It doesn’t look like the resistance will be around much longer since Superman Will single-handedly took out most of them in one day.
I don’t, but I found in on Amazon Instant Video (& have now paid for the entire season since it turns out it’s not really on Hulu).
I don’t have much a problem with the timeframe since our own history shows how rapidly citizens of former democracies can adapt to occupations. For what it’s worth I’m more interested in the worldbuilding than character development. I’m inclined to believe Gauleiter Snyder was telling the truth…
…given that his boss confirmed there’s a apparently a New York Colony as well. They’re really hitting us over the head with the Nazi parallels; if they’d just cut the decontamination scene after the lights started going in the showers I’d take it for granted the prisoners were killed. Granted Snyder came off as more Tywin Lannister than Roland Freisler during the show trial. Also the “ghettos” seem like the only safe places given it seems everyone outside of them has disappeared.
I’m worried we don’t get and really payoff as to the nature of the Hosts though.
I almost hope we never see the aliens. The story of how people deal with an occupation is more interesting. Falling Skies started to suck the more they involved aliens.
I finally got around to watching the most recent episode after work today (& also came the conclusion that’s I’d most likely end up either dead or a petty bureaucrat in the Colonial Authority).
As if the tutor wasn’t creepy enough; now she’s part of a cult that thinks Jesus was one of the Hosts. :eek: And she’s alone in the house with Gracie most of the day. Also what exactly is Maddie’s boss’s reckless scheme? 
Looting confiscated art instead of turning it over to the Authority? :dubious: Who’s she going to sell it to; other high proxies?
Well, it turns out the Factory isn’t a death camp, it’s an actual factory.
And it’s on the Moon.
Best episode so far. Lots of great psychological drama here, with Rick/Katie/Broussard/Quill/Snyder all second-guessing each other, not knowing who to trust, and trying to figure out how to work things to their own personal advantage.
The conversation where Helena (I’m not sure if they’ve ever stated exactly what her job is - is she the head of the LA Colony who oversees the bloc governors?) implies that Snyder is being a lot nicer to his subjects than the other governors are was pretty chilling. Snyder mentioned a few episodes ago that there are a total of seven Colonies in the CA/OR/WA region - I’m gonna guess LA, San Diego, San Francisco/Oakland, Portland, Seattle/Tacoma, and Spokane. If Snyder is the nice guy in terms of fascist police state governance, I shudder to think what O-Town must be like.
Not only is it on the Moon but the slave quarters have windows? :dubious: Granted that’s probably more a torment than a comfort. And my take on the scene with the guy coughing up blood is that’s only a factory for the able-bodied; if you can’t work it’s still a death camp. Being on the Moon does confirm whatever they’re building is for the Hosts. If the Factories were making goods for the Colonial authorities they wouldn’t need to be off-world.
Snyder is the Governor of the LA Bloc; Helena is his boss & his Governor-General for the Greater Lose Angles Colony. Her boss is the Chief Minister of the Pacific Coast. It is unsettling (but not unexpected) that Snyder’s one nicer proxies. I wonder if the propaganda cult is another one of his eccentricities. Helena’s apparently unknown outside of the higher ranks of the Authority. I do wonder what say the Pyongyang Colony is like (betcha the locals aren’t even aware there’s been an invasion ;)).
Heh. Good point!
The writing on this show continues to impress me. The quickness of humans to attribute godhood to entities who demonstrate their superiority–and the quickness to assume the servile position of the lower-status individuals–rings very true to our psychology. ‘They will care for us and reveal to us our place in the universe’…ick.
We haven’t really heard about exactly what happened during “the Arrival”, but from what the characters have said about it, the Hosts/Raps were in a period of somewhere around eight hours able to overwhelm the united military forces of mankind and force their surrender without causing significant damage to the environment or to major urban centers (as evidenced by the fact that downtown LA’s skyscrapers are, though charred and abandoned, still standing).
I can easily see how people would be willing to knuckle under to them in consideration of that. If anything, it’s the resistance whose behavior becomes hard to understand - they might be able to topple Snyder, or even take out the Chief Minister, but I can’t imagine that there’s anything in their bag of tricks that could even touch the Hosts, and it seems like the inevitable result of their success would be the Hosts just suspending the human government and taking direct control of the colony, which would probably be a much worse outcome than the status quo.
Sure, “knuckle under.” But what we were shown in that church scene, and in the scene of the tutor showing her book to the protagonists’ daughter, was the propensity to ADORE the conqueror. As in, to make the strong (in this case, aliens with superior technology) into literal gods, to be worshipped and venerated.
That’s not an impulse that all humans have—but it’s common enough to be believable in the context of this story, I think.
So, the Chief Minister - “Hyperion” - was one of the Hosts.
And Katie and Broussard killed it in their kidnapping attempt.
Whoops.
From the brief glimpse we got there, Hosts are apparently humanoid and need full-body suits to survive on Earth, which makes their agenda even murkier. At first I assumed that they were imperialists intent on settling Earth with the colonies as an apartheid-style way of keeping the natives under control, but there’s got to be more to it than that. Nolan’s wife’s job was apparently to sort through LA’s fine art and find the good stuff to give to the Hosts, they’re using slave labor to build something on the Moon, and they want the children to think of them as gods. Snyder seemed to think back in the first episode that their stay was temporary and they’d be leaving eventually, but that’s getting less and less likely.
My best guess at this point is that their master plan is something similar to that of the aliens in John Christopher’s Tripod novels (a mainstay of my childhood) - they’re planning to terraform Earth to suit the needs of their species, and keep a small number of humans around who’ve been indoctrinated from birth to serve them. The Factory is building the terraforming device, and once it’s ready, they’ll find some way to round up the young indoctrinees and keep them safe while everybody else chokes on the new toxic atmosphere.
Next week is the season finale. It’s a good thing this has already been greenlit for season 2, since there’s no way they can tie up all the loose ends in one hour.
I’m not entirely convinced Hyperion was a Host, or at least that was him. Humanoid aliens would be a big let down. Also these are the same beings that conquered the planet in 8 hrs, but they sent one of their own to LA via light rail and with less security than a presidential visit? :dubious:
The Hosts could be non-humanoid, and that was just a remote operated drone used to interact with humans. Or they could not be aliens at all, which would be a bigger let down, but at least explain they’re apparently so interested in our fine art. And I think Mrs Nolan just got the nicest treatment ever by the Red Hats. 
Based on the flag/logo and the “rapts” nickname, my assumption is that the hosts are avains - sentient birds, more-or-less.
Alternately, it’s possible that the Hosts are an artificial intelligence, and “Hyperion” is a robot that was constructed to act as an interlocutor between the machine consciousness and the humans. This possibility would explain some things about the Hosts - their obsession with order, their considering entertainment to be unnecessary, considering diabetes to be unworthy of medical treatment,how they were able to sort through the government/corporate databases to identify and track down people who were threats and people who were fit to run the occupation, their poor understanding of causality (I don’t recall the exact wording Helena used in her phone call a few episodes back), their needing human aficionados to tell them which artworks are the good ones, etc. It does cause one to wonder - if they were able to erect the walls so quickly, and gather up all the cars and toss them in a heap on top of the LA Convention Center, why do they need humans to work the Factory for them?
It seems like the “Raps” nickname, and the bird of prey on their flag logo, must be connected to their true nature somehow, but seeing as nobody even seems to know what the Hosts look like (aside from the high-ups like Snyder, who described the encounter only by saying how insignificant it made him feel), it’s hard to conclude that it’s an accurate description of the Hosts themselves. I’m guessing that the ships they arrived in and/or attacked the cities of the world in were somehow superficially similar to birds of prey, and that’s where the name comes from.
Some screenshots of the body on the train.
https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipMA5-PIaYocjhEP2K3R5YGLpyS5RlYtrSAZrJDuwY5CwWLWwA8NFumjL1ewJ3BHPg?key=V0ZMNHdNbEthYlZKUmdMTllqTlhzXzdyQkFUTXZn
Four fingers, and something on its wrist that looks like a heartrate monitor. I’m leaning towards it being a Host rather than a drone.
I am bad with character names so bear with me but even though I rewound twice I couldn’t make out what Artist Girl said to get herself out of trouble and get Bitchy Wife arrested. Anyone know?
Her name is Maddie/Madeline. She’s Katie’s sister, Katie being the main female character.
I don’t know if she says anything in particular, seems to me that she just mumbles indistinctly. They took “bitchy wife” because she’s in charge, Maddie is just an underling.
I looked up the subtitles. She says “I’m just an assistant.”
She’s also married to Nolan and Snyder wanted leverage over him so he’d give Snyder intel on the “possible changes” Helena was planning. Snyder doesn’t give a damn about the actual art theft or her underlings; he just waned a pretext to arrest her.
That’s what I get for not paying careful enough attention. I thought Nolan was not upset to have his wife taken away since he wanted the Sister anyway and Snyder was doing him a favor.