Is there any? The Zones brew their own alcohol (anyone with the ability to make spirits will never be poor) and find their own hallucinogens (toads and fungi), and wild meat of an unappetising nature can be caught (lizards and stringy birds), but most of the food we see comes packaged. Do people grow food in the Zones?
It’s certainly the case that the land is too arid and irradiated for regular farming, but we could imagine smaller agricultural projects - hydroponic farms, dome cultivation, solar-powered lagoons built from salvaged materials - even if we never see them. Who would build and tend them, though? The hedonistic and nihilistic lifestyle of the zonerunners we see doesn’t exactly lend itself to agriculture - killjoys like Vaya and Vamos obviously aren’t going to spend their days tending a farm, but the crashqueens who hang out with them don’t seem to have any occupation either. Is there an older generation of zonerunners labouring to keep everyone fed, and if so, when does the generational divide kick in?
If there aren’t any farms producing corn or tomatoes or tilapia flakes, that implies once more that the Zones are entirely parasitic on the City, which is uncomfortable both because it conflicts with the ideology of freedom from BL/ind, and because it raises the question again of why Bat Cit enforcement bothers with raids and wanted posters when they could just clamp down on food smuggling.
This show actually gets structural violence, what a knotted mess it is, instead of like... Fake Woke getting structural violence.
Namely:
Hills has sinned against his people for the Company - and he finds the strength to say no, finally. But the system that motivated him to sin against them remains as it ever was, and standing up to it means giving everything you have. He knew the moment he pulled that alarm that it would cost him his life. One way or another. It doesn’t make up for what he did all those years... but it also doesn’t erase the fact that, when you got right down to it, he saved lives at the cost of his own. His death was sudden and awful.... but he’s known since the moment he decided to do the right hing, what the right thing costs in this world. Structural violence by the Company has set it up so decency takes all that you have.
Alvis turns to violence... but that isn’t a simple, easy way to fix things, actually. It’s complicated and difficult and there’s potentially innocent casualties. The story and Dutch understand how violence in this circumstance can be totally justified. That is not denied. But the show isn’t naive that somehow violence will be an insta-fix because that’s not true. This is a very well made trap and there is no easy way out of it for anyone.
This is nicely matched by the way that Alvis understands Dutch’s circumstances and the compromises she makes - he’s a radical but he also is a pragmatist
I ship them so much
Simms isn’t that great of a person... like, her personality is clearly that of an addict. But being an addict was the thing that separated her from the privilege she was born into enough to find compassion/connections with people in different ways. She’s an addict and she was CREEPY in how she treated D’av - but all that means that her decency comes from a real, complicated place, rather than her being simplistically pure uwu.
Dutch’s own journey for standing up for exploited people is a complicated one - she has a real core instinct toward decency but she knows the score. She knows how to compromise. She’s reluctant, and with good reason.
OMG, this finale was everything I’ve ever wanted. And nobody died! This is how you write a TV show.
We started with a group hug before the final showdown, aww.
Dutch used Khlyen as bait to lure the Lady to his cube on Arkyn while the rest went after her body on the Armada and Delle Seyah and Aneela procured Qreshi missiles via Aneela’s shear hullen power.
The Lady opened the cube and wanted to clone Jaq because he was too unique and precious to risk damaging him.
But when she went to Arkyn, he freed himself (he has some tricks in his sleeve), and then saved D’avin’s life – because that’s why he had sent the Lady the signal to discover him: he had had a vision of D’avin dying and had to come save him. Aww.
Jaq was also shot, but not fatally, since he heals although not as quicks as Aneela – but it got Aneela come to the Armada in all her fury and together they found the lady’s nasty spider/octopus body and killed it.
Meanwhile, Zeph found the Lady’s stash of experimental patients, one of them being Pippin, who’s alive, himself, and his spider has shrunk, so they got their happy ending.
The Lady made Dutch and Khlyen fight to the death, but Khlyen reminded Dutch of his 10th birthday gift to her – a knife she was always supposed to have hidden on herself – and wanted to kill him before he would be made to kill her.
Fortunately, her stabbing him coincided with the others killing the Lady’s real body, so she didn’t actually have to kill him.
Alas, the Lady dispatched who-knows-how-many ships with the hatchings across the J before her demise, so they now have to hunt them down.
Dutch was trying to convince the Lady – whom she didn’t kill, either, because she’s now a human trapped in a human body and kept in Khlyen’s cube on Arkyn – to give her info on them under pain of death, but she also brought her a doll in one of Khlyen’s red boxes. Aww.
Poetic cycling back to the past all around. I liked it.
Delle Seyah named Pree the governor of Westerly and Aneela will give the refugees land on Leith until they can rebuild.
Also, Aneela would have Delle Seyah rule with her as human, but she offered to share the green with her and to see if there is enough to make her hullen again, which is what Delle Seyah chose and I guess it worked.
My only complaint: barely a glimpse of Fancy.
Johnny prepared to leave and Dutch told Lucy to take care of him and bring him home safe in a year (there was even a nice reference to him maybe finding Clara, yay.)
She also told D’avin she loved him, too.
But first, the three undertook one last task together to kill a few hatchings – and it was the most perfect ending of perfect endings. TAF FTW!
So, that’s it.
What a ride it was!
Oof course there have been things I’d like to see (more of) and the show wasn’t without glitches (you know I had some complaints, one in particularly, but it was subjective), but overall it was really, really good and very-well-written, and I can say for myself one of the best TV shows I’ve watched in these five years – if not the best, since unlike some others with comparable writing it wasn’t cancelled.
I am so glad I’ve watched it. I forgot who I have to thank for bringing it to my attention, but thank you!
OMG, what a mind-fuckery was this?! But well worth it.
So, the rescued kids were carrying a virus, infecting everyone they came in contact with. Qresh eould be happy to wipe the entire Westerly from the existence to stop it from spreading, but Turin managed to convince them to hold off until Zeph found the cure. Alas, when cured, people lost their memories. Courtesy of the Lady, because memory is how she controls people.
(And, apparently, memory and imagination are something the Lady’s race don’t possess, hence her obsession and stealing.)
Meanwhile, Aneela took D’avin and Johnny into the green – but D’avin left the spores-weapon with Turin as insurance.
The plan was for D’avin to incapacitate the Lady long enough that they all got out and then destroyed the green with the Lady in it.
It didn’t quite work out, with the Lady making Aneela offers of having her family back – and I would have been so pissed if Aneela had fallen for it and betrayed them, but she didn’t.
Instead she stalled the Lady by faking accepting her offer to give Dutch the opportunity to get the spores from Yalena again – because the green is a universal hold of all memory so inside it you can recreate any memory – and I loved how it worked into Dutch being Aneela’s family, OMG.
So, Dutch destroyed the green from within.
But unfortunately, the Lady overpowered Aneela and assumed her image, tricking the trio and getting out of the green before it died.
And then everyone woke up in a weird alternative world where they are ‘owned’ by the Lady (as per her own words), Johnny and Dutch are married (LOL) and apparently have a kid (?), they don’t know D’avin, Turin is a beggar (?), and Gared fights with Johnny in (illegal, I assume) fights. I think.
Fascinating.
Anyway, I guess the next season our heroes will figure out there is something majorly wrong with their alt-lives and find a way to get out of the Lady’s clutches.
And I really hope Aneela is alive and didn’t die with the green. Maybe since the Lady got out and as it appears now controls everyone’s memories, like herself being a kind of universal memory, Aneela is somewhere there, too, and can be brought back as well.
(Who’d think a season ago, I’d grow so attached to Aneela.)
Or maybe Aneela will be the one to save them or at least start the process – it could be a nice way to fully redeem her (they began this season, but for a lot of people, like Pree and Turin, she would have to do a lot more to get there, I guess.)
Anyway, looking forward to the great finish. Although this is going to be a loooong wait for the next year.
Zeph found the spider from the green melded with Pippin’s brain she can’t get it out without killing Pippin, but she fried its connection to Pippin via sonic frequency, so it can’t control him, at least. Alas, the spiders don’t survive long outside the green, so Pip is going to die soon anyway. :( (Maybe she’ll figure something out at the last moment.)
Delle Seyah gave her kid a name, finally, Ozzman after her father, and Kin Rit, which was Annela’s family name. Then she left for Qresh to take over the ruling – or so she told the team, but went somewhere else (to look for Aneela, I assume.)
The kid has some ‘supernatural’ senses, as he just ‘knows’ certain things.
Dutch and Johnny visited a memory-retrieval .bloke to find the ‘she’ assassin from Khlyen’s story, which in turn brought an assassin after them to protect his ‘colleague’ – Dutch surmised that both of them work for the Lady.
(Also, I saw someone speculate the female assassin might be Aneela’s/Dutch’s mom – and OMG, yes, please?)
Auntie Dutch was also tasked with teaching D’avin’s kid self-defence, which was nice and fun, but then she was going to teach him less savoury things when she proceeded to interrogate the male assassin, but D’avin put a stop to it, calling Khlyen’s parenting methods a spade for what they were: abuse.
Well fucking done, show! I love that they remember these things, that even though they flipped the story and Khylen turned out to be on the right side and for all his intentions were good, what he did to Dutch was still wrong and no kid should go through that.
And D’avin was a perfect person for spelling it out. This is going to be my second favourite moment of the show after Sabine’s episode.
And I love how they write the relationship between D’avin and Dutch, where even though he loves her and respects her, he isn’t afraid to tell her how it is.
And Dutch’s reaction, defending Khlyen for doing what he ‘had to do’, and being hurt by D’avin calling it abuse was perfect, so very real-life like.
This show. See, that’s why I like it.
Sure, this season has been a bit whacky (well, all of them were)/different (?) and the show overall isn’t without its issues, but in comparison to other shows, it’s still one of the best ones I’ve ever watched, especially with jewels like that.
(Although, the fandom seems to be getting smaller and smaller/near extinct this season. (Apparently it’s also hard to watch legally even in the US. WTF.) I might have to start giffing it myself again.)
Anyway, D’avin also looks quite good at being a dad, he’s had nice bonding moments with junior, who at the end, as per his earlier advice, chose his own name, Jaqobis, Jaq for short. And then they left, we shall see where to.
And we also got Pree and Fancy trying to find Gared and the kids and setting up a trap for the Hullen hunters with the intention for Pree to be caught and taken, so Fancy could find via out a hidden camera where they took everyone – which was the RAC, as we already knew, I think.
We got to see how Dutch and Johnny got into killjoying: after Johnny’s scamming stint went awry and they were basically broke, Dutch got them a ‘legit’ transporting job that took them into the Quad for the first time.
But they got busted for smuggling on Westerly and there was also poison they hadn’t known about in the merchandise that was later stolen from the RAC impound, so Dutch made a deal with the RAC agent who arrested them to let Johnny and Lucy go if they find the source of the poison/the assassin.
Which they did, after some typical Dutch and Johnny shenanigans during which we got to see Johnny’s tech savviness & love and Dutch’s fighting skills and both of theirs’ clever investigator minds at work.
We also saw how Johnny made friends with Lucy after hacking her to prove to her that he could just rewrite her code to make her obey his orders instead of Dutch’s (because Dutch had ordered Lucy to keep him locked in the ship for his own safety) but instead he let Lucy choose for herself to trust him because they had a common goal to help/protect Dutch, which was the beginning of their beautiful friendship. ;)
Of course they caught the assassin, saved each other’s lives, were offered to join the RAC (although there was a warrant for her!), and Johnny made a deal with Dutch to try it on a 2-year trial basis, demoting her from ‘queenie’ to ‘duchess’ (and voila, how Dutch got her nickname, yay!)
We’ve got to see all this because Dutch got wounded/infected while fighting the Lady (I think) and Khlyen couldn’t help her apart from re-telling her the story of how these beginning of her and Johnny because she had to remember the details for when she couldn’t fight off the Lady anymore – when infection reached the brain and the Lady gained access to her memories and all of their plans, consequently.
Which, from the way I understood it, is the point, as in the end we saw Dutch going off into the woods to fight the Lady again and collapsing while everything around her cracked, as I assume the infection won, as Khylen narrated over it about ‘the thief that will save us all’.
It is a little confusing, but in a familiar way that Killjoys tends to be and I trust everything will fall together to make sense in a few episodes/by the end of the season.
There was also Aneela on guard while all this reminiscing/story-telling was happening and I loved that it turned out that she wasn’t jealous of Khlyen paying Dutch more attention than her but was worried about Dutch, saying she perhaps should’ve never brought her to Khlyen.
And Khlyen called her Neelie! Because of course he has nicknames for both his daughters! (And he referred to both as such!)
Pree, Hills, and Turin also appeared!
Also, could the episode title have been more perfect? And it tied so well into Khlyen’s ‘tale of the princess and the thief’.
I guess we’ll see what D’avin, Delle Seyah, and Johnny (and him getting started on saving Dutch/everyone) and the rest are up to in the next episode.
All in all, we’ve got just the right amount of sci-fi mind-fuckery with banter and sass and the show typical action. But most of all I love it so much that everything goes back in cycles to Johnny and Dutch as the heart of this show. Just… *SQUEE* <333
Again, such a good episode, heart-warming despite the ending and the trouble that’s bound to be ahead.
All right. By now we’ve gotten so many hints that this was basically expected, but still slightly unexpected. Well done, show.
Where to start?
Okay, D’avin and Johnny tried to find a way to pilot Khlyen’s black root fleet. Unsuccessfully, until Fancy revealed they need the cleansed to pilot the ships because the ships basically function as a hive and only the cleansed can manage that kind of connection due to the Hullen leftovers/rewiring or something.
I was hoping Turin was one of the good ones, and he’s not exactly bad ‘bad’, because I get his POV and him being wary and distrustful of the cleansed, but arresting people before they’ve done something to warrant it ain’t the shit, ‘kay, Turin?
Anyway, D’avin deposed Turin and had him arrested in turn, and now he has an army. Because Dutch doesn’t want it due to dealing with Aneela-related things. On that in a minute.
And it kind of doesn’t sit right, because of the mess between D’avin and Dutch that really have to clear up. Although, D’avin IS a good leader material and I’m not saying at all that he shouldn’t be (but I don’t think he wants that role – I think he’s more comfortable (and better) at being the right hand and not the guy in charge although he deserves to be.)
So, Dutch and Zeph stole Lucy and went into an abandoned Company lab so Dutch could access Aneela’s memories. Which Khlyen took away because Aneela couldn’t deal with feeling so much. And also possibly so the Hullen wouldn’t learn of them. (And now I’m back to being confused whether Khylen and Aneela ‘worked with’ the Hullen or tried to fight it. Although, maybe it was a third option and they tried to exploit it to save Qresh, but failed (obviously.))
Anyway, while Aneela was hidden away in the box thingy (I assume hiding from the Hullen because of her abilities with the Green; also the Green is a Lady) she missed Khlyen and the time before so much she basically brought the memory of her younger self with her from the green (which she saved up by squeezing it out of herself) – and that what Yala/Dutch is, the version Aneela would be without the Hullen. Like I said, I expected some kind of clone-version, but this was still a surprising twist on it.
Okay, so, considering that Aneela mentioned ‘the other nine’, I understand there were once 10 ruling families and the tenth were the Yardeens, shunned for something that was said in S1 but I forgot but I’d say now the real reason was, dealing with the Hullen/being ‘tainted’ with it and thus being traitors (I think it was mentioned they were traitors)? Yes? And, of course, Khlyen and Aneela themselves being the Yardeens. Or am I reading too much into this completely wrongly (and Khlyen just made up/used a convenient existing name that was known but no one could either prove or disprove it?)
Also, my poor heart at the fact that Khylen actually was, albeit in a messy way, Dutch’s father (and that’s a lot to deal with for Dutch, too.)
I also do want to know what happened to the mother, though. (Or was it mentioned already in S1/2. Possibly. My memory is shit.)
Oh, yeah, and I loved Johnny’s following Dutch and Zeph and that Zeph was smart enough to both block him from accessing Lucy and still leave him a way to do it just in case they got themselves in trouble (which they did) anyway. So cool.
And the flashback to Dutch and Johnny’s first meeting! Basically, everything Dutch and Johnny, okay. <3
Also, Johnny and Lucy’s banter (okay, let’s just call it flirting at this point, lol.) <3
Also, it was very Johnny to jump to conclusions about who initiated the kiss that never happened and I’m glad D’avin set him straight right away.
Things are getting interesting (even more than usually)!
So, today on the menu:
First, self-flagellating Dutch (because of killing Banyon) got a pep-talk from D’avin. And D’avin is really good at pep talks. (I like how this show doesn’t fall into stereotypes: when he was first introduced I thought, ‘oh, right, the dumb brute soldier’, but no, he’s actually rather smart and has great insight in people.)
Also, there was an almost-kiss – but it fit that it wasn’t, after all. Slow is the way to go with that story arc, and so far they are doing it great.
Now.
During the honorary funeral for the dead RAC captains, Luella Simms tried to kill everyone to avenge Pawter. Only managed to kill some, though. Fortunately. On the occasion, TAF tried to persuade the Nine to fund the war against the Hullen with little success until Dutch discovered they were planning to run and drove it home that even if they could run from the Hullen, she’d find them. So, I guess now they’ll open the coffers.
Lucy and Johnny are now finishing each other’s sentences. <3
Meanwhile, plot twist: Aneela is/might not really be the bad guy! Apparently her fancy ship is her prison, because she has a special gift with the green and so the Hullen need her. Except that her experimenting with D’avin’s blood led her to a discovery due to which the Hullen deemed her redundant. They also tried to access her memory via having her hallucinate Khlyen, upon which they would have probably kill her since they did something to Delle Seyah to replace Aneela with.
Lucky for Aneela, she had at least one loyal soul (Brynne) who woke her up from the hallucination. Plus, Aneela remembering that she’s not alone anymore (Aww!) helped. Cue murdering a lot (possibly everyone on the ship) while calling for Delle. I’m afraid it might be too late for Delle Seyah, but we’ll see – maybe whatever they did to her made her equal to Aneela but not her enemy (yet?).
Zeph found out that the Remnant contains a part of brain, with hidden memories, the DNA of which matches Dutch’s. And Aneela doesn’t have all her memories.
Here’s the theory: either Aneela was forcefully taken by the Hullen or infiltrated them (and was then caught up) either of her own volition or by Khylen’s ploy… in any case, it think it was first in order to control/stop the Hullen with her abilities with the green.
(Yes, Khylen said in S2 Aneela became obsessed/evil/what not/something in that direction. But Khylen wasn’t all that open, truthful person, was he. Besides, if caught while infiltrating, he could actually believe she was turned.)
Maybe Khlyen kept a part of her brain/memories for (her) safety so the Hullen couldn’t get everything or to keep something of her (of she was taken/sacrificed by him) – or both.
Dutch being a (sort of) a clone is becoming more likely by the episode. Could be that the Yardeens were even in on it and were helping Khlyen against the Hullen.
We know he was grooming Dutch for level VI and we know that whatever he did to D’avin made him like Aneela in a way… all of it with intent to fight the Hullen. And working with or sacrificing his own daughter for the same cause would be in line with that, too.
Basically, shit is getting good. (Who’d think I’d start being sympathetic to Aneela. I might even root for her. At least against the Hullen. I’d only like her to abandon her ‘kill Dutch’ plan. Oh. How amazing it would be if they ended up working together.)
(Of course, I think Aneela has also been severely scrambled/damaged by the Hullen, so it’s a question if she is capable/sane enough to fight for good/come back to it/herself.)
(Really, show, why did you have to make me feel for Aneela? Not that I’m complaining.)
