"Emancipation"
Airdate: October 18, 1999

Liam (Robert Leeshock) and Renee (Jayne Heitmeyer) team up to rescue the Skrill Queen, kidnapped by a group of renegade Volunteers.

This week's installment (which I'm dubbing "A Wild Skrill Chase") is a bit like those local news reports about animal rights activists infuriating scientists by liberating lab critters. It's all a matter of semantics -- one critter's liberation is another's kidnapping. The Taelons say the Skrill Queen has been kidnapped while the renegade Volunteers say we liberated her.

There are three sides to this story though: The Taelons', the renegades', and the Skrill Queen's. This is one of those times where I have to wonder, who haven't the Taelons genetically raped? The Skrill Queen's flashback sequence as related to Kincaid plays out like a kind of This is Your Life featuring the Taelons' mass capture and enslavement of her kind. Though brief, it's long enough to show us the peaceful lives the Skrill led on their beautiful homeworld, and the outrage and sorrow over their present fate.

And what about these rogue Volunteers? What's their game? What was so important that they'd risk their lives to use a Skrill without the benefit of a cyberviral implant? I saw no evidence of Resistance ties. Of course, now that they're all dead, the world may never know what they meant to ultimately do with the Skrill Queen's children, or to whom they were linked. What's the Taelon word for MacGuffin?

The guy in the opening scenes didn't inspire any caring on any level beyond 'Poor guy; he has to watch the crazy volunteer blast his house but listen to her smart mouth, too'. I barely cared about the rogue volunteers when they each croaked. They end up being just as expendable to the writer as characters, as they are expendable to their cause. Whether the result of poor writing or poor acting, I just can't bring myself to care about these rebels with a cause. I'm merely curious about their plans.

Chevolleau's Augur is showing signs of a breakdown. The stress he's under would make anyone snap, which he does in rare, angry form. I especially like how he yells at Liam. It was long overdue. His life is going down the toilet, Lili is dead to him and Liam's one-track mind just cannot conceive what he's going through.

In the end, "Emancipation" wasn't as compelling as "The Vanished". I hardly had any interest in the characters -- Augur, Liam and Co, excepted, of course. Like Renee, I didn't expect to feel anything for the Skrill Queen at first. By the time she's delivered her brood of little babies in her new home, I was definitely having an all's well that ends well moment.

--Vivian E. Lee

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