Original air date: May 3, 1997

Written by: Chris Ruppenthal & Tommy Thompson

Directed by: Terrence O’Hara

An anonymous email promising clues concerning his past sends Jarod to New Orleans, while Sydney receives a note telling him to go to Minneapolis.

Jarod’s Discoveries: Animal Figurines

Jarod’s Occupations: Hitman

Jarod’s Aliases: Jarod Doe

Behind the scenes insights and the Creator’s Take

Official Synopsis

In New Orleans, Jarod impersonates a dead hit man…and searches for a clue to his own past.

After Jarod gets an e-mail containing a man’s picture and a note telling him to go to New Orleans for a clue about his past, he arrives at a hotel room…but finds it in a shambles, with an injured man on the floor.  Jarod performs CPR, but it’s too late and the man dies.  Finally, Jarod looks around, sees a scar on the man’s knee, and a case full of guns nearby.  Just then the phone rings, and a man on the other end, Donny, asks about a “hit”—revealing the dead man is a contract killer.  Meanwhile, back at the Centre, Sydney receives a note telling him to go to a hotel in Minneapolis for another clue about the past.  Back in New Orleans, Donny takes Jarod, who’s now pretending to be the hit man, to see his uncle Tug, a nightclub owner, who hires Jarod to kill a man named Benjamin Worth.  A bit later, Sydney and Miss Parker arrive at the Minneapolis hotel, where Sydney is amused to see a convention of twins in full swing.  Back in New Orleans, Jarod sends Donny, who has been assigned to verify Ben’s death, off on an errand, then goes to the house shown in the fax he received.  There, a neighbor says the man in the photo, Sonny Herbert, used to investigate missing children, and tells Jarod where to find his old office.  Then, a bit later, as Ben frolics in a pool…Jarod sticks a gun into his neck.

A bit later, Jarod goes back to his hotel room, and practices breathing through a tube from underwater in the bathtub.  Then he loads the real hit man’s body into the shower, fills the stall with ice, and goes off with Donny to carry out the hit on Ben.  Back at the twin convention, two women, Millie and Tillie, approach Sydney, calling him “Dr. Jacob,” and reveal they were once a part of a study at the Centre.  At Ben’s house, Jarod enters first, and when Donny follows a moment later, he finds Jarod taking pictures of Ben’s dead body.  When he finishes, Jarod and Donny drive the body to a deserted road, and bury it. Then they return to Tug’s club, where Tug gives Jarod a picture of his next victim.  A bit later, back at his hotel, Jarod asks Ben, who’s very much alive (he used a tube to breathe through the dirt when Jarod buried him), why Tug wants him dead, and Ben explains that Tug wants to buy a club which Ben owns, but refuses to sell.  Jarod shows Ben the picture of the next victim, which Ben says is his estranged wife, Doris.  A bit later, Jarod goes to Sonny Herbert’s old office, where the manager says another man, fitting Raines’ description, also visited recently, but didn’t find anything of interest.  Now, however, he remembers some old files in the basement…but although this news excites Jarod, he’s quickly disappointed to learn the files contain no information about him.

Back in Minneapolis, as Sydney flashes back to his and Jacob’s car accident, Millie and Tillie return, and tell Sydney that they remember seeing Jacob, just days before the car accident, arguing with Mr. Raines, who pulled a gun on Jacob.  In New Orleans, Jarod visits Sonny’s old secretary, who says Sonny’s still alive, but in the hospital, in and out of consciousness, after being critically injured in a fire not long ago.  A bit later, Jarod goes to Ben’s wife’s house, and as he goes inside to talk to her, Donny watches from across the street.  Then, suspicious, Donny returns to Ben’s grave, digs it up and is furious to find it empty.

A bit later, Donny and Tug confront Jarod, but Jarod insists he moved Ben’s body to keep it hidden, and then shows Tug a photo of Doris Worth, bound and gagged, to prove he is setting up her murder.  Tug calms down, but asks to verify Jarod’s identity by seeing the scar he has heard the hit man bears on his knee.  There’s a tense moment, but then Jarod rolls up his pants and, sure enough, there’s a large scar, which satisfies Tug.  After Tug and Donny leave, Jarod goes with Ben and Doris to a clearing in the woods and puts Doris in a locked car, which has a tube going from the exhaust pipe to the interior.  Just then, Tug and Donny arrive, and when Tug is satisfied Doris will die, he asks Donny to kill Jarod.  Jarod, however, knocks them both down, takes Doris out of the car, and locks Donny and Tug inside instead.  Then he and Ben set up a video camera, and as the car starts to fill with exhaust, Jarod gets Tug and Donny to confess to hiring a hit man to kill Ben and Doris.  Finally, Jarod puts the confession tape in the trunk, where he is also stashed the real hit man’s body, and, after explaining to Ben and Doris that the car only has enough gas in its tank to run another few seconds (which means Tug and Donny will still be very much alive when the police arrive), he drives away.  Back in Minneapolis, Sydney imagines talking to a ghost of Jacob’s younger self, and says he realizes now that Jacob was in trouble.  Meanwhile, Jarod goes to Sonny Herbert’s room, and shows him a picture of Jarod’s mother…but while Sonny does remember the woman once hired him to look for her missing son, he slips back into unconsciousness before he can remember her name.  Finally, much later, Jarod calls Sydney to thank him for sending Sonny’s photo, but Sydney says he wasn’t the one who sent it.  He thanks Jarod for sending him to the twins’ convention, but Jarod also insists the invitation didn’t come from him.  And then, as we see them both wondering who did contact them, we see Angelo, watching Sydney from inside a nearby air vent.