Helix Post-Game: Star Trek’s Jeri Ryan Makes This Clusterfrost Even Crazier
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Like a prince arriving to wake a cursed girl using only his kisses, Star Trek: Voyager‘s Jeri Ryan and her team of investment-upholding soldiers enter Arctic Biosystems with two goals in mind: make sure a cure is developed and then kill off everyone who knows about the virus in the first place. It’s a goal that finally gives this series an actual end-game scenario to look forward to, even though I’m sure we all figured out that anyone getting out of The White Room alive was a long shot. Constance Sutton won’t be taking any shit. She does take some tongue from her sex buddy Major Balleseros, though, and it’s as gross as it sounds.
As the resident leader of the Ilaria corporation, Constance wants to make good on her company’s investments and will say anything to anyone to make it look like she’ll do her job lawfully. Alan wants to head down to Level R to get Julia? That’s fine by Constance, who sets up a team to go on the inevitably unsuccessful mission. But even though the plan fails, mostly due to people not using guns the way they should, she still wants Alan to produce the cure, as if just the attempt is worth the same as having Julia’s expertise on hand. Hatake knows that Constance is a woman with many dubious layers, and knows to tiptoe around her, probably when she’s filing her teeth down for whatever reason. (If they reveal that she’s actually a vampire at some point, I might have to completely re-evaluate my opinion about this series.) She actually runs her hands across the spines of books on a bookcase, which is a total villain move.
But Constance isn’t the only bump in the road for the base, as Anana and Major make their way back into the base, which is doubly disastrous for Second Banana. First, it shows that he sucks at leaving people to die out in the snow, and now he is forced to contemplate a past where he was kidnapped and raised by Hatake, never knowing about the twin brother that was left behind. He still puts all of his trust in Hatake, though, so it’s going to take more than Anana’s photographs to get him to change sides. I really wish she would have just left Major to die in the snow. His reappearance isn’t a good thing for anyone.
Julia, meanwhile, isn’t at 100%, despite Hatake’s cure last week, and she’s experiencing giant headaches that make it hard for her to see; as such, she uses a blindfold for most of the episode, plummeting things to ignorant depths in an episode that largely avoids them. Trapped in a room with a vector, Julia frightfully hides behind a medical bed, and just when the boogeywoman is about to reach her, someone yells out in the hallways, causing the creature to leave the room. Julia then stands up and pulls her blindfold off in obvious relief. So why wouldn’t she have taken the blindfold off of her head immediately? Was this perhaps a white flag, signifying she didn’t want to witness her own demise, or was it just bad timing? In any case, Julia and Alan are at last reunited before the episode’s end.
The big mystery of the moment is now “What’s up with those greyish-violet eyes, and why is Hatake so sad that Julia has them?” It’s obvious he’s a major part of her past. So what do the eyes have to do with it, and why does Constance also have them?
“Survivor Zero” was about as solid an episode that Helix is capable of, but didn’t have nearly enough ironically enjoyable sequences of awfulness. I had such hopes, based on Sarah blaming “Big Pharma” for all their problems. But providing slightly more sensible storytelling is hardly something to get mad at. The episode ends with vectors dropping in, ready to make these characters’ lives a little bit worse for next week’s Day 8. Hope your week goes by better than it did for Arctic Biosystems.
