- Ryan (Lex Luthor’s flunkie) sharps the little kids at poker, finally finding his intellectual equals in people under the age of eight.
- Cornered by the Demon Dogs, who apparently are a tribe similarly evil to the Locos, Lex Luther and Dalek decide to split up. The Demon Dogs are entirely befuddled by this, and their leader just stands there looking back and forth. No wonder they mistook the Sattelite of Love for a dog bone.
- Magenta seems like she’s got her eye on making off with the still-unnamed baby. Trudy, after being thoroughly unpleasant at all times except when she was delerious with fever, turns out to be a crazy, manipulative bitch.
- Dalek, who after a touching moment a few episodes back, decided not to take a picture of his dead family, stopped while running from the demon dogs to get a baseball mitt.
- For the love of God. Zoot appeared in like 10 scenes, and 8 of them were just the same shot of him looking menacing from the back of his police car, but they keep flashing back to him. He’s had more screentime since he died than he ever did when he was alive.
- The new leader of the Locos is some chyk who it is implied would not like it if she found out that Zoot had fathered a child by some other girl. Episode 9 ends with her looking menacingly at the camera through the flames of, I believe, Zoot’s funeral pyre, which, of course, is still burning. I think maybe they’ve decided that in the fictional world of this show, fires, once lit, will remain burning indefinitely, as, it seems, it was only the adults who enforced the idea that fuel is depleted as it burns.
- In episode 10, Bray talks Amber into running against Lex for leadership in an election, which Amber decides to throw, in order to teach Lex an important life lesson. In the post-apocalypse
- Meanwhile, Bray laments over his dead psychopath brother. Oh, dead psychopath brother, how sad it is that we can not be a family, you and me and your girlfriend and daughter, we could give up your lifelong orgy of destruction and just settle down somewhere pastoral.
- And, of course, everyone votes for Lex Luthor, because he threatens them. They elect the guy whose whole schtick is that he’s evil. They elect Doctor Insano President.
- Amber throws the race because she thinks it’s important that Lex believe he won fairly. Of course, since Lex thinks he won by coercion, I don’t know if that counts.
- Also, Lex doesn’t find it odd that he won with 99% of the vote. Who voted for Amber? Bray, obviously, and Amber if she’s got any sense, because, let’s face it, if no one voted for her, it would look rigged. So who’s the third?
- Trudy cycles between accusing Bray of having a thing for The Girl Who Looks Like Magenta, accusing Bray of having a thing for Amber, and insisting that she loves Bray. She’s emotionally inconsistent, sort of nutty, and a moody, angst-ridden manipulative bitch. In other words, she acts more like a 14 year old girl than any one else in the cast.
- Which reminds me. Episode 10. A 14 year old girl has given birth, a gang of kids has committed murder, and Lex Luthor has kinda sorta killed a man. There is no way this show could ever be aired in the US.
- Now that Kiwi Haley Joel Osmet (You know, not really. You know who he is? He’s the Kiwi version of the kid who found the Doctor’s watch in “Human Nature”. Y’know, the little kid in Love Actually whose dead mom was married to Liam Neesen and who had the crush on the little girl that sang that number in that play.)
- The choices of times for the heartwarming music to kick in are a little surprising, like when Lex apologizes to Ryan for knocking him down in training. I guess this is to indicate that Lex is like a father figure for the tribe. A drunken, abusive father figure prone to fits of violence
- Lex Luthor: “The trick to leadership is to never be predictable.” Oh my God! George W Bush learned his leadership skills from Kiwi Television
- Magenta makes bread. They eat it from bowls with spoons. Does bread mean something different in New Zealand?
- Lex Luthor finds that despite his tough-guy act, he can’t murder Cloey’s pet cow. So he lets it go, then claims he was jumped by one of the crazy tribes. And insists that the last he saw, the cow was being brutally killed and sodomized. He says this to Cloey, and, as far as I can tell, he says it for no reason other than to be a dick.
- Trudy is in full-on Fatal Attraction mode. Again, still acting the most like an actual teenage girl of any of them.
- Lex Luthor leads the search party for Cloey, and he intentionally leads them in a stupid direction so that his leadership is consistent with his story: instead of taking them in the direction the cow would have gone, he takes them in the direction of the tribe he claimed took the cow. Which means he’s knowingly leading them on a wild goose chase just to be evil. Lex Luthor doesn’t think his evil through very far, does he?
- And yet, the Locos have indeed gone into the woods, where Cloey and the cow have gone, rather than into the city where Lex Luthor is leading the rescue party. Jean-Paul Sartre has joined the writing staff.
- At the end of episoode 15, Cloey is rescued by a new girl, a sort of weird zen hippie chyk whose name I have forgotten, but who I will call “Hsu Tai” after the Chinese girl on The Tomorrow People. She speaks entirely in platitudes, which leads me to believe that after the apocalypse, she holed up in a fortune cookie factory for six months.
- Hsu Tai eplains that she was destined to come hang out with the tribe in order to reaffirm their bonds by giving them a name, and, Lex Luthor being the one who gets to make this decision, they go with “Mallrats”, implying that only the works of Kevin Smith will survive the apocalypse. I think I liked them not having a name better.
- Trudy decides at the last minute to join in their femmy little ritual of solidarity where they choose their name, thus indicating that she’s decided to stop being a crazy bitch and actually contribute something to their new little civilization. Then she walks in on Bray making out with Magenta. Wonder how long this “Not crazy” phase will last.
- And to celebrate Cloey’s safe return and their new name, they do what The Matrix Reloaded tells us must always happen when a post-apocalyptic civilization decides to celebrate: they hold a rave. Remember: post-apocalyptic priorities: Ridiculous makeup, check. Hair dye, check. Extasy, check. Rave music, check.
While I’ve been writing this, Battlestar Galactica ended its run. Four years after the apocalypse and not a single person wearing silly Beyond Thunderdome makeup. They came so close.