Sarah spends the day assuming that Jack is just playing sick to avoid an algebra test, but of course he's at death's door, so when she finally comes to check on him, Jack's dad Greg is sitting there in the dark expressing concern about her life, their child and her entire concept of parenting. To assume this goes anywhere other than directly into the crapper is to admit one doesn't know Sarah Linden very well.

After a long day of Belko nightmares, biological tragedies, wheelchair awkwardness and yet more pretty ladies feeling sorry for him, Councilman Richmond is at low tide. Luckily, Plucky Young Jamie pulls some strings at the DA's office and learns the truth: That somebody, obviously the Mayor, was behind the faked photos that got Darren arrested, released from jail, shot and paralyzed all in the space of about twenty minutes. Finally reinvigorated, Richmond takes up the cowl -- and Jamie's only too happy to get back into his Robin costume.

Outside town, Mitch's ghostly girl turns out to be very real: A fistful of angry facial piercings and bad choices named Tina. After some pretty sad conversations and emotional keepaway, Mitch decides to save Tina from her own daughter's fate... Becoming the most appealing and graceful she's been in the history of this show.

And it couldn't happen at a better time, because the nuke dropped at the end of the hour sort of radically recontextualizes everything that's happened so far: After they find him hiding at Monica's house, Alexi lawyers up, gets out of the police station and heads back to Babka's... But in fact he's just baiting Holder so that he can kidnap him for secret meeting with Sarah, in which he tells them the big secret that sent Rosie off the deep end in the first place: Stan wasn't even Rosie's father.

Stan learns that his charges in the Ahmet case have been dropped, but he won't be pleading out: He's facing three or more years for assault, etc. This -- along with the sight of the son of the man he murdered -- causes him to go crazy in a new way, and he seeks comfort in Terry's arms. But she's too busy feeling weird about their cohabitation, getting shit from her parents and strange calls from her old johns, to even really deal with much beyond the starkly depressing fact of that. So she bounces, out into a black towncar that may well belong to...

The real murderer, as described by Alexi. Turns out he abandoned the Ogi Jun thing early on after coming to care for Rosie, and was her ride to the ferry on Fridays when it was time for her to do her secret things at the Casino, because he wanted her to be safe. At least once there was a towncar that worried her, but that's all he knows, and then from the night of her death, we get a voicemail that expressly lets him off the hook and brings out this whole relationship: She called him, scared, from an unknown location, but by the time he got to the dock she was gone.

We're not quite done with Alexi -- after all, he still needs to yell at Stan for killing his dad and leaving him with old Monica and thence the CPS -- but this twist about the parentage seems both fresh and oddly obvious at the same time. One thing I don't think I would have anticipated is anything really bizarre or secretive coming up with the Larsens after all this time, so it's exciting just by existing: They've always been technically as interesting and complex as the other leads, but necessarily trapped in stasis by the facts of their claustrophobic storyline. Once Mitch comes home -- probably with her horrible surrogate hooker daughter in tow -- the Larsen marriage is going to look completely different in every way. Which is, I think, a very good thing. God knows it was nice to see Mitch smile, even once.