The human population of G889 continues to prove itself much larger than first assumed. This time we come across a veritable village’s worth of humans living in caves. This group, made up of penal colonists and their descendants, was taken in by a tribe of Terrians who felt they had the potential to be redeemed. Also, the Terrians are once again sharing some of their mystical powers, though unlike with Mary, it isn’t the ability to travel through dirt. Apparently Terrians hibernate in the winter and, by touching their immobile forms, the humans can access the dreamscape of the Terrians and project themselves anywhere, even back to the stations around Earth.

And that ability is how Governor Shepherd has apparently met Devon decades ago in her dreams and inspired her to come to the planet in the first place. Though she didn’t believe he was a real person back then, just a dimly remembered dream, he incepted the idea that going to G889 might help heal her son Uly. Also, in dreams they fell in love, so Shepherd has been waiting for her arrival on the planet for decades.

But the thing is, he had problems during those decades. His sister Katrina, also a penal colonist, had a malfunction in her sleep chamber when sent to the planet and she aged the two decades that everyone else spent in suspended animation. This messed her up and she made Shepherd promise never to leave her. Thus, she’s not happy when Devon arrives and Shepherd considers leaving the village to go with the Eden Project. In the end, Katrina stabs Shepherd rather than lose him, and Danziger kills her by shooting her with a flaregun. The end. (Devon does still see Shepherd in her dreams.)

The paragraph of numbers: 1) To keep suspense in the episode, we get a back and forth on whether Shepherd is a good guy or not. I never found him likeable and I’m glad he won’t be sticking around. 2) In this cave village, True got to hang out with someone close to her age other than Uly for the first time since they left the stations. The culture in the caves is much different, from what she’s used to, though. For instance, they don’t consider family to be very important. True asks the kid “”Don’t you have a dad?” and he just kinda gestures to a crowd of people saying “I guess one of them must be.” 3) This village is only a few hours from where the Eden Project are camped for the winter, so it is entirely possible they encountered Mary, or even her parents back in the day. Could Gaal have wandered by these parts at some point? Why not? The Eden Project made it here in a few months from the area where Gaal was, and there were decades for it to happen. Really, humanity is all over this dumb planet.

The Eden Project gang is still camped in the spot where they intent to spend the winter, which remains a vaguely haunted place. This time the crew are being bothered by dreams of their mothers (or at least a motherly figure) trying to send a message to them. This, it turns out, is because an actual transmission from a mother (Dell Curry) trying to reach her son that is somehow penetrating the planet’s dream-space. Anyway, the episode has the team try to find this mother and son and rescue them, only to realize that the bad guy they were trying to rescue them from is actually the now-grown son, who has been living in the wilds of the planet for decades (in spite of which, he is one of the most clean-shaven humans that has ever existed). The kid-now-man doesn’t end up joining out crew, but he does get the message his mother was trying to get to him, and wanders off into the woods. I have no idea if he’ll be back.

I’ll be honest, this one didn’t grab me too well, but I feel like that may be my fault. Throughout the whole episode, I never assumed, as the crew did, that the transmission was coming from a living person. Maybe it’s just because I’ve seen this kind of story play out on other shows (Star Trek, for example), but as soon as the transmission first appeared, I assumed it was years-old from someone now dead. I assumed that was what I was supposed to think. I didn’t realize I was supposed to assume otherwise until the character started looking for Dell as if she were alive. Ah well. It is extremely hard to come up with fresh sci-fi concepts, so I can’t fault the show if one of them doesn’t land for me.

What I can fault the show for is that the eagle sound effect, which I said I was gonna ignore, appears about twenty times in this episode! There’s a three minute span where it is heard about six times! It’s madness! I swear the creators of the show in the 1990s did this on purpose just to rankle me in the 2020s!!! Anyway, they use more Doom sounds for Grendlers again in this one, so that’s cool.

1) Yale says there is a chance this year’s winter will be a “Leap Winter” which is twice as long as a regular winter. This is bad, but even worse considering they don’t know how long the regular winter is yet anyway. 2) Casual mention is made of something called the “STIM Program” which can save personality traits from a person and implant them in someone else (presumably someone mindwashed like the Yale cyborgs) which continues this show’s trend to casually reveal that back on the Earth stations they have very impressive sci-fi tech. In any case, Danziger at least realizes that the person who has the implanted traits wouldn’t be the same person, not really. 3) When the whole camp is being bothered by dreams of their mothers calling out to them, we learn that True has never met her mother and knows almost nothing about her. This is revealed to be because she had been in an accident not long after becoming pregnant. In the end, Danziger lets True see her comatose form via VR. No mention is made of how this is affecting Uly. Is he, the only person in camp whose mother is actually there with him, just like “That was a weird dream.” 4) Oh yeah! The episode begins with the Eden Project team stealing from what they assume to be a Grendler stash of goods. Danziger mentions that he ought to maybe feel a twinge of guilt about this, but the fact they need them to get through the winter makes the guilt go away quickly. 5) Morgan is very active as a team-member in this one, both during the raid on the Grendler stash, and during the search for Dell. Hopefully, after the events of the two-parter, his redemption arc has really begun in earnest.

This second part of the two-parter picks up, as one would expect, where the last one left off. Morgan has activated a geo-lock that petrified a chunk of the planet, and a Terrian with it, and now the rest of the Terrian tribe is going to punish Morgan, Bess, and Yale.

Mary the Human Terrian is back! I honestly didn’t realize that would happen, but it seems obvious in retrospect. She gives the Terrians a human face they can use to talk to the Eden Project group. Anyway, the Terrians send Mary out to tell them that the geo-lock has done bad damage to the planet and as a result, the three humans they have captured are going to be punished at dawn. Devin and Danziger argue about how to deal with this. Devin wants to talk to the Terrians and ask for more time so they can deactivate the geo-lock, which is complicated by the fact that the petrification of a portion of the planet has disrupted the Terrian’s dream-space communications, so Alonso has trouble talking to them. Danziger’s plan is to use the remaining geo-locks to threaten the Terrians that they’ll do it again unless the hostages are released.

Meanwhile, Yale is concerned that he’s gonna go cyborg-violent and he is happy to see a chance to die protecting others. He convinces the Terrians that what happened was his fault (a complete lie) and that Bess and Morgan are innocent. The couple are released and Yale stays behind to accept the punishment. This plan is complicated when Yale learns that the sunstones (which is what the Terrians call the “Morganite”) can help him recall his pre-mindwash memories. It turns out that he was not a vicious killer of innocents. When Yale was a soldier (named Braden Coye or something close to that), one of his fellows was going to shoot on unarmed people, and Braden shot that guy to protect them. Still, he was deemed a criminal and mindwiped into a servant cyborg. I assume this is why he never went bad, though. He wasn’t a violent type even before mindwashing. But learning this, Yale (who isn’t yet prepared to call himself Braden) doesn’t want to die.

When Bess and Morgan make it back to camp, Danziger wonders if it wouldn’t be worth it to just let the Terrians kill Yale. After all, he still sees the cyborg as a risk. But Devon won’t have it and she goes to talk to the Terrians to buy more time. She fails, but luckily Morgan feels pretty darn bad about what he did and he attempts works hard to deactivate the geo-lock, even though it is actively shocking him to prevent tampering. Alongside this, Dr. Julia learns that the sunstone, being a part of the planetary equivalent of a neurological system, is able to communicate in a rudimentary manner such as binary. Using his VR gear, Morgan is able to team up with the rocks and they unlock the geo-lock and unpetrify the land. Even that one Terrian who got got is back to life.

The unpetrification came just a moment too late for Yale, who had been brought into the earth to die. But Mary saves him just after the unpetrification, then Yale tries to get Mary to join the humans. Mary refuses, but the Terrians take away her ability to traverse through the dirt. I can’t tell if this is because she rescued Yale or if they think he’s right that she ought to join the humans, but either way, she still refuses to join and runs off into the woods to attempt to rejoin the tribe.

Stray thoughts: 1) I like that, in all her dealings with the Terrians here, Devon never once says “Well, Morgan did it!” even though it was true. She always tells the Terrians she wants to fix what “we” did, accepting the actions of one of her people as something done under her leadership. 2) After it’s all said and done, Danziger gives Morgan a handshake to show he respects that he helped save the day. Granted this is also a chance for him to squeeze Morgan’s hand, which is covered in burns from the shocks he got, so this is the best of both worlds for manly Danziger. 3) The intended method of killing the hostages for the Terrians is to pull them into the earth, presumably to suffocate and be crushed under the pressure and such. This is quite similar to what the Terrians did to Gaal. And it isn’t that far off from the way the Terrians liked to die during Moon Cross, to become one with the planet again. In fact, in that last one the outcasts who were refused death were punished by not getting to be brought into the earth. Does this mean the death of Gaal and near-death of Yale are meant to be merciful by Terrian standards?

We’ve reached a two-parter! The first one, if we don’t count that extra-sized pilot (that would have presumably been chopped in two if it aired in reruns). Naturally, for an event like this, the show needed to justify the two parts, so both of the plots in here are paying off things that have been set up throughout the show so far: Morgan and Bess being selfish jerks, and Yale being a potential killer cyborg threat.

First is Yale, who is having nightmares and thinks there is something wrong with the group’s convenient new campsite. He has flashbacks to a time before he was mindwashed, when he was apparently a soldier who gunned down unarmed people who had surrendered. Now he’s getting anxious and having angry outbursts, even lashing out at Uly. The rest of the team has to debate what to do if he, like the other cyborgs in his line, reverts to violent mode. In the end, he exiles himself from camp to ensure he doesn’t hurt anyone.

Meanwhile, the group has discovered a new kind of rocks that seem able to store energy, which will be a benefit to the group to use as batteries. But Morgan and Bess see this as the chance to use their “geo-lock” device from way back to do exactly what they said they were gonna do: stake a claim on a valuable mineral (they’re calling it “Morganite”). When it turns out that this plan could hurt the Terrians, Bess backs down and thinks they should wait until they know better (Bess has never lived up the heel turn she promised back then). The couple fights and Morgan goes off to set off the geo-lock alone, intending to petrify the land so nobody else can take the Morganite. All is going well for him, until he realizes that Bess has wandered off to investigate the rocks and, since her life is the only thing that could possibly make him act against his cowardice, he rushes into danger’s way to help her. It’s dumb luck that Morgan didn’t harm any of the humans with the geo-lock, but he did manage to petrify at least one Terrian. The episode ends with him, Bess, and Yale (whom they’d run into) being confronted by Terrians.

Other stuff: 1) It seems like Alonso and Julia are officially boning now. We didn’t get an episode about it, which should be a flaw, but I don’t care enough to feel like we missed out on anything. 2) I recently said it was strange that we hadn’t seen any more of those little puppet aliens from the early show, but one turns up here! Doesn’t really do anything, but it is there. 3) Julia throws in what I assume to be a pretty important piece of lore. Examining the rocks they found, she finds that they are very similar to the Terrians, and from this supposes that the Terrians and the planet itself are all part of a single organism. 4) It’s done mostly to play up his cowardice, but I like that Morgan, who spent most of his life on space stations, would be unnerved by an earthquake. “Space stations move. Planets don’t!” he says.