Thursday, August 25, 2016

Colony: Season 1, Episode 4: Blind Spot



Oh layers upon layers upon layers, it keeps on coming – all against a backdrop where a teacher being brutally arrested and kids beaten because they were being taught Fahrenheit 911.

And one of those cops was Broussard – resistance fighter.

Because nothing is ever simple.

And Kate ends up right in the middle of a hot mess of complexity and difficulty. Part of the various complicated plans going on with Kate involves having the resistance staging a fire bombing of her home. I’m not entirely sure how it’s supposed to help the cause because this being a brutal police state it just ends up taking the excuse to search the house from top to bottom. Which ends up with mastermind Phyllis having a drawer full of illegal Geronimo tapes from Will’s son.

Ooops, this has Will even further under Phyllis’s control. And she’s good – while Shnyder (and, presumably, the aliens) picture a great big conspiracy with a mastermind she more accurately sees lots of independent cells because that tends to be how it is.

Phyllis is dangerous. Even more so because while Will is busy questioning his son and trying to track down Geronimo, Phyllis has recognised the real resistance fighter in their household – Kate

Yup, her super super super super creepy filing system has finally turned up that Kate is one of the insurgency which firmly puts Kate under Phyllis’s thumb. Because she’s just that terribly good at her terrible job (though I do wonder why she keeps harping on about cheating on their husbands). We also see from here that she’s clearly aware of what a terrible world they now live in – she has no illusions


Of course, we’re not just going to say “Phyllis evil” because this is not that’s how. Phyllis shows two other motivators – firstly she clearly thinks they cannot fight the Others, the aliens. They’re too powerful, all the resistance will do is provoke a horrendous retaliation that they will not survive

Her second motivation is more poignant – her husband is comatose. And we’ve already seen from Kate’s sister Maddy struggling to find insulin for her son that medication is hard to come from. While being loyal to the aliens, she manages to secure care for her husband

But Kate has one last card to play – in exchange for the resistance not killing her husband, she points out Will’s boss. And Phyliss gets a visit from Broussard. Before he kills her, she begs that he kills her husband as well – pretty much confirming he will receive no care without her.


Back to Will, he does manage to track down Geronimo – or a fake Geronimo because he’s convinced it’s not the real one. He also carefully doesn’t watch the interrogation – you can see the steps he takes to try and live with the utterly terrible things he’s doing. His clues point to the real Geronimo being in the green zone somewhere.

Of course, going for Geronimo isn’t likely to win any support from his son.


Back to Maddy who we are reminded works in the Green Zone (which has incredible amounts of security to get near) and has to somehow source insulin for her diabetic son. Working in the green zone she manages to score a job as an art dealer’s assistant – her former job in a museum means she knows where various art caches may be found. No doubt this is going to quickly become a devil’s bargain – and extra creepy since her boss’s husband starts flirting with her. This is going to be a mess of dangerous power levels.