Killjoys - 'The Hullen Have Eyes'

Like a particularly indiscriminate Darth Vader with fabulous hair.

As we saw last week, Johnny is back, although he needs to get his return approved by the RAC internal affairs type who was introduced in episode 3.1. She tries to lean on him to give up Dutch, which seems but probably isn't a bit random, but he points out that if she wants the other missing Killjoys to come back, throwing the first returner into a hole for not selling out his captain isn't a smart move.

Johnny, let us remember in what follows, knows a smart move. This is important because Dutch and D'av – the latter loving that for once Johnny bailed and he had to be the responsible one – introduce him to Zeph, and they do not get on. Johnny feels replaced, and seems threatened whenever Zeph's thinking moves ahead of him, or maybe he's just feeling down because IA made him lose the laser finger.

They open up one of the Hullen ships, although they aren't sure how, and Zeph realises that it's a little bit organic. She also detects a radiation signature which suggests that it went somewhere pretty irradiated, and recently. Dutch decides that they should follow the trail and overrides the boys' concerns, slapping D'av's hand onto the control to return to its last location, a planet under a bright star which bathes the surface in solar radiation. Dutch and D'av are taken in by the Unseeing, a group of mole people who worship and wait for the Undying. Since they arrived in a Hullen ship, the Unseeing take them for the Undying, but their leader, the Last Seer, notices their empathy for rebellious young Unseeing Quin and has them imprisoned.

In the kingdom of the blind, the man with regenerating eyeballs is king.

Johnny is abandoned by Zeph, but rescues D'av while Dutch is getting out of the Seer that this planet was used as a training camp where Hullen learned to act human. Khlyen wound the place up and told him to keep the former slaves waiting, and when Dutch reveals that Khlyen isn't coming back he sets the Unseeing on her as a false prophet, in order to maintain his power. Quin helps D'av and Johnny and tells them that D'av came in a ship a week ago, looking for something called 'the remnant', which she thinks she can lead them to. It turns out to be a mysterious orb stored in 'the room that sings', the main server farm for the facility.

Zeph returns to rescue the team, having worked out that she needed to use a sample of Dutch's DNA from the control surfaces to prime the ship. Johnny chews her out anyway for working stuff out alone instead of talking to people. He tells her that Dutch and D'av rely on them and they have to communicate with them, constantly and in ways that they understand.

Elsewhere, Delle Sayah gets snooty with the help and learns an important lesson about her place in the Hullen plan when she tells Aneela that her father is dead. Aneela flips out and murders a bunch of goons, whereupon her aide tells Sayah this us on her and forces her to clean up the mess. Still, you can't keep a good schemer down, and Sayah is soon pushing her luck to forge a bond of common vengeance with Aneela in the name of self-promotion.

'The Hullen Have Eyes' does a lot of set up work, properly introducing Aneela and her erratic personality, as well as hinting at a kind of plasmic elitism when she tells Sayah that she has moved her from cheap plasma to her own reserve. It also shows something of the scale of the Hullens' plan, with the training camp for infiltrators, and reveals that D'av getting into the Hullen ship was due to some sort of contingency plan set up by Khlyen, which included using D'av's DNA as the key to all of the ships they found. So, they have a part of an army, an uncrewed armada, and maybe at some point a bunch of pissed off cyborgs on their side, while Aneela has a legion of indestructible warriors and a battle fleet. I almost feel sorry for her.