This episode’s focal character is True, the young daughter of Danziger (Clancy Brown’s character). She’s pretty unhappy with things, which is understandable given that she’s crashed onto a planet she was never meant to be on, and her father is busy keeping the equipment that everyone needs running. She feels ignored and chafes against the rules she’s expected to follow. Gaal, our Tim Curry-portrayed “stranded astronaut” who is really a penal colony survivor sees True’s dissatisfaction and uses it to manipulate her.
I still don’t have a handle on Gaal’s motives. He claims he wants off the planet, but he’s scheming and sabotaging and working with the Grendlers. If he actually wanted to leave the planet, he’d be working with the humans, rather than against them. Today he is specifically trying to steal one of the group’s vehicles. What he wants it for, I don’t know. But we do learn that he’s giving the Grendlers a periodic taste of his blood to keep them working for him. Gaal is up to something.
But for all his scheming, Gaal isn’t the mastermind he hopes. Danziger is suspicious of him, so he makes sure the vehicles aren’t stealable. And, though Danziger thinks Devon is too trusting of Gaal, even she is having Yale do an investigation on the mysterious stranger (It turns out that one of Yale’s cyborg powers is a computobrain that lets him surf an Internet-like database). Yale notes that Gaal has a tattoo that says “E2” that connects him to the penal colony program that we, the viewers, learned about last episode (and it also is like “Earth 2”, y’know?). Essentially the group, except True, has lost any reason to trust Gaal.
Gaal bonds with True by agreeing with her that the rest of the group are jerks and making her feel special. He tries, but fails, to get her help in stealing a vehicle. She successfully steals a horse* but that’s not really what he wanted. Still, he rolls with it and continues to manipulate the little girl. In the end, she is rescued by her father and Gaal is driven away at gunpoint, but True remains loyal to the stranger who treated her well. She assumes, as do I, that their paths shall cross again.
* Oh, by the way, they grow a horse in this one. The group find some canisters that were part of their lost cargo. It turns out they’re cans of horse. As in, they activate the can and a couple hours later it grows into a horse. This miracle technology is apparently advanced even within the sci-fi future of the show and it isn’t without its flaws. The horse grows to adult stature over the course of a day and it is only through the hard work of young Dr. Julia that it doesn’t continue aging until it dies. Uly names the horse Pegasus and, I’ll be honest, I can’t tell if Gaal gets the horse in the end or if we’re meant to assume it ran back to camp. I’d assume the latter, but I figure we’ll find out next time.
Most importantly, this episode gave us this: