, Vanessa takes the opportunity to attack the nurse and escape.

As she makes her way through the facility, Vanessa makes a few discoveries. For one, there aren’t that many guards. For another, there are a whole lot of vampires, but they’re all locked up in observation rooms. Oh, and one more thing, the whole facility is run by one man: Dr. Bruce Harrison. He’s studying vampires in an effort to cure the disease and thinks Vanessa might hold the key.

Vanessa keeps running right past Dr. Bruce, but she ends up trapped once she discovers that the whole facility is built into a mountain. The nurse, whose name is Abigail, arrives, and she starts talking about how brilliant Dr. Bruce is and how he’s going to save them all from the Rising. One thing that’s unclear: how does he know about Vanessa’s abilities?

So it turns out that Dr. Bruce was brought in by the government years before the Rising to find a cure for vampirism. He really just wants to know if Vanessa can turn vampires back to humans. Dr. Bruce introduces Vanessa to Martin. He's a vampire, currently, but he used to work there. They injected him with what they thought was a dead version of the vampire virus with obvious results. They want Vanessa to turn him so they can study his blood and maybe find a cure.

Vanessa says she'll think about helping him out with a cure, but before she can storm off, the nurse is calling after her. Only she's using the name "Nessa." Apparently she used to know Vanessa's mother when they both worked at The Farm.

Back in her room, Vanessa continues to have those creepy Vampire dreams full of images of the elder and the Red Door and now the vampires in the basement and Martin. The creepy voice nearby tells her he's been there for years and that most people in the facility don't know what's "really going on."

A little snooping in the facility leads Vanessa to a suspicious looking book. It’s called “History of Vampires” and it's full of odd pages and strange images but before she can get far she's interrupted by her mom's old "friend” who tells her that the fluke of Vanessa and Scarlett's abilities came from an accident at the Farm. Their mother was obsessed with being prepared for the Rising and as a result accidentally injected herself with a serum made from the blood of a "special vampire." She ran and hid the girls when the military found out about them.

Of course, there's more to Abigail than meets the eye. Like the fact that she's Abigail Van Helsing AKA Vanessa and Scarlett's mother. Abigail assures Vanessa that she wasn't an experiment, and is very surprised to hear that Scarlett is alive and that she was one of the people left behind when they grabbed Vanessa.

Vanessa agrees to help Martin now that she knows her mother is involved. It doesn’t go quite as planned and she ends up having to bite him in the arm but from there on out it’s the usual blood vomit and transformation back into a person. Of course not everything can be business as usual. When Dr. Bruce doesn't get the results he was expecting from Martin, he asks Abigail to ask Vanessa to go find the Elder and bring back DNA samples. Vanessa finally takes the chance to tell her mom about her visions and Abigail warns her that the Elder is more dangerous and important than anyone realizes.

A little more snooping on Vanessa's part reveals that Dr. Bruce might be older than he's letting on. He was at the Farm when Vanessa was a kid and he looked exactly the same. Meanwhile, he and Abigail aren't quite as cozy as they seemed to be in the beginning. He once again insists that Vanessa go after the Elder, while Abigail tells him she'd rather be anywhere but with him.

Vanessa decides to let Dr. Bruce know exactly what she's figured out. Like how he made a drug that allows him to live without aging and how he only wants her to go to the Elder to finish putting together the longevity serum. Vanessa and Abigail decide they've had enough of Dr. Bruce's lies and that they're going to escape the facility together. The armed guards are surprisingly unwilling to shoot, even when Vanessa uses their own vampiric subjects against them, and she and Abigail make it pretty far before Abigail tries to stop her, telling her they need to find Scarlett and get to the Elder. All this because, of course, this was a set up the whole time. Abigail isn't her mother. It was all part of Dr. Bruce's plan to get to the Elder. When Vanessa confronts her about her real identity she loses all pretense and shoots Vanessa, claiming that they won't need her once they find Scarlett.