“On the bright side we’ll starve to death before we run out of ammo.”
- Weaver
Episode two dives right into the action. Since the high school raid, skitters have started attacking the compound, looking for food. Without Espheni overlord orders, they’re kind of in chaos. The 2nd Mass is defending their stash of supplies when it accidentally blows up. This kicks off a week’s worth of near-constant raids by the Skitters and the 2nd Mass isn’t doing so hot. According to the Volm, there are other militias having similar problems but they still aren’t having a lot of luck getting organized as a big old group. And Tom is still kind of moody after his bizarre encounter with no-Rebecca. In fact, he sees her again in the infirmary as Anne tends to a bite from a weird little bug that stung him at the school. Her task is to study it but she doesn’t have the equipment to do it properly.
Matt is hanging out with one of the ghetto survivors when a girl named Evelyn shows up and tries to take the mystery bug. She’s really hungry and unfortunately in the food line, Anne runs out and Evelyn collapses. Matt doesn’t seem to trust her and I’m not really sure why. Maybe he actually kind of likes her? It’s hard to tell. I have a sinking feeling that she may have eaten the bug thing and it’s now going to do horrible things to her. Elsewhere at camp, Pope has the smart idea to cook and try to eat dead, week-old Skitter. One of the other guys tries a piece (even though Pope intended to feed it to a cat first to test its safety) and it kills the guy in a pretty nasty fashion. It kind of made my stomach turn.
Tom’s whole “use your rage’ mantra ends up turning into not a very good thing because Anthony manages to capture a Skitter and is beating it and torturing it to get out his aggressions. Tom just stands by and watching it happen. Weaver eventually has to step in and shoot the Skitter in the head before ordering everyone back to work. Weaver confronts Tom about the situation and Tom isn’t apologetic. He insists they need the darker parts of their nature to win this war and save the planet for future generations. Really not sure I like this version of Tom which is sad since these are the final run of episodes.
In digging through the rubble of the food storage, Ben finds a can of pineapple. Hal is pretty impressed his little brother didn’t eat it himself. Weaver thinks it will be a good idea to use it for the desperate and people who are worst off amongst the 2nd Mass. But it also gives them an idea. They’ve settled in Georgia and the packing plant is also in Georgia. In fact it’s only one town over. So they assemble a team consisting of Ben, Maggie, Pope and Sarah to go raid the facility and see what they can find. It takes some cover fire and some luck but the team makes it out of the compound and to the facility. Even better luck, they find packaged food!
Ben and Pope start loading up the truck that Pope found while Maggie and Sarah chat about the awkward love triangle that Maggie finds herself in. Of course, things can’t go absolutely to plan and the gang gets taken hostage by a teenage girl. She claims she and her brother have been surviving off the stores in the warehouse but what she doesn’t reveal right away is that her brother is one of the Skitterized humans. Maggie lies and says that the 2nd Mass has a machine that can reverse the process on her brother. Obviously that’s not true but it works and gets the team on their way back to the 2nd Mass.
Back at camp, Matt is tasked with building a microscope for Anne to examine the bug while our resident tech guy is trying to make alien tech work. He recounts a story about a girl he met one summer when he was a little older than Matt and he didn’t tell her that he liked her and he was always left wondering. Gotta love random relationship advice thrown into the middle of an alien siege. But it resonates with the youngest Mason. And the tech actually works. Just as Pope and company come blazing back into the camp! Because the weird no-Rebecca thing hasn’t been wrong yet, we see Hal collapse from starvation. Luckily, he’s okay and Maggie is by his side when he finally wakes up. I honestly don’t do a lot of shipping on this show but Hal is my least favorite of the Mason boys and I just think Maggie and Ben are more interesting. Ben’s a more interesting character anyway. Matt ends up taking the advice and chats up Evelyn (she didn’t eat the bug and she’s going to be okay).
The Skitter attacks have completely stopped which should be cause for celebration (heck Pope and Sarah have a nice dinner together) but Tom is anxious. He can’t explain why they stopped and he doesn’t like not knowing. But that seems the least of their worries when Anne gets the bug under the microscope. It has parts of a human, a wasp, a Skitter and an Espheni. And it isn’t dead. It activates and flies off. Anne and Tom chase after it and find a giant swarm. If it isn’t one thing, it’s another for our poor heroes.
Overall, I didn’t love this episode. It felt a little boring to be honest with the quest for food and the constant clatter of gunfire in the background. I guess it was good that we got a little movement on the militia front but it feels like with so few episodes we can’t afford filler. Hopefully next week will push the story ahead a lot.
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