Killjoys - 'The Wolf You Feed'

Oh,but of course it's the eyes...

Stop me if you’ve heard this one, but there’s a man with two wolves in his heart...

As the Ferren arrive to honour their oath to Dutch, things start to go a bit Pete Tong for the Killjoy army. Three Racks have been blown up, Dutch is off on a personal mission, Turin has alienated Fancy and the other Cleansed by treating them like traitors waiting to happen, and the Black Root ships have a kind of neural networking that lets them fly in incredible formation or – for those lacking the correct cerebral architecture – fly into one another. The Cleansed could fly them, but see above.

Dutch’s thing involves getting Zeph to patch Aneela’s memories into her and so learn whatever Khlyen wanted her to know. This is a dangerous prospect, risking getting lost in someone else’s memories and/or suffering irreversible brain damage, but had you noticed that Dutch is a little bit obsessed about this subject. ‘The war is all,’ she declared previously, and for her it’s even more personal. So, in she goes, to discover the truth of Khlyen and Aneela’s Qreshi origins, and also her own ‘birth’ as a Green-powered recreation of Aneela’s younger self, birthed by Aneela’s will alone to alleviate her loneliness after Khlyen conceals her from the vengeance of a mysterious other ‘her’ by isolating her in one of his cube vaults.

“She’s the me I should have been if we never went to Arkyn. She’s your good wolf, Papa. Maybe now you can forgive me for not being good enough.”

I can not begin to tell you how happy it made me that they used the old story that the episode is named for, but that it doesn’t try to make the moral of the story a revelation.

While Johnny races to break through Zeph’s locks and contact Lucy, D’av struggles to restore faith with the Cleansed, which in the end requires him to take down Turin, arresting his former commander for arresting other Killjoys, specifically the Cleansed, without warrant. This impressed the Ferren enough to transfer their oath to him, and the Cleansed enough to get the army their pilots. Once Johnny has recovered Dutch from the rabbit hole of her own mind by re-enacting their first meeting, he lets her finish her business and get that last revelation, because he’s got her back; always has done, even after she caught him trying to steal her ship.

Back at the Rack, D’av tries to get Dutch to shape up, but she tells him that she’s always going to have to take this personally, which means that he has to lead the army. Once more, Killjoys knocks it out of the park with its relationships. I absolutely adore the way our three leads interact, the way they know and trust one another. I’m way behind on it at the moment, but hopefully I can get my shit together and close out Season 3 before DC season sets in hard.

Killjoys - 'Attack the Rack' and 'Necropolis Now'

So, clearly I'm running slow on my reviews. Bear with me.

Not the most successful interrogation ever.

Dutch is going all out for war and seeking to recruit the rest of the RAC. To do that, however, she needs to be sure that she isn't recruiting double agents, and thus she and her team set out to use knockout gas to disable every Killjoy in the Rack so that they can be cut-tested and the Sixes eliminated. It's a smooth plan, but goes south when the Hullen prove to be wearing anti-toxin injectors, one of the tech nerds having sold out the cause for the promise of immortality.

The brothers Jaqobis are captured and tortured to force D'av to reveal his magic goo powers, while Dutch confronts Banyon Grey and stabs her, only to learn that she has been tracking the Six infiltration herself, and thought that Dutch was a part of it. Dutch rescues her boys and manages to clear the Rack with the aid of Johnny and the DNA bomb, but the cost is massive and Banyon - a potentially strong ally - dies of her wounds. Worse, Aneela sees a demonstration of D'av's abilities. On the upside, the leaders of the other nearby RAC Cruisers are convinced... right up until Aneela blows up their ships and all of the Killjoys aboard.

Also, Turin shows doubts over Fancy's loyalty, causing the latter to go off in a huff.

"I don't think you understand how rich, posh and objectionable we are."

So, things are going badly for everyone but Aneela, and maybe Kendry, who moves up her campaign to become Aneela's second in command to a physical level.

In 'Necropolis Now', the team attend the funeral for the RAC leaders, a swanky affair led by Alvis and with top-level representatives of the Nine in attendance, at which a newly doubtful Dutch is hoping to solicit financial support for the war. She finds them less than receptive, and eventually realises that this is because, with their deal with the Hullen fallen through, they are planning to run away and leave the Quad to their erstwhile partners. As the dignitaries begin to die from mysterious causes, Dutch and D'av are trapped in a lift with the nobs and a bucket of sexual tension, while Johnny tries to find common ground with Pawter's sister. Unfortunately, it turns out that Louelle Seyah Simms is the murderer, using tiny robots developed by her mother to avenge her sister's murder, for which she also holds Johnny responsible. This leaves a dying Johnny to talk her down, while D'av and Dutch work to un-stick the lift and save their potential donors.

Family's always embarrassing.

Meanwhile, on the Black Root cruiser, Aneela cracks the secret of D'av's abilities, only for her aide to move against her. Kendry realises that the ship is Aneela's prison, somewhere she can be contained while the Hullen use her erratic genius. Armed with D'av's power, however, Aneela slaughters her guards and storms about in search of Kendry.

And then Zeph tells Dutch that the Remnant contains brain cells, complete with memories, with a DNA profile closely matching Dutch's.

Killjoys continues to be a cracking space opera, although it has lost some of its former joie de vivre in all the loss and desperate struggle for survival that's going on, and I miss that. Our heroes have also been on the back foot for a while, and that can be a grind. Thankfully, funding from the Nine and a possible break in the form of the Remnant may indicate a shift of footing. Also, Aneela is so far a slightly less compelling character than Dutch, although the revelation that the Hullen have (or had) a complicated relationship with their 'commander' has done wonders for this childlike monster.

Killjoys - 'The Lion, the Witch and the Warlord'

It's Pree! With hair.

Johnny and Zeph are interrupted in their work of trying to open the remnant – Johnny with a blowtorch, Zeph by attaching electrodes to D'av's nipples, apparently – to celebrate Johnny's accession to Level 5 Killjoy. The party is tragically cut short when a group of out of town Killjoys show up to lock and serve him for the murder of Delle Sayah Kendry, forcing Dutch to take him on the lam.

While D'av tries to find out who set the warrant, and to find proof that Johnny did not kill Delle Sayah in cold bloo(1).) Dutch tries to talk him into joining the fight against the Hullen, but he decides that Dutch and johnny have to compete in a trial by ordeal. If Dutch wins, Pree lives; if Johnny wins, the Ferren join the war.

d, Pree takes the fugitives to hide out with the Ferren, a band of mercenary freedom fighters he used to run with, and when he says run with, he means lead. Johnny is excited to meet the Ferren, although Dutch has never heard of them, since – in her words – 'I grew up a slave princess in a harem, whereas you grew up reading comic books and building robot dogs.' The current leader of the Ferren, Lachlan, is pretty pissed at Pree, however, since leaving the Ferren is a betrayal (plus, they were an item

Dutch is all for saying screw the help, but Johnny is angry and eager to prove himself, having learned from Turin that Dutch previously blocked him from level 5. When the third challenge involves a truth serum, this all comes out, and Dutch admits that she never wanted him to be a killer. Then the out of towner captures them from under the Ferren's eyes and they work out most of their issues while tied to a chair, before Pree brings the Ferren to the rescue after confessing to Lachlan that he faked his death because he knew that Lachlan was going to get himself killed protecting him, where he should be leading himself.

New Nerd.

Meanwhile, having seen footage of Delle Sayah getting up after being shot, Zeph helps D'av to access the green and find the murder victim aboard the Black Root flagship. There, the aide is again warning her that being Aneela's favourite is dangerous, as well as telling her that he has cancelled the Black Warrant on Johnny as personal vendettas are beneath the Hullen. He follows her to Aneela's room, where Aneela is able to see the mental projection of D'av and dismiss it.

Later, Zeph uses plasma and Khlyen's blood to open the remnant... then closes it again. More mystery!

'The Lion, the Witch and the Warlord' wraps up Johnny's reasons for running, and exposes some cracks in the team. I'm glad he and Dutch made up, as I enjoy their partnership a lot, and also that th show feels able to have them argue and work through their problems like grownups, even when they often act like big kids in many ways. Also welcome was an episode with a bit of focus on Pree, and the fact that the wider team remains in play.

(1) And kiss on their reunion, which is good to see as an m/m kiss (or f/f for non-fanservice reasons) is still a mark of confidence in an SF show's staying power.

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.

Killjoys - 'A Skinner, Darkly'

Dutch wants a war, so it's time to get an army.

I say army; it's more of a logistical support corps.

With Johnny still on the lam and a data retrieval mission going bad due to lack of technical savvy, Turin decrees it is time to get a new brain. Thus he digs up three of the RAC's finest lab rats and sends them on a mission with Team Dutch to determine if they've got the stuff. The mission in question takes them into a facility where a contagion is on the loose. With all five infected and terminal sterilisation protocols in effects, the nerd squad will have to come good to get them out alive.

Meanwhile, Johnny gets Olli checked out – after asking the barkeep those pointed questions - and finds that her 'kill switch' was triggered. Learning that the false-faced assassin had received treatment from a rejuvenation clinic, our intrepid pair infiltrate and learn that the clinic is killing and skinning hackmod owners, in order to allow mods to wear their skins. The skins are preserved with plasma, which is of course of great interest to Johnny. Clara's friend Yuki, who works at the plant, warns them off, revealing that Olli is Clara, with her memory blocked and her face changed due to scheduling conflicts. They meet with Yuki later, but one of her mods emits a pulse that disables all of the hackmods in the bar, leaving Johnny to be captured so that Niko can infiltrate the RAC by giving someone his face.

Dutch's mission goes further south when bio-nerd Zeph sacrifices herself to complete the mission objective. The whole thing is revealed to be a simulation, and Zeph alone fails Turin's test by not getting out alive. She insists that she knew it was a simulation, but Turin is not interested, dismissing her and recruiting the two tech nerds to the fight. Dutch, however, finds Zeph at the Royale and tells her that she needs biologists to fight the Hullen.

"Let me tell you about my mother..."

Niko reveals to Johnny that she plans to destroy the hackmod owners and their factory using her skin-grafted infiltrators and the properties she is discovering in the plasma. Olli busts into the clinic and fights Niko. It's a close fight, but Johnny escpaes the surgical chair using his laser finger and calls in the other hackmods to shut Niko down. Johnny retrieves Niko's list of plasma sources and heads back to the Quad, leaving Clara/Olli to continue the fight for a hackmod homeland at the far end of the Jay.

As Dutch welcomes Johnny home, Delle Seyah revives in a ship, where she is taken to meet Aneela.

I have to say, I'm not loving that Karma Houdini at the end, although from her attitude Delle Sayah knows that she's not come up smelling of roses. Normally in control of every situation, faced with Aneela she's basically bricking it, and that's something. Olli/Clara is a pretty fair replacement for Stephanie Leonidas, and Niko subverts the classic femme fatale tropes of her look by being her own brains and muscle. Zeph looks like being a good addition to the team, although her male competitors are pretty forgettable. Also, she might be a mole; always so hard to say.

All of which pales beside the heartfelt reunion of Johnny and the team (I would say Johnny and Dutch, as the Brothers Jaqobis are sort of 'sup', but there's also Lucy to consider, who informs Jonny that if she could cry, she would be rusting.) Yay!

Killjoys - 'Boondoggie'

Negotiations for the new series went as well as could be expected.

Have your levels of space-bound sass and swagger been getting a bit low of late? Well, worry no more, because the Killjoys are back.

Well, that's sort of true. Dutch and D'av are present and correct, still in their rocky alliance with RAC superior Turin and forming a supergroup with Fancy Lee, Alvis and Pre, to root out infiltrators from the Hullen(1) and prevent the conquest of the Quad by the green goo monsters. Unfortunately, although he is feeding them locations for goo pools, Johnny is not back with the team. Still on the run following the murder of Delle Sayer, he is separated from Clara (probably because Stephanie Leonidas landed a featured gig on Mockney TV spin-off Snatch) and left with new face Olli and Alice, Clara's good arm, now attached to Olli. He does still have Khlyen's dope ride, at least.

Dutch and D'av kidnap a fixer named Pippin, also known as 'the Mouth', to help them retrieve a chemical beacon sent from allies outside the Quad to identify the Hullen infiltrators. Now, this is one hell of a thing to just drop into the first episode of the season, but it turns out to be a bluff. The beacon flushes out the infiltrators because the Mouth is just indiscrete enough to tip off a group of sixed agents, who turn up to arrest the team and thus give them the opportunity to a) prime and collect some more plasma-killer to take out the pools, and b) be all kinds of sassy badass.

"And I shall call my good finger 'Steve'."

Meanwhile, Johnny bonds with Olly as he explains that he and Clara were planning to take out the Factory; the industrial plant which creates hackmods. They find out that Rat City, a hackmod sanctuary, is increasingly unsafe, and Johnny is given a mod of his own – a tiny lightsabre in his finger which makes him incredibly chipper – as the price of leaving a hackmod bar alive. The barkeeper also insists on giving Olli's mods a once over. Later, a supposed contact dummies Johnny away while a mysterious assailant comes to take out Olli, but luckily this isn't Johnny's first rodeo(2). Less fortunately, Olli collapses for reasons unknown, although I feel the barkeep maybe is owed some pointed questions.

Every time a beloved series returns, I worry that it's going to go tits up, but this is a promising opening for my current favourite space opera and inter-Librarians TV happy place. The humour is sharp, the action is cracking, and the characters are just the best. Within the space of the episode, Hanna John Kamen's Dutch is kicking arse, telling scary stories to scary people, and sitting cross-legged on her cabin floor working up a heartfelt conversation with Johnny's latest voicemail. Separating Johnny and Dutch is a bit of a risky play, since so much of the heart of the series rests on their relationship – Olli asks what his deal with Clara was 'fetish, wifey, non-sexual life partner' and he tells her that the latter would be Dutch – but this episode at least makes the separation play to strengthen the bond.

My one disappointment is the absence of Clara, who was awesome, but Olli is pretty good too, and has an immediate chemistry with Johnny as they share 'dark talk' and save each other's lives. She seems pretty eager to belong somewhere, and I hope that's tragedy and not infiltration, because I like her.

(1) And not, as I misheard last season, Holla.

(2) As ever, huge props to the series for remembering that Johnny is the least badass of a Killjoy crew that includes Dutch and D'av, not a wimpy tech diva.

Killjoys - 'How to Kill Friends and Influence People'

"Who's queen?"

Our favourite team of Killjoys are in a bad place at the moment. Westerley is more or less back in Company hands, Jelco is in the wind and Delle Sayah is even more smug than usual having murdered Pawter and stepped into her place as Westerley's favourite posh bird. Johnny is pretty much inconsolable, and Khlyen is on his way for a denouement.

The Black Root ambush the team on board Lucy, which is just adding insult to injury, but Khlyen appears with his new anti-Six dart gun, having been waiting for this test opportunity. Fortunately it works and he lays out the plan: Locate the only pure source of Arkyn green not currently surrounded by Black Root gunships and kill it, and through the miracle of the plasma's limitless entanglement, all the other plasma in the Quad, thus averting an all-out invasion by his people, the original Sixes led by his daughter, Aneela.

Okay, so this is a bit fiddly, but as I understand it, Khlyen found the plasma - Holla, I think he calls it - while trying to make miracle grow for his peeps. Instead it turned them crazy; or killed them. Aneela was his daughter, and one of the craziest. When they found more green on Arkyn they made a deal with the Nine to tame and then hand over the Quad in exchange for immortality, and the deal is now due. Delle Sayah is spearheading the process of turning over a core of the strongest workers to be subjugated by overexposure to the plasma. Khlyen is working against them because he met Dutch, who is extraordinarily a double for his daughter, and wants to destroy the Arkyn plasma so that the Quad ceases to be interesting.

This episode is just thick with badassery.

With help from Alvis, Dutch determines that the scarbacks who went to Arkyn took a tree that had grown in Arkyn plasma. The Devil - Aneela - stole it back, and secured it in the Archive, a funky space bank for the super rich. Khlyen is all for ninjaing the place, but Dutch points out that this is a Killjoy mission: "Get in, get dirty, get out."

It's about now that Delle Sayah gets a call from Khlyen asking for a meet to hand over Team Dutch.

D'avin and Fancy Lee have a massive fight with security and John and Lucy dogfight with a couple of Black Root gunships despite being unarmed. Khlyen and Dutch have a punch up with more security before they get into Aneela's vault and find the tree. To kill the pure plasma, however, Khlyen has to sacrifice himself to activate the anti-plasma shot. He dies, but so does the tree, reverting all of the Sixes converted using that source (including Fancy.)

Dutch is conflicted, but Johnny assures her that you can miss someone without forgiving them, and love someone you hate. Later, he excuses himself from Pawter's wake and keeps the appointment he made with Delle Sayah using Khlyen's likeness, whereat he shoots her. Then he leaves, but not before Lucy has said her goodbyes and - having noticed him booking eight different flights out - sets him up with a travel buddy, and be still my beating heart it's Clara (and Alice the gun arm.) They nick Khlyen's super-swanky ship and head off into the black, where Aneela is still around and Dutch is gunning for her.

So, that was Killjoys season 2, and yeah; the strength of this offering is definitely part of why I was underwhelmed by season 2 of Dark Matter. They have a similar space-opera-with-grime feel, but this is markedly superior. The emotional hit of Khlyen's death was complex and powerful, and Johnny's shift towards the renegade side of things a real shakeup. Possibly my favourite scene was the shooting, not least because the actors sell that Johnny and Sayah are both legitimately surprised that he did it. I'm not convinced that Sayah is dead though; I figure that even without plasma the Nine still have a wicked health plan.

And it's been picked up for a third season, so woo!

Killjoys - 'Johnny Be Good'

Not a good start.

With Johnny and Pawter's plan to save Oldtown in the crapper, it's time for Dutch and D'av to step up.

We cold open with Dutch being held in the Royale and tortured for information on Jelco's whereabouts, and through flashbacks we learn that, after extracting Johnny and Pawter, the team went into Springhill to take down the Wall. Jelco ran, and without his codes Pawter opted to destroy the Wall by overloading it, switching its mood-control function to generate extreme rage and so inciting the citizenry to charge en masse until it couldn't cope, which is some dark shit right there. Pawter also transmits a message across the Quad to reveal what has been happening in Oldtown and what is planned for the other Westerly settlements, but it gets worse.

"Scratch that off the bucket list."

Dutch and D'av pursue Jelco to a basement facility which turns out to be set up to turn the survivors of Oldtown into an army of Sixes. He offers information, which leads to Dutch getting captured buying time for D'av to get Jelco clear of a lynch mob. Dutch holds out until D'av can destroy Springhill, which is clearly a bit of a moment for him.

With the Quad in uproar, Delle Sayer shows up to negotiate for Westerly independence, in exchange for Pawter standing down from the Nine. At the signing, however, Delle Sayer stabs Pawter and sicks a group of Sixed Scarbacks on our heroes, forcing them to retreat while she swaps the treaty for another document and announces Pawter's tragic death and her intention to replace her as the bridge between Westerly and Qresh.

Back at Lucy, the crew find Fancy Lee and an absence of Jelco, and are invited to come and talk to Khlyen.

In all honesty, Killjoys may be another reason that I've lost interest in Dark Matter, since it is just... better. Well, they're about equal on their good days, but Killjoys has a lot more good days. It's consistently on its game and manages to keep its focus on the core dynamic even while servicing a larger plot. This week the episode is all about the political horror show, but the emotional core is Johnny and Dutch repairing their relationship after Johnny's well-meaning betrayal. For that to be resolved only for Pawter to be murdered is a pretty harsh twist. I'd say I never saw it coming, but fucking Wikis man. I really need to remember to look up actors on IMDb.

Killjoys - 'Full Metal Monk'

Eww!

D'av and Turin track down a Six in Oldtown, and D'av discovers a new string to his Green-power bow when he makes the Six's eyeballs explode. Umm... yay?

In pursuit of the Sixes and of Aneela, Dutch, D'av and Alvis travel to Arkyn - now bereft of its protective shell - n search of Aneela and discover another of Khlyen's safehouses, this one opening at Dutch's touch to an elevator. Below the surface they find an antiquated Six lab, where the Scarbacks who came to fight the Devil were injected with the plasma, one surviving in a cell made of the same sort of wall as surrounds Oldtown.

Speaking of Oldtown, Pawter gets Johnny out of the clink and they head into that grim metropolis in search of the means by which Jelco plans to destroy the people. They realise that contraband is slipping in and that the Company plans to send in poisoned food to winnow out the weak and leave only strong workers, but unfortunately the wall also serves to sedate the mind, inducing a euphoric state. They get another of the Nine to come and see their evidence, but wind up high as kites and powerless to stop Jelco murdering their potential ally and framing them via the power of selfies.

Not good.

The SixMonk identifies Dutch as Aneela, and as the Devil they came to fight, and Khlyen as Aneela's father. Then he asks for death and refuses to forgive Dutch for delivering it. With just a little more information, the team leave Arkyn and look for Johnny, but with the poisoned food on its way and all of Oldtown on a permanent high, is it too late to get the band back together?

Okay, so this episode was kind of a downer, especially watching Pawter and Johnny stumble drunkenly to their downfall. There is nothing more dismaying in Killjoys than watching Jelco win. I really want Dutch to punch his head off. And Delle Sayah, who was revealed as his ally in this diabolical plot (although they prefer sinister scheme.)

Killjoys - Heart-Shaped Box

"I think I broke him."

Dutch: It's Sabine.
Johnny: Yeah.
Dutch: It's Sabine in a bag.
Johnny: Yes.
Dutch: Johnny, why did you bring me Sabine in a bag?
Johnny: Not a lot of better options. 
Dutch: Oh I think when you're in girl in bag territory you skipped way the hells past better choices. What is going on?
D'avin: She's a Six.

So, yes; to answer that question from last week, Sabine is - present tense - a Six, but D'av's weird anti-Green pushed the Green out of her. Since a big part of the Green's purpose is to nullify the parts of the brain which deal with empathy and morality, this means that she is, temporarily, just a regular girl with lethal skills, as she proves when Turin's in-house torturer tries to shish kebab her head and she decapitates him with her restraints. Turin goes into lockdown and leaves Dutch to take care of Sabine.

While Dutch and D'av clash over Sabine's fate - her Green is regenerating already and Dutch is not convinced by D'av's clear but unspoken plan to maintain a messiah-complex-engendering codependent sex-curing relationship - Johnny goes looking for one of the Wall's engineers, seeking to uncover the Company's plan. She points him in the direction of Jelco's compound, but then betrays him out of fear. Since he's on film breaking and entering without a warrant, Jelco puts Johnny in a box and has his face used as a dance floor. Not pretty.

This is entirely necessary, I'm sure.

D'av and Sabine try to use a sexy hypno-bath and mind link tech to let him see through her Green-memory, leading them through a vision to a mirrored cube on Leith. Then Dutch checks Sabine's room and discovers that she isn't just a Six, she's part of the Black Root; described by Turin as Level Six internal affairs and set to track down Khlyen via Dutch and her crew. She kills another Black Root who tries to kill her, but finds that D'av has already released Sabine, but planted a tracker on her first. This leads Dutch to the self-same mirrored cube where, after killing Sabine before she can become completely Six again, she finds a wealth of items apparently intended for her to find, but probably not until later in her search for the truth, as she doesn't understand a lot of it yet. What she does understand is a red kill box with the name Aneela, whoever that may be.

'Heart-Shaped Box' deepens the rift between Johnny and his crew mates, and in doing so puts him in real danger. Meanwhile it further explores the nature of the Sixes and their internal structure, although the Lady remains mysterious. Perhaps she, Aneela and the duplicate of Dutch (elsewhere dubbed 'Double-Dutch') are one and the same? The episode as a whole is excellent, with some crackling dialogue, especially from Dutch - the Sabine in a bag bit, or Dutch's immediate response to learning of Sabine's release: 'I'm sorry, I can't hear you over the knife in my back.' - and serious feels from Sabine providing depth to Sixes by making the expendable Terminators into unwilling zombies.

Killjoys - 'I Love Lucy'

Talk about sparks flying.

After another successful graq mission, Dutch and the Jaquobis boys are back on the trail of the green goop.

Discovering that mossipede plasma only allows D'av to relive mossipede memories, and that he can apparently manipulate the goo remotely, they set out to find the purified stuff that Khlyen uses. Pree gives them a lead from his old warlord days and they head off to meet with San Romwell, a trader of rare stuff with a gajillion warrants on his head and his own spaceship made of asteroids. They push, he pushes back and has his three gynoid bodyguards - seriously illegal tech - take them all prisoner, but agrees to trade Dutch's sitar for her freedom.

Things are not going as well for San Romwell as might appear.

For most of the rest of the episode, the team are split up. Dutch trades stories with San - she was placed in the harem when her rich family lost everything and trained by Khlyen to marry a prince; he was captured by aliens who conquered his world and flew in spaceships powered by the plasma - while the boys are taken to be rendered down to a molecular pattern, before Johnny manages to hack one of the bots, allowing a roaming 'app' version of Lucy, the ship's AI, to control her. Dutch sings her wedding song while San plays and gets poisoned by the sitar, and she strangles him, but he comes back thanks to nanites which have sustained his life for centuries. The gynoids go berserk and Lucy sacrifices her physical self to stop them (after kissing Johnny,) while Dav uses his goo manipulation powers to throw exploding crystals at shit.

Not good.

San gives them some more goo and Dutch gets him a new ID since they blew up his shit. Then she goes and gets some with Alvis the Scarback, Pawter shows up to get frisky with Johnny and D'av scores with bartender Sabine, who explodes. Opinion seems to be divided as to whether Sabine was a Level 6 until his unique ability shagged the goo out of her, or whether the downside to the cool powers he was crowing over earlier in the episode is that he kills people with his sexy. If the latter I suspect that a lot of fans may be aggrieved by the lack of future D'av sexy.

'I Love Lucy' was a cracking episode, not least for a bravura performance from Tamsen McDonough, the voice and now the face of Lucy, delivering lines like 'stop talking, be naked' with total commitment and soliciting a final kiss from Johnny because 'it could be your only chance to kiss a robot.' I also liked that Lucy was complicit in bringing Pawter to the ship in the end, rather than getting all cyber stalker. I like that even the computer is capable of loving on many levels.

Killjoys - 'Meet the Parents'

Oh, but that face!

D'av and Dutch are doin' how they do, bagging bad guys and flirting with bartenders (although in this case that's just D'av, hitting on mixologist and amateur psychologist Selina. Not much action for Dutch this episode.)

Meanwhile, Johnny is working a solo escort warrant to return Pawter to her home on Qresh, where we meet her sister Louella and her husband Hank, whom I think everyone pegged for a nogoodnik from the moment Louella's 'of course you know Hank' hinted that he'd hopped sisters after he failed to get into the Simms household via the Pawter route. Then her dad shows up, and he's a sweetie, if a little overshadowed by his as-yet-absent wife. Johnny finds a pool - or, as it turns out, baptismal font - and goes skinny dipping, luxuriating in that much water to remind us what a crapsack the rest of the Quad can be. Then Pawter finds him and takes him off to drill him in Qreshi table manners, and damn that dinner is awkward. As much as he gets to do later, Johnny's big hero moment is when Pawter's mum, Adaline, sends her fleeing from the table and he follows.

"There is a ritual for leaving."
"Yeah, but I'm not from Qresh, so I don't give a shit."

They say good manners cost nothing, but Qreshi etiquette is such a contrived form of social control that honestly they do have a cost; in dignity if nothing else.

Meanwhile, Khlyen and Fancy visit Papa Jaquobis and find nothing out of the ordinary. Khlyen tries to tap into D'av's brain to find his mother, but accidentally gives himself away and Dutch urges D'av to push back. Brains are swapped and hilarity ensues, as the actors have a ball pretending to be each other. D'av's hilarious failure to convince Fancy that he's Khlyen is especially priceless. Oddly, this leads to a new rapprochement between Dutch and her former mentor as they seek a way to swap the minds back (the non-clinical decription would be 'taser in the face') and the revelation that the woman D'av saw on Arkyn in his green goo memories was not Dutch. I'm calling it now that Dutch is a clone of whomever that was. It also brings a new understanding between D'av and his father, so it turns out Freaky Friday plots are still recommended family therapy in the Quad.

Back on Qresh, the Simms household comes under biological attack from a freezing virus created, it emerges, by Adeline herself, to render Qresh uninhabitable by the enemies of the Nine. Adeline sacrifices herself to provide a detailed prognosis and Johnny heads out to rig an exploding gas main to destroy the viral fog. Hank tries to stop him, having been paid to destroy the Simms, but Papa - who is also revealed to have been the family's carpenter before Adeline rebelled by marrying him - takes his skeazy would-be son-in-law out and then sacrifices himself to manually detonate the damaged bomb.

Pawter becomes Lady of the Land and she and Johnny kiss, which I didn't hate as much as I thought I might, although it does lead to him keeping secrets from Dutch, which makes me sad.

'Meet the Parents' is a cracking episode of Killjoys, balancing the comedy of manners with action, plot progression and just the right amount of sentiment.

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.

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.

Killjoys - 'Wild, Wild Westerly'

"When were you a warlord?"

So, I have decided to switch my recording time for Killjoys from 8pm on SyFy to 9pm on SyFy+1, in the hopes that it won't be cut for violence in a way that makes the series not make sense. I'll let you know how that works out.

Anyway, 'Wild, Wild Westerly' opens with the team seeking a warrant to re-enter Old Town. They have a surprise run in with their old boss - the one that Khlyen stabbed, but who is neither dead nor Level Six - and then get a docket for eight escaped prisoners, but first have to bypass a high-tech force wall which exercises an unhealthy fascination on Johnny - because that's how he is - and the new garrison commander, Smarmy McSleazhat. He has a name, but I'm convinced that's an alias. He's a nasty, supercilious, superior piece of shit who probably tortures puppies for shiggles. He can't keep them out while they're serving a valid warrant, but he is clearly among the ranks of those Company officers who feel that the RAC is an unnecessary liability.

"Did I mention how much I missed working with you guys?"

They find one of the escapees at the Royale while Dutch fights the interim owner to win the place back for Pre, but their quarry kills himself rather than be taken in and handed over to the Company. When they contact the monk Alvis, however, they learn that the remaining escapees have holed up back in the prison with, it turns out, a tank of hideous nerve gas. Dutch tries to talk them down, but a company drone drops in and kills the escapees. McSleazehat - okay, his name is Liam Jelco and we later learn that he's a torture expert, as well as just the kind of arsehat who'd gas a civilian population just to expedite the solution to a corporate problem - demands the return of the gas as part of the warrant, probably intending to use it on dissidents in Old Town. Or some puppies. When Dutch won't just hand it over, he puts out a hit on them.

Aspects of gender relations in Killjoys that I love, number 2 in an occasional
series: Pawter greets her friend Johnny when they meet, rather than her ex,
D'avin.

Prior to this, the crew found Pawter maintaining a clinic among the ruins, supplied with drugs by Alvis luring drug dealers into trying to beat him up and then robbing them. Johnny persuades her to try to reach her mother on Qresh for help, and the old garrison commander gets her into the Company bunker to make contact. Unfortunately, Jelco shoots the decent old fella in the head fro warning the population about the bombing, and leers menacingly at Pawter. He hasn't called her 'my proud beauty' yet, but I'm assuming he's just waiting until his twirling moustache grows in.

Alvis tries to gas the bunker, but they talk him out of it for Pawter's sake. They leave after another tense confrontation with Jelco. Pawter insists that she's staying in the bunker where she can help, and Johnny kisses her as an excuse to slip a communicator behind her ear. They then head for Arkyn with Alvis, to explore the Scarback Monk connection from D'avin's indoctrination visions, but are detoured by a signal from Turin, their boss at the RAC. He claims to be trying to root out the Level Six conspiracy, but that he needs their covert help to do so.

Back at the bar, the interim owner tries to roughhouse Pre, who reluctantly gives way and lets him have the bar. No, wait; that's just the impression you get if you cut the shot where Pre stabs the guy in the hand with his own knife. This is what I mean about the cuts. I keep expecting people to get back up when they've been shot in the head, had their neck snapped, or otherwise died horribly what is, for me, off camera.

Other than SyFy's misguided timeslotting and consequent bowdlerisation, I'm really enjoying Killjoys still. It has an interesting, organically revealed world and strong, likable - or hateable - characters, and a fair few shades of grey in between, as well as conspiracy on top of conspiracy like a mad Da Vinci sandwich.

Killjoys - 'Dutch and the Real Girl'

"Dutch! We're in the middle of a heist!"
"You're right. Something red."

After last season's bombshell cliffhanger, we cold open with Dutch, Johnny and D'avin assaulting the Level 6 base on Arkyn, which is a bit of a jump ahead until it becomes clear that this is just a dream, part of D'avin's conditioning.

Above Arkyn, unable to approach due to an artificial defensive layer, the team are forced to retreat and go looking for a rumoured piece of tech that allowed a smuggling crew to dip in and out of Arkyn's atmosphere to escape pursuit. Their warrant broker confirms that the tech exists, and that a warrant exists for any person in possession of it, but that it was believed to have been deposited in a black market casino. Fortunately for the Killjoys, they have added bartender Pree to their roster, and he happens to have a criminal past notorious enough to get them in.

"I like that one. Can we keep her."
Alas, Lucy, it seems she will only be recurring.

So, Johnny pretends to be Pree's husband and Dutch pretends to be luggage to get into the vault, where they find the shield tech embedded in the body of a 'hack-mod' - Killjoy-speak for an extensively modified cyborg - named Clara, who was bought by the Connaver gang and turned into a living weapon to protect their shield. It's a slightly mad state of affairs, but it introduces us to Clara, a total badass in the shape of Mirrormask's Stephanie Leonidas and her 'good arm', Alice. It turns out that the tech embedded in her body redirects the radiation damage from the defence layer into Clara, and the crew are endearingly conflicted about the whole thing. Clara, however, is totally up for helping out another girl who was turned into a weapon and a family trying to get one of their own back.

Meanwhile, something about D'avin rejects the green conditioning goop. Learning this, Khlyen breaks him out and sends him back to Dutch, explaining that the only reason for taking him was to create a protector whom Dutch would let close. He also tells D'avin to lie to Dutch and say he's gone, because she won't leave until she's killed him, and staying would bring her into contact with 'the Black Root'. Fellow Killjoy Fancy Lee comes with, but when he doesn't bleed after being shot they chuck him off for a Level 6 and book, while Khlyen is knocked out and taken off by the Root to see 'the Lady', although one of his minders is then shivved by Fancy.

"Don't make me cut a bitch."
"Please, cut a bitch already."

Despite an offer to have her harmful mods removed, and the fact that Lucy the spaceship AI likes her, Clara heads off to hunt her own demons, leaving the crew to plan a rescue of the surviving refugees in the now walled-off Oldtown.

Killjoys blasts back for a second season in fine style, with its impressive cast, organically-explored world and more than usually sophisticated SF corporate conspiracy. It's a shame not to see the always-impressive Leonidas - who is north of thirty now, curse her eternal, fresh-faced youthfulness - become a fixture post-Defiance, but the existing ensemble is strong enough. Between this and Dark Matter, it seems we are living in a new golden age of space opera.

Killjoys - Season 1

John Jaqobis (Aaron Ashmore), Dutch (Hannah John-Kamen) and D'avin Jaqobis (Luke Macfarlane)

In the distant future, a particular subset of humanity is settling a solar system called the Quad, after the four variably habitable worlds it hosts: the planet Qresh and the moons of Arkyn, Westerly and Leith. Owned almost in its entirety by the Nine ruling families of the Company, the Quad is policed by a mixture of private and corporate security and the agents of the Reclamation Apprehension Coalition*, known as Killjoys.

Dutch and her partner John are a successful Killjoy team, whose relatively simple lives become complicated when John uses Dutch's name to pick up a kill warrant, in order to rescue his wayward brother, brooding ex-soldier D'avin. In addition to putting them on the RAC's shit list, this draws the attention of Dutch's former tutor, the mysterious Khlyen. At the same time, political tension in the Quad ramps up as the Nine look for a way to weasel out of their promise that any family holding down clean jobs in the industrial hellhole of Westerly for seven generations will be granted a land claim on the pastoral, upper middle class idyll of Leith.

Killjoys pitches in as a pretty basic post-Firefly sci-fi actioner, but over the course of the first season develops a sophisticated world distinguished by the symbiotic polity of the Quad, and an emergent conspiracy which plunges the characters into the heart of a conspiracy engineered by the supposedly neutral body they are sworn to serve. The interdependence of Qresh and its moons serves as a justification for the planet of hats set-up, with Qresh the upper class paradise, Westerly its dependent slum, Leith its wannabe suburb/Old South, and Arkyn a scarred wasteland of mystery.

The characters are not finely drawn, but then there's always a pay off when a series is working with a ten episode order and the performers work what they're given. John is the technician and genuine decent sort (when he agrees to take a warrant as a favour to a prostitute, Dutch tells him 'you have to stop being friends with everyone you sleep with; it's weird') while Dutch and D'avin are different kinds of enigmatic badass; she a lethal close-up fighter rejecting her past, he a soldier whose memories were taken from him.

Definitely worth a look, and I'll be following Season 2 starting this month.

* RAC, pronounced 'rack'; never ar-ay-cee, probably because the British lead actress pointed out it could never be taken seriously in the UK.