“I know you’ll eventually hear me. Wherever he’s taken you, whatever he’s done to you, I will find you” – Dutch
The above refers to the season 1 finale in which D’Avin Jaqobis (Luke Macfarlane) was captured by Dutch’s nemesis Khlyen (Rob Stewart). In case you missed season 1, I did a writeup on the premise of the show on May 27, 2016, in anticipation of Season 2.
In the opening sequence, we see a blue-filtered dream sequence full of corny lines, but whose dream? Dutch, Johnny and D’Avin are infiltrating a mysterious base that D’Avin has escaped from. They find Fancy Lee (Sean Baek) inside. D’Avin has memory lapses, but thinks it may be a trap for Dutch. We pull out of the sequence to find a dreaming D’Avin strapped to a chair, IV spike in his back, receiving a forced infusion of the green goop that we last saw at the end of Season 1.
Lucy
We left our heroes escaping from Oldtown when the Quad goons came down hard on it at the end of Season 1. Now Johnny Jaqobis (Aaron Ashmore), partner/team leader Dutch (Hannah John-Kammen), and bartender Pree (Thom Allison) who escaped with Dutch and Johnny, are on their way in Lucy (voiced by Tamsen McDonough) to find and rescue big brother D’Avin. Their search has led them to the planet Arkan. When Lucy’s probe explodes on contact with a hi-tech defense layer, Dutch orders Lucy to crash through. However, radiation is high, and Lucy is unable to do it without killing the team. Johnny orders her to pull out.
And so the plot of this episode is revealed. Mission: rescue D’Avin by finding some way to get through the defense layer. Johnny has heard of a gang called the Conavers that somehow was able to circumvent Arkan’s defense layer. So off they go to:
Leith Bazaar
At Leith Bazaar, they speak with the warrant broker Bellus Haardy (Nora McLellan), long time friend and Dutch’s mentor, who tells them that the ”slick as melted shit” Conaver gang was indeed able to evade capture by hiding out on Arkan, and that there is a standing live or dead warrant out for the person or persons who have the defense layer shield tech. Rumor has it that the tech is possibly to be found at Eulogy – a criminal barter town. The hitch is that there are two requirements to get in. The entrant 1) must be a known criminal and 2) has to have a cargo worth gambling with. Johnny has the second, and there is no need to set up any cover stories because Pree, it turns out, is a known criminal. With the requirements met, they take the warrant and head off to:
Eulogy
At Eulogy, Pree’s criminal status is handily verified, and he vouches for Johnny. Their cargo is accepted as collateral and put into storage. And this is interesting (and unexplained, lol) Dutch is tiny but there is NO WAY that she could have actually fit into that crate, lol. Regardless, Dutch unfolds herself from a secret compartment in the crate and goes looking for the shield tech, armed with a Johnny-rigged lens in her eye.
Meanwhile, in the Casino, Johnny is on a winning streak when Dutch comms him wondering what it is that she should be looking for. Pree takes Johnny’s spot at the table, laughing that Johnny has teeny bladder. Johnny tells her that the shield will show through her lens as red, since it will have absorbed the radiation signature of the Arkan defense layer. Dutch locates it behind a big ass locked door, which Lucy is going to have to override. Johnny returns to the table, and engages Pree in a “lover’s spat” over a phone call from Pree’s mother whom he disses quite handily, causing shock and consternation from the hardened criminals around the table. Apparently you don’t diss your man’s mother, even in the criminal world! Pree knocks a drink over, and Johnny takes advantage of the chaos to insert Lucy’s porta link into the betting slot. Lucy crashes the system and gets Dutch behind the locked door, but the casino system is fighting her, which means there is only limited time to acquire the tech and get out. Lucy is kicked out of the system, leaving Johnny to hack the elevator old school. Dutch discovers that the tech is inside a real girl who is chained to a post as collateral for some criminal type, most likely the Conaver gang. Dutch and the girl quickly reach a deal, her freedom for her help in getting through Arkan’s defense. Dutch releases her, she insists on finding her good arm, Alice, which it turns out is a badass weaponized mod arm. They shoot their way out of storage to meet up with Johnny and Pree when the elevator reaches them. Pree is “locked and cocked” and ready to “give these bitches some stitches” when the elevator door opens. The girl is injured in the requisite firefight, they drag her into the elevator, and Pree brings the group out of the facility safely, since he knows a secret way out. Seems he may have spent a lot of time in Eulogy in his criminal life!
Lucy
Back on board Lucy, Johnny is quite concerned about the girl’s mods. She has too many, and the one they need is actually killing her. Dutch asks her for her story, and she fills them in. Her name is Clara (Stephanie Leonidas), and she was won in trade for a debt by the Conaver gang, taken directly to “The Factory” by them and illegally modified. Among other mods, her arm was replaced with Alice, the shield was implanted in her so she could protect it, and she was unable to use her mods to kill the Conavers because of a friendly fire block that delivers 500 volts to her brain should she try. She tried anyway, which resulted in her taking many extended naps.
Arkan
D’Avin is having another dream. He sees guards and inmates fighting on the planet surface, leaving plenty of green goop all over the ground, and a mysterious triangular symbol on a building. Khlyen sees him and tells him he is not supposed to see this yet. WTF?? And furthermore HTF? is he able to wake up in a vat of green goop, IV spike still in his back? The techs attending him have never seen that happen before. Khlyen enters the lab, and approaches D’Avin, who wrenches out the IV spike and stabs Khlyen through the hand with it. The wound does not heal, which surprises Khlyen to the extent that he realizes D’Avin is something special, and so kills his own techs and takes D’Avin out of the lab, with the intention of letting him go. He answers some of D’Avin’s questions, telling him that he was to be made into a level 6, which the green goop is an essential part of, but D’Avin appears to be immune, and Khlyen needs to know why. He goes on to tell D’Avin that he wants him to go back to Dutch, not to spy on her, but to protect her. Meanwhile, he is busy killing all the men they meet up with.
Dutch and Johnny have a dilemma. Do they use Clara to rescue D’Avin, making her sicker or even killing her, or do they give up on D’Avin? They can’t remove the shield from her because it has been rigged to blow up if tampered with. Clara asks who Khlyen is, and when she realizes that he is Dutch’s Conaver, she insists on helping them to mess his shit up, because this time she can choose. She slides into the pilot seat, links with Lucy and lands them on Arkan, at some expense to herself. She and Pree stay on the ship, Dutch and Johnny go looking for D’Avin.
Khlyen sticks his hands into a bowl of the green goop, and informs D’Avin that he is connecting with the big system to wipe out any trace of D’Avin ever having been there. D’Avin sees the mysterious symbol of his dreams on the floor, and is told it was not a dream but a memory. But not whose memory. Khlyen knows that Black Root is coming for him, and asks D’Avin if he would die for Yala (Dutch); when he says he would for her and for Johnny, Khlyen pushes him out the door and tells him to get Dutch off the planet, by lying to her if necessary, as he himself has done many times. While he is communing with the goop, Black Root men find him, express their honor at meeting him, and then promptly taze him. They are to take him to “The Lady”.
Dutch and Johnny enter the lab to find all sorts of dead bodies laying around, but they discover Fancy Lee, who is very much alive, and captive. They release him and follow Lucy’s directions to D’Avin, whose signal she has now found. They get back to Lucy, where D’Avin asks Fancy if he was hit with the green shit. Fancy says no, but D’Avin shoots him anyway. Fancy heals, and Dutch shoots him off the ship, since the healing is proof that he is now a level 6. D’Avin makes Dutch and Johnny test him by slashing his hand with a knife to make sure he is not a level 6. He doesn’t heal, so he isn’t. Or is he? After all, Khlyen didn’t heal in the lab either…
Lucy
The team flies back to Oldtown, to try to find their friend and Doctor, Pawter, only to find that Oldtown has been completely walled in and blocked off from any entry or exit, or even communication. So they have no way of knowing if their friends are even alive.
Since Clara is illegal in the Quad being more than 26% modified, she needs to leave it. Nor would she want to be ‘fixed’ even if they could rescue Pawter. However, what happens next for her depends on the warrant that Johnny and Dutch have for the person or persons in possession of the shield tech. Johnny points out that because she is so heavily modded, she is, by company rules, not considered to be a person, and so the warrant doesn’t apply. Dutch takes her to some friends who can smuggle her out of the Quad. Lucy knows how to contact her if needed, but she really likes Clara, and wishes they could keep her, which of course, is not how it works, not even a little bit.
D’Avin fesses up to lying to Dutch on Arkan about Khlyen’s whereabouts. Dutch already knew, but left Arkan anyway because they all needed her to. D’Avin proposes the theory that Khlyen may not be the enemy she thinks he is, but that he may instead be protecting her from something. He wonders if maybe Khlyen is not running the RAC, because it sure seemed to D’Avin that something above Khlyen scares him. Dutch is not convinced.
And that wraps up the first episode! It leaves us with a bunch of questions…. Is Khlyen really not the bad guy he has been made out to be? What is D’Avin? How could he possibly be immune to the green goop? Will we see Clara again? I’m with Lucy on that issue! And what skeletons are hiding in Pree’s closet? What is the Black Root, and who the H E double hockey sticks is The Lady? What are your opinions on this first episode of the new season? Let me know below! And since you’re here, maybe click the follow button? Until next time, remember:
The Warrant is All!
Reblogged this on Forty Two and commented:
Episode 1 sets the story arc for season 2!
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