Posts tagged: Killjoys

Killjoys S01E08 “Come The Rain” REVIEW

Airing in the UK on SyFy
Writer: Jeremy Boxen
Director: Peter Stebbing

Essential Arc Plot Developments

• The Company is prepping for something big in Old Town.
• Dutch doesn]t reall’ trust D’Avin anymore.
• The trio are split up; D’Avin is off the team for now.
• Dr Pawter is addicted to Jakk.

Episode Recap

• After last episode’s events, our trio of Killjoys are miserable, and dealing with it in their own ways, which mostly involve drinking and sex.
• To try and get the band back together, John has created a level one warrant just for Dutch and D’Avin – transport a device from Leith back to Westerley.
• John stays at The Royal (Pree’s bar in Old Town), to let Dutch and D’Avin complete the warrant, and in the process work out their differences.
• Dr Pawter has a headache and needs some “medical supplies”.
• There’s a stage four black rain event: an acid rain storm over Old Town, lethal for anyone caught in it.
• Pree offers safe haven for anyone stuck in the bar, unfortunately this includes some unsavoury looking types, as well as John, Alvis and Pawter.
• It seems some of the unsavoury types hiding out in the bar have stolen some land claim chips. However there’s also a Company man in the bar, and he wants to bring them to justice.
• A shootout ensues – the leader of the thieves is wounded so Dr Pawter has to operate and save him.
• Pawter is a bit shaky though, because of her “headache”; she didn’t get her “supplies” in time.
• Back on Lucy, the device Dutch and D’Avin are transporting disables the ship and won’t turn the engines back on until they answer a series of questions. It’s a set-up from John to get them talking again.
• Pawter is actually jonesing for some Jakk and Alvis knows where he can score a hit. To avoid the rain, Pree shows them the tunnels under the city.
• Dutch and D’Avin get drunk and answer John’s questions, but the final question for Dutch – “do you trust D’Avin?” – is one she can’t answer.
• Alvis gets the Jakk. Although it’s “dirty” it makes Pawter better. She keeps hearing space rats scratching in the walls, but manages to patch up the guy with John’s help.
• Lucy gets caught in the storm while disabled, but Dutch and D’Avin smash the device and get the engines online again.
• John shoots all the bad guys in the head with a nail gun.
• Alvis was there to meet the Company man; he’s one of his spies, and has a message for him – the company are prepping something big in Old Town, storing weapons and amassing numbers.
• D’Avin is off the ship until they can all play nice again.

Review

There’s been a storm brewing in the Quad for a while now, and this episode finally sees it break, although maybe not in the way we were expecting.

Last episode Pawter said she would see the captain of the med ship “staked in the rain” if he didn’t help her, and now we find out exactly what that means. Execution, Company-style. A group of three men fastened to a scaffold, facing the heavens and exposed to the elements. The electro acid rain is lethal, so it’s a rather gruesome way to go, but the imagery here is superb.

The episode has its own story but the main focus is on giving us more backstory for everyone, and they all have issues. It’s a bit late in the series for this sort of introspection but it does serve to split up the team as we go into the finale. And while the plot here is a little incidental, it’s well-written and serves as a nice diversion to everyone’s problems.

John gets the most airtime this week, and it’s great for him to be the focus of the episode. Aaron Ashmore is more than capable of taking the lead, and he really seems to have relaxed into the role now. It’s also good to see a bit more from Morgan Kelly as Alvis. Kelly is great at playing the monk with a god complex and one eye on a revolution.

Dr Pawter’s “headache” turns out to be her jonesing for a Jakk hit. We find out she took Jakk in med school to get through finals. Of course she ended up getting hooked, and killed a patient while high. Her parents covered it up, shipped her off to Westerley and have been supplying her with a supply of pure Jakk ever since. Sarah Power does a great job with the Doctor, and after mostly taking a back seat recently it’s nice to see.

Dutch and D’Avin try and work through their problems, and even get close to getting close again, but Dutch has a problem. If Johnny or D’Avin (normal D’Avin, not evil psycho D’Avin) hurt her, she’d just kill them, mourn them and move on. Their current situation is messier than that, and she doesn’t know how to move on. And as Dutch says, D’Avin is as much a victim as she and John are in this. Seems it really is D’Avins turn getting it in the neck, as John finally lets loose at him for leaving to join the army. This left John to look after their parents, and there are hints that their mother was something of a Jakk addict. In the end D’Avin is left on Westerley, off the team for now.

Dutch and John’s relationship is stronger than John and D’Avins – they’ve been together six years after all – and we end the episode with a cute scene of them reading comics in bed.

There’s some nice lighting this episode, using red filters for the heat, blue for Pree’s bar in the storm, back to orange after the storm. There are also a couple of standout shots too, one of Lucy falling into the storm, and a really neat long shot of Dutch and D’Avin dancing on Lucy’s bridge seen from a distance.
With an action series like Killjoys it would be easy to forget the little things that make a universe more whole. But the little things here are really appreciated: Dutch and D’Avin have their own ladders on Lucy; there are more references to level 6 Killjoys; the use of “staked in the rain” before we find out what it actually means. All of these things combine with the action to make Killjoys a real treat.

The Good

• Belish takes a pop at D’Avin for hurting Dutch.
• More of Alvis the penitent, born of rats.
• We learn what “Staked in the Rain” means.
• Some really nice space scenes.

The Bad

• The story is a little surplus to requirements again.

And The Random

• We mentioned how blue John’s eyes are before, but at one point this episode they appear to be different colours. Heterochromia iridum? Or a lost contact lens?
• Quotes of the Week:
  • John to D’Avin: “You bought me a comic to apologise for stabbing me?”
  • Dutch: “Long day?” Johnny: “Shit weather.”

Review by Arthur Scott

• Read our other Killjoys reviews

Killjoys S01E07 “Kiss, Kiss, Bye Bye” REVIEW

Airing in the UK on SyFy, Mondays, 8pm
Writer: Michelle Lovretta
Director: Paolo Barzman

Essential Arc Plot Developments

• Delle Seyah Kendry (of land Kendry) helps our Killjoys find Dr Jaeger…
• …which means Dutch owes her a favour.
• The Killjoys find Dr Jaeger, and learn that D’Avin is part of Project Chrysalis – a black ops scheme to create mind-controlled soldiers, designed to attack friendly targets.
• Under Dr Jaegers control D’Avin attacks Dutch and stabs his brother.

Episode Recap

• Trying to track down Khlyen, Johnny tries the neural link on himself. It doesn’t work and embeds itself in his spine.
• They go to Dr Pawter to get it removed. She isn’t in prison anymore, and isn’t happy that D’Avin didn’t respond to her calls when she was.
• She extracts the link from Johnny but breaks it in the process.
• She has a lead one of Dr Jaeger’s former patients, who is now in a mental institution.
• The trio “borrow” the patient: Grayson Hicks. He knows Dr Jaeger as Dr Bliss; she operates from a club called Utopia.
• Undercover on Utopia, D’Avin takes advantage of some free samples and kisses Dutch (and even though he’s high, she isn’t complaining).
• Dr Bliss turns out not to be Dr Jaeger, but her former assistant, and she doesn’t know where Dr Jaeger is.
• Johnny takes the neural link to be fixed.
• Back on Westerley, Dutch is arrested for kidnapping Grayson.
• Delle Seyah visits Dutch in Westhole prison; she’s been doing some homework on her, and knows about “Yalena”.
• Dutch makes a deal with Delle Seyah: in return for getting her off the hook for kidnapping Grayson, Dutch will owe her a no-questions-asked favour. Dutch manages to get some “alone time” with Dr Jaeger as part of the deal.
• The tro find Jaeger, who tells D’Avin she can reverse the process and return his memories. D’Avin is all for it, but Dutch advises caution.
• Back on board Lucy, D’Avin and Dutch get it on. Jaeger “activates” D’Avin and he fights Dutch but she manages to subdue him (by bashing him on the head with a massive crate).
• Dutch goes to confront Dr Jaeger.
• D’Avin stabs Johnny and escapes from his confines on Lucy.
•  Lucy summons Dr Pawter to help Johnny; she calls for a med ship.
• Dutch gets Jaeger to deactivate D’Avin, then wipes Jaeger’s memory (all at gunpoint, Dr Jaeger isn’t going to do it out of the kindness of her heart).
• Doctors save John.
• Although D’Avin is now back to normal, he remembers everything he did.
•  Dr Jaeger escapes through the Stargate.*

Review

The very aptly titled, “Kiss, Kiss, Bye Bye” sees Killjoys moving from monster-of-the-week territory to more of a major-arc-driven format. When there’s so much going on in the Killjoys universe, it’s a better bet than trying to shoehorn a new story in every week.

So Dr Pawter isn’t in prison anymore, and we don’t get an heroic D’Avin-shaped rescue. She’s pissed at him for not answering her calls from prison, which leads to a, “I didn’t know this was a relationship” exchange between the pair, which feels a little 90210. Pawter being in prison doesn’t really seem to have served any purpose; not as yet anyway. In fact, Dr Pawter as a character seems to have been mostly ancillary to the plot up to now. She seems to have been downgraded from mystery high-born Doctor to sex-crazed therapist with a thing for broken bad boys.

The visit to Utopia is a nice diversion: a floating fetish club decked out appropriately with Das blinkenlights and filled with dodgily dressed patrons. D’Avin and Dutch’s initial canoodle may be drug-fuelled, but it’s been on the cards since episode one, and inevitably it leads them into bed. Although what follows is probably not what Dutch was expecting from a relationship, with D’Avin going all Angelus and trying to kill her. It’s a little hackneyed to hook up two of the main protagonists, make them happy and then turn everything around, and perhaps a little moralistic for it to happen straight after coitus. During the fight with D’Avin we see Dutch look genuinely frightened for the first time, but we suspect this is more to do with her not wanting to hurt D’Avin than getting hurt herself. She gets a little battered, but as usual she comes out on top.

Another link back to episode one is the explanation for the warrant that reunited the Jacobi brothers, created by Dr Jaeger in case D’Avin ever came back to the Quad looking for answers. Even though the Killjoys have been pinging around the Quad all series looking for Jaeger, she’s been hiding out on Westerley the whole time, and it’s Delle Seyah who leads them to her, not anything Pawter has been up to (we did say she’d become somewhat surplus to the plot).

It’s nice to see Mayko Nguyen back as the snarky Delle Seyah, and there’s some fun banter between her and Dutch. Dutch flirts with her as much as she does with D’Avin.

Rather randomly Dr Jaeger turns out to be played by none other than Stargate’s Amanda Tapping (maybe she could lay claim to being this episode’s monster-of-the-week but she probably wouldn’t thank us for that). She spends most of the episode looking startled and seems a little wasted here, although she doesn’t die at the end so maybe she’ll make another appearance.

The latter part of the episode manages to pull out all the emotional stops. And even though we’re pretty sure Johnny isn’t going to die –this isn’t Game Of Thrones after all – it’s still a wrench to seem him lying on Lucy’s floor bleeding out. The final scenes give us a nicely done musical montage of Johnny being operated on and then recovering in hospital, with a few neat soft focus screen wipes.

We end with D’Avin wracked with the guilt for what he’s done. He managed to get together with Dutch at last and then ruined it by trying to kill her, as well as stabbing John. Maybe the fact that his brother survived the attack is worse for D’Avin, especially as John seems so ready to forgive him when Dutch can’t. He’s been seeking Dr Jaeger for redemption the whole series, and when he finally finds her all he gets is more remorse.

There’s not really anything new here (but is there anywhere these days?); the show’s not breaking new ground. But what is here is very well done. In what’s ostensibly an action series, it’s refreshing that characterisation doesn’t take a back seat. We’re not sure where we’ll be going from here as we head toward the end of the series, but we’re happy to be along for the ride.

The Good

• Utopia is very well done, like a techno Torture Garden.
• D’Avin seems more than happy to be Dutch’s leather boy while undercover.
• Dutch and D’Avin finally get it on.
•  Amanda Tapping.

The Bad

• It’s a little clichéd to have D’Avin try to kill Dutch after they get happy.
• Amanda Tapping.

And The Random

• When calling a med-ship, Dr Pawter identifies herself as Illenore Seyah Simms of Land Simms. We know she’s of high-born descent, so does this mean Seyah is a title, as in Delle Seyah Kendry? Or is she using someone else’s credentials?
•  Dutch’s captivating coiffery continues to astound us; this episode sees her enjoying some fringe benefits.
• Amanda Tapping.
• Quotes of the Week:
  • Johnny to Pree at the bar: “I may have walked in on Dutch and my brother in flagrant dictation.” (he means In Flagrante Delicto).
  • Dutch to D’Avin on Utopia: “Follow me, leather boy.”
  • Delle Seyah to Dutch in prison: “I snap and you come.” Dutch: “You must be one hell of a snapper.”

*No she doesn’t – there isn’t really a Stargate, because this is Killjoys, not Stargate.

Review by Arthur Scott

• Read our other Killjoys reviews

Killjoys S01E06 “One Blood” REVIEW

Airing in the UK on SyFy
Writer: Annmarie Morais
Director: Michael Nankin

Essential Series Plot Developments:

• The Company own a device which can vaporise an entire bloodline in an instant.
• Khlyen is unusually – unusually for him anyway – worried about such a device.
• Dutch is going on the offensive, and vows to kill Khlyen after he gets aggressive with her.
• Dr Pawter is arrested. Even though she’s of highborn Qreshi descent, her family have disowned her and won’t help.

Episode Recap

• The trio receive a black warrant: a competitive warrant sent to the top Killjoys.
• The warrant is for Big Joe, an old Killjoy, and Dutch’s mentor. He’s stolen something from The Company, a device of unknown function.
• Khlyen wants the device more than the RAC, he gives Dutch a neural link and a head start. She sets off on her own to retrieve Big Joe, and the device.
• The Jacobies team up with Fancy Lee to find Dutch and complete the warrant.
• Joe has been stealing things for a Lethian family. They’re paranoid about The Company and the RAC, and are very protective of their land. They don’t take kindly to Dutch being with Joe, and take the pair hostage.
• The Jacobi brothers and Lee rescue Dutch.
• One of the Leithian family triggers the device and vaporises himself and all his siblings.
•  The Company get the device back, but upgrade the warrant on Joe. Fancy Lee shoots and kills Joe.
• Dr Pawter tries to find Dr Jaeger for D’Avin, she drugs Hills to get access to The Company database, and gets arrested for her trouble.
• Khlyen is upset at Dutch for losing the device. He hits her in anger for the first time. She stabs him, several times which doesn’t seem to have any effect.
• Dutch tell the Jacobis about Khlyen; she wants to find and kill him.

Review:

Following last week’s episode was always going to be difficult. Maybe if this episode had been in another position in the season, it may have stood up better. As it is, it feels a little like it’s trying to impart too much information, and set up the rest of the series in one fell swoop. The last episode showed us you could progress the series plot, while still telling a really riveting story. The Killjoys’ world is so rich and great thought has been given to the backstory, the politics, the language. The downside to this is that sometimes it feels like it’s trying too hard to cater to everybody in explaining everything, and ends up doing a disservice to the fans.

There’s such lot going on here, and maybe viewers don’t need to be handed everything on a plate. Sometimes, we can join the dots ourselves; sometimes the details don’t need to be so detailed. If the show had kept a little more back, or wasn’t so heavy-handed with the exposition, more could have been made of the actual episode plot, which feels a little contrived at times.

The whole premise of the family of Lethian freedom fighters is a case in point. Using the family gives us a little more politics and serves to show what the device is capable of, but at the expense of complicating the episode plot unnecessarily. And in showing us what the device is capable of, how convenient that it leaves someone untouched to explain what has just happened. Apparently he was only family by marriage (but he loved those boys like they were his own).

That said, the things the episode does well, it does really well. The competitive nature of the black warrant brings out a great sense of camaraderie with the Killjoys in the bar, including an urban legend about a secretive cadre of Level Six Killjoys based on a remote moon.

The stand-out characters this episode actually come from outside the usual threesome of Dutch and the brothers Jacobi: namely Khlyen and Fancy Lee.

The interactions between Khlyen and Dutch, (or as he calls her “Yala”) are well scripted and well acted. Rob Stewart is wildly unpredictable as Khlyen, moving from friendly banter to creepy stalker to vengeful father figure without missing a step. To add to the air of mystery surrounding his character, Dutch stabs him several times in the stomach, he doesn’t blink, and there doesn’t seem to be much – if any – blood.

In the same way that Khlyen is mysterious and enigmatic, Fancy Lee is well, fancy. His diatribe about every group needing an asshole – and that for the Killjoys that responsibility falls to him – is spot on, self-deprecating and serious at the same time. The final scene in which he shoots Joe and then goes back and sits on his own is perfect in its simplicity; it speaks volumes about his character without him saying much at all.

Back to the usual crowd, and there’s still building sexual tension between D’Avin and Dutch. She mentions his “special therapy” with the good Dr Pawter and he tells her he’s going to quit. This leads to Pawter trying to help find his missing doctor. The scenes with Pawter seducing grumpy old Company agent Hills are fun but like much of the plot this episode seem a little contrived. All her efforts only serve to get her arrested. Surely some sort of gung-ho D’Avin rescue/break-out is inevitable.

There’s a sense that a storm is brewing in the Quad, between The Company and The Nine, with the RAC stuck somewhere in the middle. Here’s hoping future episodes can keep one eye on the storm, while still remembering to tell their own story.

The Good:

• Fancy Lee is back, and he really is fancy.
• Khlyen is an enigmatic badass, so his banter is even more fun.

The Bad:

• The Lethian nationalist family feels a little shoehorned in. We already know how important land is in the Quad, we don’t need it rammed down our throats.
• Killing everyone with the weird device except the lead Lethian is just too handy, leaving him to explain what’s happened.

And The Random:

• Khlyen has a neural link to Dutch, but he still walks down a hill and has to move branches out of the way, even stopping to gaze at the berries.

“Fancy Lee, an asshole, but undeniably a fancy one.”

• Quotes of the Week:
  John to Fancy Lee after seeing his homemade homing dart: “You really are fancy.”
  Fancy Lee on being an asshole: “Every organisation needs a designated asshole. The asshole may not be liked, but he will always be necessary, because he does what’s needed.”

Review by Arthur Scott

• Read our other Killjoys reviews

Killjoys S01E05 “A Glitch In The System” REVIEW

Airing in the UK on SyFy
Writer: Adam Barkin
Director: Chris Grismer

Essential Series Plot Developments

• D’Avin remembers he killed his entire squ:ad – but not why.
• D’Avin’s memory loss is due to neural blockers implanted in his skull, not amnesia.
• Khlyen arrives to take Dutch away – threatening to hurt John.
• D’Avin and Dutch both inhale nanites (which are later removed); the tiny machines essentially repair anything wrong with the host, hence scarring in D’Avin’s brain is healed.
• Red 17 is mentioned a lot – maybe something Dutch knows about?
• John is most definitely Lucy’s favourite.

Episode Recap

• The crew find a seemingly abandoned spaceship, and go on a claim-and-clear mission.
• The ship turns out to be not quite as abandoned as they’d thought. Things are not what they seem, and there at least two crew members aboard.
• Lucy retreats to a safe distance owing to a quarantine alert, essentially isolating the crew.
• The first crew member, Wilson, blows himself out the airlock, but not before writing Red 17 in his own blood on the window.

• The other crew member, Hogan, is a prison guard. He tricks D’Avin and then imprisons him for interrogation.
• Hogan injects nanites into D’Avin, and proceeds to question him. If he doesn’t answer in time or correctly, the nanites break down parts of his body, then rebuild them.
• The ship is on a covert military mission, the interrogation program is stuck on a loop and wants to know what Red 17 is.
• Dutch gets herself captured (on purpose), escapes, and rescues D’Avin.
• Dutch blows herself out the airlock. The nanites keep her alive long enough for Lucy to rescue her.
• D’Avin and Dr Pawter get more closely acquainted.
• Khlyen brings Dutch a present: the severed hand of the red box target she let go. He threatens to hurt John unless she does as he says and goes with him.

Review:

We’re halfway through the season now, the perfect time to bring in an absolutely storming episode. “A Glitch In The System” not only stands well in its own right, but progresses both major plot arcs: giving us insight into D’Avin’s and Dutch’s murky pasts.

The pacing is exceptional: the initial claustrophobia of the abandoned spaceship; the excitement and action of D’Avin’s capture and his subsequent rescue by Dutch; finishing with Khlyen’s continued control over Dutch and her life.

Atmosphere is also top notch. There’s a great sense of isolation as the teams comms break down and the music that John asked Lucy to pump through the ship keeps glitching. We catch glimpses of fleeting shadows, corpses and bloody writing. There’s a nicely chilling touch as one of the discovered crew members – Wilson played by Kyle Mitchell – chews off the ends of his fingers to paint Red 17 in his own blood, before blowing himself out the airlock. Extreme finger painting!

The premise of the perpetual interrogation loop is horrifying; the ship and its systems are so broken that the interrogation program just repeats itself forever. Using the nanites to constantly break down and then repair the unfortunate subjects’ bodies is the perfect torture device. The only way out is brain death, the one thing the nanites can’t repair. Hence an infirmary full of crew members who’ve resorted to shooting themselves in the head to escape the endless cycle.

Hogan (Richard Clarkin) has been acting as prison guard for the ship since its accident. Once he ran out of crew members to interrogate he used the ship’s distress beacon to lure in unsuspecting travellers. The realisation that Hogan is so far gone that he regularly submits himself to interrogation, even though he doesn’t know the answer, is unsettling.

Richard Clarkin is outstanding as Hogan. He portrays the crazy loner determined to carry on the mission regardless very convincingly. The interplay between him and Hannah John-Kamen, when he realises that Dutch has turned the tables on him is great.

We learn the name Red 17, which could just be a plot device for this episode. However, Dutch’s reaction to the name, and her admission to Hogan that she knows all about it, makes us think it’s more important than that. She could have been bluffing, but we don’t think so. Most likely it’s to do with Khlyen and the mysterious red boxes.

The Good:

• John keeps trying to have a moment with D’Avin, leading to some funny and awkward dialogue between the pair.
• Space rats!
• Red 17 is a suitably great name for some mysterious government program.
• Genuinely unpleasant premise with the endless cycle of torture.
• Superb pacing, and a great sense of atmosphere.

The Bad

• Nothing! It’s a storming episode!

And The Random:

•  John has unfeasibly blue eyes – surely some sort of CGI trickery?
• The crew member Wilson blows himself out the airlock to kill himself, but Dutch does it and survives. Lucy does rescue her, whereas she would have ignored Wilson, but surviving in outer space even with nanites is a bit of a stretch.
• Space rats!
• Quotes of the Week:
  “Let’s go find some treasure and blow shit up.”
  “Look out! Space rats!”

Review by Arthur Scott

• Read our other Killjoys reviews