What They Say:
Ghost in the Machine – The Mason clan and the remaining 2nd Mass are attacked by a new Espheni war machine; The Masons must forge new relationships and abilities to survive.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
With a third season that had its moments but also drew things out once again while going weird at times in a way that really spoke of late 80’s TV science fiction, I’ve been pretty apprehensive about the fourth season of the series. We saw some good pushback, some interesting betrayals and the whole Charleston aspect that went south pretty quick. I liked that they expanded the world a bit, or at least the country, and showed more of what’s going on out there as opposed to just following a small group. But as things played out at the end, we ended up with the group on the move again. While the time between the second and third seasons was fairly long, this one is just a couple of weeks which makes it easier to keep on track with things and not feel like we lost a whole lot of time and experience.
While they’ve made their journey back to Charleston, things go south pretty quickly outside of it as they get trapped and blocked in through some creative alien weaponry that leads to a pretty decent little slaughter that goes on, though not with the main cast of course but rather the unknowns. While most are stuck inside, a few are on the outside, including Matt, which at least gives Tom a bit of hope. It’s a pretty dark and ominous cold open to the new season that puts the upper command level in a pretty bad way that makes it clear that they’ve completely lost any advantage that they may have thought they had before. Which is why, as bad as it is in a way, the four month advance that we get is pretty damn frustrating because you want more of what happened that now has this small group of surviving humans stuck in captivity.
The use of a concentration camp city of sorts is certainly interesting, though once again you wonder why they let any of them live overall. It’s also interesting that we get the new insect style aliens there that seem to be on a different level and take various people for whatever activities that they’re up to. The Skitters themselves are milling about as well, though they look to have been cowed in a way as well, being very subservient again. All of it doesn’t stop the humans that exist though as those on the inside are looking for a way to take down the laser fences that exist that keeps them in and those on the inside are looking for a way to get in. All of them are still wondering what happened to Volm as well though, since they ended up disappearing after everything else that happened those five months ago. Not surprisingly, Anne has put together a decent group to push back, though she’s driving them and herself pretty hard.
The weirdness comes in a different area as well as there’s a Chinatown of some sort that exists where Ben has no woken up to discover that it’s a place that the Espheni have not attacked in the slightest. It’s so peaceful and normalized that it really doesn’t make a lot of sense and you can see Ben struggling with it in a big way, even with all that he knows. But it also gets weirder when he meets up with his half sister Lexi again, though now she’s in her late teens, blonde and some sort of spiritual leader here as a part of a new unity. You can see where parts of this is going to go, especially with the fluctuation in reality that seems to come into play, and that works to make you take even less belief in what you see there. Manipulations are the order of the day in this particular Chinatown.
With the three main situations set up, there’s some minor interesting aspects to each of them but again it’s something that just comes across as very forced and not all that engaging by the time you hit the halfway mark of the episode. Which, sadly, is par for the course with this series as it has a hard time really connecting well. It certainly has potential as a good invasion series with actual aliens ranks high on my interest list, but what it does here just keeps falling so short of really working well. It’s amusing to see how Tom plays vigilante of sorts in the camp in order to make sure some aren’t abusing things as the food shortages really hit hard but he also spends his time mapping out the place for his bigger plan of knowledge in general and planning for when things go really bad and they have to escape. This are at least makes some sense in how it plays out after what’s happened. Other areas are less clear since we see the way things come across in a pretty established way that doesn’t fit in with what we’d seen before. The manipulation of the kids to be the next generation of partners, controlled as they are, isn’t a surprise since kids are more easily manipulated. Using them to establish a coalition that has them pushing back against the resistance makes sense. Putting Ben in the middle of that gives him a bigger role here, especially since the actor is getting older. Indoctrination is laid out plainly here and it’s just so bluntly done that it is, unfortunately, comical.
With a re-education camp storyline going on with Ben, Anne trying to take down a truck with ammo only to discover it’s full of unharnessed kids and Tom coming across Cochise after all this time makes for a somewhat scattershot episode. Discovering that the Volm has abandoned Earth in order to deal with a looming threat with one of their secret creches, that’s put an obvious strain on what little relations are left. Luckily for Tom, there are a few Volm that have remained behind and they have some decent intel to pass on in a small amount of time, but mostly it just puts them in a difficult position with each other as there is a desire to trust. But there’s uncertainty after all that’s happened. With the news that the Espheni are putting together a new power source and that there are concentration camps like this all over the world, they paint a pretty bleak picture here once again which mirrors the past seasons in a general sense.
In Summary:
The start of the third season threw a lot at us with the Volm and what was going on in Charleston, but the fourth season runs in a lot of different directions. Some of what it does is familiar and feels like it’s carrying on the overall nature of the show with what Tom and Anne are doing in their separate areas and the way Pope and Hal are struggling among the common population in different ways. But it goes off the rails more in an uninteresting way with the re-education camp and even more so with the changes that comes with Lexi and what she represents. It’s not surprising that they took this leap with the whole human and alien combination as you can see shades of the old V series if not other things over the years. But it just comes across as so fanfic in style and without a lot of logic that like a lot of the past seasons, it frustrates me so to see it unfold like this.
Grade: C
