This one picks up where the last one left off. The team has crashed onto some moon or whatever and they are taken prisoner, but it isn’t just the Chigs who have them captured, the aliens are working with the Silicates. That alliance had been raised as a possibility before, but it is confirmed now, which is handy because it means they can do an episode with the team prisoners and have them able to speak to their captors, which they couldn’t do with just the Chigs.
Incidentally, we’re told the Chigs don’t like that humans call them “Chigs” or “Aliens” but we’re not given a preferred term, so I’ll have to stick with it. We are told that the Chigs’ term for the humans translates to “red stink creatures” which does amuse me.
While captured, the Wild Cards go through various tests of loyalty with the implication being that the Chigs are testing them to learn about humans or whatever. Vansen and Damphousse are told to pick which of them gets to survive, but figure out what is going on and refuse to turn on one another. West is reunited with his missing ladyfriend, who turns out to be a prisoner there as well and who turns out to be in the middle of an escape plan, which I immediately clocked as being too convenient to be real and West eventually does as well, shooting the fake version of ladyfriend. Hawkes and McQueen just have fun times fighting Silicates and debating why In-Vitros should serve in the human military. Wang is just tortured. And sadly for Wang, he’s broken by it. He’s told that the target they bombed was full of innocent civilian Chigs (a claim the veracity of which I’m still uncertain about, save that I doubt the show would actually let the heroes have done that) and he records a video in which he takes the blame for war crimes. True or not, Wang is torn up by his torture in a way that stays with him, so that when he gets home he can’t even hook up with his new romantic interest from last episode. It’ll be interesting to see how that goes down the line.
While I could tell West’s ladyfriend was fake almost instantly, I assumed she was a Silicate who had been made to resemble the missing woman. This, I thought, would be a sign that the Silicates are more of a potential threat than I had assumed, if they were able to create doppelgangers of humans. But it’s weirder than that. When West shoots her, she seems to turn into a dissolving Chig. Does that mean Chigs can shapeshift? Can they create custom-made bodies to be grown at a moment’s notice? Either way, now that they definitely have a way they can look human and communicate with humans, I expect we’ll get a representative of them to speak to the cast very soon.
Oh and there’s a cliffhanger where the corporate guys look in a suitcase with a glowing light in it or whatever. I’m sure that’ll matter at some point.
