First Wave
"Lost Souls"

Airdate: April 23, 2000

During preparations for the building of a new subway tunnel, a body is discovered amid the concrete. Its pigmentation has been completely lost, but that's not the really freaky thing. What brings Cade to the scene (other than another maddeningly vague Nostradamus quatrain) is the fact that the person who was buried over fifty years ago is still alive.

The limestone and frog explanations reek of The X-Files but are nonetheless compelling. The heinous cruelty of burying someone alive seems like the handiwork of the Gua, but as is frequently the case with season two First Wave, things are not what they seem. Instead of an alien experiment designed to facilitate the enslavement of the human race, Cade finds another piece of the puzzle that explains how the Gua first arrived on Earth and discovers that he is not the first to combat the first wave.

As usual, Cade stumbles blindly into a situation where determining the exact nature of Gua influence is more than difficult. His empathy for the first victim's loneliness is almost his undoing as his own experiences at the hands of the Gua have left him even vulnerable to feelings of sympathy for those who may not deserve it. As a character flaw, it's not a bad one for a hero to have.

There seems to be another underlying theme to the second season that was less prevalent in the first. Perhaps it is just a byproduct of living so long on the run and sometimes being thwarted by both Gua and fellow humans alike, but Cade seems to be moving towards a particularly nasty crisis of faith. While he found allies in "Deep Throat", "Susperience", "Red Flag" and "Prayer For The White Man", his failures are beginning to take their toll on him. The loss of the more open-minded (and considerably less-Gua) federal agent as well as the architect who was probably one of the first to combat the Gua have chipped away at his confidence and left him... well... er... depressed. Other than for, say, Batman, that isn't usually a good thing for a hero.

Continuing in that inner life of the characters vein, I particularly liked the amusing look at Crazy Eddie's ego in "Lost Souls". When the federal agents reveal that all three of the victims had traveled to the same foreign country the year before their disappearance, a fact that he completely missed in his research, Eddie becomes highly defensive at the disappointed note in Cade's voice. His pride stung, Eddie digs deeper and gloats haughtily when he discovers another connection which the feds missed.

On a less serious note, there may have been more, but I did manage to catch two nods to other conspiracy shows currently on the air. The first was, of course, the torrid relationship between the federal agents, who were obviously thinly veiled references to Mulder and Scully from The X-Files. The mention of Pez dispensers, however, could only be an allusion to Jarod's addiction to the little candy tablets that has been a running joke in The Pretender since the beginning.

Hey, it amused me, okay?

-- Linda M. Najera

First Wave airs at 7pm EST, Sundays on The Sci Fi Channel.

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