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.

I mentioned last time that Fred Van Lente had written an “other-continuity” appearance of Rocket Racer not applicable to the mainstream Bob Farrell. Well, let’s delve Into The Rocketverse and explore that:

This was in a book called Marvel Adventures Spider-Man #21. You know how mainstream superhero comics are a poisoned cesspool of non-stop drastic changes to the status quo trying to trick the audience into thinking stories are “important” because apparently the bulk of readers of mainstream superhero comics only value stories for how “important” they are? Well, Marvel Adventures Spider-Man was mercifully not that. It was just a book that sought to tell simple Spider-Man stories and, from what I’ve seen, it did them well. Naturally it’s long dead now.

This story begins with Spider-Man chasing the Rocket Racer who has a big bag of cash stolen from a bank (classic!). This version of Bob stutters with almost every other word and he lobs insults at Spider-Man implying that the vigilante is dumb, showing that this Bob very much values intellect. Bob escapes with relative ease, but Spidey finds one of his rockets hasn’t exploded and it has a “T” logo on it.

Spider-Man then has to deal with two other supervillains, Frog Man (Eugene) and Stilt-Man (Wilbur), only to discover that the three are actually working together. They are just nerdy guys who “met online at a message board for connoisseurs of the mechanical arts” and from there they met the Tinkerer, the guy who provides supervillains with technology. The Tinkerer offered the three guys super-suits for free, no strings attached, because what the Tinkerer actually wanted was to show off how good his tech was to real supervillains. When these three loser villains fail to defeat Spider-Man on their own, Tinkerer remote controls them to attack more violently, against their protestations. The hero still wins, of course, but we see that these guys are crooks, but don’t want to be murderers.

This version of Bob clearly loves technology, but it seems like all credit for his devices goes to Tinkerer here, which clearly makes him less of a self-made Rocket Racer. The regular version of Bob did have his tech improved by the Tinkerer, but only after designing it himself and beginning his Rocket Racer career. Like Van Lente’s Supervillain Team-Up story, this story leans into the “nerd” take on Bob. He’s got a Star Trek shirt and a Godzilla poster and the like. I don’t mind this take, save for the fact I don’t think the mainstream Bob has the disposable income to collect things like that.

As for Wilbur and Eugene: Bob-616 has only minor connections to either of those characters. He attended the funeral/wake for his universe’s Wilbur Day, but more to be with his friends who were closer. And he may have met his universe’s Eugene, but only in passing as far as we’ve been told. For the sake of this story, Bob is roughly the same nebulous age that he always is, but Stilt-Man is, if anything, aged down and Frog Man aged up, so they are all now in the same cohort. For the record, in the Marvel Universe proper, Eugene is not a tech-guy. His Frog-Man suit was built by his father and he’s had to rely on others to repair it. Also, regular Eugene has never been a criminal.

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.