"Paul Levinson's It's Real Life is a page-turning exploration into that multiverse known as rock and roll. But it is much more than a marvelous adventure narrated by a master storyteller...it is also an exquisite meditation on the very nature of alternate history." -- Jack Dann, The Fiction Writer's Guide to Alternate History

Thursday, June 25, 2020

Colony 3: Ascending, in More Ways than One 




I'm a little late reviewing the third season of Colony - well, more than two years late - because I missed its initial airing on the USA Network and then I couldn't find it anywhere for free until I happened upon it the other day on Netflix.  And I thought it was so excellent, so fine a season of science fiction television, so much better than its first two seasons, that I regret I didn't shell out the few bucks to see this third season much sooner.





[Spoilers follow]







In addition to the whole season being top-notch, there were two especially effective and memorable turning points.







One was the death of Charlie, killed in a hail of grey-hat bullets.   The grey-hat commandos had been called in by "Uncle" Alan, and Will understandably holds him responsible, even though Will, Katie, and Bram were about to be killed by a firing squad, when the grey-hats arrived and violently disrupted those proceedings.  Charlie's death was a daring, terribly transforming event for both Bowmans and the audience, upsetting the previous givens of the series, and letting us know that anything was possible.







The other turning point flows from Charlie's death.  Will is determined to kill Alan, who, conniving as he always is, feels genuine grief about what happened to Charlie.  In a sequence that lasts at least ten minutes, Will later in the season has a gun pointed at Alan, and later his head in a bucket of filthy water, and struggles with himself over whether he can do this.  Peter Jacobson gives a tour-de-force performance as Alan, alternately trying to reason with Will and screamingly pleading for his life, and the combination plus whatever Will has inside him gets him to let Alan go.   Some of what Alan said, especially that without the grey-hat attack Will, Katie, and Bram would have died, apparently got through the Will.  I was on the edge of my seat, the whole time, as this scene played out.







In addition to Jacobson, the acting by the rest of the cast was good, especially, again, Josh Holloway as Will, Sarah Wayne Callies as Katie, and Tory Kittles as Broussard, and it was fun to see Peyton List from Frequency on the science fiction screen again.  The plot was fairly complex, with two outer-space entities at war with each other and we humans caught in the middle, but it all made sense through the end, with some kind of alien attack ensuing in the sky above Seattle.  It would have been great to find out more about this in a season 4 of Colony, but--







The geniuses at the USA Network failed to renew the series, for who knows what reason, so we're left high and dry, or maybe under the clouds of battle in the sky would be a better metaphor.  Hey, if it helps, I'll pay money to any streaming service to see another season of this series which, because of this third season, now ranks as one of the better science fiction series ever to have been on television, above Falling Skies and Revolution, its two closest competitors in theme.







































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