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.
It makes sense that, after West and Vensen got episodes that focused on them, Hawkes would get the third. He’s the other member of the cast most fleshed out. And, of course, the episode is going to focus on the fact he’s an In-Vitro. Also, there’s another In-Vitro in the cast, the high ranking Commander (or Corporal or something) McQueen. So the episode looks at the life that “Tanks” live by creating a conflict between the rebellious Hawkes and the by-the-books McQueen.
The plot is relatively simple. The crew are on a space freighter. Most of the “dirty jobs” are done by In-Vitros and there is a big cargo of In-Vitros still in their tanks, waiting to be awakened at the destination world, more cargo than people. This division between Tanks and Humans comes to a head when the freighter is attacked and the most realistic way to survive is to cut the power to the section of the ship keeping the suspended In-Vitros alive. The result is a mutinty, the details of which are unimportant, other than that it gives Hawkes and McQueen (and others) their chance to debate the topic of racism with stakes. We learn more about In-Vitros as we go. They are awakened from their tubes at eighteen years old! So basically someone like Hawkes has probably been sentient for less than a decade. We also know that, given their lack of a true family, they can sometimes bond over being grown with similar DNA configuration, and Hawkes has a “sister” of this kind among the cargo of In-Vitros on the freighter. All in all, this is a decent setup for this kind of story and I’m impressed that this series has done it.
It’s also worth noting that, if last episode was a battleship and groundfighting combat episode and the episode before that was dogfighting combat, this one is submarine combat. If I’d gone off my memory I’d’ve thought the show was all dogfighting all the time, but it’s good that they mix it up. Keeps it from getting stale.
Not much else to report. We get a subplot about romance with the characters unused in the main plot. Wang has started dating someone he met online (over the “SpaceNet”) and Vensen thinks romance is a waste of time. Damphousse has a boyfriend back home who has a daughter from a previous relationship who hasn’t warmed up to her yet. I don’t know if any of this will matter down the line, but we do get West admitting his selfishness in going AWOL that one time, so the show will address things serially on occasion it seems.
