Airtime: Thursdays at 10PM on USA
Episode: Season 1, Episode 10 (S01E10)
Tweetable Takeaway: Will and the Resistance finally come to a head in the season finale of #USAColony
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Plot-wise, a lot went down on the season one finale of USA’s COLONY but despite all the interesting cliffhangers, I was left feeling like it was missing some good emotional beats.
After Katie and her resistance crew blew up a metro train and captured a “Visitor,” Will and his team are faced with having to track down the body and retrieve it before the aliens gets pissed and flatten the entire city. Helena informs us that during the Arrival, two Visitors were killed in Dallas, and that city is now destroyed. As the resistance scrambles to get into hiding, it’s up to Will to get the kids to safety AND get the body back before it’s too late. However, the Visitors already start destroying buildings in repercussion for the attack, killing hundreds, if not thousands of innocents.
Luckily, Maddie informs Will of her hook-up in the Green Zone, telling him she can get the kids there and to safety. Before she leaves with them, Will gets Bram to confess he doesn’t know where his mother is, but she did give him a telephone number to call in an emergency. This is a direct line to the resistance hideout where they are keeping the Visitors body and trying to figure out what to do. Bram of course tries to get Will to let him come with him, and of course Will forbids it, telling him to go to the Green Zone.
Getting into the Green Zone isn’t as easy as it sounded the way Maddie told it to Will. There are mobs trying to get in, attempting to escape the carnage in the city. When Maddie does get to the head of the mob and gives her name, she realizes Bram is gone. He’s run off to his teacher buddy and convinced him to enter this tunnel with him so they can get parts for their telescope to see what if in the sky above the city, and what is on the moon.
Will finally does track down the resistance hideout (asking his partner to give him a 20 minute head start before she reports it) and through the door tries to convince Katie to leave everyone there and come with him to safety. It wasn’t an argument, really, as much as it was Will begging his wife not to die this way. And for what it was, I think the writers could have pulled at our heart strings a little more. Make us care about their relationship. Let us feel in our guts that we REALLY want these two to stay together and both survive. As is, I didn’t find myself rooting for Will or Katie, I didn’t care if it went one way or the other. Just watching another scene.
Will ultimately leaves without Katie, but she almost immediately after forces her resistance friends to evacuate by activating the dead Visitor’s location device on his suit. They are coming and they have no choice but to go.
I did find it interesting and a bit charming when Proxy Snyder went to find his daughter (in some kind of hippie combine) to give her his pass that allows him anywhere in or outside the walls. She can escape. He knows that the VIPs are coming and that he will soon suffer consequences for what has happened in his city. If he uses his pass to run, he will be caught almost immediately. But his daughter has a real chance. It was a humanizing moment for the Proxy.
In the end the destruction of the city is stopped when the body is recovered. Snyder gives Will a pass to the Santa Monica bloc and we see him driving through it. Bram and his teacher friend are caught by the Authority in the tunnels beneath the wall and arrested. Maddie has the kids in the Green Zone but the creepy babysitter assigned by the Authority is there with the kids as well. And Katie is back at home, family scattered, all alone. It left plenty of solid cliffhangers and unanswered questions to go into a second season with, but ultimately lacked the emotional punch Katie losing her family deserved.
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Paul co-created and writes for SHOWoff, a game that lets players predict what happens next on their favorite TV shows, earn points for what they get right, and see where they stack up against friends and the world (free in the iOS App store). Check out the SHOWoff app at playSHOWoff.com
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Paul Gulyas | Contributor
