As the time left in the episode gets smaller and smaller I could think only one thing: this isn’t going to wrap up. This is gonna be To Be Continued on me. And so it was.
In this one the Saratoga manages to capture a Chig ship intact. Civilian corporation scientists (who are really being painted as the bad guys on the show) want to study it, but McQueen and the Wild Cards can only think of things that involve them directly and immediately attacking, so they do an attempted suicide mission where they take the ship into enemy lines and blow stuff up. So a lot of the episode is the team grappling with the idea that they might be going off to die. Lots of character stuff, most of which did nothing for me. Wang gets the best things to do in this one, even though it includes a trite scene in which he is impersonating McQueen and McQueen walks in behind him. But more interesting, he gets a romantic interest and notes the bad timing this has when he’s probably about to leave and die. Otherwise, it’s a lot of uninteresting brooding.
Otherwise, not much. There’s a bit where they try to unmask a dead Chig on the captured ship only for it to dissolve before they can see anything. We meet a lot of Saratoga personnel who are not on the Wild Cards this time, like a bridge crew or something. Wang’s love interest is one of them, I think, and not one of those replacement extras who showed up a few episodes back. I think those replacements have faded into nonexistence.
Anyway, the cliffhanger has the suicide mission fail but the team uses an escape pod, meanwhile the Saratoga is taken over by that evil civilian science company.
This one is a pretty standard sci-fi show setup. The Wild Cards are on a mission on some planet and they get exposed to an alien weapon that affects their brains such that it activates their fear. They start acting panicky and suspicious. They turn on each other. Eventually they get through it.
There’s a framing device where Ross and McQueen are questioning the kids about what happened, and the episode opens with Damphousse being the one questioned, so I assumed we were going to get an episode focusing on her. While the episode is about determining whether or not she was derelict in her duty, she doesn’t get any more narrative focus than anyone else. She, and Wang for that matter, do get a decent amount to do, but the main trio of Vansen, West, and Hawkes still come out feeling like the stars. Still, showing us what the cast are afraid of never hurts. Some are predictable, Vansen fears things that remind her of the night the AIs killed her family, and West fears he’ll never find that missing girlfriend of his, but we also learn that Wang fears insects because they remind him of growing up in squalor and he hates that. We also learn Damphousse fears the sight of blood, but if there was a specific reason, I missed it, so maybe we got that focus I was hoping for and it washed right over me unseen.
Either way, it’s an example of how things that a modern show wouldn’t bother with because it feels like “filler” can be useful for learning or reiterating things about the cast, so we know them better. Shows have become lesser since they came to see filler as a bad thing.
For years now I’ve been putting my non-stop thoughts about Superman up on this site, right? And I’ve also put more thought into Rocket Racer than anyone else on the planet, right? So you must think those are the only things that ol’ PDR ever thinks about! But no! I think about Star Trek too!
I felt the need to post about Superman so much because I got to reading what other people thought about Superman on the Internet and I so rarely felt like I agreed with what was being said that I felt ostracized from the “fandom” of the character. And I post about Rocket Racer because nobody else cares. But when it comes to Star Trek, I feel like I mostly agree with what the Internet at large has to say. Sure, there’s a lot of difference among the fans. I may not enjoy one series in the franchise as much as some others, or maybe I dislike an episode or two that are considered classics. But overall, it’s a massive franchise the size of which builds in room for such disagreement. You’re allowed to think the reboot movies are the funnest thing if you want to. You’re allowed to think Voyager is the best show. I may not agree, but I’ve already got DS9, so I’m good.
But there are nits to pick. Believe me, I can overthink any franchise of fictional stories. Ask anyone who knows me. So I’m gonna start doing that to Star Trek here on this site. I’ve got to do something with the constant torrent of thinking my brain does and, while I may watch other shows, Star Trek is where I feel at home, so my brain doesn’t shut up about it.
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.
