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Review by An Honest Fangirl
A happy, somewhat humorous image to go with a less happy, less humorous episode. Also I now want to use that as a reaction image for everything.
Well, it certainly felt like a midseason finale. Relationships that had been bubbling over for awhile now finally came to a head, and with disastrous consequences for basically everyone involved.
Let's start with Clarice and John. While I am a little annoyed at the cheating insinuation, I'm glad that Clarice finally walked. She's been increasingly unhappy all season, and it's pretty easy to see why. John went more than a little off the rails this week. Remember the good old days when our heroes didn't torture the people that they wanted information from? Yeah, me neither. And I've always considered John to be one of the more moral and levelheaded members of the cast. It really goes to show just how much these feelings of failure and inadequacy have been weighing on him.
And now he's been captured by Jace and the Purifiers, which cannot end well. Obviously, we're going to have a big battle to break John out - possibly involving the Morlock, and definitely involving Clarice - but... what if we don't? They spent a lot of time focusing on Jace as he said that mutants were more than welcome to join the Purifiers. Now, granted, it could just be lip service in order to make them seem less like an obvious hate group, but hey, maybe not! It could be a cool direction to go in, not to mention continue to muddy the waters between which side is "good" and which is "bad."
Although, I think it's very clear which side Rebecca belonged to. Was the opening flashback supposed to make her sympathetic? Yeah, it absolutely sucks that your parents would betray you like that, but they were obviously terrified. Rebecca still came off as unstable in those scenes. It wasn't something that the mental hospitals did to her; it was already there.
Of course, that doesn't excuse what Reeva did. She was still torturing a teenager, and who knows what the ultimate plan for her was? It was really difficult listening to Rebecca scream like that. (And couldn't have been fun to do for the actress either.) Still, something about her scenes just felt lacking to me this time around, even once Andy accidentally killed her. I guess I just expected more? I said last review that I didn't expect Rebecca to get away only to be killed one episode later, and I guess that's where my dissatisfaction comes from. It felt like a pointless waste, even if there was only so many directions left that her character could go.
But what's done is done. Rebecca is dead, and just in time for Andy to recommit himself to the Inner Circle. We also got to see the next step to the Inner Circle's plan, and it could definitely cause some interesting wrinkles down the line. We've seen time and time again how awful those mutant control collars are, and so ending the abuses of them is a categorical good. But... at the same time, there were a lot of bad people that those collars were keeping under control. I'm not sure if this is going to help or hurt the social campaign that the Inner Circle is running.
Finally, in our C-plot, we had the Struckers and their quest to destroy Madeline's research. It was a perfectly adequate use of time. Honestly, I had no real issues with it, even if Noah's sudden turn felt very quick and unearned. My biggest complaint is how divorced it felt from the rest of the episode, but we still got some interesting information about Lauren, Andy, and how exactly their X-genes work. If nothing else, it explained why their powers worked so well together. We'll have to see what impact it has later down the line.
The only thing is that Reed still doesn't have a solution for his powers, does he? Not a permanent one, at least. Where are they going to go with him? Will he learn how to control his powers through the power of will and controlling his emotions like John said? If that's the case, then this string of episodes will feel a little meaningless. I guess we'll see.
Random Thoughts
This, if anything, just proves to me that you don't have one, central server that controls everything in the country. Come on, have some sort of redundancy or backup plan!
Seriously, Andy, what did you think would happen? You know that Rebecca loves to kill everyone who wrongs her in the slightest way. Don't tell her where people who wronged her are!
I actually really liked Noah, and I liked the chemistry he had with Lauren. I hope he's not dead and that he comes back.
There's some good set up for when we come back from break. I'm honestly really enjoying the kind of culture/societal war that's been happening so far. It definitely wasn't what I was expecting when we started this season.
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An Honest Fangirl loves superheroes, science fiction, fantasy, and really bad horror movies.
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