Directed by: Karen Gaviola  |  Written by: Jennifer Cecil

Official synopsis: Ellen has to make another life-changing choice when she performs emergency surgery in her own home. Meanwhile, Duncan demands answers when Archer tells him that an innocent person in their plan has become a victim.

Last time on Hostages: The Sanders family tried to escape the Ski Mask Crew. The kids, shockingly, were the most successful; Brian/Jimmy Cooper stayed behind as a decoy and got shot in the stomach for his troubles. This episode opens right where we left off, with Ellen staring, horrified, at her video chat as her husband bleeds on the floor. She looks between her phone and her kids waiting in the bus station like she’s not immediately going to run back home. Back at the house, Duncan “Gillette Me Help You With That” Carlisle is frantically trying to save the life of the man he just shot. Maria-whose name, apparently, is now Sandrine in the show?-wants to know why he’s bothering, but Carlisle tells her to help. Instead she asks Brian where his kids are. “Gone,” he says, and she presses her hand into his towel-covered wound to try to get him to talk. Then Ellen shows up and tells her to get away from him.

Meanwhile, the kids are at the bus stop panicking that their parents have abandoned them. Then Morgan gets paged on the intercom, and they run to the desk. But instead of a member of the Ski Mask Crew waiting for them, they find the envelope with cash, passports, and a note from Ellen telling them to go on ahead. Morgan, to her credit, immediately buys two tickets to the next bus while Jake protests

At the house, Ellen examines BJC’s wound and tells Carlisle she has to operate, and he’s like, Great! Use your kitchen table. BJC asks Ellen why she came back, then goes incoherent, and she realizes he’s bleeding out. She pulls out her home defibrillator and shocks him into consciousness, and is weirdly calm throughout the whole thing, as Kramer comes up and tells Carlisle he can’t find Archer, but that he “left word,” because he apparently doesn’t like the word voicemail. But then Archer shows up and tells Kramer they had a little problem with Angela the nurse, whom everyone thinks is dead: She’s actually dead. Archer was tasked with hiding her away for two weeks, but she tried to run and he shot her instead. Carlisle is not pleased, but Archer serves up some real talk: “You don’t get to kill the President and keep your hands clean at the same time.”

Sandrine tracks the kids to the bus stop, but they manage to hide from her. Then they get on the bus, but the driver says they’re waiting on one more passenger-which turns out not to be Sandrine. She’s inside trying to bribe the ticket officer, but he is having none of it, so she walks away-and straight into the clutches of a private detective and some goons, who take her gun and muscle her into a car. Turns out she owes money to a drug lord (or something), so he beats her up and tells her he needs his money pronto.

At Chez Sanders, Ellen is operating on BJC and makes Carlisle help. Then they hear pounding and yelling at the front door. Carlisle orders Ellen to answer the door but to first take off her dress because it’s covered in blood. She does, and the camera lingers on him watching her undress, and I swear if they are trying to set up some kind of sexual connection between the two of them I will break my TV. Ellen goes to the door, and of course it’s Morgan’s idiot boyfriend, Boyd. He babbles that he loves Morgan and that he got off to a bad start with Mr. Sanders but with Morgan being pregnant and all he wants to make things right. Ellen has about two seconds to digest this information before Carlisle comes out of the shadows with a gun, so she says something about baby hormones making Morgan crazy but she’ll come around, and hustles him out the door. Ellen is mad that BJC talked to Boyd and didn’t tell her, but then she figures out it was Carlisle. “He thought you were my husband,” she says, looking disgusted.

Later, BJC is on the couch recovering from surgery and asks Ellen why she came back. He says he was prepared to die. She says she knows he told her about his affair with Samantha to make her hate him. “You hurt me, but when he shot you I couldn’t just walk away,” she says. Then Carlisle comes in and ties her hands, then pulls her out and puts her in the trunk of a car. “You tried to escape; now it’s time to pay for that,” he says. Kramer’s left in charge of BJC, who asks him to get him something for the pain. Kramer gets him a whiskey, and BJC deduces that he is a former alcoholic. He starts trying to appeal to Kramer’s compassion, asking him to let the family go, but Kramer tells him he doesn’t even know his own family-including that his son is dealing weed. Speaking of the son, Jake the idiot calls home from a payphone, and Kramer picks up. Jake asks if his parents are alive, Kramer says yes and that Jake can trust him, but Jake hangs up instead.

Duncan has driven Ellen out to the middle of the woods, because “no one can hear you scream out here.” (Seriously, he says that.) He tells her to start digging a hole. As she does, he tells her the story of a rapist who came into the ER while Ellen was on duty and attacked her, and she defended herself with a scalpel but then let him bleed out, because he deserved to die. He makes her admit it’s true, then tells her that’s why they picked her for their nefarious plan-“because we need a killer” and the President deserves to die. Then he tells her to kneel down and pulls out his gun. She cries and steels herself for death, but instead of shooting her he rolls Angela’s body into the hole and tells Ellen to bury it. She says what I’m thinking and calls him a sick bastard. After she’s done, they head back to the house, and she tells him he can torture her as much as he wants, but her kids got away, so she won. But of course, when they get back to the house she finds her kids there, because Kramer was able to trace Jake’s phone call. Also Carlisle for some reason has Archer arrested, and Sandrine tells Carlisle she needs $50,000 by tomorrow, non-negotiable.