Monday, July 11, 2016

Killjoys, Season 2, Episode 2: Wild, Wild, Westerley



So the team is reunited and we’re heading to Old Town in Westerley. Firstly we establish with a brief hallucination and flashback that Dutch is firmly backing away from her relationship with D’avin so we can have another season of awkward sexual tension.

We also check back to D’avin’s memory hallucinations back on Arkhan in which he remembered lots of presumably scary Level 6 people slaughtering Scarbacks, which, as we remember from the last season are freaky masochistic sort-of-pacifist-but-also-armed-resistance monks.

Next step is make sure D’avin is reinstated as a RAC agent in which they speak to Turin – the first of many characters this episode who we were pretty certain died last season but apparently didn’t. After lots of checking out the others are not Level 6, they both basically come to the idea that Level 6 is terribad awful and needs to get the fuck away from the RAC which needs to go back to its happy, reputation essential – neutrality.

Which isn’t happening yet as, at the end of the episode, Turin, Dutch et al form a reluctant alliance to figure out exactly what Khylen is up to and why.

But before we get to that, the gang is heading back to Westerley to get Pree home and generally try and sort out what is left of the mess of Oldtown after the Company bombed it then walled it off with a very very shiny laser fence: said laser fence is a) awesome and causes lots of hilarious geeky glee from John – and he’s so very cute with that. It also scans them all revealing that Pree was technically a Warlord

Y’know I really appreciate these little snippets that point to Pree having had an exciting and adventurous life before this, but little snippets don’t replace the need for actual storyline. Just saying.

Naturally to get through this fence they need a Killjoy warrant and they have one to help a Company man called Jelcho

He is The Worst.

Basically he’s fencing in Oldtown, not giving them any supplies, no food, no medicine and generally ruining the whole place as an object lesson to every other Company town about what happens if you rebel. He’s quite happy to pretty much annihilate the town to make that point. Oh and his resume includes “torturer”. He is officially, The Worst. I look forward to the time when Dutch murders him most brutally, which will be great fun.

He wants them to hunt down and bring in some escaped prisoners before they do anything unfortunate.


Inside Oldtown the gang finds that the whole place is just awful. Way way way more awful even than it was before – and it was pretty awful back then. They find Pawter, the connected doctor with the royal mother, desperately trying to treat the vast number of injured and sick with no medication and generally being her utter stellar self – tough, clever, completely unphased by the worst of injury but also pretty much drowning in an impossible task

There’s also Hills (seriously, these were the worst bombs ever, I don’t think they managed to kill anyone! They were really just bundles of strongly worded notes. Canada-Level WMDs). He was the Company officer who played by all the rules and was still screwed. He’s now hiding out so the locals don’t kill him for being Company and the Company doesn’t kill him for sounding the alarms and getting everyone to safety when the angry notes dropped.

After getting Pree his bar back with some sassy quips and established violence they eventually find Tighmon, head of the escaped prisoners. And the only one left – on account of all the others being killed by anti-escape poison gas that the Company has rigged up in the prison. The gas turns people into mummies, is super destructive and a spare canister of it has

Point of note – even if you do try to kill your prisoners rather than let them escape, having large stores of WMD in the same building as your political prisoners is a bad bad bad bad idea. Really.

While Tighmon does have this devastating weapon he’s actually a pretty decent guy; though he’s mainly focused on trying to get the families of the miners some help – especially now the mines re closed and they’ve got nothing. He’s willing to turn himself in, hand over the gas, anything so long as those families are allowed out of Oldtown

Nice – but Jelcho is the worst and uses the trackers he’s planted on Dutch and her team to send in a drone and just kill Tighmon. Despite it being a no kill warrant. He then tries to get the whole town to hunt down both the gas canister and kill Dutch

We don’t like this guy. Now obviously he needs to be brutally murdered, but isn’t there some kind of push back for this? Even as a member of the Company? The RAC is supposed to be someone one does not fuck with after all…

Their presence in town has also inspired Pawter and Hills to try and make some kind of difference – basically going to Jelcho so they can use Pawter’s influence to convince her royal mother to make Oldtown less awful, using Hills, as a Company man, to get her access

Alas, Jelcho is The Worst and just shoots Hills in the head. Alas, RIP poor, conflicted, noble Hills who did his very best to live by a system which would never let him actually succeed.

More alas comes from Alvis who is having a major crisis of faith and generally in a terribad place. He takes the opportunity to snatch the canister and plans to use it to massacre Jelcho and his minions. Not a bad thing per se – except Pawter’s there. In the end, only quickly telling him that stops him unleashing a massacre and ending the season early – and only D’avin’s quick actions and possible level-sixish-abilities allows them to save Alvis from the gas

The gas, by the way, can be cured by water. Which isn’t that much of a flaw since the amount of water required is pretty much “drowning”. It also dissipates super super fast in air – so fast that I don’t think it could kill anyone unless they turned it into vaping fluid.

The gang ends up taking Alvis with them when they leave to help the unknot the whole memories D’avin has of Dutch fighting Scarbacks – but Alvis insists that there have been no Scarbacks on Arkhen for centuries. More indication that Dutch is a clone/immortal/reincarnated/all of the above.

Pawter remains as a “guest”/spy/agent/prisoner of Jelcho’s with a secret communicator from Johnny for more plotting in the future. They leave Pree in Oldtown.

And low we have met this season’s dedicated villain – let’s hope we see more complicated politics and debate over the RAC basically serving the company because, despite being neutral, it’s the company that has the money to buy warrants. This really does have to be considered and included in the whole idea of RAC neutrality – even without people like Jelcho abusing RAC neutrality and using them


Also may Dutch murder him.