Season finale! Val gets kidnapped in the middle of labor! Erica gets invited to a dinner with Anna and Lisa and Tyler to discuss Live Aboard! Erica wants to kill all the eggs!
They really want us to know it’s the season finale.
Jack finally starts playing the, “let’s manipulate Chad” game by giving him a fake message to give to Anna. While talking to Chad, Jack tells him to drop the message in medical bay, but Chad takes the message straight to Anna. She reassures him that there are no V Fifth Column members, it must be for Live Aboard humans. She tells him to deliver it. He takes it to Joshua who refuses it, not trusting Chad. They try to warn other Fifth Column members but they’re caught, Joshua placed behind a force field. Chad visits him and Joshua tells him he’s been played, Anna gave him an aneurysm instead of removing one, and how to find out the truth. Chad goes down the scary red corridor to find a woman being tortured.
Ryan hears from Dr. Pearlman that the V have Val. He goes straight to the ship and is captured. Anna wants to study him to learn about why he turned, and if they can get him back. Anna tells Ryan that they have to fight to save Val’s life. Ryan and Val declare love for each other, she apologizes for leaving. He is ushered away as she gives birth (we don’t see the baby, dammit). Afterward, Anna gives Val an injection to kill her. Anna takes advantage of Ryan’s grief, hitting him with Bliss and then introducing him to the baby (we still know nothing about it except that it has a tail.)
Joshua cashes in on the favor with Lisa, saying that she has to help with a diversion with the eggs. She refuses to murder her own kind, but Joshua reminds us Anna has a plan for Tyler and the humans.
Hobbes gives Erica a next-gen explosive and says he’ll get Marcus off the ship. That night, Marcus wants to hire him, because Hobbes has apparently been working for Marcus for years. Marcus wants Hobbes to infiltrate the Fifth Column, and uses a photograph of “her” to get him to talk.
Erica and Tyler go to dinner. Security takes Erica’s gun and her purse, where the explosives are stored. Lisa gets her out of the dinner to give her the blue energy grenade and then goes to free Joshua. Erica enters the egg room, sets off the grenade, then finds Joshua in the hall. She tries to get him off the ship, but he demands she keep her identity as Fifth Column secret, and says she has to kill him. She shoots him, grudgingly.
Anna tells Erica that it was a human who stole a V uniform that set off the grenade. She then tells Chad that it was thanks to him that he took that message, and mentions without them he’d be nothing.
Father Jack has been arguing with the senior priest at his church who doesn’t like his anti-V message, even though Jack says he doesn’t like how people are turning from God to worship the Vs. The priest tells him to stop preaching that, or leave. He delivers a “let V stand for victory!” homily anyway, causing most people to leave the church, but a few (including Erica and Hobbes) stay. As he walks out of the church for good, Father Jack sees Chad Decker standing at the back.
Anna finally finds out about the death of her soldiers and we see a crack in her calm exterior; she breaks down, screaming. She runs to the computer terminal and sends an order to the cloaked V ships in space. Red clouds begin to cover the earth.
In the medical bay, doctors are at work, and Joshua gasps, coming back to life. Marcus smiles and says “welcome back.”
Commentary: At the end of this, I was looking forward to seeing what Lisa would do as the sole surviving V Fifth Column member on the ship, but a little fangirl squee came when I saw Joshua come back. Looks like we’ve lost Ryan, though, he’s all about the baby and in Anna’s thrall.
And Marcus, a stodgy character up to now, is seemingly Fifth Column. Very sneaky! They laid down some interesting seeds this season, from the beginning with Erica’s partner dying on Earth and then being resuscitated by Joshua on the ship; now Joshua himself goes through it. And as Hobbes tells Ryan that attachments are used against you in wartime, it gets turned on him by Marcus.
Now Erica and Lisa know they’re both Fifth Column, but Tyler doesn’t. I wonder if that’s going to come up.
I find it interesting that the V need no small areas for privacy. Anna’s office is huge, with no door. Joshua seems to do half of his Fifth Column communication in huge hallways. Lisa and Erica plot mass V murder and treason in a huge antechamber outside her mother’s quarters. No one tries to have a talk in a private area. We could chalk it up to “they’re alien and different” but really, it’s weird.
Apparently the V are like 1950’s hospitals, telling Ryan he can’t stay with Val for the birth. You’d think Ryan would be smarter; he knew the V were trying to kill them, you’d think he’d know that leaving her alone with the V was like leaving a cow with wolves—especially since she confessed love and how sorry she was for leaving. That signed her death warrant. (Didn’t they see V: The Final Battle where the couple get engaged before a mission which of course gets the guy killed?)
The V ship continues to not make sense. There are no door locks. There’s a security system in the medical bay. Did I mention none of the doors lock? And I know CGI is an awesome technology, but I miss real sets.
So next season we have Father Jack without a church, Hobbes possibly working for a V, who’s possibly Fifth Column himself, Joshua is back (and likely will be taken off the ship for his own safety), Ryan is a single dad to a hybrid baby, Chad Decker is waking up, Lisa and Erica are both trusted by Anna, and Tyler is, well, a puppy dog.
Oh. And what’s that red stuff in the sky? We thought ash from Eyjafjallajökull was bad…
See you next season!
Mur Lafferty is an author and podcaster. She is the host and producer of the Tor.com Story Podcast and I Should Be Writing and the author of Playing For Keeps, among other things. You can find all of her projects at Murverse.com.
