Friday, March 29, 2024

Killjoys Remains the Only Show About Parental Issues That I Get This Excited For

Share This Post

Content warning for discussion of attempted suicide

This week on Killjoys: Dutch is baaack! And D’av is now a D’ad.

Kendry goes into labor, and since she’s Hullen, she can’t feel pain (lucky). Zeph figures out that the baby is too big to deliver normally, thanks to Hullen regeneration, and they’re going to have to attempt a C-section—which fails, also thanks to Hullen regeneration.

Dutch wakes up and finds herself locked in her cabin on Lucy. Worried that this is all part of the Lady’s illusion, she overrides the lock on the door and breaks out. Once out, she wanders into the cargo hold, and demands to know where Johnny is.

Dutch is less than happy (okay, she’s furious) that Johnny is Hullen—though, in all fairness, it reads like she’s mostly upset that Johnny is so obviously not alright. Regardless, D’av reminds her that it really isn’t fair for her to act like the decision and the fallout was somehow easy for him.

Dutch goes to the cockpit to “think”, and changes their course for the nearest Green pool that isn’t the one she came out of. Rightfully, we all start to worry that maybe this isn’t Dutch, or that something happened to her in the Green.

Dutch claims she’s looking for a Green pool to Cleanse Johnny. D’av points out that they need some of Johnny’s source plasma, which is most likely going to be on the Armada, not some random pool. Dutch only squeaks past that bit of logic because Lucy announces that this pool, and all the other pools on Johnny’s plasma map, are just as solidified as the one Dutch came out of. Even the Green that Zeph took from the Necropolis is solid.

They tell Johnny, who is pretty upset that he’s not going to be able to either be Cleansed, or reach critical Hullen mass. We get a little more insight into what kind of pain he’s been in, being in limbo between his human connections and Hullen detachment, and he’s had enough. Instead of waiting for another possible solution, Johnny opts to attempt suicide by breaking his own neck.

While they’re trying to heal him, Zeph realizes that the Hullen parasite almost died completely off when Johnny’s spinal cord was severed. She inserts a knife into Johnny’s spinal column, waits for the parasite to die off, and then heals Johnny’s spine with her regeneration… lamp? As fast as she can. This gives her an idea for how to deliver Kendry’s baby. (That whole plot point makes me more and more uncomfortable the further out from the episode I get.)

Kendry is, understandably, unwilling to go through with this, since it means she won’t be Hullen anymore. She’s on a ship full of people who have every reason to want to kill her; being Hullen is survival, since she’s not a combatant. She’s alone, and Aneela, her protection, has disappeared. She handled it like a pro last episode, but now, she’s a lot more vulnerable, and she’s running out of options.

She corners Dutch and demands to know where Aneela is, reminding Dutch that the Lady wants to use the child to escape the Green. She also doesn’t quite manage to avoid saying that she wants Aneela to be there when the baby is born—and, as far as emotional moments go, this was one of my favorites for the episode. Kendry might be scathingly sarcastic and totally done with everyone around her, but she is absolutely terrified—of going through this surrounded by people who don’t care for her at all, of the reminder that her agency was subverted and that’s why this baby exists in the first place; of the fact that the Lady will undoubtedly try to claim the child somehow. And the only person who has a chance at preventing that is Aneela. Dutch realizes this, and tells Kendry that she had to leave Aneela in the Green, and reveals that going back in and saving Aneela is something she was already planning to do.

Once the procedure is performed, there’s an obligatory scene with the crew and “D’av’s baby”, which is funny and sweet, though I still feel obliged to point out that, like Kendry says, D’av had very little to do with the creation of this child—really, Aneela is the one responsible for the baby existing at all, and she’s not there. D’av “contributed” his DNA by getting beaten up. It is completely in character for D’av to find out that this baby has his DNA and compulsively care, though, and he seems happy about becoming a dad.

We also get to see Dutch get all doe-eyed watching D’av hold a baby, and it’s surprisingly nice that, even though D’av is nominally her love interest, they haven’t tried to shoehorn her (with all of her trauma around her training as a child) into parenthood alongside him.

While they’re having a drink to celebrate (and Kendry is presumably taking the longest nap ever), Dutch fills her family in on the Lady, including the fact that the Lady showed her a vision of the future in which they lose the fight against her. Zeph asks why they don’t just leave Aneela and the Lady in the Green. Dutch replies that Aneela trapped the Lady in the Green with her, but that Aneela can only hold out for so long, so they should do their best to save her and stop the Lady.

Thoughts

With Dutch returning to the land of the living, the emotional core of the show locks back into place. The other characters have carried the show incredibly well for two episodes, but the shift with Dutch back in the driver’s seat shows exactly why this is Dutch’s story more than it is anyone else’s (not to mention that Hannah John-Kamen played three separate characters this episode). Without her and Aneela, the Armada, the RAC, the Killjoys themselves—they just turn into so much of what “clever” contemporary sci-fi tries to be: Somewhere on a spectrum from blatant fanboy nostalgia a la the CW, to something like “Sherlock” or “House”, but in space. Clever, maybe (rarely), but ultimately ungrounded.

There’s some temporal switching that happens, because we need to fill in the backstory, but we can’t fill it in too fast, otherwise this would be a very different episode: Everyone is asking what Dutch’s secret is, including Dutch, and the audience is on the ride with them. Practically speaking, maintaining a level of suspense around Dutch’s intentions is good, because we’ve seen just how interacting with the Green can change people, but they don’t draw it out unnecessarily long. Creating a sense of mystery around Dutch is something this show has done well since the beginning, and I’m still enjoying their use of it—mostly because they don’t go back to the same “mystery” over and over again, and when it comes down to it, they drop the pretenses, tell you what’s going on, and deliver on the emotional fulfillment that that kind of build-up needs.

Dutch and Aneela

In an episode drowning in themes of parenthood (not usually my thing to begin with), the line that actually made me tear up was this one: “You shouldn’t be doing this on your own, Yala. I didn’t give you life just so you could throw it away.

The Lady tries to imitate the care that Aneela radiates in this moment, and I love the play between the two bookending scenes: In Dutch’s first encounter with the Lady, the Lady (wearing Aneela’s face) says, “You matter, too”, trying to lead Dutch to think about how to get out of the Green. She also provides the kind of awkward-yet-oddly-sweet interaction that we might expect from the Aneela that we saw in the season premiere: Aneela trying to help Dutch, but not really knowing how.

But at the end of the episode, we get this reveal: In a flashback to the scene that was teased in the season premiere, where a hooded figure approaches Dutch’s collapsed form in the forest, we find out that that figure is actually Aneela. She wakes Dutch up and tells Dutch to go, to leave the Green, in words that sound very similar to what the Lady said earlier.

The difference is entirely in the delivery.

Dutch has spent her entire life being shaped into a weapon. She spent the last third of Season 3 preparing to die, knowing that if she killed Aneela, her “source”, she would die, too. It’s why she keeps hunting the Lady, even when wounded; she’d already made peace with dying, with the fact that Aneela wants (or at least wanted) to “put her back” in the Green, to close the door that might allow the Lady to escape. The only difference was that she was going to die fighting a different enemy.

In this episode, Dutch does what she always does: Run headfirst into the fray. Unlike usual, she’s beaten, badly. The Lady, with her vision, reveals that Dutch’s sacrifice could be for nothing. And then Aneela rescues her in the forest, and tells her to go; that this isn’t what Aneela wanted for her, living through the same psychic torture that Aneela’s endured, over and over again. You see Aneela’s words get through to Dutch for the first time in this interaction: Regardless of how wrong things went for them, Aneela wanted Dutch to exist. She wanted Dutch to live, and she still does, and while Khlyen was perfectly content to “fix” Dutch’s memories so that everything wouldn’t be lost when the Lady overcame her, and send her back out alone, Aneela isn’t.

Dutch wasn’t meant to be a weapon. Or a distraction. Or a pet. Aneela doesn’t view her as dispensable; Aneela views her as her child, someone she created—maybe for not the best reasons, but she didn’t create her just to watch her die. And even though Dutch has every reason to be angry with her, Aneela doesn’t waffle or struggle to express how she feels. And when Aneela tells her to go, you can see Dutch’s eyes go wide: She understands, after her experiences with the Lady, what Aneela is volunteering for—The Lady has threatened to trap her in her worst memories, to take away the experiences at the core of her being, and this is maybe the one arena that Dutch truly can’t fight in. No one can. “They’re who you are,” the Lady says, and Aneela has already lived through the Lady’s mental manipulation—and emerged all the worse for it.

Given that we’ve had a total of (maybe) twenty minutes of them actually interacting, it’s mind-blowing how Aneela has shown far more care for Dutch in that short time than Khlyen ever showed for either of them.

The fact that Aneela made a decision to leave the ruins, go out, and find Dutch also feels incredibly significant—instead of allowing Dutch to play the role she’s always played, Aneela puts her mind and possibly even her life on the line to keep the Lady from Dutch. Aneela has picked a side, and it doesn’t matter whether or not “no one is coming” to save her—she’s decided. And it makes even the Lady a bit nervous.

Of the two semi-decent parental figures in this episode, I also feel obliged to point out that D’av shows a lot of promise (and remains the eye candy, looking pretty and cuddling a baby), but it’s Aneela who takes action.

This might be going too far, but this episode made me want to jump up and down and go “THIS. THIS is how you talk about how powerful motherhood/fatherhood can be without lapsing into the sanctification of motherhood.”

Next week on Killjoys: It’s gonna be real hard figuring out what Khlyen’s “message” is when Johnny and Dutch have very different recollections of how they met to begin with.


Images courtesy of SyFy

Author

Latest Posts

House of Fire & Blood – Episode 33 “Great Man Theory” Retrospective

What if George R. R. Martin's Fire and Blood...

Kinfire Delve: Scorn’s Stockade Adds New Tools And A Healthy Dose Of Darkness

The next installment of Incredible Dream Studios Kinfire Delve...

Chaosium Announces Return To Board Games With New Call Of Cthulhu Board Game ‘Horror On The Orient Express’

Yesterday, tabletop roleplaying game publisher Chaosium announced the upcoming...

Pandasaurus Announces New ‘Ships & Shores Expansion’ For Nautical Board Game Beacon Patrol

Publisher Pandasaurus Games has announced the first expansion to...

Easter Bloody Easter Treads Familiar Ground Well

It's time to take a look at a new...