The show continues to stretch into different war-related genres. This episode, which starts with a quote from John Wilkes Booth, is a political intrigue thriller. Even though the Earth in this future era is still one divided into countries (our characters are explicitly United States Marines), it turns out that there is a uniting governmental body in the form the United Nations. That means that the person who holds the title of the Secretary General is basically the leader of the Earth.
And then the Secretary General is assassinated. By an In-Vitro no less. This causes all manner of strife, including making the populace even more suspicious of “Tanks” so the two on the cast, Hawkes and McQueen, have to undergo loyalty testing. Meanwhile, one of the frontrunners for the position of the world ruler is the leader of a far right wing party (complete with a swastikish logo) that holds very anti-In-Vitro policies. The episode does all that you’d expect with further assassination attempts, including Hawkes being basically hypnotized by the loyalty test to try to kill this potential fascist ruler. In the end, though, the fascist is not elected and it is mostly a victory.
The woman who actually does win the Secretary General position is interesting. She’s clearly well-meaning, but is willing to get her hands dirty because she’s behind the assassination attempts on the fascist. When West prevents one of those attempts, he says that killing is not the answer and that they have to trust the voters (Must be nice to have that level of confidence in the system). And Hawkes clearly didn’t support the fascist party, but he wasn’t a fan of being forced to be a puppet assassin either. And finally, it is suggested that her company knew about the existence of the aliens before they sent out the colonists who got massacred in the pilot and kept it secret for some reason. So, she’s definitely the “good” choice to rule the planet, but the show is treating her as a complex player in the political game here. Also, for the record, she’s played by the woman who played Bebe on Frasier and the character is blind, with some sub-Geordi level of technology compensating for sight. I can only assume she’ll be back.
The episode also has some replacements come to the Wild Cards to take up the positions of the extras who have been killed off over the course of the show. That’s interesting because I assumed they’d just whittled it down to the main cast and it’d be like that from now on. One of the replacements turns out to be an attempted assassin and gets killed, but the others (whose names I have not yet bothered to learn) may indeed be actual new additions to the cast.
