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.
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.
The show continues to stretch into different war-related genres. This episode, which starts with a quote from John Wilkes Booth, is a political intrigue thriller. Even though the Earth in this future era is still one divided into countries (our characters are explicitly United States Marines), it turns out that there is a uniting governmental body in the form the United Nations. That means that the person who holds the title of the Secretary General is basically the leader of the Earth.
And then the Secretary General is assassinated. By an In-Vitro no less. This causes all manner of strife, including making the populace even more suspicious of “Tanks” so the two on the cast, Hawkes and McQueen, have to undergo loyalty testing. Meanwhile, one of the frontrunners for the position of the world ruler is the leader of a far right wing party (complete with a swastikish logo) that holds very anti-In-Vitro policies. The episode does all that you’d expect with further assassination attempts, including Hawkes being basically hypnotized by the loyalty test to try to kill this potential fascist ruler. In the end, though, the fascist is not elected and it is mostly a victory.
The woman who actually does win the Secretary General position is interesting. She’s clearly well-meaning, but is willing to get her hands dirty because she’s behind the assassination attempts on the fascist. When West prevents one of those attempts, he says that killing is not the answer and that they have to trust the voters (Must be nice to have that level of confidence in the system). And Hawkes clearly didn’t support the fascist party, but he wasn’t a fan of being forced to be a puppet assassin either. And finally, it is suggested that her company knew about the existence of the aliens before they sent out the colonists who got massacred in the pilot and kept it secret for some reason. So, she’s definitely the “good” choice to rule the planet, but the show is treating her as a complex player in the political game here. Also, for the record, she’s played by the woman who played Bebe on Frasier and the character is blind, with some sub-Geordi level of technology compensating for sight. I can only assume she’ll be back.
The episode also has some replacements come to the Wild Cards to take up the positions of the extras who have been killed off over the course of the show. That’s interesting because I assumed they’d just whittled it down to the main cast and it’d be like that from now on. One of the replacements turns out to be an attempted assassin and gets killed, but the others (whose names I have not yet bothered to learn) may indeed be actual new additions to the cast.
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.
