21 Days Under Quarantine
Adam has been reunited with his dad in the prison and is
very very confused. He wants to get Adam out of there. He tells Adam about a
tunnel where he can get out – but he doesn’t expect to join Adam. In fact, he
doesn’t look well. He also tells Adam there is no cure for the disease – he should
know, he worked on it
It also means, as an over-22 year old, he’s probably
dying (though this disease never had symptoms before, people just died). They
have to hide when a large number of military vehicles drive in… Adam’s dad says
“they’re early”. The soldiers have been sent by the government to dish out
cures – not knowing that the injections will actually kill everyone in Pretty
Lake AND that the protective masks the soldiers are wearing won’t save them either
All he thinks he can save is Adam – he’s dead, the
soldiers are dead, the kids are dead, he just hopes he can save Adam. Adam
insists he has to help people, especially Wylie – and his dad dies.
The troops arrive at the prison with ominous trays of
syringes.
Pat is all tortured over Amanda’s death while Chuck and
Samantha bury her. Of course they blame the Creekers and Chuck is on another
vengeance kick. Samantha thinks this is a bad idea but since when does Chuck
listen to other people.
Naïve Wylie tells Tracey she can just explain it all to
Chuck. Because that has worked in the past. While in town someone warns Melissa
that Chuck & co are going after the Creekers so she needs to get her sister
out before Chuck’s classic random violence gets her killed.
Speaking of, Chuck and his gang head to the Creeker house
carrying guns, of course the possibility they’re not at fault is not something
Chuck wants to hear. They find the house empty, but also find Pat’s damaged
car.
While they’re at his house, Pat goes to Chuck’s to try
and talk to him (oh such naivety) and only gets Samantha – he tells her he
killed Amanda. When Chuck returns, Samantha tries to arrange a peaceful
discussion
While she does that, Ronnie, Tracey, Wylie and several
Creeker cousins head into town with guns. (Wylie has brought a baby to a gun
fight. No matter how hard you throw a baby, it will never match the range or
accuracy of a rifle). Samantha tries to get everyone to play nice (which is
usually Gord’s job but he’s wisely decided to stay out of this bullshit). But
she’s sure they have a peaceful settlement ready at the church.
In the church Pat offers to give up to “justice”, even
death at the hands of Chuck the awful (hey can we have the same punishment for
the man who nearly murdered a child?). He’s doing this because he wants peace.
He wants promises that the war ends with him (uh-huh, until next week when
Chuck decides whatever random event happens is totally the Creeker’s fault and
goes on another rampage). Ronnie agrees – and so does Chuck so long as he gets
his vicious revenge.
At the farm, Gord isn’t entirely happy with Hannah and
her surprise husband showing up. She explains it was an arranged marriage – but
though she’s not a big fan of hubby John, she’s not willing to abandon her
community. Gord is waves her on the way, still not happy.
Gord returns to wondering about his father who died from
suicide, asking Frances about it and revealing some really deep insecurities
(was his dad just looking for an excuse to commit suicide that the virus
presented – since the farm wasn’t doing so well). Poor Frances worries Gord may
be thinking of following his dad – when he reassures her, she insists they go
into town with the milk as they’re supposed to.
When he’s in town checking on Melissa, he sees the two
sides of the Creeker/Chuck war gather – oh Gord you do not want to get
involved. Chuck has decided to shoot Pat in the head because he’s totally
convinced this is fair and just. Wylie stands in the way and demands to be shot
as well because she was also in the car.
Melissa (and Gord – run Gord, you and your sister must preserve the town’s only brain cells) arrives to confirm it and, technically, condemn her sister. Something she’s really thrilled about because she wants her sister to take responsibility for taking life saving drugs for a dying teenager. Melissa your sister issues are not the topic at hand. But apparently we are actually taking time out in this whole hot mess for sister spite – because now she wants Wylie to tell everyone who the father of her baby is.
Really? Chuck is pointing a gun at Wylie and Pat. No-one
cares, Melissa.
Well until we learn that the father of Wylie’s child is
Chuck’s dad – Charles Senior the arsehole. Ok can we cut the soap and return to
the collapsed society plague thing this show was supposed to be?
Apparently someone was listening to me because the powers
that be contact the whole town to ask them to report for vaccinations. Everyone
needs to report to the prison for this – and everyone is quite happy. Chuck
still wants to get gun happy though but is derailed by his new brother
Which is when Adam arrives to tell them the vaccination
is actually lethal. He tries to talk sense to them all, pointing out how weird
it’s all been – how they’ve had all communication stopped, the no-fly zone,
none of this makes sense for a quarantine. Poor Adam, he’s trying to explain
things to the terminally clueless. When the soldiers start hitting people and
assault us with terrible acting, the kids agree with Adam and fight back,
overwhelming the soldiers.
Frances and Hannah are taken to the prison. The soldiers
begin injecting the children.
At the church, Wylie and Adam have a moment but, more
importantly, Gord (he with a brain cell, takes charge). He makes a plan and
they use Mark who was an inmate so knows the layout of the prison. While they
go off, Wylie and Melissa remain in the church to talk things out and generally
Melissa continues to be a terrible person (she assumed Wylie kept the kid out
of spite). This continues with Wylie telling her how much Charles listened to
her which no-one else did even while they’re hiding from soldiers. Melissa
finally sees that maybe Wylie was being exploited by Wylie rejects that – she says
she’s not a victim. The crying baby gets them discovered and dragged to the
prison.
With Gord pretending to be a guard they enter the prison,
take a few guards hostage and head to the control room. Though Chuck and Pat
don’t manage to hold the hostages for long. They all end up in a series of
firefights and send Adam to lock the prison down – reasoning that then everyone
will be far too busy trying to escape without dying of plague than injecting
kids.
Which Adam starts to do when his Not!dead father arrives. He kind of wanted the whole purge to go ahead and only wanted to get Adam out. Dear ol’ dad asks him not to save the kids – for the sake of the planet, because it’s only a matter of time before one of the quarantined escapes and spreads the deadly disease. Extra tid-bit, the reason why he’s not dead is he decided to put his own DNA in the virus, as you do, so he and Adam are immune. Everyone else is a carrier and will all die when their biological clocks (which I don’t think is actually a thing) tick to 22.
Time for a ridiculous motive – Adam’s dad designed this
virus because he’s worried about overpopulation… so he designed an extinction
virus? Utopia did this storyline and did it better.
The virus got out and spread early because of Art who
went rogue and did… something. Anyway, that’s why all the carriers have to die
now. Time for Adam to point a gun at his dad, while his dad tries to convince
him to kill everyone. Adam shoots his dad. Fake that one daddy.
Everyone is captured and Frances is next to be injected.
Adam locks down the prison according to plan (the guards,
presumably, fight to escape rather than inject more kids(. And Pat and Chuck
take a moment midfirefight to talk. REALLY?! Y’know can we go back to the
everyone is dying plan? Please? C’mon if everyone doesn’t die they might renew
this drek. Anyway this is all so Pat can heroically try to sacrifice hismelf
The van carrying Melissa and Wylie crashes as the drivers
die of plague – Wylie leaves with her baby, but can’t bring the unconscious
Melissa out of the burning van
Move on a little – all the guards are now dead. The
remaining kids are alive… until they turn 22 anyway. Adam lets everyone go. Melissa
is presumed dead. Pat is dead saving the worthless chuck. Melissa and Tracy are
not happy. Many children are dead from the inoculations – but not Frances. Gord
finds her and she’s alive.
Wylie finds her way to Adam and asks why they wanted to
kill them all with Adam adding extra angst that the soldiers didn’t know they
were killing kids. Alas, Adam says it isn’t over. Of course, Adam also knows a way out thanks
to his dad.
And lo concludes the season finale of this mini-series –
which is the whole problem with this show.
6 episodes. 6 episodes is all this show had. That’s far
too few to throw in as many potential conflicts as it did. And there was a lot
here which were designed to be big and meaty and need development. Wylie and
her conflict over raising a child with her upbringing and issues – we’re
supposed to handle this in 6 episodes? Melissa with her desperate attempts to
be good despite being overwhelmed. Gord trying to get by in his farm but also
trying to stop Chuck going off the deep end and there are his relationships
with Hannah and Frances. Hannah torn between a marriage she doesn’t value and a
community that still needs her. Ronnie and his addiction and general badness,
Pat trying to hold his family together, escaped prisoner Mark doing whatever he’s
supposed to be doing, Chuck falling apart because he’s just not capable of
doing what he thinks he should – to say nothing of a dozen more characters and
the actual underlying mystery pursued by Adam as well (like how it kills people
at exactly 22, why anyone would think this is a good thing to create and how it
manages to infect through a HazMat suit). An no, I don’t count the utter rushed
bullshit in this episode as anything closely resembling an explanation
So many characters and so many characters with actual plot
lines and issues to explore – but 6 episodes could never do half of them
justice. I feel like half of these characters ended up with character traits
that went nowhere simply because there was no time to develop them. Wylie is a
teenaged mother, but we don’t do anything with that. Hannah shows up with her
conflict – but why is she there when we have no time to explore that conflict?
Chuck’s sister was a drug dealer, but that just kind of dropped because, again,
no time
There’s not even any real underlying time to explore the consequences of the world. Beyond Melissa running a crèche, how is this community of young adults and teenagers handling all of these kids? What about food and supplies? What about grief? Except for a couple of episodes, is anyone actually grieving for all their parents, older siblings et al dying? Because after the big bonfire in episode 2 everyone kind of got over that
Instead we just got episode after episode of Chuck vs the
Creekers which was fairly clichéd, fairly dull and could have happened in just
about any setting with any set of characters in any story. It seems a shame to
focus on a dull feud storyline between characters I care so little about when
there was more potential elsewhere – and no time to explore that potential. It
was also poorly done, class issues were touched upon but rarely developed and
it was constantly framed (especially this episode) as a mutual feud – when in
actuality the Creekers did very little that Chuck accused them of (the death of
Amanda – an actual accident – is the only thing they actually did) but were
constantly accused and attacked for it.
Let’s look at Wylie – so it turns out she had sex while
17 with Charles senior (a man in his 40s or 50s) I don’t know what the age of
consent is there but the age and power difference alone make consent severely
unlikely and the whole thing screams of sexual assault. In fact, even that much
doubt is dubious in the extreme – at best Wylie was exploited by a much older,
more powerful man (how often have we been told that he owned this town) and I’m
more inclined to call it rape. Yet Melissa has spent this whole show judging
her and demanding she take responsibility – she has been hit with shame from
the very first and, in the end, we only get this revelation for a purely
bizarre moment that makes no sense at all. Melissa just decided “hey, can I
interrupt this random shooting to tell you your father raped my sister while
she begs me not to?” Other than establish that Melissa is a terrible terrible
person, what did this achieve?
Which also applies to Ronnie’s attempted rape of Wylie –
we know Ronnie’s a terrible person, it did nothing for Wylie’s storyline and
they’d all forgotten about it the very next episode. What was the point of this
gratuitous bullshit?
And other women on the show? What did Hannah, Samantha,
Tracy, Melissa, Ms. Symmons, Amanda (she was fridged and appalling portrayed
before then) or Stacey actually do? At least Frances killed a tiger. The women
have been singularly ineffective, extras in a plot line that always centred
around men – and Wylie was supposed to be the protagonist. The whole cast of
women have been extras.
POC? We had Ms Symmons (who died to let us know the virus
kills as soon as you turn 22). At least Frances and Gord were the only people
in town with sense and the only ones I actually didn’t want to die a horrible
death. But that having sense meant Gord was continually called on to fix people’s
problems – and never received any credit for that.
The plague also killed all LGBT people – like so many
dystopian afflictions.
All in all, with the series over, I conclude it to be
drek. Please do not renew – or at least make Renee recap this crap next time
(the show is Canadian, so I think she has a moral responsibility to do so).
