When the most viable option for governing a collective is an intense woman with a shrieking problem who can explode people with her eyes, things must not be going very well. But this is where the surviving members of the atheist colony find themselves after a considerable breach of, uh, trust between Mother and the supercomputer she shares a maker with, resulting in its system being shut down after committing the one infraction Mother has zero chill about: messing with her children.
It turns out that when the Trust met with Paul to grill him about Marcus, he did so knowing Paul would eventually find his way back to his camp regardless of whether he’d had a direct interaction with the man he once thought of as his father. When the Trust returned Paul’s mouse friend, it wasn’t a good deed or an act of kindness, as we may have thought, but rather a weapon in the waiting to assist with the atheist’s seek-and-destroy mission.
Campion’s affections for Vrille, the droid daughter of Marcus’s new girlfriend, Decima, lead them straight to Marcus’s camp, and it’s there that Paul’s mouse, kept in his little hippie hemp bag, detonates some manner of viral load that turns an atheist soldier, and Paul himself, into a bumpy, warty mess. Marcus, still infused with power obtained not from Sol but from swallowing Mother’s necromancer eyes, carries Paul out into the sun and prays for Sol to heal him, which, of course, he is unable to do because it is highly unlikely he exists. What does exist as a tangible being who is physically capable of getting shit done is Mother, and after a brief battle with Marcus in which she fetches her eyeballs back from his stomach by using her powers to raise them out of his mouth, she flies back to the colony with Paul and asks for Sue’s help in making him un-bumpy again.
The absence of Mother’s eyes in his stomach causes Marcus to lose all power almost immediately. Without this, it’s a lot more difficult to con the smattering of followers he assembled into thinking he’s the right-hand man of Sol, and Decima is finding his demotion back to mortality a real turnoff. She immediately picks up on the fact that he no longer has a gross, veiny face, which she was into for some reason, and after kissing him, she says things feel different. What will inevitably come to be an even bigger issue in their relationship is that Decima being under Marcus’s cultlike spell, now broken, led to the destruction of the droid she had fashioned as a replacement for her human daughter, Vrille.
Marcus blames Vrille for leading Paul to their camp, resulting in the boy being used as a pawn by the Trust, and tells Decima to “make things right,” which is code for “Kill your daughter — I never liked her anyway.” There’s nothing grosser in media, or in real life, than women choosing men over their own children, whether those children are droids or not. Decima uses the Mithraic scalpel they have at camp to slash at Vrille’s face in a fit of rage that, it seems, is mostly self-hatred. “You’re not her,” she screams at the girl, slashing at her with the blade. “Well, who am I then?” Vrille yells back. The girl taunts, “Are you going to break my neck again?” That’s a reference to the mysterious act of violence that took place in the past between her and her mother-creator, and it sends Decima over the edge. She continues to slash at the girl to such an extent that her face comes off, leaving her a heartbreaking vision of a metal-and-plastic skeleton. If droids are capable of feeling, which it often seems they somehow are, Vrille is heartbroken by the betrayal of her mother, who has already hurt her so much in ways we have not yet learned. Vrille gets up, runs to the edge of a cliff, and throws herself off. I hope this isn’t actually the last we see of her because she’s been the most dynamic character of this season so far.
A few themes are taking shape in this season, but the strongest seems to center on the fact that the inability to think independently is dangerous. Loyalty is often a word used as a blunt tool for people looking to gain power, but the word’s true meaning is rarely honored in those situations. The members of the atheist colony thought they were really onto something by being governed by a supercomputer. They saw it as the only way to have cold, hard truth and clarity without the messy influence of human emotion. But in the end, the computer was just as capable of betrayal as a human — possibly because it was created by a human or possibly just because that’s the way the cards flop in this world, or any world. Any good intention, no matter how simple and pure at its generation, is going to be bent and bastardized by the strong arm of an opposing influence looking to gain more power and use something — whatever that something is, even a mouse — to get closer to its goal.
Mother offers to oversee the atheist camp until a more suitable leader presents itself, which will probably be either Campion or the luminescent being Father regenerated with fuel blood. As of now, I’m pretty firmly Team No. 7, and I think Mother and Campion should just get on its back and fly off somewhere. These existing camps are too stressful, and now that there are sea monsters in the acid water, it’s just all a bit too much. Start fresh for the third time.
Zephyr in the Sky at Night I Wonder
• Paul telling Marcus he’s not going to find the tree of knowledge because it hasn’t been grown yet was an interesting little info drop. He mentions that the seeds are in the hijacked Mithraic ark known as the Tarantula, and for some reason I feel like this will end up having something to do with Father’s “being.”
• When the rivet in Father’s chest started leaking fuel blood, it reminded me of Mother lactating when she heard No. 7 shriek. They’re both focused on their babies, and that’s probably gonna set them up for a huge battle against each other when they decide those babies are more important to them than each other.
• Paul says he hates Sue because she’s an atheist, and you can’t forgive an atheist, but Sue is the most capable, aside from Mother herself, of healing him. If she’s successful in doing so, that will likely lead to a reunion of affection between the two. I hope for that because Paul needs an attitude adjustment. Plus he and Sue have matching haircuts, so it just makes sense that they stay friends.
• Very interested in seeing what becomes of the control chip Mother is making for No. 7.
