"Hey, when you gotta go, you gotta go...”
This episode always threatened to be a downbeat one, and unavoidably it is, but we also get a big pleasing twist at the end which seems to offer the chance to divert this first season from its unrelentingly downbeat tone. We begin, though, to a curious flashback- there's a senator, electioneering in ways which are deeply unpleasant in terms of chauvinistic nationalism before he even gets on to his anti_mutant racism. A character for next season?
In the here and now, though, Andy, Lauren, Dream and Blink are captured and collared, and things appear very bleak indeed. And there appears to be nothing but aimless argument at the Mutant Underground, something for Esme, the cuckoo in their nest, to exploit. There's a startling interrogation scene between Jace and Dreamer, though, in which he tells her what she did to him by making him mourn his daughter all over again- and in which he bitterly tells her that he wants not apologies, but vengeance; a nice touch, as this is followed up on.
Campbell, though, is back from hospital, cured, if scarred, and manages to persuade Jace to release all four mutants to him for his nefarious, cruel and extra-legal purposes. We see his cruelty as he forces the Strucker teens to perform their joint power under controlled conditions through torture, during the process of which he murders Sonya in cold blood.
We also see Esme turning the adult Struckers and their mutant allies in different directions, manipulating them and, perhaps not entirely credibly, persuading Reed and Caitlin to try and appeal to Jace's decency; as far as I'm concerned, personal tragedies be damned, he has none. He simply isn't an ambiguous character; he's a shit. Nevertheless, the two of them drive into his neighbourhood, full of flags on people's lawns (does no one in America find this kind of aggressive nationalism creepy?) to the home which Jace shares with Mrs Jace- and attempt to reason with them by gunpoint. Jace, of course, is unmoved, but Mrs Jace is naturally appalled at what her husband has been doing, and that simple question "What are you doing in our little girl's name?" seems to have an effect.
Indeed, when we next see Jace, he's seizing back his prisoners from Campbell and promising to investigate Sonya's suspicious death. But chaos ensues as Thunderbird and the mutants strike, and it becomes clear that Esme has an agenda of her own. Who is she...?
An uneven episode; this season was good at the beginning as it slowly built its world and characters but soon fell into a pattern, and now we may be seeing an escape from this bleak pattern. But there's still plenty of bleakness here and I'm not sure where the ending to this season is going.
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