In Boston, a bike courier rides up to an office building. We can tell he's a courier as opposed to a biking enthusiast because he's doing the pant-leg-rolled-up thing. He locks his bike up and heads into the building, past the Vitas Petrol sign.

Into the elevator he goes, which already holds an older man with close-cropped hair, who's already pushed the button for the 16th floor, which is where the courier's going. "Going to be a nice one today," says the courier as he glances over the man, receiving a curt agreement in accented English from the other dude. There's a little bit of sweat rolling down the older man's face. "You don't look so good," says the courier, which is easy for him to say, with his youth and his hairline! The older guy turns his head, and there's a little trickle of blood coming from his left nostril. He wipes his nose with a tissue, but there's more blood coming, and as they get off the elevator, he's pale and glistening with sweat. He wanders away from the direction of Vitas Petrol's reception desk, and the courier tells "Helen" that he thinks there's something wrong with the guy. Helen calls to him to tell him he needs to sign in, and the older guy looks at her, and it's not clear if he's even comprehending her.

Then he collapses and is on his back on the floor while people freak out and the courier performs CPR on the guy to no avail. He checks for a pulse around the guy's neck. "He's dead," the courier tells the office worker who was trying to help.

But wait, there's more! Suddenly the veins in the dead guy's body are all standing out in sharp relief as his body convulses, and a red mist spews from the corpse's mouth, splattering on everybody nearby, which is a lot of people, since the looky-loos had all come over to see what was going on. In a talking head, Michael Scott says, "Reminds me of the time Meredith collapsed after a bender the night before."

After the opening credits, we watch Astrid anxiously make her way through the Boston Children's Science Center, until she's stopped by a helpful employee. Astrid says she's looking for someone who's lost, and the employee assumes she's talking about a kid, but it doesn't take a genius to see where this is going. "Ah. A special needs individual," says the employee when Astrid tells him it's not a student but a man. "You have no idea," says Astrid.

Sure enough, there's Walter, lecturing a bunch of kids about the history of the first circumnavigation of the world, and that when the Victoria arrived back home, only eighteen of the original 237 crew members were on board. A little girl asks what happened to everyone. "They all died, little girl, horrible and most likely painful deaths," says Walter, looking slightly annoyed at being asked, while the woman with the "Science is fun!" sticker on her sweater looks uncomfortable. Heh. Walter starts telling them about the price to pay for opening certain doors, and gives them the example of how when you check under your beds for monsters, you are immediately eaten, whereas if you hadn't looked, you wouldn't wind up "being slowly digested in the stomach-sac of the creature." I'm not convinced this is as self-evident as he seems to think it is. The bright side, though, is that maybe their screams will serve as stark reminders of the grim butcheries that await us under our beds.