Mara and Bit leave the garage to make a delivery, only to have a tanker go off road in front of them and cause a massive accident. When she comes back to the garage a little later, Mara has turned her hair orange and is not acting like herself. When she calls a sky full of rectifiers beautiful, both Zed and Beck realize that something is seriously wrong.
Zed tracks Mara to the 001001 Club only to find her talking with Hopper and Bartik, talking about a party that Tesler would be throwing in the city later that afternoon. When Zed asks her about the renegade, Mara attacks him, as she now fully supports Clu. Zed watches the trio leave, and then sets out for the scene of the accident to try and find out what happened to Mara. When he arrives, Beck is already there, disguised as the Renegade.
Together they discover that seven tankers all crashed on different roads at the same time, and that the tankers were driven by remote. They set out to stop another taker from causing an accident and succeed, only to see other tankers on different roads explode. The Renegade says they'll have to follow the victims to see what's going on, and they discover that all of the accident victims are being subjected to a mind control agent, and the "party" that Tesler was throwing was so the victims could have another dose of the agent.
Beck goes off to stop the ship that's dumping the mind control agent on the partiers, while Zed heads off to extract Mara from the party. As he is dragging her away, they come across some Tron Lives graffiti that Mara starts attacking with her disk. Zed tries to ask her about the Renegade, only for her to turn and attack him. As she is about to derezz him, Beck has steered the ship towards the radio antenna that's being used as part of the mind control process, but ends up having the fight Pavel. Their fight in interrupted by Keller, the scientist who invented the mind control agent, attacking Pavel, but before he can react to either of them he notices the ship is about to hit the antenna and flees, followed by Keller and the Renegade. As the tower is hit, the mind control ends. Keller is now on the run from the occupation for failing.
Tropes
- Blue-and-Orange Morality: Played with. After she's put under mind control, Mara changes her normally blue hair to orange. Later, when the mind control is lifted, she changes it back to blue.
- Call-Back: The modified bike that Beck as the Renegade stole from Zed in an earlier episode? Beck puts the bike back in Zed's locker, and he finds it at the end of the episode.
- Date Rape: Pavel invites Keller to "celebrate" with him. She retorts that he'd have to give her some of the mind control gas for that to happen.
- In Medias Res: The episode starts at the point where Mara is about to derezz Zed. The story of how things got to that point is told in flashbacks.
- Irony: Zed complains to the Renegade that he has another friend who should be there helping him rescue Mara.
- Mind Control: Tesler's plan is to gather the citizens to an open-air party and spray them with a mind control gas that would make them worship Clu.
- Sir Not-Appearing-in-This-Trailer: Tron, most noticeably. Able also never appears, though part of the story takes place at his garage.
- Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Zed with the Renegade.
