I don’t think it’s too early for me to say that I am enjoying this show less than I did Earth 2, but I’m not yet ready to claim this is a bad show, and certainly they’re able to try some interesting things. Large swathes of this episode are without dialogue and, even if there is some clearly-mandated-by-higher-ups clumsy narration at the beginning, I found this to be a bold choice for television of the era.

One of our top two favourite handsome In-Vitro cast members, Cooper Hawkes, gets to star in this one. He’s recruited for a secret mission that goes badly and he winds up stranded on a Chig-occupied planet waiting for extraction that he may or may not be able to get to. Hawkes spends a lot of this episode killing Chigs and being haunted by a corpsey sexylady (who, being bad at faces, I didn’t realize was played by the same actor as Vansen until after, and I don’t know what is relevant about that to the scenario). This is interspersed with flashbacks to Hawkes’s birth and training in the In-Vitro training facility (we see text on screen and In Vitro is apparently not hyphenated, but I ain’t changing now). We see that Hawkes first began to question the propagandistic programming they were being fed when he saw a bird (appropriate given his name) and he was considered “defective” and had to escape. All good stuff.

In the present, while stranded on the planet fighting the Chigs, he is about to kill a Chig when he notices it looking up at that planet’s equivalent of a bird (and I was very happy to see this example of alien life, I assure you). With this, Hawkes (and the viewer) finally comes to think of Chigs as persons with maybe different personalities and points of view and whatnot. Maybe it’s just that they all look exactly the same because of their armour, but I suspect that they probably have a lot of similarities to In-Vitros, who are trained from day one to be soldiers. Later Hawkes has a moment of bonding with a Chig (probably the same one who watched the bird, but how would I know). And later still, he has to fight some more and realizes that one of the ones he killed was the same one he had the moment with. It’s a shame. It’s a tragedy. It’s war.

Well, I sure wasn’t expecting this: it’s a Christmas episode. And it’s a religiousy one too.

Instead of their usual space planes (which actually don’t see that much use now that I think about it), this time with Wild Cards are in a mid-size ship where they can all be together doing different jobs (there’s a communications position, and pilots, and turrets, and cetera). They get in a fight with the Chigs and get blown off course or whatever and are left pretty much dead in the water.

Back on the Saratoga, they are assumed dead but McQueen doesn’t believe it. He’s able to convince Ross to let him use resources to look for the main cast. They figure out that the Wild Cards can hear their radio calls, but not respond, which keeps the search going, but the Saratoga is searching the wrong part of space. That means that the team gets to all react to being stranded, drifting toward enemy lines, and it’s Christmas above it all.

Amusingly, we learn that Hawkes left the In-Vitro training before learning what Christmas is or who Jesus was. There’s a tinge of “teach someone the true meaning of Christmas” to his plot, but I wish there’d been more. I wish the show had gone on to be fully about teaching him Christianity. I would have laughed. McQueen’s plot is about not losing faith that the team is out there. Mildly religious stuff. But then there’s Wang’s plot. He’s the type who will cross himself when he thinks he’s going to die, so he was probably religious growing up, but now, after all he’s had to see and do during the war, he’s a non-believer. Thus, it is through him that the miracle that saves the day comes to pass. While Wang is on communicator duty, he picks up a strange code that he translates and uses to find the location of a nearby comet. This “some scientific language” goes on to explain how the ship could adjust its momentum to fall into orbit around the comet, which will carry them back to the Saratoga. And because Wang has faith in the message, he does a spacewalk to adjust the thrusters and does the dang thing. And then they have a Christmas party.

So the theme of the episode is mostly vague “faith” stuff, but Jesus and Christmas are specifically mentioned, something you don’t get in Star Trek. We don’t get explanations for where the strange code came from (though the comet used is clearly analogous to the star the Magi followed), or why a group of passing Chigs didn’t shoot the ship. These are just miracles. If we learn that the Chigs celebrate Christmas too, I will be highly entertained.

Some other stray notes: 1) There are definitely extras among the Wild Cards for the last couple episodes, but I have no idea if they’re the same ones who were introduced in that one episode. I ain’t gonna check. 2) At one point in this episode the team picks up a transmission from Earth, assumed to have been beamed out into space long ago. It’s the Adam West Batman theme song. I approve. 3) There’s also a point in here where it seems like the team can hear Chig fighters flying by not only through their ship walls, but through space. Generally with sci-fi shows I assume that the sound in space is just for the benefit of the audience, but the team hears the ships flying by and react to them and everything. Sound definitely travels through space in this, I guess. 4) Commodore Ross plays guitar for the missing team, which was cool.

This one starts with West being brought back from a combat scene, the only survivor of the Wild Cards. I guess they must’ve killed off most of the cast between episodes. Well, at least we’ll get a West-focused episode that isn’t about him pining for that ladyfriend of his.

When he comes to, West asks McQueen what happened to the rest of the team and McQueen is like “You know what happened, you told us.” The team is dead and they even have a recording of West saying so in his distress call. West can’t remember what happened, so the bulk of the episode is him stressed out and having hallucinations and such while insisting that they aren’t dead. McQueen is sympathetic, he is the only survivor of his team from the pilot after all, but he assumes West just has survivor’s guilt. Meanwhile, the doctors basically say “It’s really inconvenient for him to think his friends are still alive, so we could just do some sci-fi brain stuff and make him forget them” and that almost happens. In the end though, West’s memory comes in and he reveals that he sent the distress call as part of a plan to ambush the Chigs, then got separated from the rest of the team. Anyway, now that they know that they go and save the team, who held up fine while they were thought dead behind enemy lines for a couple days.

I like when war stories make war look bad, because I’m biased because I think war is bad, so seeing West suffer trauma and even break down in tears at the end is a plus for me. I’ll even allow the happy ending this time, because realistically I never expected anything else. Felt like a bottle episode. Not much to comment on. In the future they still use big loud floor buffers like we have now.

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.