Picking up right where the last one left off, the Secretary General from previous episodes gives a speech about the alien envoy and how peace is in sight! How happy! The peace talks go badly pretty quickly, culminating in an explosion in which McQueen is badly injured. The war is back on, and our main cast are now at increased risk because the show is cancelled.
One good thing does come of the peace talks, though: the colonists taken prisoner in the pilot are being transferred back to the humans and, when the talks deteriorate, the prisoners are still on a ship in space where the Wild Cards can fly in and rescue them. This is the last episode of the show, so it all comes back around to West’s missing girlfriend, who is confirmed to be among the survivors. But the mission goes only slightly better than the peace talks. Main Character Powers are dimmed by season finale stakes and series cancellation, so Vansen and Damphousse are shot down and are last seen crashing down onto a planet, trying just to make the crash survivable. It probably would have been, if the show had continued, but it didn’t, so I assume they’re both dead. What’s more, Damphousse is unconscious for this, so she doesn’t even get to have a final moment of import. Wang is killed in this fight, but he does get his moment, going down in a blaze of glory by fending off enemies and doing it in the names of allies who have died over the course of the series. He’s still dead, though. Also, in this episode Commodore Ross has a cold. Is nobody safe?!
So West and Hawkes are all that remains of the Wild Cards. West does get his reunion with the love of his life, though it’s brief. She’s saved from imprisonment, but she’s off back to Earth and he has to continue doing war. Hawkes, meanwhile, was forced into the military in the first place as a form of punishment, so in theory he could go home. I bet he doesn’t though. The show ends on a downer, and that’s appropriate. Usually the show tries to have it both ways, saying that war is bad, but also look how cool this war is. I like that, in the text as given, war is bad wins that particular tug-of-itself.
CHIG STUFF: The envoy reveals a bit about their motivations. When asked why they attacked the Colony in the pilot, they say that the Aero-Tech company ignored their warnings to stay away (warnings Areo-Tech claims to have not been capable of understanding). More significantly though, the Chigs do not recognize human claim to own Earth. Their science determined that their homeworld was seeded by organic compounds from another world, and they believe that world was Earth after a long-ago comet impact. Furthermore, they say they evolved on their world long before we did on ours, so really they have more claim to be the first rightful children Earth than we do. It’s interesting to see panspermia go this way. I’ve seen so much that uses it to explain how life got to Earth, less often do I see it as how alien life arose. I wonder why the show went that way with it… and is the answer very Jesusy?
Anyway, show’s over. I’ll be back with a final thoughts post, but for now that’s it.
