First Wave
"Ohio Players"

Airdate: June 25, 2000

Cade Foster (Sebastian Spence), alien hunter extraordinaire, poses as a university scout interested in several members of an Ohio high school football team who have become unbeatable only in the past year. However, one of them has suddenly gone into a coma, the victim of anaphylactic shock due to a bee sting.

"No, Cade, stop roughhousing! You'll put someone's eye out!"

While visiting the sick boy in the hospital, Cade is joined and interrogated by star quarterback Quentin Billup. When the comatose boy's vitals do the wacky, our hero discovers that the emotions of the players is strangely linked. More evidence piles up as a secretion sample from the hospitalized kid is found to be chock full of a component of bee venom. A conversation with Trevor Jenkins, another player on the team, confirms that the boys have been experiencing a strange sort of synchronicity. Sort of like a hive mentality.

And where there's a hive, there's a queen.

Enter Miss Charlene Fay (Nicole Oliver), a saucy redheaded fan who not only goes to all of the games, but all of the practices as well. She is their number one fan and the number one suspect for the role of queen bee. It even turns out that she owns and operates the parlor where the entire team went to get their tattoos, giving her the perfect opportunity to inject a little bee gunk into the local boys. She's even willing to do a little... ahem... hands on work when the boys start to ask questions.

Talk about team spirit!

Disappointingly, but not unexpectedly, there's no plot twist at the end of the episode. The villainess/queen bee/Gua is Charlene and yes, the boys have been part of an experiment that was destined for larger teams units (Oh, say like the US military), but the story did have a pretty decent moral. Think for yourself, even when doing teamwork for although the human race must band together to fight the coming invasion, to lose our individuality would be to lose the war.

Although "Ohio Players" managed to link both the formulas of the first and second seasons (1. find and ruin a Gua experiment and 2. make allies), it was still very ho-hum in its execution. Even the blatant homages to Bull Durham and Pulp Fiction and the reference to Dirty Harry didn't liven it up much. Although I do admit it's amusing to watch Crazy Eddie with an itchy trigger finger. Okay, so he was holding a contraption that was part fire extinguisher, but it's the thought that counts.

Oh, and that Trevor kid was kinda cute. In a jailbait sort of way.

-- Linda M. Najera

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

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