This is the rare episode where the narration is provided by the character most appropriate to do that narration, because this episode is narrated by Dr. Julia Heller and this is a pretty big episode for her.
Since we’ve learned that Julia is reporting to “the Council” (via a guy named Reilly) she has been torn between feeling a patriotic desire to serve the Council and her attachment to the other Eden Project folk that she does want to keep safe. Reilly still wants her to reveal the location of the Eden Project people so that the Council can come and basically dissect young Uly for research purposes. This time, Julia offers a different option: She takes DNA samples from Uly and injects them directly into her brain. Surprisingly, this doesn’t go well for her.
From her injections, Julia does seem to gain a replication of Uly’s connection to the Terrians, but it isn’t quite right. First of all, a Terrian appears and screams at her. That’s not great. But also, it has drug-like side effects that cause her to act uncharacteristically, but then forget about it afterwards. She gets all horned up for Alonso and then confesses her espionage lifestyle and DNA stealing plans to Morgan in an attempt to recruit the other least-trustworthy cast member. Morgan refuses and she knocks him out and leaves him in the woods where her sober self doesn’t even know. All of this is starting to be noticed by the others, which peaks when True actually catches Julia in VR talking to Reilly and, when Julia notices her, races back to town to tell the others.
In the end, the crew get Morgan back and find out what they can from Julia’s logs, then leave their former doctor alone in the wilderness, knocked out and presumably unable to follow them. We’re told they never found Julia’s VR device, so she should be able to contact Reilly, but will she? For all the flaws in her plan, she really did want to help her Eden Project friends. Will she stay where she is and live off the land and become the new Gaal? This is potentially the biggest cast shakeup of the show so far, or it could all be undone next episode. I have no memory from my youth, so the only way to be sure is to come back next time, same Earth 2 channel and all that.
Other thoughts: 1) True goes through a whole chase scene when Julia is after her and I don’t think she screamed once. This kid is forgetting her role on this show. (The eagle is still screeching, though). 2) True, having grown up on the space stations around Earth, gets to see snow for the first time. It’s just little patches of snow on the grass, not the gross full-on winter stuff that everyone should hate. 3) When True tells the others what she saw Julia doing, Julia tries to play it off as if the child is lying. Most people don’t believe the kid, but Bess just knocks out Julia with the Earth 2 equivalent of a hypospray. Don’t mess with Bess. 4) There’s actually a lot more VR in the show than I remembered. In this episode alone, in addition to being used by Julia and Reilly for communications, as usual, we also have the kids using it to play cowboy games. It really is this show’s holodeck.
