First Wave
"Underworld"

Airdate: September 10, 2000

Ladies and gentlemen, girls and boys, it's time for First Wave meets The Sopranos. Or rather, First Wave tries to meet The Sopranos and gets punched in the stomach and told to fuggedaboudit and go back to f---in' Canada where it f---in' belongs.

Cade impersonates some mob muscle.

Okay, so not really.

A Nostradamus quatrain leads Cade to Kansas City and Sammy "The Horse" Kozak, one of the city's underworld leaders. After the other two self-destruct in gangland-style wars, Sammy is one half of the remaining two bosses in the city. But while Mitchum, the other boss, goes around wherever he wants, Sammy has been scared by two attempts on his life and conducts business from his safehold, a strip joint.

Cade goes undercover as the former muscle of a Miami mobster who is looking for work. A call to his former boss -- who is really just Crazy Eddie doing a Mafioso impression -- allays some of Sammy's fears, but it isn't until Foster politely but firmly rejects Sophia Kozak's advances that he is fully accepted. From them on it's Crime Wave, Kansas City Style.

Well, it might have been only the shit hits the fan.

One of Sammy's guys is found to have been carrying around an internal, freaky-like, listening device which Cade and Eddie recognize as Gua. Even Mitchum's confesses to the involvement of the Gua before he is assassinated by Sammy isn't enough proof for the old-style gangster. It isn't until one of his own people dissolves in a puddle of goo that Sammy is ready to start believing Cade's warnings about beings from outer space. Searching for the Gua's reasoning behind taking over Kansas City's underworld, Foster and Kozak discover that they have been using Mitchum's trucking business and illegal contacts to secretly ship human husks all over the country in what Cade theorizes is a setup for the second wave.

When they are caught, the Gua give Sammy an offer he can't refuse. Just as he steps into their car, however, it blows up, leading Cade to believe that the gangster hadn't really thrown his allegiance in with the aliens. The old man, he thinks, had planned to make the people responsible for one of his men's deaths pay.

The fact that Foster is wrong is what saves this episode from being complete crap. Not only is there a certain poetic justice to Sophia Kozak's murder of her husband, it also speaks of the strength of will applied to this very underused character. A speech earlier in the episode explained why she felt such love and loyalty towards her scuzzball of a husband. Despite her not truly being "in the life", she fully embraced and believed in its rules. When her husband broke those rules, she, as the only true remaining Mafioso, had to make him pay.

Now how cool is that?

-- Linda M. Najera

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

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