Contributor: Henry T.
Written by Julie Siege
Directed by Gwyneth Horder-Payton
It figures that a courtroom scenario would come about in a military drama like this. Only, there exists a really flimsy reason to do so and it serves to show what a waste of time the entire plot is. Especially when two things are painfully obvious from the beginning: The suspect in the rape case is guilty, and it’s all a setup by Serrat to foster conflict between the island natives and the military personnel. It doesn’t evolve naturally from previous events on the island, many of which are ignored.
The search for the missing captain’s key and the traitor is mentioned in passing. Once again, the island plot isn’t properly balanced by the subplot on the mainland because it is inherently uninteresting. Kylie and Christine’s spying on her “friend” tells us nothing new except that there are other forces that don’t want Christine on the family ship that’s headed to the island for the soldiers. Given the show’s relatively short lifespan at this point, clumsy tries at setting up long-term storylines isn’t the smart way to go. Going with standalone episodes isn’t too good either, and shows why it’s hard to maintain a complicated premise like this with so little time to develop it.
As a prelude to the chaos that would take up most of the episode on the island, there is an attempt to stabilize relations between the natives and the military personnel by sharing a meal in the spirit of Thanksgiving. Morale improves because a ship is being sent to the island to restock with food and supplies with the added bonus that the crew’s family members will also be onboard. Everything surrounding the military personnel isn’t all great, though. Commander Kendal is still interrogating Booth on the orders of Captain Chaplin to find out who the sleeper agent on the island is.
The storyline gets strained at this point because it’s clear Booth will never give up the name of the agent (or that he doesn’t know the information). So it’s all swapping war stories and comparing Chaplin to current dictators of various countries before everything just stops. It’s as if the writers didn’t know where to take the plot and had to get rid of the Booth character. Comparing Chaplin to Ghaddafi is a bit too on-the-nose, and then Kendal and Booth launch into an action sequence that ends in a predictable manner.
Tension between the natives and military come to a head when one of Chaplin’s men is accused of rape. The episode tries its hardest to cloud the truth about the incident, but the effort doesn’t really work. The case devolves into a “he said, she said” situation, and as such, there is no ambiguity to the man’s guilt due to the lack of characters involved. This means he had to have raped the girl, which is proven correct even as the jury was rigged to render a “not guilty” verdict. Adding the fact that Grace was raped during her Academy days is really hammering Anders’ guilt home as well. That was a byproduct of Serrat’s intentions to sowing a war between the natives and the military. Chaplin is dealing with a lot right now, and that lends to a real mess of an episode. He doesn’t seem to have full control of his crew or his rule over the island, which might factor into what the US government might do as the relief ship comes closer to touching shore.
There’s little to be said about what’s going on with Kylie and Christine on the mainland. Putting aside the fact that they are able to glean very exact information from their bugging of Paul’s phone because he only talks about the government conspiracy on the phone, it still doesn’t change the fact that Christine will be on the relief ship with the rest of the families of the Colorado crew. If the conspiracy had more wide-ranging complications for both women, it would be more intriguing, but there isn’t much of that so it’s largely a dead end. We find out that Paul has a sad backstory involving his family abandoning him so that explains his attraction to Christine. It’s more genuine attraction than an act to further the conspiracy, but that doesn’t help to alleviate the small feeling that he’s a weak sleazeball. Hopefully, there will be more fireworks when both of these plots will be combined with the ship coming to the island. Keeping them separate hasn’t helped to generate much in the episodes that have aired since the pilot.
Score: 6/10
