4-03. "Subduction"
Written by Dan Nowak
Directed by David Petrarca
First aired 12 December 2019
SYNOPSIS
UN Home Secretary Nancy Gao resigns, then runs for UN Secretary General against Avasarala. Arjun pressures Avasarala to let him help run her campaign. They uncover evidence that Gao had help with her career, and they leak it to the press.
On Mars, in response to Bobbie's destruction of the drug lab, a gang kidnaps Bobbie's nephew. Their leader turns out to be police Detective Esai Martin, who pressures Bobbie into helping him steal Marian tech in repayment for the drug lab's destruction.
On Ilus, lightning strikes the Belter settlement, damaging their power generator. While Amos and Naomi attempt to repair it, Amos raids Murtry's supplies. Murtry orders the execution of the Belters responsible for the shuttle's destruction. Holden and Okoye, the RCE scientist, discover another massive alien structure that has begun moving toward the Belter settlement. Against Okoye's protests, Holden and Alex obliterate the structure with a missile.
ANALYSIS
"The swarm was bad enough; this feels a whole shitload worse."
Sadly, the Season's good start begins a nosedive. The political situation on Earth takes a sudden turn towards predictable: from the moment Nancy Gao announces her bid for UN Secretary General, I foresaw Avasarala's defeat. What I didn't foresee, however, was her husband's disruptive involvement with her campaign; the "real" Arjun would never have done such a thing, which invoked my increasing disappointment with the writers for choosing to go down this road.
Then we have the whole Protomolecule artifact mess. The lightning strike sequence seems as if it was fabricated just to threaten the Belter settlement's power generator. Then the bizarrely rotating structure, with its 3-kilometer-wide field of destruction, threatens to flatten the whole settlement.
In the "meh" department, Bobbie's whole crooked-cop thing feels like a giant red herring in the making. But on the positive side, Murtry and Naomi's fiery confrontation is credible and gripping, especially as Naomi appears to suffer a heart attack due to her rage (although we know it's because she's having problems dealing with gravity). Later, Murtry and Amos have an intriguing little chat about their respective similarities as killers. Indeed, the escalating tension in the settlement effectively ramps up the drama, with great punctuation as the episode concludes with another cold-blooded shooting by Murtry.
Best Scene: As implausible as it is, the rotating Protomolecule structure creates a memorable visual.
Best Line: After Amos steals parts from Murtry, Wei threatens to shoot him the next time he tries it. "So, does that mean we're not fucking anymore?"
Technobabble Alert: Things were fine with the alien planet—a nice, believable place—until Holden puts his dick in it and all Protomolecule hell starts to break loose. Each new threat seems to top the last in increasingly implausible ways, requiring ever-increasing loads of technobabble to explain them.
Hard Media "After Show": Steven Strait; Executive Producer Naren Shankar; Co-Executive Producer/Writer Ty Franck; Dominique Tipper (Naomi Nagata); Burn Gorman (Adolphus Murtry).
SCORE: 