Our intrepid crew are still running low on supplies as the winter continues (this show has been like half winter at this point) and four of them volunteer to go out and get supplies from a pod that landed during the original crash landing. Unfortunately, it doesn’t turn out well, as the pod has been emptied, either during the crash or by Grendlers after. Now these four (Danziger, Julia, Alonso, and Morgan) don’t even have enough rations to make it back to camp, and seem to be doomed.

But then the episode surprised me and we have Yale showing up to save them. You’d think the rescue would have been the whole point of the episode, but no! Instead they get safely back to camp and we learn that something bad happened while they were out there. It’s doled out in mildly-Rashomon-style flashbacks. The stranded crew were starving and Danziger followed a Grendler to its stash hoping to find supplies, but it went bad, he panicked and shot the Grendler. Then, it wasn’t an easy decision for them, but they ate some of the Grendler’s corpse. This is the only thing that kept them alive long enough to get rescued by Yale.

Back in the “present” of the episode, another Grendler comes to camp and Danziger assumes it is seeking revenge and threatening True. Instead, we eventually learn, it only wanted an answer for why its friend (Friendler?) was killed. Danziger is often depicted as the rugged, common sense guy of the show, and his manliness can chafe against my tastes, so seeing him get a chance here to tearfully admit that he made a mistake and that the Grendler didn’t die in vain because it helped them live made him a lot more appealing in my eyes (Clancy Brown, of course, does a great job with it). And honestly, the fact that the show let one of its star characters actually kill an innocent in a moment of panic without reneging on it at the end impressed me.

Anyway, I don’t have many other thoughts for this one. It was a good episode. I feel like the show considers the Terrians the star aliens of the show, but I like the Grendlers. They’ve got more character. I wish Star Trek, decades after this show, could give us one alien species in Starfleet as neat as the Grendlers. I guess if I need one other thing I can point out that there was acidic water in the Grendler’s cave and I liked that because it called back to that time they encountered acidic water before. Consistency like that makes the planet feel more alive.

Anyway…

CAMERON WATCH!!!

Though Baines, Walman, and Magus all get a bit of a role in this one, everyone’s favourite character, Cameron, doesn’t have much to do. When the rescued four are brought back to camp, Julia immediately starts giving Cameron orders. Maybe he’s been working as her assistant? That could be.

Somehow, even though they’ve been camped in the same spot for months now, the protagonists are still finding new stuff within walking distance. This time, they find a Terrian corpse that has been frozen for 300,000 years. Julia brings it back to camp for study, and unfortunately it brings an ancient evil with it. Creepy stuff happens around camp and then there’s a scene clearly inspired by The Thing in which they all have to find out which one of them is possessed by an ancient evil. It turns out it is Danziger, so Alonso has to fight the so-called demon in the dreamscape. The ancient evil is banished and everyone is happy.

ALIEN STUFF:

• The 300,000-year-old Terrian remains tell us a bit more about modern Terrians. Julia says that modern Terrians are like plants in that they take in nourishment via osmosis, but apparently this old Terrian ate is closer to humanity in form, so it probably ate. Also, the ancient Terrian has a spinal column and vertebrae, which apparently the modern ones do not.
• Although the ancient Terrian was more humanlike, Julia notes that it is still not either a “he” or a “she”. While we were told (by Alonso, I think) that all the modern Terrians are male, I’m taking this as a sign that the previous reference was a mistake and they are, in fact, sexless beings and the concept is too confusing for the dumb humans to get.
• But the most significant thing about the Oldie Terrian is that it comes from a time when Terrians had emotions! But they thought this was bad, so they wanted to pull the ol’ Vulcan Maneuver and become a less emotional species. They purged all their emotions by placing all that psychic into a single entity and having it “swallowed up by the earth”. You’d think that the Terrians, whose whole deal is going into dirt, would be able to better “swallow up” this frozen Terrian, but instead they’ve left it in ice that, even after 300,000 years, is still easily seen from someone walking by. Ah well, it’s dead now, so it all turned out okay.
• For the record, the reason that Alonso had to fight the “demon” in the dreamscape is because even this embodiment of all that they hated about themselves is still too Terrian for them to attack. Still, in the dream Alonso is able to gain Terrian powers for the fight.
• As for non-Terrian life on G889, WE SEE BIRDS!!! At one point, while we are hearing the omnipresent eagle sound, we see a couple of birds fly by. We don’t see them up close, though, so I can assume they are indeed weird alien-looking birds. I hope we never see anything to contradict that.

Other stuff: 1) When Devon wants to learn more about the evil entity attacking the camp, she heads back to the village of humans we met a couple episodes back. That’s a nice little bit of continuity I wasn’t expecting and do appreciate. 2) The minor characters like Baines and Magus and Walman (the latter two being the white woman and white guy I have identified in some previous post respectively) get more focus than usual in this one. It’s mostly so that there are more suspects for us to wonder about when we aren’t sure who is possessed, but I like seeing them fleshed out even a little bit more. Also, there’s some beardy guy named Cameron I’ve never noticed before. Let’s see if he will have time to do anything important before the show ends.

It’s Uly’s ninth birthday! It’s also sixteen years in the future! It’s Earth 2’s first time travel episode!

Because the planet G889 has the strange metaphysical connections to dreams that it does, Devon is able to receive dream messages from her son in the future. The future version of Ulysses needs her to send little Uly on a mission, alone, to hide some of his DNA in some Terrian tunnels. Devon has to grapple with sending her little boy on a dangerous mission, but she does and Uly does fine.

We spend a lot of time in the future in this one. They give the standard line about how it is a “possible future” but nothing in this episode does anything to convince me that this isn’t the actual timeline the show is building toward (and since the show was cancelled after this season, I doubt they ever do anything to say otherwise). In the future, Uly is indeed leading a faction of Terrian rebels who are fighting against oppression by the humans. It turns out that the colonization of New Pacifica worked and the planet is now home to humans who are expanding into Terrian territory. For some reason (racism?) a lot of the parents of sick kids, who came to this planet to be healed, refused the help of the Terrians and are living with synthetic treatments. The humans are trying to “civilize” the Terrians and Future Uly and his Terrians (and Future True is with them!) are working against the humans. But then Ulysses is captured and, though Future Devon (a politician who hasn’t spoken to her son in too long) is there to rescue him, the baddies successfully take away Uly’s Terrian abilities, but luckily, because he dreamed into the past and got little Uly to stash his DNA in a safe place, he is able to get the powers back.

Other stuff: 1) There’s a subplot about True finding a Koba (again) and enlisting Yale’s aid in caring for it. It doesn’t really contribute much to the episode, but it’s nice to know that True respects Yale much more than she did back when she hated him for trying to make her learn. 2) It’s established that Terrians won’t hurt Uly because he has Terrian DNA. This checks out, given that they wouldn’t hurt Gaal because he wore a necklace of Terrian bones and Uly’s DNA was caused by the Terrians. It does interest me that this tribe of Terrians actively (at first) dislikes that Uly is a connection between their kind and humanity. I like seeing that the different tribes of Terrians can have different opinions. It adds complexity to them, as a species. 3) It is also suggested that Ulysses can do the time-travelling dream because of the emotional connection between him and his mother, and Terrians don’t have such emotional connections, so they can’t do it. 4) In this episode Devon sneaks around and doesn’t tell anyone about her dream from the future or the mission she is sending Uly on. I don’t know why. Embarrassment? Probably would have been helpful to consult Yale or Alonso in situations like this.

Spiders, spiders everywhere, and not a drop to drink. (That said, a Grendler does almost drink a spider in this one.)

The Eden Project people are still camped out awaiting winter to end, which is getting to annoy them because they aren’t making any progress in getting to their destination, the coastal region they’ve named New Pacifica. So when a couple of human blood-addicted Grendlers bring fresh fruit to them that must have come some long distance very quickly, the group looks into it. It turns out that there is a tunnel nearby that is part of some sort of space-folding process that can allow the Grendlers to travel all the way to the coast nearly instantly! There are complications and what ever, what with the Grendlers being addicted to human blood, but none of it really matters so let’s just jump to the end: it turns out that the magic cave actually goes the wrong way. It brings them all the way to the opposite side of the continent than they are trying to get to. With that potential travel system no use to them, it’s back to camping out the winter.

ALIEN STUFF:

• We get new animals on G889 finally! Though because they look EXACTLY like Earth spiders, I couldn’t tell for much of the episode if they were supposed to be Earth spiders that accidentally stowed away with the colonists or not. Turns out not. These are some weird darn spiders, even if they look just like Earth ones and spin webs. It turns out they are magic! (Inasmuch as the weird metaphysical properties of G889 are “magical” but being filtered through a sci-fi lens here.) There are two species, considered “opposites” and each with some mystic connection to a concept of attraction. One species is about things coming together and one is about them coming apart. They build webs that create forcefields and that is what causes the weird space-folding effect, naturally. But also, if one of the attraction spiders bite a human (or a Grendler) then that person will fall in love with the next person it sees. Presumably a repulsion spider can cause hatred or at least aloofness. These are, indeed, some weird spiders.
• The Grendlers, as I say, play a big part in this one. We’ve not seen Grendlers who are addicted to blood since the ones that Gaal was keeping as henchmen and I don’ t know if these ones are supposed to be those same ones or not. Either way, they don’t know where blood comes from, so they spend much of the episode trying to get Dr. Julia to create it for them. That said, one of them does see her bleed, so it is possible the knowledge could spread, which would not be good for our heroes. For the record, the Grendlers are still speaking in Doom sound effects. I assume that’s just gonna be like that forever and it makes me very happy.
• As I said, these new spiders are disappointing because they look just like Earth spiders and the show had, until now, done a decent job making the aliens look alien. I’ll have to allow them this one though, because for the most part they’ve not created new aliens since the Grendlers first appeared. So far we have two seemingly sapient species (the Terrians and Grendlers) and those little lizard puppets from the pilot that the Internet tells me are called Kobas. We’ve never seen what is making the ever-present Eagle Sounds, but I’m hoping it is some freaky looking bat thing. Devon also mentions that she hasn’t gotten used to the insects on this planet, which indicates tiny life forms we’ve not seen and I sure hope they are some weird little guys.
• That’s right, I’ll bother doing real bullet points for an Alien Stuff section.

Other Stuff: 1) The “will they/won’t they” for Devon and Danziger continues in this one. She’s over her dream man from a while back, time to start having feelings for the one the audience is gonna root for. The “they will” for Alonso and Julia also continues. Good for them. 2) I do like that the crew seem to take care not to harm the spiders. Considering they’re basically always intent on taking this planet from the Terrians and Grendlers, seeing them do minor nice things to the local life helps.