“Either some of us die, or all of us die; you get the honour of deciding which of those it’s going to be. ” (Alan Snyder to Bram)
It’s been fairly obvious for some time that the time was coming when people would have to make a choice that went beyond a mere accommodation or not with the alien powers that be (and their human proxies); in other words, really fight or really throw their hat in the ring with “the Hosts” – there’s that term again; it’s our planet thank you, our climate change, our degraded environment, our … well look, it’s OURS – and that time, drumroll please, is pretty much now upon them.
Through events big and small, mostly bombastically, hard-to-miss big – oh let’s say exploding unmanned planet-to-orbit spaceships exploding (go Maya, played by Jessica Parker Kennedy), the discovery by Broussard’s (Tory Kittles) team via some info downloaded by Katie (Sarah Wayne Callies) from collaborating sister Maddie’s (Amanda Righetti) husband’s (Adrian Pasdar) well-connected alien computer, the brutal mob-like killing of a Redhand resistance cell by Will’s (Josh Holloway) brutally cold partner Bourke (Toby Huss) that there’s no room for standing on the sidelines any longer.
Not that people like Will were doing that exactly, nor Katie for that matter; both, in their own ways, had done what they could not to comply, Katie most actively in the Resistance which she links up again by degrees in these two episodes and Will by letting a resistance member slip away there, by going easy on a cell leader there (Frankie, played by Lyndon Smith).
But as the aliens make it abundantly clear that they are all just smoke-and-mirroring the hell out of their invasion of the planet – not even the much-vaunted global authority, fronted in the L. A. Colony by Governor-General Helena Goldwin (Ally Parker) or her proxies can stop the Raps from leveling the labour camp from which Bram (Alex Neustaedter) barely escapes by the self-serving grace of Synder (Peter Jacobson) in retaliation for the destruction of its ship and its cargo of human-esque beings – aliens or humans? Who knows? – in their weird pods.
In other words, even the people who have compliantly drunk the intergalactice Kool-Aid are realising that they have thrown their lot in with a wildly, volatile gang of extraterrestrials who want it all and they want it now, on their terms, with humanity only window dressing at best … well until they’re all gone that is.
What’s that you say? Gone? As in extinct, no more, wiped from the face of the Earth … GONE?
Yup. Tucked away in Katie’s Pandora Box of Raps’ Wikipedia horrors, is evidence of a ticking clock, one with two years, three months and nine days left to run, at the end of which the L.A. Bloc, which is just a great big unfancy source of grunt labour when all is said and done, will be empty.
So you see, as anyone with half a brain could see from the beginning, any talk of the Greatest Day – which let’s face it didn’t serve Lindsey (Erin Way) well when she was gunned down by Redhand executioners while rightly-cynical Charlie (Jacob Buster) and Gracie (Isabella Crovetti-Cramp), thanks to the streetwise former’s quick thinking were not – of a glorious partnership between humanity and its aliens overlords (not Hosts dammit!) were all just a great big load of the steaming proverbial.
In other words, you either stand your collaborating ground and hope you won’t end up as ground beef in an alien burger somewhere down the track – chances of avoiding that fate, no matter how brown-nosing snivelling you are? Slim to freaking none – or you fight and you fight hard.
Not an appealing choice when you’re only just got the family fully back together for the first time in a long time – the reunion between Bram and Charlie in the grotty post-divorced apartment complex the Bowmans end up in after the Redhand attack is as authentically touching as you could ask for – but not one anyone has the luxury of not taking.
Humanity is very much at the crossroads and unlike Falling Skies, a show which flirted with the gritty politics and grubby morality of collaborating or not but never really took it beyond cardboard cutout posturing, people like the Bowmans, like Morgan (Bethany Joy Lenz) who throws her lot in with Broussard after some fatal pushing back by Simon (Charlie Bewley), like pretty much everyone on the damn planet like, I suspect, even Snyder (the ultimate human cockroach), have a very real, very dark choice to make, one that will define their lives, or let’s be honest, whether they’ll even have lives at all.
This is life at the very pointy end of authoritarian wall where your true colours have to be nailed very firmly to the mast, where abstract ideals of resistance and standing up for what is right go from floaty warm-and-fuzzies to very real action, and it’s one that will change the flavour of Colony, which has never been afraid to tell it graphically like it is, for the rest of its run, however long that may be.
The brilliance of Colony is that uses science fiction as its meant to be used – as a window into the human soul, into the dire choices that can come our way, and an unstinting examination of what awaits if we give in or we don’t to an, on the surface at least, overwhelming power.
This is not some feel good alien blockbuster where Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum save the day (fun though that is) nor one where Tom Cruise miraculously gets his way through an extraterrestrial killing fields; this is the real thing, the grim horror of dictatorial rule when the choices are brutally simple – kill or be killed, comply and lose your soul, or resist and continue to hold your head, literally and figuratively, up high.
The show has shown its more than able, in excruciatingly good, frog-boiling degrees, to draw us a picture of authoritarianism in action and that the axiom of evil only prospering if good people do nothing, is desperately, heart-stoppingly true.
There’s no wiggle room left, no excuses left to make, and no way of excusing yourself if you’ve thrown your lot in with the invaders and are having second thoughts or you’ve resisted all along. You either fight now or you don’t but either way, rule by dictator isn’t going away, and it’s getting worse, and you have only one choice, as the Bowmans are all too aware of now, fight or die.
That’s it. Decision made. Time to go and change the world, come what may.
- Thought the Bowmans couldn’t possibly get into any more trouble? Think again my friends … the alien sh*t gets real in the next episode “Tamam Shud” …