The Eden Project gang is still camped in the spot where they intent to spend the winter, which remains a vaguely haunted place. This time the crew are being bothered by dreams of their mothers (or at least a motherly figure) trying to send a message to them. This, it turns out, is because an actual transmission from a mother (Dell Curry) trying to reach her son that is somehow penetrating the planet’s dream-space. Anyway, the episode has the team try to find this mother and son and rescue them, only to realize that the bad guy they were trying to rescue them from is actually the now-grown son, who has been living in the wilds of the planet for decades (in spite of which, he is one of the most clean-shaven humans that has ever existed). The kid-now-man doesn’t end up joining out crew, but he does get the message his mother was trying to get to him, and wanders off into the woods. I have no idea if he’ll be back.

I’ll be honest, this one didn’t grab me too well, but I feel like that may be my fault. Throughout the whole episode, I never assumed, as the crew did, that the transmission was coming from a living person. Maybe it’s just because I’ve seen this kind of story play out on other shows (Star Trek, for example), but as soon as the transmission first appeared, I assumed it was years-old from someone now dead. I assumed that was what I was supposed to think. I didn’t realize I was supposed to assume otherwise until the character started looking for Dell as if she were alive. Ah well. It is extremely hard to come up with fresh sci-fi concepts, so I can’t fault the show if one of them doesn’t land for me.

What I can fault the show for is that the eagle sound effect, which I said I was gonna ignore, appears about twenty times in this episode! There’s a three minute span where it is heard about six times! It’s madness! I swear the creators of the show in the 1990s did this on purpose just to rankle me in the 2020s!!! Anyway, they use more Doom sounds for Grendlers again in this one, so that’s cool.

1) Yale says there is a chance this year’s winter will be a “Leap Winter” which is twice as long as a regular winter. This is bad, but even worse considering they don’t know how long the regular winter is yet anyway. 2) Casual mention is made of something called the “STIM Program” which can save personality traits from a person and implant them in someone else (presumably someone mindwashed like the Yale cyborgs) which continues this show’s trend to casually reveal that back on the Earth stations they have very impressive sci-fi tech. In any case, Danziger at least realizes that the person who has the implanted traits wouldn’t be the same person, not really. 3) When the whole camp is being bothered by dreams of their mothers calling out to them, we learn that True has never met her mother and knows almost nothing about her. This is revealed to be because she had been in an accident not long after becoming pregnant. In the end, Danziger lets True see her comatose form via VR. No mention is made of how this is affecting Uly. Is he, the only person in camp whose mother is actually there with him, just like “That was a weird dream.” 4) Oh yeah! The episode begins with the Eden Project team stealing from what they assume to be a Grendler stash of goods. Danziger mentions that he ought to maybe feel a twinge of guilt about this, but the fact they need them to get through the winter makes the guilt go away quickly. 5) Morgan is very active as a team-member in this one, both during the raid on the Grendler stash, and during the search for Dell. Hopefully, after the events of the two-parter, his redemption arc has really begun in earnest.