‘Haven’ 3.02 Recap: “The Angry, Rabid Man-Dog with a Gun”

Honestly, I hadn’t planned to continue recapping this season of ‘Haven’ beyond the season premiere. However, Friday’s episode was preceded by a warning about gruesome, disturbing content, and how could I resist that?

‘Stay’ opens when a seemingly feral naked man invades a convenience market. My cable provider’s programming guide describes the threat this week as “barbarians,” but Audrey and Nathan assume that he’s a zombie at first. As it turns out, he’s neither. Nor is he even Troubled.

In tracking this crazy guy, Nathan and Audrey find more just like him holed up together in a barn on the outskirts of town. Unbelievably, these men are dogs. No, not just horny jerks – they’re literally dogs. The Troubled person in this instance is a young boy named Liam whose dog Jesse was about to be put down for rabies. His power manifested by turning all of the dogs in the area into humans. The longer they stay humans, the smarter they get, to the point where they figure out how to wear clothes and use tools as weapons – even, potentially, a gun.

Jesse is the alpha of these dog-men. Because he’s a loyal pooch, he loves Liam and kidnaps him to keep him safe from the boy’s father, whom Jesse sees as a threat. (The guy was going to put him down, after all.) But because Jesse has rabies, he’s also kind of nuts, and thus dangerous. This all leads to a confrontation in the woods, where Audrey makes the boy’s father apologize to Jesse and show him compassion, upon which all of the dog-men turn back into dogs, and the rabid Jesse dies.

Liam is found soon afterwards, and Audrey gives him a stray she calls Cookie, whom she’d grown attached to when she found him in the form of a teenage boy.

The disturbing content mentioned in the warning? Audrey and Nathan find a bunch of dog carcasses torn to pieces. I’m unclear whether they died while turning into humans, or were killed by the dog-men. Also, in following clues to a veterinary office, they see an adult man’s body scrunched up in a tiny cage, his neck broken when he transformed.

In other events, as a result of her kidnapping in previous episodes, Audrey is assigned to mandatory therapy with a younger psychologist named Claire Callahan. Audrey is resistant, but Claire, who has plenty of experience counseling the Troubled, proves to be an asset in the dog-men case.

Also, Duke investigates the warning that Audrey had found (in her own handwriting) to “Find him before the Hunter.” We already know that the “him” is the Colorado Kid. What Duke realizes is that the Hunter is not a person, but a meteor storm that passes the Earth every 27 years. Each time it does is when Audrey (or whatever her identity at the time happens to be) vanishes, only to turn up in a new identity later. The next appearance is scheduled for just two months away.

The case-of-the-week in this episode is a little corny, and the resolution strikes me as pretty lame. However, the turn of events about the countdown to Audrey’s impending disappearance could lead to something interesting. I still like this show, even if I wish that it had remained a summer series.

1 comment

  1. Bryan

    This was a weird episode with the man-dogs, but I ended up liking it – mostly for that reveal about when Audrey is supposedly going to “vanish.”

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