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| Courtesy of Relativity Media |
Liber8 continued to up their game, and the importance of family got a push from directions other than Kiera. What it added up to was an episode that very much felt like a building block. The B-plot advanced some of the mythology, but the A-plot was all about setting up troubles for the days ahead. And sometimes, that is exactly what you need.
Hit the jump for the review, which contains spoilers that are just going to jump ahead and call themselves "protectors."
Travis is probably the Liber8 member we know the least about, or is the least developed. From day one, we've taken it as writ that he is the leader, because he's the biggest, the strongest, the most willing to engaging in killing sprees. For two seasons, we've taken for granted that he's mostly a homicidal psychopath, the blunt instrument of Kagame's finesse organization. We've looked forward at each of the other member's pasts, and know why they joined up, either as true believers or as plants. But Travis has always just been a snarl, a bloodied fist, and occasionally a corpse (hey, remember when they were stealing people's brain juice to make his super solider serum? That was weird, right?). Finally, he received some additional definition. Travis, you see, was in the family way. Paternity and tenderness aren't characteristics that he's displayed in the past, but seeing his former reality didn't feel forced. I believed that he was a caring and worried father, that he would risk his own freedom just for a moment of tranquility with his daughter.
But it was more than that (what on this show can be taken at face value?). It played into this season's theme: what are you willing to sacrifice? Kiera has spent two seasons fretting that her actions in the name of justice would destroy the future and the family she is trying to return to. This season, she's been given a very specific choice, to choose the future she knew, and all it's terrors, or the future she can help create, that can be righteous. And all she has to do is give up her family. Travis made that decision. He willing came back, has killed many people, is actively tearing apart the components that made his world so terrible. Every time he knocks a brick out of the wall, he risks it falling over and killing his family. For all he knows, they stopped existing the first time he fired a bullet. And he has accepted this. We know that, because unlike Kellog back in season one, and Kiera nearly every week, it doesn't weigh on him. He isn't tormented by his choice. He came back so that his daughter wouldn't have to live in a world ruled by oppression, even if that means she never gets to live at all.
A reader asked me a couple weeks back if Kiera will eventually accept Liber8's position, and I can't get the question out of my head. On one side, you have Liber8, whose sole mission is corrupt time to it's maximum, in order to create an entirely new sequence of events. On the other side, you have the Freelancers, who are fastidiously trying to make certain that events happen the exact same way every time it happens (though more and more, I'm thinking it's only to ensure the survival of their cult than an appreciation of history). Liber8 are willing to sacrifice everything, while the Freelancers won't even let their own members die, plucking them out of half dead timelines to ensure the success of the mission. Kiera can't decide which way to go. She clearly enjoys the regimented structure of the Freelancer system, a soldier eternally looking for orders. But then she'll uncover something like a private military contractor buying a media company in order to minimize negative publicity. She knows what the corporations are doing is wrong, even when she was in the future she regularly enacted tiny moments of rebellion. But she can't make the emotional jump.
It's interesting how over the course of the series, the various side characters, each originally without allegiance, have naturally started to drift to one side or the other, leaving Kiera alone in the middle. Carlos, who has apparently internalized all the grief and pain he suffered last week (that's not going to be healthy), is as close to a Liber8 sympathizer as you can get without being an active participant. His "call us protectors" line was my favourite of the last few episodes. Dylan, since his mid season sojourn into the cult of Escher last year, has increasingly been of the opposing side: corporations give us the tools to make things better.
The Freelancers and Liber8 will always be the extremes of the spectrum, because of their willingness to kill, but Carlos and Dylan each represent the reasonable position on both side of the argument. They only want to do their jobs to the best of their abilities. One sees corporate influence as an interference, the other as a boon. Though, in the episode's twist, Dylan proved just as willing to sacrifice his daughter in order to destroy Liber8 as Travis was to rewrite time. The Dylan storyline appeared out of nowhere here, and I'm hooked. I've very interested to see how this will play out (or maybe it was a reaction to the relief that Dylan avoided getting shot in the head. Despite this show not regularly killing off it's main cast, I spent the episode very concerned for Dylan's survival).
The Alecs too have fallen along the divided lines, with Earlier Alec fully embracing the road that leads to the Elder Sadler. He's locked Later Alec out of his life, sent Kellog into the wind, and exorcised Kiera from his life completely (you might be forgiven for remembering that this was the path he started season two on, before he was sidetracked by Emily). Later Alec is now the one with everything going for him. He has Emily, Kiera's support, and Kellog's eye for vengeance. What he lacks is access, infrastructure and capital. Kellog proved to be a powerful if misguided ally in the past, and it seems like history keeps bringing these two somewhat desperate individuals together. Kellog was also more than a little of a corrupting influence, so it is yet to be seen if his partnering up with Later Alec, who glimpsed a lot more suffering than Earlier Alec has ever known, is now immune to Kellog's more poisonous attributes.
No new episode next week, I guess because of the Easter weekend, so we'll pick this up in a fortnight. Until then, I'll be going back over the season thus far and try to put together an early-days theory as to who killed Earlier Kiera. Best use of a four day weekend I can think of.