Much better episode this week; more focused, less confusing, and with important revelations. First off, I got confused last week and thought Tyrell had shot an officer and then escaped in a car - but it was someone else. Tyrell is still at the main base and helping out – to an extent anyway. He is hesitant to tell them anything until they have almost figured it out for themselves. He explained it was for fear that whatever he told them might be intercepted by the NDs when they kidnapped people.
The sleeper officer pulls someone over to take his car; I thought for a second he was going to shoot the poor guy. Later, the driver is pulled over by military police driving the sleeper’s car. They look highly embarrassed for having pulled over the wrong guy. However, he was technically driving a stolen car; it’s not like they pulled him over for driving his own car or something.
Bad news for sleepers; attempting to remove the controlling device means bye, bye, brain. So nothing can be done for Amanda who tests out as clean, but may still have some sleeper program inside her. Nevertheless, she is back to work. We now know that the NDs are biological in nature and only able to travel for short times. Their end game is to change the nature of their enemy into something they can defeat and then eventually feed off of. The Echos meanwhile are advanced technologically and can travel through space in fancy ships. They were apparently aware of the NDs plan and came to Earth to try to help us defeat them. But it didn’t end well.
Flashback to 1944, where the surviving alien from episode 1 is sent to a mental institution. When Tyrell comes to help him, he is asked why they are using him. Are there not enough “idiot officers” around? Actually, that term seems accurate in this case. After the alien spaceship crashes and two spacesuited aliens emerge, one being shot and killed, the officers deduce that they are both imbeciles genetically engineered by the Germans to fly their sophisticated rockets. The dead one is cremated. What did they do with the ship – cut it into pieces and put the pieces in a crusher? Tyrell tries to communicate with the surviving alien, who is not only institutionalized but left alone and naked. Tyrell gets a rapport with him, but isn’t able to find a way to formally communicate and is finally removed from the case. The alien eventually dies and is buried in a grave marked “unknown.” The actress who plays the Echo does a wonderful job incidentally, conveying confusion, wonder, fear and other emotions without a word. I think the alien is still supposed to be male, or perhaps they don’t have two sexes on their world and this is both male and female.
Meanwhile, it seems that the NDs were attacking Earth back in the 40’s as well – kidnapping mentally disturbed people and making them sleeper agents to poison the water supply with estrogen to lower the male sperm count and eventually wipe out the male population or at least make the entire population more feminized. People were disappearing near water, so I thought I saw Tyrell create a false waterway so that he could be kidnapped as well – but that would attract the NDs, not the Echos. Huh? So, I went back and took a second look: turned out he filled a ditch with gasoline and burned a symbol like the one the Echo showed him in order to get their attention and then go with them as a liaison between planets. (Sometimes it’s worth it to go back and check.)
Meanwhile another Echo crashes to Earth and Drake gets to jump in the water and save him. But the rescue is short-lived as the Echo dies from having his brain shattered by Tyrell. I gather it was at the alien’s request, as he had been implanted by the NDs and preferred death to causing harm to others. Tyrell later tells us all the Echos destroyed themselves rather than submit to ND slavery.
The end of the episode almost has a finale quality to it – concluding that the Earth has no defense against the NDs and all is lost. Fortunately, we have three more episodes to go so there must be something we can do. Amanda’s friend has tapped into the Echo ship’s database, and that “ND” Amanda scratched into her arm may yet mean something. Maybe she figured out some Achilles’ heel the aliens have, but she just can’t remember it yet. Tune in next week for more. I had planned to give this episode an eight, but in going back I watched the wonderfully poignant scene again where Tyrell rails about how they squandered the opportunity to connect with this alien race, who came so far to try to help our warring planet. So I’m giving it 9 caring RAF lieutenants, nurses and Echo aliens.
Final thoughts: The actress who plays Amanda kept reminding me of someone. It finally hit me that she looks like Mimi Rogers, except that Mimi has black hair. Also, Tyrell and the nurse seemed to care for each other (as well as the alien.) I wondered if they would get together for one night and it would turn out that Amanda was their granddaughter, but I guess that’s not going to happen. Lastly, I know the plural of echo is echoes, but since Echo is being used as a formal term to refer to the alien people I'm spelling it Echos because it just seems right to me to do it that way.
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