First Wave
"Gladiator"

Airdate: August 20, 2000

Oh, you've got some schumtz on your jacket. Here, give that to me. And your shirt. And your pants. And...

Cade enlists his old Joliet cellmate, Omar Healy, into helping him infiltrate a Gua-backed study that is investigating aggressiveness under the guise of the Human Genome Project.

Season 2 of First Wave has, for the most part, been about Cade making allies in his fight against the Gua. These true believers have had to see for themselves the web that is being drawn around the human race by the alien invaders. Luckily for them, however, Foster has been able to vanquish whatever evil has been afoot and then leave, secure in the knowledge that he has been able to protect his new followers from the Gua-threat.

(cue dramatic music)
Until now.

The unlucky soul, Omar, is a former Olympic hopeful whose dreams were shattered when an over-the-counter migraine medication made him test positive for drugs. At that point he truly turned to drugs and then bank robbery to support his habit before ending up doing a four year stretch at Joliet where his cellmate, the extremely white Cade Foster, kept the prison's Aryan Nation contingent off his back.

Since he got out, however, he's been existing in the world of bare knuckle fighting and growing weary of his less than stellar opponents. He wants a shot at the big time and some real competition. Into his shady world walks Cade Foster who needs his help to gain access to a Gua experiment that he and Crazy Eddie have discovered with the help of one of Nostradamus' quatrains and a little poking around in computers they have no business poking around in. You know, the standard stuff of First Wave episodes.

Healy agrees, but more out of a sense of adventure and need for real competition than a desire to pay back his former friend. The Gua wants fighters, you see. Big, strong, aggressive, kick-ass-and-take-names-not-necessarily-the-sharpest-knife-in-the-drawer types of fellas. And Cade's buddy Omar is just what the Gua ordered; big and dumb. Okay, so Cade and Eddie don't come off as the most... um... sane couple of guys, but Healy must have taken a few too many hits to the head not to realize that something fishy was going on.

Hmmm.... Well.... I have no caption for this. My brain has melted along with the rest of me.

Supposedly condemned research wings are broken into, Gua plans are discovered, and the aliens come after Foster like gangbusters. So, you know, it's almost like every other episode of First Wave. Only this week Cade's butt has to be pulled out of the fire by someone other than the mysterious Joshua. This time it is Omar who, finally realizing that Cade and Eddie have been telling the truth all along, steps up to the plate and takes the beating and death meant for Foster.

Which, of course, leads to more Cade-angst.

"Gladiator" is intended to show that, despite his seemingly cavalier attitude about his own safety, Cade is very much concerned with the well-being of his followers. Having amassed allies for a while now, he is starting to realize that by calling them into action, by asking them to stand in defiance of the Gua, he may be sentencing them to their deaths. Although right now his army is small and dispersed, Cade Foster has begun to think and feel like a general. And it isn't fun.

Of course if I all I wanted was that information I could have just fast forwarded it to Cade's final voice-over and skipped the rest of the episode.

Show, people. Show, not tell.

-- Linda M. Najera

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

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