Killjoys - 'Shaft'

"Who's the cat who won't cop out,
When there's mossipedes all about?"

How do you feel about bugs? I hope you like bugs, because otherwise this one is going to be a toughie.

The team - with Alvis along as guest Killjoy of the week - are dispatched on one of Turin's unsanctioned warrants to rescue another crew who were sent into the Westerly badlands to 'salvage' a scarback monk, and whose original distress call was intercepted by Khlyen. They find one of the crew and a whole lot of moss - odd for a desert - and an uncharted mine in which the survivor's husband has apparently gone crazy and kidnapped his sister in law. Bringing Alvis along as a former miner, they go underground, and discover that the moss is a byproduct of the mine's special indigenous species of large, flesh-eating, nigh-unkillable moss centipedes, which bleed the same green goo used in Level Six's, or something similar.

Nice.

Still confined to Spring Hill thanks to an exploding lojack, Pawter fends off Jelco's sleazing and pokes around his office, but all the good stuff is locked with a genetic key. Jelco admits that he is from a Qreshi 'low family', and obviously has some hang ups, lording it over Pawter in part because its his chance to get all superior with a member of the Nine. He even forces her to operate on his congenitally defective heart, which gives her an opportunity to sedate him, drug his guard and use his blood to unlock his desk and retrieve plans to wall off every city on Westerly.

"That's self-rescuing pretty princess, thank you very much."

Although clearly moved when Lucy relays Johnny's message that he is coming to get her out, Pawter proceeds to rescue herself by using the same genetic sample to unlock her ankle band and sew it into Jelco's chest cavity, so that she can walk out of Spring Hill and he can't follow. She does then get hit on the head, so Johnny's chances of a big damn hero moment are still open.

Deep in the mines, the hallucinogenic effects of the centipede goo have Dutch seeing Khlyen, but D'avin and Alvis get her out in time and Johnny takes a mossipede for testing. In addition, Alvis finds the body of the monk the first team were to salvage, complete with a passage from the Scarback religious texts about twelve monks going to fight the Devil on Arkyn. This passage adds 'and one came back,' setting Alvis to go to Leith and read up on obscure apocrypha.

I don't know if I gained anything by switching times, but this episode made a bit more sense than the last. Pawter, a bit of a non-character for much of Season 1 and referred to by Jelco in this episode as a 'pretty princess', continues to be pretty awesome, and I coudl certainly live with her being the bonus crew member for an episode or two, since that seems to be a thing now. The religious aspect of the conspiracy - or perhaps the pragmatic aspect of the scarbacks - is also interesting, and I'm keen to see where it goes.