At first it seemed that McQueen (I don’t remember any of these characters’ ranks, but I’ve got their names down now) is going to be the focal character of the episode, but actually it’s about him being replaced temporarily, so he’s not around for most of it.

The Saratoga (which I have neglected to mention looks pretty much like a less pointy Star Destroyer from Star Wars) finds a space plane drifting, seemingly dead, but it lands in the carrier of its own volition. They discover aboard it one Ray “Kicks” Butts, a gruff pilot who has been through a lot of wars. In spite of his cool name, Butts is a real jerk. He’s racist to the In-Vitros on the crew, he takes opportunities to berate or embarrass the Wild Cards, and just in general he’s a prick. And it isn’t until after he spends a while being a prick to the team that he reveals that he’s got orders from the brass to replace McQueen and take control of the Wild Cards for a secret mission.

The mission, the team is told, is to recover some space planes that the Chigs have managed to capture. The Wild Cards parachute down onto a Chig-controlled planet and then Butts immediately goes AWOL (is it still called going AWOL when you’re in charge?). It turns out that those planes belonged to his unit and on their last mission he was the only one to get away. He wants to bury his friends’ bodies. So he does that, then they go and do the actual mission. The team have a bonding moment where Butts makes them realize they might not all come back from the mission, so they say preemptive goodbyes, just in case (slightly undercut by them all being main characters, save Butts who is pretty clearly being set up to die). Anyway, Butts dies to help the team escape. The end.

Butts being a prick is intentional, sure. It’s meant to show that he’s been messed up by the wars and whatnot. But I never warmed up to him even when the story thought he was redeeming himself. The only positive about him is that he’s pro-pancakes. Anyway, I don’t know. I didn’t like him.

One thing I do like is that Hawkes, the angsty bad boy In-Vitro, is by this point completely a part of the team. They all get along with him and that pleases me. I like it when teams get along.

It makes sense that, after West and Vensen got episodes that focused on them, Hawkes would get the third. He’s the other member of the cast most fleshed out. And, of course, the episode is going to focus on the fact he’s an In-Vitro. Also, there’s another In-Vitro in the cast, the high ranking Commander (or Corporal or something) McQueen. So the episode looks at the life that “Tanks” live by creating a conflict between the rebellious Hawkes and the by-the-books McQueen.

The plot is relatively simple. The crew are on a space freighter. Most of the “dirty jobs” are done by In-Vitros and there is a big cargo of In-Vitros still in their tanks, waiting to be awakened at the destination world, more cargo than people. This division between Tanks and Humans comes to a head when the freighter is attacked and the most realistic way to survive is to cut the power to the section of the ship keeping the suspended In-Vitros alive. The result is a mutinty, the details of which are unimportant, other than that it gives Hawkes and McQueen (and others) their chance to debate the topic of racism with stakes. We learn more about In-Vitros as we go. They are awakened from their tubes at eighteen years old! So basically someone like Hawkes has probably been sentient for less than a decade. We also know that, given their lack of a true family, they can sometimes bond over being grown with similar DNA configuration, and Hawkes has a “sister” of this kind among the cargo of In-Vitros on the freighter. All in all, this is a decent setup for this kind of story and I’m impressed that this series has done it.

It’s also worth noting that, if last episode was a battleship and groundfighting combat episode and the episode before that was dogfighting combat, this one is submarine combat. If I’d gone off my memory I’d’ve thought the show was all dogfighting all the time, but it’s good that they mix it up. Keeps it from getting stale.

Not much else to report. We get a subplot about romance with the characters unused in the main plot. Wang has started dating someone he met online (over the “SpaceNet”) and Vensen thinks romance is a waste of time. Damphousse has a boyfriend back home who has a daughter from a previous relationship who hasn’t warmed up to her yet. I don’t know if any of this will matter down the line, but we do get West admitting his selfishness in going AWOL that one time, so the show will address things serially on occasion it seems.

This episode’s focal character is Captain Vansen. I don’t think that I’ve even mentioned her yet, but she’s the leader of the unit we’re following on this show (the Wild Cards, apparently) and her deal is that she lost her family during the AI Wars and she’s understandably upset about it. It’s worth noting that a woman in command is another commonality with Earth 2. We’re lucky the Internet in those days wasn’t what it was now or we’d have had a frothing horde of men who claim this was oppression.

Because this is Vansen’s episode and we’re delving into her past, we learn a lot more about the AIs. There’s a whole thing about their creation that I didn’t commit to memory because I doubt it’s important, but what we do know is that they’re called Silicates. If that came up in earlier episodes, I missed it. What is definitely new is that we learn a bit about their culture: they worship risk and chance and gambling as if it was their religion. After the AI Wars, they left Earth and, at least the group we see here, are living as space pirates. When this group tries to hijack some mining operation, the Wild Cards assume they are going to sell it to the Chigs. I don’t know if that’s entirely a guess on their part or if such an economy actually exists. If it does, I have to assume first contact between the Chigs and the Silicates happened before that with the rest of humanity, because humanity didn’t know the Chigs existed until a few months ago. I find their worship of chance to be an interesting choice, though it did lead to one of them saying “Fate’s a bitch!” in a way that was probably meant to sound cool or threatening, but was instead goofy. But they’re gonna be goofy because we’re told they are completely taught on existing material and can’t come up with ideas of their own, which is actually pretty prescient given the current state of things that the news continue to call “AI” in spite of the fact it is closer to predictive text.

Anyway, Vansen wants to know why the Silicates killed her family. Because the AI are able to access the memories of each other or whatever, she learns her family was picked by a coin flip. I’m someone who likes to see the randomness of the universe in the fiction I deal with, so I like that. Vansen then goes on a killing spree of Silicates and saves her allies, who were pinned down. She doesn’t exactly get closure, but in the militaristic genre, getting kills is proof of your worth, so that’s good for her.

By the way, the episode opens with the unit being assigned guard duty of this mine and they are unhappy with it. This unit of idiot children want to be assigned at the front lines, where they get to see action. You’d think that people in the military would understand the idea of strategic value and such, but these guys just want to bang their ships against the Chig ships to prove how tough they are. Idiot children, I say. We don’t actually see their space planes in this one. We get the Saratoga battleship-style turret fighting in space and then the rest of the battle is ground fighting. These kids can do it all.

Also, when on a planet with a third Earth’s gravity, the first thing that Wang does is throw a football into orbit. So good for him.