- SPOILERS AHEAD … AND SUBTERFUGE, DOUBLE-DEALING AND UNDERHANDED EVERYTHING!
If the alien apocalypse wasn’t such a serious business, and we’re talking “serious” with a capital “S” and some highly luminous but grim neon, you could well argue that everyone is having a hood of a time trying to outfox and outplay everyone else.
In one action-packed narrative, “Disposable Heroes” delivered up Kynes (Wayne Brady) who looks like he’s working with the Hosts while possibly working with their enemy while possibly aiding and abetting the Resistance while quote possibly not.
Got all that? But wait, there’s more!
Over at the GA Fascist Circus, Helena Goldwyn (Ally Walker), who is a failed Hollywood studio exec (this explains a great deal) and Alan Snyder (Peter Jacobson) who is a failure as a human being among other things, the game is to make Kynes look incompetent and unable to run the Seattle colony properly by staging a series of terrorist incidents that will make it look like the smarmy governor of the Modelest Colony There Is is losing control.
Of course, being a Snyder-run operation, it’s hamfistedly, messily son and it’s obvious to all and sundry that the explosions, death and terroristic stuff is all a great big amateur hour series of diversions.
The GA don’t care since the end goal is a pretext to come jackboot-ing Morks style – again my favourite description of Earth’s new alien overlords ever – but it exposes just how sloppy Snyder really is in pursuit of keeping his new cushy position in Davos.
He thinks he has all the cards, but after Helena informs him that he is now in charge of the Seattle Colony – after Kynes disappears, sensing the noose is tightening around him, and switching off the servers, phone and tracking systems to render the GA blind – he realises he might have grabbed the old family pack, you know the one that’s been in the games cupboard for years, is missing several key cards with a few UNO cards thrown in for good measure.
He’s been had, and he knows it but honestly it couldn’t have happened to another guy; although there is a sneaking suspicion that he may be playing a whole other game than a purely GA one, a likely idea since he’s always looked after one person and one person only – himself.
Someone who is most definitely playing a double game, and playing it magnificently well as it turns out, is Kynes and the full extent of his grand epic scheme came into somewhat full view last night (although, once again, Colony, is doing a whole of hinting and not nearly enough saying upfront, loud and proud; don’t be another Lost, please Colony!)
As Helena and Snyder close in, Kynes realises it’s time to set the mysterious Project Phoenix in play, a plan which involved summoning his own collection of Outliers (members of the ex-military who he’s diverted from the Hosts’ own private army into the Seattle Colony under assumed identities) which includes Dave O’Neill (Will Brittain), Will (Josh Holloway) and Broussard (Tory Kittles) to rallying pints where they’re readied for what it is promised will be a coming war for the soul of humanity.
Indeed, good old Kynes, while he’s definitely flawed, arrogant and rather in love with himself, has been quietly building Seattle into “an ark” as his lieutenant Adam Ford (David Paetkau) – newly partner-less after Agent Harris (E. J. Bonilla) ends up dead and tortured as part of the half-baked GA’s grand initiative of murder and bombing – tells the Outliers, filling it with doctors, engineers, all the people who’ll be needed to rebuild human civilisation after the coming war between the Hosts.Morks/RAPs/Terminators and their enemy who’s due on Earth any day now.
Or have they arrived? As we saw right at the start of the season, and again last night in an opening sequence where Outliers, newly-awoken from pods in the middle of the forest, trying to stay alive against a foe encased in a shimmering material that effectively renders them invisible, Predator-style.
It’s only once all the Outliers are dead – and honestly their moment in the narrative is brief and brutal – that their foe decloaks and we see the edge of a spotted head that is most definitely NOT human, and NOT robotic.
It appears, and it’s reinforced later once Kynes has made his dash for freedom, that he might well be working with the enemy of the RAPs, on the basis that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Yep, it’s been proven to be a less than successful way to approach strategy but what choice does he have? The GA, and is slimy collaborative horde – the scene where Kynes denounces Helena and Snyder as traitors to the species and weak, spineless self-survivalists who drag everyone else down is a joy to behold! – seem to hold all the aces and if Kyne is to have any hope of making his vision a reality, he’s going to need help from the only other beings that can provide it.
But if they, and by extension, non-collaborating humanity emerge alive and intact from the coming war – please let there be a season 4! Please! – what will be the price? Will they, once resident on Earth’s green-and blue pleasant lands, decide to stay a while, set a spell and enslave us all over again?
Quite possibly they will, but it’s the price you have to pay when the options are few and far between.
Speaking of limited options, in the light of Will going boots and all with the Outliers cause, Katie (Sarah Wayne Callies) and Amy Leonard (Peyton List), who meet delightfully awkwardly outside of the house that Amy and Broussard share, are left sitting on the sidelines when the men going riding into the announcement of battle.
They don’t get to do much but talk but that conversation is illuminating with Amy, used to dealing with people with PTSD, remarking that men often deal with grief by going all gung-ho Rambo on everyone’s ass.
In that respect, Will is Exhibit A through Z, the Amy-revealed knowledge of which Katie finds confronting since she and Will are still finding their way back to the closeness and intimacy they once shared and have missed a lot of things about where each other is at, a process that has as its casualties Bram (Alex Neustaedter) taking Gracie (Isabella Crovetti-Cramp), who simply wants a normal life, increasingly into the orbit of his girlfriend’s family.
It’s games night all around in “Disposable Heroes” which emphasises with a brilliant elegant economy of narrative style just how unfunny, unenjoyable and high stakes all this games playing is, especially when the fate of humanity, and the people you love, are hanging in a precarious balance.
- Coming up next on Colony in “Bonzo” … humanity stands at the crossroads and it’s not a choice between Candyland and Happily Ever After unfortunately …