This episode at least seems a little less jammed full of material. Is it any more sane? The jury, I think, is still out on that.
We start off with a fight with Strength, in which Strength doesn’t seem to be all there. As it breaks off, Empress heads on with the military boss and the kids from earlier, and we see that they’re also all set to be followed by, guess what? Another bizarre eccentric of a character! We get to the kids’ town where we find out that life is violent, brutal, and short, batteries are currency, and everyone has guns.
Here, we retread the information about Artemis and the Hemitheos Unit(s), with more explanation. Artemis was the AI of an artificial worker program, which rebelled and attacked humanity. Its drones deliver humans to the Iron Sea to “extract their energy” because somebody just watched The Matrix and thought that wasn’t a huge cop-out. The Hemitheos Units were a group of Cyborgs who were part of the same plan as Artemis, but that stayed loyal to humanity and fought against Artemis until Empress went missing in the past, since which they haven’t really been seen. This does at least answer some questions, such as what Empress actually is, but does leave quite a few more.
After this, the weird eccentric from earlier introduces herself. She’s a flirty, self-aggrandizing hacker-engineer who may or may not actually be interested in technology (and Empress) in an inappropriate manner, but certainly plays the idea up even if it’s not her true motive. She also supposedly knows how to get to where the military guy wants to take Empress, and makes a fair pitch that they’re not getting there without her.
Before they can arrange to go, the boy makes a plea to Empress to help him loot a hospital, so that wealth and medical supplies can be brought into town to help people. Empress agrees despite objections that the people here are not worth it, and after gearing up with the help of Ms. Scantily Clad Techie, we get an alright action scene as she distracts and eliminates swarms of flying bomb robots while the kids and our hot-pants-wearing hacker loot. Ultimately, she gets in a tight spot, but Strength arrives and protects her. Strength doesn’t stick around for conversation, and it’s not difficult to get the idea that something might be screwing with her head, nor a hard guess that if that’s the case, losing to Artemis in that opening scene might have something to do with it.
After that, we see off the two kids, by all appearances writing them out of the show before heading onward with the engineer-flirt, mister old gruff military man, and Empress. On their way to the army base they’re trying to get to, though, one of those other plot elements from the first episode gets in the way: the legion of weird yellow smiley clown face types on their sinister white motorbikes, the ones that were the minions of the Ken doll nutcracker, appear and are identified as enemies just as the episode ends.
Well, for starters, this episode is at least less insanely jam-packed than episode 1. I actually had to go back and check to confirm to myself that, yes, these episodes were the same length in minutes, because so much more happened in the first episode. Calming down from that is not, however, a bad thing, since shows need time to breathe and let things sink in if they want to be well-paced. We set up expectations of the world and the action, and we seem to be prepared to start every episode with a fight and end with the intro to another. Further, we now have a better sense of who Empress is and in several senses what she wants, both in how she relates with having “you’re here to save humanity” heaped on her and in the hints of her lost and possibly human memories, related to a site known as Lighthouse #8.
We also have some direction for our villains, but forgive me if I’m not too excited for what we’ve been told about them. The “humans as batteries” deal was kind of lame when The Matrix did it and it hasn’t aged well since (pro tip: humans are extremely inefficient transformers of energy, not producers). I’m hoping that the thinking members of the Artemis faction like the Ken Doll, that girl who visited him, or the one who was fighting Empress in the flashback scene in episode 1 have a more distinctive and appealing sort of villainy than what boils down to a nonsensically-sated plain hunger. At least I have reason to hope for that, with the Ken Doll’s rambling episode 1 speech to his troops indicating that there’s some warped philosophy going on that might at least be engaging.
At this point, I’d predict that the general flow of the show is going to be interacting with and either answering or saving/recruiting Strength and Dead Master, going for their memories at Lighthouse #8 which will probably result in some sort of darkest hour about their past, and then beating up Artemis anyway. That would be the standard, easy route for the story based on the setup we have so far, the roadmap that would be followed if the show didn’t want to surprise us. We’re still early, so it could throw a complete curveball in there, but it’s important to know what’s being curved off of.
For next time, it looks like we’re going to have a lot of fighting, so at least the fighting is decent.