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Colony: Departures & Arrivals, But Who Can You Trust? Review, Episode 304

Who do you trust? As far as I’m concerned, the only people we really can trust are the Bowmans and Broussard. That leaves a whole Colony universe of people who may or may not be who they say they are, who may or may not do what they say they will. There’s a long line of potential betraying, lying, scheming plotters. And a shorter, but no less worrisome, line of people that we feel more certain about, but who could break our hearts in the end.

Let’s take a good look, shall we? In no particular order:

Snyder

This wouldn’t even be a question, except that he has definitely formed a bond with the Bowmans. Especially the kids. And I think we can, at a minimum, not do anything knowingly that would put Gracie and Charlie in danger. He’s already shown some trustworthiness toward Bram – getting him out of the LA work camp when he said he would went some of the distance toward establishing a soft spot within that black hole he calls a heart. And he misses his own daughter, and feels guilty about what happened – or at least what he suspects may have happened – to her.

He’s waiting for an opportunity to call in the cavalry, or the Grey Hats. And he knows that when that happens, all hell will break out – after the attack on the Bowman’s cabin, that’s a given. But if anything happens to the RAP/Click, it won’t even be Snyder calling in the bad guys – there’s some mechanism, we should already know, that will alert whoever should know if the alien is destroyed. (And I’m actually surprised that there’s not a GPS built into the thing. But maybe they didn’t anticipate a Resistance sufficiently strong enough to overpower and capture one.) So, more than once, he tells Will and Katie that they need to get out of the camp now, and get far, far away, because McGregor isn’t using this asset the way a military man would, as a major source of information. And that can only mean major disaster.

(Photo by: Eric Milner/USA Network)

But still, Snyder can’t control everything that happens. And Will and Katie have done the run and hide thing already – faced with a tantalizing piece of information like the RAP, they know that getting intel out of it is worth the risk. I don’t think they completely believe Snyder’s fears – but why shouldn’t they? They know who he was, they know he still knows more than he’s telling. They should be listening. The one thing you can trust with Snyder is his instinct for self-preservation. If he says run, you run.

Dispatch

Who is this woman? And as Broussard said, “You came through the wall with a superficial wound and a sad story, but I really don’t know anything about you.” We don’t really, either – we saw flashbacks of her as a doctor, post-invasion, but so what? And bad things happen around this woman. Sure, she says that all those people that Broussard and others like him were getting out of LA were safe in the Santa Monica bloc, but how does he know? They could have been handed immediately to the government. The walkers show up immediately after Broussard and Amy (Dispatch’s name – she wasn’t born Dispatch, you know) go with the people in the truck yard to the pharmacy. And the Grey Hats show up as soon as the bus guy hands them the coordinates to the camp. She’s offered no explanation, no life story, nothing except defensiveness when challenged.

(Photo by: Daniel Power/USA Network)

So what could her deal be? Sure, she says she if she wanted Broussard dead, she could have killed him. But maybe her goal isn’t to kill him, but to use him for something – get him to Seattle, use him to get her to Seattle, turn him over to whoever put him and Will on that creepy list. She’s a mystery, and I think there’s more to her than we have any idea yet.

And aren’t you curious about what they’ll find in Seattle? And…. why didn’t they open up that crate? Could the WHOLE THING have been filled with flyers?

Vincent

Now here’s an interesting guy. Obviously conflicted by what he’s had to do, and with interrogation experience and skills both hinted and proven, he’s an obvious ally to the Bowmans. He’s treated them with nothing but respect. But who holds his loyalty? When push comes to shove – and in this camp, there’s a lot of both – he backs down from the better strategy and turns back to the strong man. Is it to save himself or because he’s trusted McGregor for so long that he can’t put that aside?

McGregor

Now here’s the most fascinating character of the season so far. I was really looking forward to veteran professional Graham McTavish showing up in Colony – he’s one of my favorites from my other major show, Outlander. And he doesn’t disappoint in this role! Who is McGregor? Last week, we had no idea. This week, we see an internet “crackpot,” as he tells the FBI guy, with a conspiracy theory website, working hard to find a REAL conspiracy. Sure, some of us might see plots in the Kennedy assassination, or the moon landing, or the World Trade Center disasters. But here in Colony, there’s a years-long, world-wide, high-stakes conspiracy. And McGregor, a guy who works in some kind of low level job, telling his wife he had to work late getting “gift boxes ready,” has a line on it.

(Photo by: Daniel Power/USA Network)

He’s found an analyst who is telling him they discovered huge, encrypted data packets attached to internet traffic. A young computer genius who works on the project is dead in an “accident,” and the analyst himself is promoted out of the department working on this deep web project, supposedly to shut him up. And McGregor puts it all out on his website, The Enemy Above. (Which, interestingly, is the name of a 2016 book by Michael Spradlin, a young adult book about Nazi camps in WWII. Of course, the entire idea for this show, and many of its themes and references, comes from the behavior and actions of people during that conflict. So, another tie-in.)

He seems almost excited when he’s interrogated, saying they’ve made their “first mistake” in picking him up, because this must confirm something he’s gotten into – otherwise why bother with an obscure nutjob? But they’re not in this just to scare him, or find out what he knows – they want to destroy him and any potential credibility he’s built up by framing him for pedophilia and child pornography. So he skips bail and lights out for the camp he’s secretly built – did he leave his wife behind or take her with? We have no idea. If he left her behind, that makes him even more dangerous, knowing he has a personal loss to blame on the FBI, the collaborators, and the Clicks.

But he isn’t – or at least doesn’t seem to be – a man with any military or strategy background. He’s built the camp through the force of his personality, keeping people in line because he’s kept them safe. And that works, for a while. But now he’s challenged by newcomers that he doesn’t think he can trust. Katie and Will walk in, with a story that seems unbelievable to him – as he tells Vincent toward the end of the episode – a story of magically finding the gauntlet, walking out of the LA Bloc unharmed, surviving on their own for six months, telling stories they can’t confirm about events nobody else knows anything about. On the surface, it sounds pretty unbelievable. Except that we, the viewers, know they’re telling the truth. We have a vantage point that McGregor doesn’t. So his distrust looks unbalanced to us.

And because he doesn’t have a strategic background, he’s looking more to hit back than to use his asset – the RAP. This horrifies Katie and Will – they’ve fought hard, for a long time, to get the gauntlet to Noa’s camp, where they believe it will be used to create a turning point for the war. And to hear McGregor say that he’s going destroy the RAP and strike a blow against the “collaborationaist military apparatus” is against everything the Bowmans have worked toward. They decide to find a way to stop him – they don’t believe that he’s acting in the best interests of the people in the camp or a goal of winning the war. They think he’s only working to keep himself in power, or as Snyder  says, to “control the narrative.”

Where We’re Left

Snyder gets himself outside the camp to find the tracker he hid when they first arrived, and caught. This doesn’t bode well. And Broussard and Dispatch arrive at the camp – there’s been a time jump of some kind here, because they find a deserted, shot-up camp, not the active, busy site we’ve seen. What happened? How long has it been? The next day? A week? Next time… on Colony.


I’ve been listening to the “official” SyfyWire podcasts – they’re interesting and enlightening! Find them on Google Play or iTunes. (And a note: the name of episode three is different on the podcast than on the official Colony website, which is a little weird.)

Join us at Colony: The Resistance on Facebook to chat about the show!

Follow me on Twitter: @ErinConrad2 and @threeifbyspace

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