In the dark, dusty bowels of St. Louise's Orphanage, a little girl has been strapped into a rusty wheelchair. "Try to relax, dear," an older woman says. "You just trust Granny and you'll leave your past behind." She brushes the little girl's hair before fastening a leather strap around her head. The girl cries that she doesn't want to forget, but Granny tells her that her memories are holding her back. Except for being creepy as hell, Granny is an attractive woman in a matronly sort of way, quite different from other incarnations of the character. She promises that the little girl will thank her some day. She holds her hand over the girl's head. Red light glows from her palm. The girl screams.

Kent Farm. The sun is shining as Lois puts one of her mom's tapes into the VCR. Lois curls up on the couch, wraps herself up in a plaid blanket and starts the video. Teri Hatcher appears on the TV screen as Ella Lane. She greets Lois, her little girl. "I've asked that you girls not be brought to visit me at the hospital," she says. "I know you don't like being what to do, but I want you to have happy memories of me." Lois cries. Her mom goes on to say that "the Colonel" packed a bag for her. Nightgown, favorite sweater. She's touched that her husband noticed. "He even managed to slip in Blue," she says. He got it for her when they found out she was pregnant with Lois. "We were stationed in Russia; there, this is considered a symbol of hope." Ella is sure that her husband will do a wonderful job raising the girls. She and Lois both tear up. Ella is making the tapes so that she can be there for her daughters in some way, when they need her. I hope she made tapes for Lucy, too. "Play the tapes, think of me," Ella says. "Because losing a parent, it can create a hole in a person's heart." Ella says one day Lois will meet someone special, and, knowing her, it will be "someone tall, dark and handsome." (At first I thought it was odd for a child that young to have a "type," but then I remembered that when I was five, I was madly in love with Superman.) Lois exhales sharply, simultaneously crying and smiling at her mother's prescience. But Ella goes on: "...and you can't commit to that person fully if you think that there's a love that you're missing from some old memory, like me." Ella's voice cracks. She pleads with her daughter, "You can't let someone leaving you stop your future with someone else." Lois and Ella wipe tears off their cheeks at the same time. "I will always be your mother, Lois, and I will always love you." With that, the tape ends. Lois weeps openly, curling into the couch, clutching the blanket for comfort.