S01E07 - Home

"Home" is the seventh episode of Season 1 of We Can Fix Pawbert. It follows the withdrawal of the ZSI field team from Site Two and turns from crisis to the ordinary business of living there, as Nick sets out to furnish the safehouse and Pawbert leaves it for the first time since his arrest.

Synopsis

Reacher's ZSI team has withdrawn from Site Two, and the pack has the bare warehouse to itself. Nick Wilde decides to make it livable and brings Pawbert Lynxley along on the supply run, over Pawbert's fear of being recognized. At a Sahara Square thrift store they buy a worn sectional and household goods, and Judy Hopps tells Pawbert how Nick left street hustling behind by rejecting what the city said he was. Nick also buys Pawbert a small corkboard for his room. At a furniture warehouse, the catalog study his father forced on him proves useful. In the grocery aisle Nick calls the four of them family, and nobody walks it back; at the checkout a wolverine starts to recognize Pawbert, and Judy breaks the stare with an ordinary question. That evening the furnished safehouse gets house rules and a weekly movie night, and Pawbert cooks his mother's soup for everyone. Late that night he asks Luther whether he stays out of obligation or by choice, and Luther answers that he wants to stay. The next day Pawbert offers a new lead: his father's offshore accounts were run by a private banker called the Vault.

Plot

With Reacher's ZSI team gone from Site Two, Luther walks to the window without help or leaning, still bandaged and putting most of his weight on one side. Pawbert brings him coffee, hesitates at the threshold, then joins him, and the two of them watch the trees that screen the building without saying much. Later, Nick takes stock of the safehouse, which still holds folding chairs, a card table, Luther's cot, and the tactical cases the field team left behind, and decides it needs work. He plans cash purchases at separate stores with nothing delivered, tells Luther to stay off his stitches, and tells Pawbert he is coming along to carry things. Pawbert objects that he could be recognized, then asks whether Nick is worried he will run. Nick asks whether he should be, and adds that if Pawbert does run, he will not chase him; he will tell Luther. Luther, still at the window, says he would find him.

They take a rental van to a thrift store in Sahara Square, chosen because wealthy households donate their furniture there and because it is a long way from downtown. Judy tells Pawbert the precautions are not only about keeping him alive but about keeping him safe. Inside, Nick works the aisles for bargains while Judy loads Pawbert's arms with throw pillows and puts him on pillow duty. They settle on a worn sectional after Pawbert sits down on it and finds it comfortable. While Nick negotiates, Judy sits with Pawbert and tells him what Nick was before the badge: twenty years of street hustles, and a world that told him what he was until he decided the world was wrong. She tells Pawbert he can decide the same about himself.

Nick comes back from the register with a small wooden corkboard for Pawbert's room. Pawbert says he has nothing to put on it, and Nick tells him not yet. At a furniture warehouse in Canyonlands, Nick cannot tell forty identical bookshelves apart. Pawbert explains their load capacities and materials, then admits that Milton made him study furniture catalogs because understanding quality was expected of a Lynxley, and that he hated every second of it. He picks a shelf. In the parking lot the flat-pack box will not fit the van, because Nick measured the furniture rather than the boxes, so Pawbert has them unpack it and load the panels loose. They finish the job together.

On the drive to the grocery store, Judy asks about Luther. Pawbert says Luther is the first person who ever stayed: when things got hard, when Pawbert was difficult, when there was no reason to keep trying. Everyone else in his life attached conditions to him, and he assumes Luther has conditions too and simply has not named them. Nick tells him there are not always conditions, and that some mammals decide you matter and then you do.

At the store, Pawbert begins putting his own items in the cart: flour, a jar of honey, a brand of tea he recognizes, ingredients for a bread his mother used to make. Nick tells him that if the bread turns out terrible they will eat it and lie about it, because that is what family does. He hears the word only after saying it, and neither of them takes it back. In the checkout line a wolverine in a delivery jacket starts to place Pawbert's face; Judy shifts her stance to break the stare and asks Pawbert an ordinary question about the honey, and the wolverine goes back to his phone. Outside, Nick tells him to breathe slower. Judy tells him that being out in the world while he feels watched is the hardest part, and that nobody gets used to it, they only get better at pretending.

By evening Site Two has a sectional, a rug covering the worst of the scratched concrete, a salvaged dining table with mismatched chairs, and lamps in place of the overhead fluorescent. Nick claims to have built the bookshelf; Judy points out that he assembled it from a box. Luther has moved off the cot and into a bed in one of the side rooms, which happened because Pawbert quietly insisted on it. In Pawbert's room, where his mother's photograph is already standing on the nightstand, Nick brings a hammer and a nail. Pawbert measures the corkboard against the wall and hangs it himself. It stays empty.

Pawbert cooks his mother's soup again that night, remembering more of the recipe than he did the first time. Nick tells him nobody is grading him and that he has nothing to prove, and Pawbert answers that he is trying to work out who he is when he is not what his family made him. At dinner Judy compliments the soup and Pawbert calls it just soup, which Luther refuses to let stand. Nick then proposes house rules: rotating kitchen duty, with Pawbert excluded because he is already cooking by choice, and a movie night once a week with the pick rotating. The newest arrival picks first.

Pawbert chooses a comedy he has never seen, because comedies were among the things he was not allowed to watch as a child, along with anything else that was not considered enriching. It is bad and they watch all of it, and Pawbert laughs more than once. A character named Pubert draws a groan from Nick and then an argument about how close the two names are. By the end Pawbert is sitting back into the couch rather than perched on its edge.

Late that night Pawbert cannot sleep and finds Luther keeping watch by the window. He asks whether Luther is staying because he has to or because he wants to. Luther says it began as an assignment to protect a witness and that it is not standard anymore, and when Pawbert presses him for something clearer, he says he wants to stay. He explains that he has protected witnesses and assets he deliberately never got to know, and that Pawbert is different because he is trying to be better instead of bargaining, minimizing, or blaming his circumstances. Asked how he knows it will lead anywhere, Luther lists Pawbert's own choices back to him: the dock, the stamp, the morning Luther tried to wave him off and he asked for a job instead. Lying in bed afterward, Pawbert turns the answer over looking for the trap in it and cannot find one.

The next morning Pawbert makes pancakes and the four of them eat together, talking about the furniture and the districts they drove through. Judy asks Nick when they last sat down without a crisis, and he cannot remember. Afterward they work the board that has gone up against one wall: photographs, names, a length of red string, Gasket's face crossed out, and the unanswered question of who hired Oxbow's team. Pawbert steps forward with what he knows about the money. Milton kept offshore accounts, and although Pawbert was never told the details, he knows a private banker his father called the Vault ran them. He does not have a name, but he knows where the banker works. After the house has gone quiet, Pawbert sits by the window in his mother's sweater while Luther makes his last round of the doors, checks the latch above his head, and rests a paw on the back of the chair. Neither of them speaks.

Key Moments

• Nick organizes the supply run and includes Pawbert
• Nick tells Pawbert he will not chase him if he runs; Luther says he would find him
• Judy tells Pawbert what Nick was before the badge, and that he can decide the world was wrong about him
• Nick buys the corkboard; Pawbert hangs it empty
• The furniture-catalog study Milton forced on Pawbert becomes useful at the warehouse
• Nick uses the word "family" in the grocery aisle and does not retract it
• A wolverine nearly recognizes Pawbert at checkout; Judy defuses it
• The safehouse becomes a home, with house rules and a weekly movie night established
• Pawbert cooks his mother's soup for everyone
• Pawbert asks whether Luther stays out of duty or choice; Luther answers that he wants to stay
• Pawbert names the Vault as the next lead

Key Lines

Locations

• Site Two - main floor, kitchen, hallway, and Pawbert's room
• City streets - the rental van, between stores
• Thrift store, Sahara Square
• Furniture warehouse and its parking lot, Canyonlands
• Grocery store

Items

• Corkboard - Small wooden-framed board bought by Nick at the thrift store; Pawbert hangs it on his bedroom wall himself and leaves it empty
• Green sweater - Lillian's sweater, worn by Pawbert at the window at the start of the episode and again at its close
• Photo of mother - The first thing Pawbert unpacks into his new room; kept on the nightstand
• Sectional couch - Worn thrift-store find, chosen because it separates for transport; becomes the movie-night couch
• Flat-pack bookshelf - Selected by Pawbert at the warehouse and assembled by Nick
• Investigation board - Photographs, names, and connections set up at Site Two, with Gasket's photo crossed out

Notes

• The movie watched on the first movie night is Addams Family Values (1993); the character whose name draws Nick's groan is Pubert Addams.