Childhood's End - 'The Deceivers'

"Are you ready to party?"

As the Golden Age of mankind flourishes, scientific curiosity is dying, with one Dr Boyce its last champion and that almost entirely under the direction of the Overlords.

Karellen visits Ricky to tell him that being in the Overlords' ship has made him terminally ill, and that he can not have children. This visit prompts a resurgence of the pilgrim camps outside the Stormgren farm. Elsewhere, their son's night terrors prompt the Greggsons to call in counselor Peretta Jones. Thomas Greggson describes visits to a hellish landscape and responds to a cry from his unborn baby sister, Jennifer, even as an unseen force twists and warps Peretta's crucifix.

"I know it looks like a conspiracy wall..."

The Greggsons are lured to the Boyce institute for a party where Karellen makes an appearance. He tells Milo, who has been conducting private research into the Overlords (including speculating that a previous visit is responsible for tales of demons which match the description of the Overlords themselves,) that scientific curiosity was leading humanity to its destruction. Then he arranges for Amy Greggson to be brought to a chamber with a ouija board where he coaxes the yet unborn Jennifer to 'awaken' and communicate with something away from Earth in a hugely and public light show. The Greggsons depart and Boyce is visibly shaken, but Milo recognises communication in the light; letters of the Overlord language, each representing constellations, including a previously unknown symbol standing for an uninhabited constellation*.

"For Jesus!"

Back on the farm, Karellen brings Ricky a rare and precious cure for his illness, but first Ellie and then Peretta threaten the Overlord with a shotgun, because bitches be crazy, yo (and apparently they missed that worldwide broadcast showing the Overlords preventing four semi-pro shooters failing to execute Ricky thanks to routine Overlord intervention from last episode.) Okay, in fairness Ellie is pissed when she learns that Karellen deliberately sterilised Ricky, since what is coming 'will be harder on the parents,' and Peretta because... Well, because she is crazy. She talks about faith, but actually she's consumed with religious hatred, her belief shaped not by love of her God but by hatred of what she sees as its enemies: The Overlords. She shoots Karellen**, but Ricky uses the restorative to heal him (at the cost of his own life,) and Peretta later kills herself.

Jennifer Greggson is born and her eyes go all freaky.

With 'The Deceivers' (a misleading title, as the revelation is that humans have deceived themselves) the contraction of the timeline and use of continuous characters begins to bite, and the grand scope of the novel is lost in the soap-opera minutiae of individual lives. Milo's research is interspersed with an awkward romance subplot with a colleague (she's so into him, but he's all about the research and then they go to the party and she's in  acute dress and then there's kissing) and the 'seance' scene is just monumentally over-dramatic, as the slow emergence of the true purpose of the Overlords is lost in spectacle and telekinetic child rage.

Peretta Jones, a character added for the series as the voice of the dying of Earth's religions, is too much of a crazed zealot to be sympathetic. Yael Stone's wild-eyed templar with her suicide mother is actually much less affecting than the earnestness of Lara Robinson as the younger Peretta in 'The Overlords', making her simple pleas not to forget God.

'The Deceivers' then is a less effective episode than 'The Overlords', and I worry that the overemphasis on the individual in a story explicitly about the fate of humanity as a whole will continue to dog the finale.

* And yes, the astrophysicist conflates star clusters and local stellar groups with constellations, because Stargate?
** As a side note, apparently the local Sheriff considers 'she's my friend' as sufficient ID to let someone through a police cordon, and a gunshot insufficient reason to run into a barn and investigate.