RECALL
When the previous mayor dies of a heart attack and nobody else files to run, a conspiracy podcaster wins the special election with 43 votes during a thunderstorm—the lowest turnout in town history. His paranoia has roots: his mother was a Downwinder who died of cancer while the government denied responsibility. Her RECA claim was case #1638. He’s been seeing numbers everywhere ever since.
Now he has real power—and the town starts to crack. After an earthquake, Oak Street residents complain about discolored water, drifting grit, and a pattern of rare illness. Gil follows Rayborn Energy’s injection-well invoices, but a visible code violation becomes the pivot: a wide public staircase built without a center handrail—proof that “life safety” can be ignored in plain sight.
The deeper discovery is worse: a yellowed material requisition for Oak Street’s foundations—1,638 cubic yards of “reclaimed” fill sand—sourced from a Trinity settling ponds east of town. Lab work flags hot particulates not just in the water, but in basement cracks and beneath slabs. The betrayal isn’t administrative. It’s structural: the poison is in what the town is built on.
As Gil maps the baseline wind path along the mountain range—where dust rides like a river—his private math turns universal. The number 43 stops being a turnout anomaly and becomes a threshold: the one case, one vote, one missing body that makes a “cluster” impossible to bury. In the final shot, the camera descends through floorboards to ordinary sand as a Geiger counter begins to click.
The pattern was never real. The foundation was.
Tone: The Holdovers meets Dark Waters with the heart of King of Hearts—an intimate, slow-burn forensic thriller about institutional failure, visible vs. invisible safety, and the arithmetic of grief.