Killjoys - 'Schooled'

Ah. Kids.

As our favourite team of space bounty hunters settle back into their routines and the show teases the shippers with a bit of Dutch and D'av wrestling, they get word on the destination of a last signal beamed from Red 17 before it was burned.

Prodigy is a super-school for the smartest Westerlian kids, so Turin gets Dutch an escort warrant to bring the latest round of gifted and talented to school. This means we get to go back to the isolated Old Town, where Pre is maintaining the Royale as a defiant hub of vibrant society. Learning of Pawter's escape and subsequent abduction, Johnny heads off to rescue her, while D'av and Dutch learn where to look for some of their escortees from Pre's bartender Sabine, who is aggressively blonde and frankly suspiciously clean. Frankly, I don't trust her.

Pawter arm-wrestles her way to freedom and Johnny starts a bar fight to get her out of a threatened arranged marriage, and agrees to bunk on Lucy while she figures out how best to fight the company's plans to wall off every Westerley city and maintain their servile underclass. Dutch touches base with Alvis, but there's no big movement on the story of Arkyn. Dutch also confesses to D'av that she's worried John will lose focus worrying about Pawter, but D'av reminds her that they make such a good team because 'you lead, I shoot and John gives a shit.' Coupled with D'av's admittedly double-edged beatdown of a father for bullying his son (issues much) this reiterates a central theme of Killjoys: As in Camelot, violence is not strength and compassion is not weakness.Our heroes' lives are complicated by caring instead of shooting any problem in the ace, but also enriched.

I admit, I'm not wild about the more romantic direction of this relationship -
see elsewhere on this blog for my lauding of strong, platonic relationships - but
fair play, these two are pretty adorable.

The crew take the designated kids to school, and D'av bonds with one of them, Jake - he of the hitty father - whose brother is at the school. He assures him that a brother will always be there for him, and John reminds him about that time D'av stabbed him. Still, it's a sweet bonding moment while Dutch avoids the 'small people'. Unfortunately on arrival they find nothing but empty classrooms, a set of empty cryopods and Delle Sayah, the representative of the Nine with the spiky relationship with Dutch (Dutch flippantly explains her presence by claiming that she 'missed our hate-flirting,) and as it turns out a chequered history with fellow pretty princess Pawter. She gets in a dig at Pawter needing to use drugs to get through her exams, a neat reminder that our redhead is deeply flawed, which is important as a sexy doctor from practical royalty working as a doctor in a slum could easily become an unbearable Mary Sue.

Anyway, it turns out that the kids were killed when their cryopods - fitted out as part of a secret 'seed bank' programme to turn the kids into living repositories of Qreshi culture in case of... reasons - malfunctioned. At first it looks as if the killer was the teacher, but it turns out that she was also killed, and her appearances the result of Jake's brother Olan messing with them using holograms. Olan tries to steal Lucy and turns off the life support, forcing Dutch and Delle Sayah to work together to switch it back on. The system uses breath-based biometrics, which is basically an excuse for a kiss, but whatever gets a bisexual lead past the network, I guess. Delle Sayah also admits that she and Khlyen were working together for, again, reasons. The implication that Delle Sayah might have had Khlyen for a 'tutor' as well is strong.

John talks Olan down, and it's interesting that he is able to reach Olan for much the same reason D'av connects with Jake. D'av is an older brother, and Jake needs that; John is a younger brother, and that's the only thing that can get through to Olan. Poor Olan is seriously messed up, because Khlyen's message ripped through the school systems, frying the cryopods and lodging in his brain, but they drop him off with Alvis to help extract the message less forcefully than Delle Sayah might do.

Elsewhere, Fancy releases Khlyen and they head for Telen, home of Chez Jaquobis, to work out why D'av might be goo-proof.

"Must be Qreshi."
"How can you tell?"
"She hasn't got shit all over her."

The plot, as they say, thickens. Khlyen is still a colossal ass and unapologetic nerd-murderer, but definitely more towards the Operative end of things than the diabolical mastermind he initially appeared to be. He and Delle Sayah are clearly Up To Something(TM), but their Something is looking more likely to be a callously pragmatic response to an altogether more apocalyptic Something planned by the Black Root than the apocalypse itself. As Dutch points out, Delle Sayer's 'seed bank' only makes sense if she's expecting a war or a winter, so clearly their faction is anticipating the imminent need of some serious hatch battening.

On the personal level, I hope to not see Dutch/D'av kick off again. It wasn't all that interesting and D'av has had much more interesting character work since it ended. There was some tease of future developments with bartender Sabine, but I don't trust her commitment to personal grooming under occupation. On the other end, I'm enjoying Dutch's hate flirting with Delle Sayah, but I don't want that to come to anything big either. I like that Dutch's core relationships are pseudo-familial and that she doesn't need a man, or a woman, to complete her, so much as she needs a solid sense of self after what Khlyen put her through. Similarly, while I have mixed feelings about the move of John/Pawter towards more romantic territory, I do like that it's something that is emerging from friendship, and that Pawter seems always more in need of a lift than a rescue.

Actually, I can't think of a single character in this show who needs a partner to 'complete them'. Both of the main female characters are more about resolving their past, and the Jaqobis brothers are more seriously invested in the brother thing. Any sexual or romantic pairings have taken a distinct back seat to friendship and family, and I dig that.