Pilot Study: Touch

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Touch - "Tales of the Red Thread" (50 minutes)
Original air date: January 25, 2012

Themes

Fate, destiny, patterns

Setting

Modern day, New York City (with scenes in other places around the world)

Opening 

Narration: voice over by a young boy (11 years old)
- Fibonacci sequence
- Golden ratio: 1.618
- red thread of fate in Chinese legend

Characters

Martin Bohm

- baggage handler at JFK airport
- scared of heights
- former report
- Jake's dad
- wife, Sarah, was a stock broker in World Trade Center and died on 9/11

Jake

- Martin's son
- autistic and mute
- math genius—uses numbers to find connections between people and make predictions
- likes orange soda, popcorn, and taking apart cell phones

Clea Hopkins

- child services representative
- evaluating the home life of Jake because he keeps getting in trouble at school (going off on his own and climbing cell towers) and Martin's succession of low-wage jobs can't provide the resources Jake might need

Simon Plimpton

- from London
- sells restaurant supplies around the world
- lost his phone at the Heathrow airport (London), and wants it back because it's the only place he has photos of his daughter, Lily, who died the previous year.

Red threads

Globe-hopping telephone

- belongs to Simon Plimpton from London

• London: Heathrow airport. Simon lost his phone.
• New York City: JFK airport. Martin finds phone and answers when it rings, but he gets interrupted by a call on his own phone from Jake's school. Martin leaves Simon's phone on the luggage carousel.
• Ireland: Niles uses the phone to record singer Kayla Graham. Then he stashes phone in a business man's luggage.
• Tokyo: A girl finds the phone, watches Kayla's video, and starts a fan club. She arranges to have the phone's photos and videos uploaded on screens around the city. Then she passes the phone on to a man traveling to Kuwait.
• Kuwait. (We don't know what happened to the phone, but it ends up in Iraq.)
• Iraq: phone become countdown for a bomb strapped to the boy who needs an over for his mother's bakery

The phone is a red thread connecting Simon Plimpton (the restaurant supplier) to the boy in Iraq (whose mother needs an oven). Bonus: Simon is in Tokyo when the phone's contents go up on the big screens, so he sees the photos of his daughter.

Winning lottery ticket 

- belongs to Randy, the firefighter who tried to save Sarah. The numbers are the details of when and where he found her. He isn't sure that Sarah was dead when he left her during the 9/11 attack, so he played the same lottery number every day and decided if he would win, he would give the money to her family.

• Jake takes the ticket after Randy buys it, copies down the numbers, and then gives it back to Randy.
• Randy tells Martin that Jake should be kept in a cage. Randy punches Martin in the stomach and leaves.
• Martin realizes that Jake's numbers mean something is going to happen at Grand Central Station. He goes there, sees Randy, and they get into a fight.
• Randy misses his train because of the fight. On his way back to his New York apartment, he sees the overturned school bus and rescues the kids on it.

The winning lottery ticket is a red thread connecting Randy (who wants to make up for leaving Sarah behind) to Sarah's family (who need money because Martin's job does not pay enough). Bonus: Jake's predictions set up Randy to be in the right place at the right time to see the overturned school bus. Randy couldn't save Sarah, but he has the opportunity to save a group of kids.

318

- school bus number (and date it overturns)
- fire department badge at Sarah's grave
- alarm clock on Martin's computer
- address of Teller Institute (who knows about children who find mathematical patterns in everything)
- security footage time on each instance that Jake gets caught at school
- Lily died on March 18, the previous year