- SPOILERS AHEAD … TORTURE AND GRIEF’S PARTIAL RESOLUTION
Ask anyone who has experienced immense and immeasurable grief to describe it in any way.
Odds are you will be given a bewildered look and an exhausted shrug of the shoulders accompanied by a haunting look in the eyes that this is “how long is a piece of string” stuff of nightmares.
The loss of someone or something deeply, irreplacably special is a gulf, a void, a warring chasm that cannot be quantified and no one knows that better than the Bowman family who, even months after the loss of Charlie (Jacob Buster), are unable to even articulate what it is they are feeling or fully grasp just how much it has rent them asunder as a family.
With no time or willingness to talk it away as sheer survival cracks its whip of necessary demands, Will (Josh Holloway) and Katie (Sarah Wayne Callies) have busied themselves building a new life in the model Seattle Colony, albeit one that, after recent revelations, is starting to more and more resemble their time in the LA Bloc.
Katie’s strategy of becoming a model Advocate for newly-arrived refugees looking for a safe place in an increasingly unsafe world has foundered upon the shocking (or not shocking really – c’mon the Hosts and their accomplices haven’t shown a propensity for warm and fuzzy treatment of the general human populace) discovery that many of these people are ending quite a way aways from the blessed social experiment of Everett Kynes (Wayne Brady) who is hiding a great deal behind his sunny, agreeable facade.
And Will? Well, Will never really drank the Kool-Aid, even in the depths and misery of his grief, joining forces with a newly-arrived Broussard (Tory Kittles) as soon as the opportunity presented itself, with mixed results, particularly if you ask Amy (Peyton List) who’s none too impressed with her resistance bud’s old LA pal.
While Katie and Will’s approaches have varied, creating a wedge between them and an unhappy home life that Bram (Alex Neustaedter) is determined to get Gracie (Isabella Crovetti-Cramp), they’re not as far apart as it first appears with “The Big Empty” exploring, in a deeply-affecting dialogue-free final scene, just how much their lives have remained converged.
It’s been obscured by grief but they’re still a team and this episode, through moments insightful and emotionally-resonant, and fractiously intense, is the start of some healing, a knitting together if you like.
Of course, like any part-resolution of grief, the road to that point isn’t any easy one, especially when it involves kidnapping Snyder (Peter Jacobson) right under the noses of the largely-hapless security details assigned to him by Kynes. (Less for Snyder’s protection I think than making sure he doesn’t dig too deep into the Seattle Colony’s dirty big secrets such as the Outlier facility on an nearby island (big reveal – there are all ex-military just like, ahem, Will who keeps not being killed by drones; now it looks like we know why), which it turns out is creating super soldiers that number in the hundreds of thousands.)
Broussard and Amy simply want intel but the price for Will and Bram’s involvement is Snyder’s quick and violent death, a repayment for the role he played in the death of Charlie when the resistance camp was stormed by Global Authority (GA) greyhats.
While Amy counsels Will, after years working with people with PTSD, that killing the perceived perpetrator of your pain solves nothing, Will is determined to make Snyder pay, and Snyder knows it.
The weird thing, or not so weird if you’re at all familiar with the GA’s golden boy du jour, is that even when his life is on the line he LIES, Pinocchio-level, nose-growing-level lying.
You could argue that makes sense given his character, or more correctly, his lack there of; Snyder has shown a consistent proclivity to given his latest enemy, and they are legion despite his newly-acquired favoured status, whatever they want to spare him.
He is in effect his own shonky PR machine and if he needed to spin, and spin effectively, it’s now; instead he LIES, well mostly until Will constant furious pushing, driven by grief seemingly insurmountable, draws what might be the most authentic reaction we’ve ever seen from the human equivalent of a cockroach that is Snyder.
He breaks down and tells Will he’s grieving for Charlie too – in amongst all the baldfaced lies, this feels real and makes you wonder how much of his recent activities are driven by the same grief assaulting Will and Katie, Bram and Gracie on a daily basis.
Will ends up relenting on his declared intention to kill Snyder, to Bram’s livid denunciation, but only after a gut-wrenchingly visceral screaming match (Will, not Snyder) and some waterboarding that leaves Snyder less vengeful than chastened.
In fact, some evidence of the veracity of his declared grief is that when he makes it back to the security agents, who are now in full “Oh shit we lost a member of the GA!” panic mode, he lies about where he’s been, protecting Will and Bram, and letting his reputation get a little more shabby in the process.
Granted, it’s not exactly falling on his sword, and won’t cost him much in the medium-to-long run but it does bolster the idea that his grief is real, his motivations not as clearcut as we might think and his role at the heart of the GA more sabotage-oriented than faithful-adherent impelled.
Still, this is Colony which has shown, and continues to show in “The Big Empty” – one of the best descriptions for grief I’ve ever seen – a remarkable ability to observe and comment with nuance and great thoughtfulness on this human condition, the machinations of the body politic and the many and varied ways we both support and attack one other.
It’s this emotional intelligence, and the chilling narrative in which it finds expression that makes the show so damn watchable, and this episode was no exception, offering up yet another glimpse into the complex frailty of the human condition, especially when it is exposed to the eviscerating dead hand of grief which never lets you rest, especially in the midst of an apocalypse of humanity’s own misguided making.
- Coming up next on Colony in “Sea Spray” …