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.