First Wave
"Playland"

Airdate: July 30, 2000

Cade tied up and spread eagle. Oh the thoughts that image produces.

Investigating the claims of Gary Lanning, a homicidal teen, Cade Foster jumps into a quantum pocket and finds himself in the middle of a gang war between the Crips and the Bloods... er... I mean the Reds and the Blues.

Gary's ramblings about a place called Playland were right on the mark as Foster finds himself smack dab in the middle of another Gua experiment. Only, this one seems a bit redundant. The Gua have pitted two groups of youngsters against one another. They reward only the winners of the battles with something less than gruel by tossing out food via mechanisms that the kids call Feeders. Hunger and pride and savagery mix to create these bands of wild things and when one of these feral kids reaches the right level of near-insanity, they are taken by the Gua back into the real world where they detonate just like the good little time bombs that the aliens have made of them.

The rest of the episode is pretty standard. Cade tries to reason with the kids and is ignored. One of the kids gets killed. Cade is captured and almost sacrificed. It is only after Foster escaped -- in a very unbelievable manner -- that the escape hatch from this hellhole is discovered and used. Dreaming of freedom and peace and plenty, the teens, still decked out in their colors are assaulted by police and security guards who take them for exactly what they are -- dangerous, gang members.

Cade Foster in leather. `Nough said.

What's interesting about the wrap up to "Playland" is that in his summation, Foster recognizes the redundancy of this episode. Okay, so he actually talks about the experiment, but hey, it's the same thing. Cade chastises the Gua for putting so much effort into a heartless experiment that human beings are already perpetrating against their own kind. While most of the Reds and Blues were good-looking white kids, the obvious moral of the episode had more to do with the treatment of gangs in the inner city, a place that is very much like "Playland".

The pointlessness could be forgiven in consideration of the fact that we get to see Sebastian Spence in a bit of bondage if only the rest of the episode weren't so damn annoying. Forget the good-looking white kids contingent, instead I'll focus on the excruciatingly bad dialogue. The leader of the Reds, a lad of no less than 16, admits that he's been a resident of Playland for about 900 sleeps. That translates into only about 3 years and yet his language skills have deteriorated to the point that every other word out of his mouth is Playland-slang. It seems to be more than stretching the limits of believability to have someone who has been speaking normally for 13 years of his life suddenly turn to pidgin-English. Yes, I know that it was meant to be a metaphor for inner city street slang, but those speech patterns are learned from the earliest stages of life, not just in 3 years.

Unless you really feel the need to see Sebastian Spence all tied up, give "Playland" a miss.

-- Linda M. Najera

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

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