Colony is a show on the USA Network about
how this family handles life after these aliens have taken over the world. I wrote up some of my thoughts on it after a few episodes, but the first season finished up last week and I wanted to expand
on that. A second season is coming next
year, but I don’t know if I’ll be watching it.
Be warned, there will be a few spoilers if you haven’t seen it.
I
think a show like this can be done one of two ways. The first way is to just focus on the family
and have the aliens be these things that you know are there, but they are so
far beyond us that we can’t even comprehend why they are here. The second way is to set up a mystery about
the aliens that our characters slowly uncover, either leading to a greater
understanding of why the aliens are here or to figure out some way to defeat
them. Colony tries to do both. Not
50-50, more like 90-10, and that is an issue, for me at least.
For
me, being focused on the family could be interesting. However, I am more interested in the
mystery. The family story would have to
have fantastic actors and writing for me to be interested in them. For example, I really don’t care who the
sister is sleeping with, I’m curious what the aliens are doing. To me, mystery is more interesting than
family drama.
But
the mystery leads to a bigger issue, because the only clue about the aliens we
get in the first season is that The Factory where they send people is on the
moon. We do see a couple minutes of the
prisoners working, but we have no idea what they are working on or why the
aliens need humans to do it. To me, the
“Big Reveal” that The Factory was on the moon was no big deal. What
the hell are they doing? That’s what
I want to know.
But
the biggest issue I have is with the last episode. In the second to last episode, the Resistance
blew up a train carrying a VIP. They go
into the train and discover that the VIP was one of the aliens. The first half of the last episode is them
trying to sneak the body back to their base.
The last half of the episode is them trying to cut into his spacesuit,
and failing. They do manage to break off
a bit of communication system, or something.
Now, most shows would have waited until the last episode of the season
to reveal the face of the enemy to make people want to come back for the new
season. They could show the aliens to be
ugly lizards, or humans from the distant future, or the humans taken to The
Factory with mechanical things in their brains, or a Frankenspecies sewed
together from several different species, or something. I’m sure the writers and producers etc. of Colony would say that they are
subverting expectations by not showing the aliens when they so readily set
things up for that. But really, not
showing them comes off as either dickish, or clueless, as they have no idea
what the aliens really are. It’s like as
long as they keep things vague, they can go on for years without having to
explain anything.
I
just realized this vagueness also applies to an issue I had when I first wrote
up my thoughts. It’s how they don’t
really explain what happened during the Arrival. There are little hints, and talk of where
people were, but what actually happened isn’t explained. For example, there are giant walls around
various cities that are hundreds of feet high and thick. Did they just appear, or were they
built? They have families that are
separated, which would indicate that the walls went up quickly, but if they
just appeared, that’s a massive display of power which you would think would be
used to help spread the idea that resistance is futile. But as long as they are vague about the
Arrival, they can just make up stuff when needed when they need something for
an episode.
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