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.

Since her son has been healed and changed by the Terrians, Devon has been worried she’s going to lose him to them. This episode is about this. Also, Alonso does some stuff.

There are two moons around G889 and it seems like they spin in opposing directions. When they cross, it is a special time the Terrians call Moon Cross. This is a time of mystical strangeness, including the Terrians being able to “die” by becoming one with the planet. Presumably Moon Cross is also why the crew encounter Actual Ghosts! The spirits of the dead speaking to the living is a thing that can happen on Earth 2!

Anyway, winter is approaching and our explorers need to find a place to set up camp. Uly, via his connection to the Terrians, leads them to a nice greenhouse that has apparently been there for fifteen or so years. Uly calls it “Mary’s garden” and it’s a perfect place to spend the winter, if it weren’t for the ghosts. It also allows Devon to face her fears about losing her son to the Terrians when they find Mary, a human who was taken by a Terrian tribe when she was a child and who now considers herself a member of that tribe, barely remembering humanity at all. It turns out that the Terrians who killed Mary’s parents are now outcasts from the tribe, denied the opportunity to die during Moon Cross. There’s a halfhearted attempt to reconnect Mary to her humanity (Bess gives her a bubble bath) but it doesn’t go well. In the end, it looks like the Terrians are going to take Uly, but actually Uly is in some sort of Moon Cross Trance and he tells the Terrians to let the outcasts die now, so there can be peace (he’s getting closer to that dream he had about being a Terrian prince or whatever). In the end, Mary goes back with the tribe that raised her after her parents died, Uly doesn’t actually remember what happened during the trance (but he does get to keep a Terrian lighting staff which will surely be important in the future), and Devon feels a little better about things for the time being.

Now, hit me with the bullet points that instead of bullet points I put in numbered sentences in a paragraph for some reason: 1) Alonso narrates the episode and there’s considerably more narration than usual. I can’t help but wonder if they assumed the audience wouldn’t know what was going on with a lot of the Terrian stuff, so they added the narration to spell it out. 2) Mary’s parents were part of some “radical biologist” group that got put into the penal colony on the planet. When Yale tries to use his computer brain to find out more, it prevents him from doing so, which he thinks may be a sign that it is connected to his pre-wash identity, which is confirmed when he remembers some facts about it from actual memory, instead of via his computer. 3) The moons are one of the special effects on the show that don’t impress me. Stick to puppet aliens, please. (Actually, I’m surprised we’ve not had a return of the little monkeytype alien from the pilot.) 4) There are hits of intimacy between Mary and Alonso, which don’t actually go anywhere (as well they should not), but they do make Julia jealous.

I’ve identified the show as telling a wagon train story, right? Well this is the one where they have to circle the wagons because an enemy is attacking.

But really, as one may expect from the title, this episode is about getting Dr. Julia back with the group. It all begins when Alonso goes against the group’s wishes and goes back to get her. It’s a good thing he does, though, because he brings her to the camp just in time for a crisis to unfold that gives her every opportunity she needs to prove herself to the Eden Project gang. Seriously, I spent part of the episode wondering if Julia had set up the situation just to get back into their good graces. But no, it’s true, Julia is finally back on the good side and tells the whole truth about her affiliation to the Council and even throws away the device she’d been using to keep in touch with Reilly, the Council representative.

The crisis that brings Julia back into the fold begins when Yale is shot with an “incendiary worm bullet” which is, of course, a high-tech round that hits a target, painfully burrows to their core, and then explodes an hour later. It was designed specifically to be cruel, and it is the telltale weapon of a Zed Unit, a spinoff of the Yale series of cyborgs. Zeds are criminals who had been taken, memory-wiped, and turned into near-invulnerable supersoldiers (the one here absolutely looks like a simulant that should be trying to kill Dave Lister). Julia is able to use her surgery powers save Yale (and later Alonso when he is also shot). She also puts herself into harms way several times to try to prevent others from being hurt. And then she lies to Reilly, saying that Uly has been shot, so that Reilly will reveal the weak spot of the Zed units (which is at the base of their skull). When Danziger is shot and captured by the Zed, Julia leads the rescue and, though she can’t operate on him because her hand was injured by the supersoldier, she leads Devon in saving Danziger. Really, Julia has proven herself in Every Reasonable Way to be a loyal and valuable member of the team. As far as unreasonable ways, we don’t see how Morgan feels about it yet. (I joke that Morgan would be unreasonable, but he was actively attacked by Julia last episode, so if he harbours some ill-will about that, it’d be more justified than a lot of Morgan’s complaints.)

That’s about it. This episode is all a-plot, really. What else is there? Well, 1) We learn that Reilly may not actually be on the planet, but in orbit. I’m not really sure why that’s significant, but I guess it is progress. 2) During the attempt to save Danziger, Bess is a fully participatory member of the team, mostly manning the communications gear. 3) There’s a recurring crew of secondary characters (there’d have to be given the setup of the show) and this episode does give them a little more active role. I’ve mentioned Baines (who is a Black male, the only one apart from Yale, I think) and there are a couple others who seem important enough that I should know their names, but don’t. There’s a white woman who seems to be in charge of the weapons, and a very generic white guy who just generally stands near Danziger when Baines isn’t the one standing near Danziger. I like slowly seeing these side characters get more prominence and I hope that the rest of the crew, who don’t even get lines usually, get a bit more focus on occasion. 5) Oh yeah, I should mention, in the resolution of the episode Julia captures the Zed unit alive, but he’s designed to commit suicide when captured, so that’s the end of him.

This is the rare episode where the narration is provided by the character most appropriate to do that narration, because this episode is narrated by Dr. Julia Heller and this is a pretty big episode for her.

Since we’ve learned that Julia is reporting to “the Council” (via a guy named Reilly) she has been torn between feeling a patriotic desire to serve the Council and her attachment to the other Eden Project folk that she does want to keep safe. Reilly still wants her to reveal the location of the Eden Project people so that the Council can come and basically dissect young Uly for research purposes. This time, Julia offers a different option: She takes DNA samples from Uly and injects them directly into her brain. Surprisingly, this doesn’t go well for her.

From her injections, Julia does seem to gain a replication of Uly’s connection to the Terrians, but it isn’t quite right. First of all, a Terrian appears and screams at her. That’s not great. But also, it has drug-like side effects that cause her to act uncharacteristically, but then forget about it afterwards. She gets all horned up for Alonso and then confesses her espionage lifestyle and DNA stealing plans to Morgan in an attempt to recruit the other least-trustworthy cast member. Morgan refuses and she knocks him out and leaves him in the woods where her sober self doesn’t even know. All of this is starting to be noticed by the others, which peaks when True actually catches Julia in VR talking to Reilly and, when Julia notices her, races back to town to tell the others.

In the end, the crew get Morgan back and find out what they can from Julia’s logs, then leave their former doctor alone in the wilderness, knocked out and presumably unable to follow them. We’re told they never found Julia’s VR device, so she should be able to contact Reilly, but will she? For all the flaws in her plan, she really did want to help her Eden Project friends. Will she stay where she is and live off the land and become the new Gaal? This is potentially the biggest cast shakeup of the show so far, or it could all be undone next episode. I have no memory from my youth, so the only way to be sure is to come back next time, same Earth 2 channel and all that.

Other thoughts: 1) True goes through a whole chase scene when Julia is after her and I don’t think she screamed once. This kid is forgetting her role on this show. (The eagle is still screeching, though). 2) True, having grown up on the space stations around Earth, gets to see snow for the first time. It’s just little patches of snow on the grass, not the gross full-on winter stuff that everyone should hate. 3) When True tells the others what she saw Julia doing, Julia tries to play it off as if the child is lying. Most people don’t believe the kid, but Bess just knocks out Julia with the Earth 2 equivalent of a hypospray. Don’t mess with Bess. 4) There’s actually a lot more VR in the show than I remembered. In this episode alone, in addition to being used by Julia and Reilly for communications, as usual, we also have the kids using it to play cowboy games. It really is this show’s holodeck.

Bess and Morgan are the important players in this one, and they’re on the sympathetic side again, showing no outright villainous traits. Bess gets along with Devon and Morgan is tolerated by the men of the group. In times like these I can see how they’re redeemable.

This plot begins when Bess realizes she’s had thoughts of cheating on Morgan with another man (Unless I missed something, we’re not told who he was, but we know he’s with the group). She has not actually cheated on Morgan, but the the fact she considered it is enough to send her into a guilt spiral. First she goes to Yale, who has the details of all 99 popular religions in his computer head. Bess apparently is loyal to Catholicism and, even though Yale makes it clear he’s not a priest, he just has the notes on file, she confesses her supposed faithlessness to him. Then she tries to confess to Morgan himself, but he reacts about how one would expect from the character so far: badly. He makes a scene and escalates it to a fight.

Alonso then points out that the couple had a four-year marriage contract and such contracts are based on station time for the stations back around Earth. Since they’ve all spent two decades in suspended animation for the trip to G889, those contracts have all lapsed long ago. Bess and Morgan aren’t even technically married anymore, so now there’s nothing to hold them together unless they feel like they should stay together. This leads to introspection and Bess comes to think that maybe the relationship was a mistake all along. After all, she was a poor Earth girl and he is a politician from the stations, so he always considered her family to be much lower class. This leads to a scene in which Morgan does what he often does, retreats into VR, and Bess happens to stumble upon him while he can’t see. She realizes that he has created a VR representation of her father and he is trying to apologize and explain to him. Seeing him make this effort makes her fall for him again and they have Yale marry them again (this time for life) in as big a ceremony as they can manage. I still don’t get what she sees in him, but at least this time their vows didn’t include forsaking everyone else. That’s got to be good, right?

That’s not the only plot of the episode though. Also, Dr. Julia is still reporting to the Council and Uly is starting to get Terrian go-through-dirt powers. The Council wants her to harvest Uly’s pineal gland to study how the Terrians have changed him (they fear that when the rest of the settlers arrive, the sick kids among them will also gain powers and they want to study Uly to make sure they can control the situation). Julia stresses about how far to go with this for the Council, but ultimately lies to them because she isn’t willing to sacrifice the kid.

Other stuff: 1) That eagle sound effect. I was going to stop mentioning it, but then it happened like three times in as many minutes (probably not literally) just to mock me. Still, I probably won’t mention it any more unless it’s really necessary. Also, True didn’t scream in this one. 2) We get some world building about the history of Earth. Apparently, near the end of the 21st Century there was something called the Faith Wars, in which I guess religious groups fought. I feel like the real world future is still on track for that one. 3) After the wedding there’s a VR dance reception thing and I just bet the actors loved the chance to wear different clothes and be in a different set and such.