Episode Report Card LuluBates: A+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT You Gotta Have Faith
By LuluBates | Season 2 | Episode 4 | Aired on 02.01.2011
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.So last week can be summed up thusly: Ew. And this week seems to be following in those gross, gross footsteps. Several dead peace ambassadors are strung up bleeding at the threshold of the Visitors Visitors' Center. Sadly, none of them are Tyler, which simply means that they show hasn't gotten desperate enough to make a big ratings grabs yet. Fingers crossed for soon! Tyler starts tweaking at the sight of all his dead friends and decides to avenge their deaths by ransacking a church. Father Jack's to be precise. They trash the place until Father Travis finally turns up his hearing aid and confronts them. They run. Tyler being Tyler drops his phone and Father Jack finds it. He hands it to Erica, who cries. Then she sort of has a moment with the priest.
Chad Decker reports that the world's religious leaders are coming out against the Visitors, but the Catholics haven't made up their minds. Anna decides to help them… with Chad's assistance, of course. She saddles up Chad and heads to the Vatican forthwith. While there, Anna notices a ring on a Cardinal that she recognizes from her youth. He turns out to be a long-lost Visitor sent to earth to research emotions and the soul. Anna orders him back to the ship. There he declares allegiance to Anna's mother, so Anna dumps him at Diana's feet. He informs HIS queen that the soul is a wonderful beautiful blessing filled with unicorns and butterfly kisses. So Diana gives him an honor killing and pisses off Anna, who wanted to torture him.
Erica has a new partner (it's the creepy guy from Burn Notice and Brothers and Sisters and Sons of Anarchy) and he is pretty sure that Father Jack is involved in the Fifth Column. They go to interview him, which is awkward, but Erica overacts to make up for it. Anna is also gunning for Father Jack, and while she's visiting the Vatican demands that they bar the clergy from speaking against the Vs. But, you know, nicely. Hahaha, not nicely. Then one of the priests breaks it to Anna that souls are immortal. And that without the soul we would be nothing more than animals and, thus, edible. Regardless, the Cardinals refuse to condemn the outspoken clergy. So Anna calls them out and vaguely threatens them and their entire belief system. Then she stages a laser light show and makes the Virgin Mary bleed blue blood. Obviously, the Vatican quickly changes their stance.
Everyone is looking for suspected Fifth Column terrorist Eli Cohen, and Father Jack offers to reach out to his church members to see who knows what. Cohen thanks him for the effort with a skinned V head on his pillow. (So… Cohen is a cat?) Father Jack sets up the meet, swallows a V tracking elixir, and heads off. The Fab Team follows him and storms the cabin. Everyone ends up at gunpoint until Eli Cohen points out that they're all on the same side, except for that the Fab Five won't kill "collaborators". But when Cohen tells them he knows the Vs want to breed with them, they give up the pretense and join up. They come up with a great plan to catch the guys responsible for the peace ambassador murders as well as someone to take the blame for Malik's murder. That evening Erica leads the FBI to Cohen's hideout, where they find Malik's remains. Hey show: Gross.
Also, Erica's new partner is reporting on her to the FBI bosses. Who saw that coming? Oh, all of you? Right.
Melissa Locker a.k.a. Lulu Bates has faith this show will not last another season. You can follow her on Twitter @woolyknickers.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!So I don't know about you, but for me, last week's episode could be summed up in one word: Gross. I mean, you hear about flaying in, like, American historical reenactment or whaling textbooks, but to watch someone get skinned alive on primetime? Yech. I'm not going to say it crossed a line, like, say, showing Dennis Franz's pasty white butt at 10 p.m. when the kids could still be awake and thus scarred for life, but still. It may have out-SVU'd SVU, if you know what I mean and I think you do. Alien snuff films are still snuff films. I, for one, hope that she can aim not towards Nip/Tuck, but maybe a few steps closer to little Little House? ("Pa! There's an alien in the hen house again!" "Let's pray about it, half pint. Then shoot it.") What? I get sad when people are skinned alive in front of me. It's just this thing I have. Don't worry I'm seeking counseling.
Sigh...there are dead bodies hanging upside down and bleeding all over the place, which does not bode well for this not being a snuff film. Now, I don't want to get all FCC up in this joint, but it has to be said, Hey show: GROSS. So the dead people are wearing the uniforms of the new Gestapo a.k.a. the Peace Ambassadors that have no problem siding with the aliens against their own species. Or at least that is what the terrorists who killed them would have us believe. So they hung 'em upside down like cattle (dead cattle, naturally, you couldn't hang a live cow like that very easily as their prehensile tails would reach out and stab you with their poisonous tips) and cut their throats and at some point put them in masks from the Scream four-part trilogy. (I know. It's a joke. Don't email me.)
Agent Erica Evans sees dead people and immediately thinks her son has been murdered because this show needs a ratings boost and killing him off would be shocking (also, awesome). She runs to the bodies and instead of waiting for CSI or CSU or whichever acronym is in charge of preserving the crime scene, she runs up and rips the masks off their faces. None of them is Tyler. Sad, right? Oh and it is apparent that the masks are not from Scream but are, in fact, alien masks. And just when I was going to write a brilliant essay on the brilliant and subversive pop culture references in the show! And now there are none.
Anyway, Erica is hyperventilating because her kid is not dead and her Boss is reminding her that this is just what the Italians did to Mussolini. Yeah, a history lesson is just what a freaked out parent needs. That's why I always come away from PTA meetings with a factoid or two about Weimar Germany. Then Tyler comes up, breaks through the police line, totally gets his cooties all over the crime scene and Erica runs to him as he sobs, "It could have been me! Those are my friends! I was supposed to be there!" Erica comforts him as we all nod in agreement: It should have been him.
Up on the Mothership, Ryan is hanging with his baby girl who is... seven months? Eight months? Do V babies age quickly or did they just slap some older baby skin suit on her or is the timeline of this show wonky? All of the above? Anyway, Anna comes in to remind Ryan that his daughter is at her mercy. Yes, Anna, you are so very very frightening that even babies don't want fuck with you. Ryan sighs and asks her what she wants now. As usual, she just wants him to bring down the Fifth Column. He hands her the baby and goes out to bust Eli Cohen's head as rumor has it the ex-Mossad agent is the man in charge of the revolution.
Down on earth in the lair of the good guys (do good guys get lairs?) Erica is still hyperventilating, but this time she is using her words and whinging on about the fact that since she killed both her previous partners the FBI is assigning her a new one. Girl, just be happy that you aren't being prosecuted as a serial killer. Maybe they are saving that for season two? Then everyone starts whining about having everyone watching them when they are just trying to overthrow the enemy and cause a few 'splosions here and there. Isn't this a free country still? Fresh off the Mothership, Ryan joins them and explains that they have to take down Eli Cohen and the radical fringe of the Fifth Column because they are totally giving the rest of the revolutionaries a bad reputation. And not the good type of bad reputation that gets you laid, but the bad kind that gets you some extraordinary rendition. So Father Jack proposes that he reach out to some members of his church who are moonlighting with Mossad and see if he can reach Mr. Eli Cohen himself. Wait, wait, the Catholic church and the Jews are working together? That is some seriously Ghostbusters end times shit right there. Everyone looks at each other and decides that Father Jack's plan is the best plan they have. So... their revolution is based on networking. Just go on Linked In, idiots.