Category: Eschatology

After declaring Bray and Lex dead, the Chosen march back to the mall, stopping only to let everyone redo their facial markings and hair color. Trudy freaks out at the news of Bray’s death and Tyson goes cross-eyed at mention of Lex’s. Fortunately, the Chosen aren’t any good at deducing the difference between life and death, and Ebony shows up seconds later to rescue them.
This rouse fools the Chosen for about thirty seconds. The Chosen get rid of all the tribe leaders, which is why Katy Perry will not be appearing in this season.
When Bray wakes up, Lex has slipped off, and Ebony wants the two of them to run away together. But with Bray’s ankle hurt, he’s not going to do much running, which makes it a good thing that the new character who I am going to call Edward Scissorhands, (even though he looks more like The Crow, but that’s awkward to keep saying), doesn’t seem interested in attacking them.
The hungry Mallrats start a protest because they want food, so the Guardian orders all of them executed on the spot. Just kidding. The Chosen seem totally confused by the idea of anyone rebelling. The Guardian shows up and declares them all slaves, and promises to feed them and let them join the Chosen once they’ve proved worthy, once YOU WILL BOW DOWN BEFORE ME SON OF JOR-EL. Which everyone does, because they’re hungry. Except Tyson, who is more morally flakey. But Jaffa (The Guardian), who Leah has decided probably was totally gay for Zoot in life, decides to be a dick, and won’t feed any of the Mallrats until they all KNEEL BEFORE ZOD ZOOT. This starts the rats down the path of in-fighting, since it’s been something like two hours since their last meal.
The Chosen manage to track Lex because he’s molting, and Bray either gets captured or lets himself get captured. At any rate, he points out immediately that they’ve pretty much instantly redecorated the mall with the Zoot posters that were conveniently mass-produced during the fall of civilization.
While Trudy tries to persuade Bray to join the Chosen with the same success Bray has in trying to persuade Trudy to reject the Chosen, Lex and Ebony meet up with Edward Scissorhands, who promptly traps them with a net.
Jack is captured trying to escape, and the Guardian executes him. Nah, just kidding; Ellie pleads for his safety by explaining how Jack is a brilliant scientist. This is because Ellie missed the memo about the Chosen being anti-science luddites. So I guess instead of executing him, they take him off for something worse than being executed. Or something.
Selene claims that she didn’t tell Ryan about the baby because she wanted him to marry her for her, not out of duty. Ryan finds this convincing, because, as I have mentioned, Ryan is incredibly stupid.
Edward Scissorhands reveals that he’s a member of an eco-tribe lead by a chyk named “Eagle”, who he is cryptic about, except that he goes on at great length about how awesome she is. Though when Lex mentions that “Eagle” sounds a lot like Amber, Ebony inexplicably freaks out.
The next morning, Bray’s ankle is entirely healed, because the writers do not comprehend the passage of time. When Bray refuses to submit, they lock him in a room and show him a three-screen multimedia presentation made by their AV department.
Thirty seconds later, Bray is all but brainwashed, until he boldly looks up and shouts “THERE ARE FOUR LIGHTS!” We also get to see that Trudy can still have her baby yoinked away for disobedience, so when she creepily tells the Mallrats that Zoot is real and his spirit dwells within his followers, we can maybe just about get that the point here is that she’s gone completely ’round the garden path.
Lex wants to rope Edward Scissorhands and his tribe into helping out in the fight against the Chosen, but Ebony is still freaking out at the idea of Lex meeting Eagle. Fortunately for her, Edward Scissorhands isn’t a big one for confrontation.
Ellie and Alice grill Patsy to work out what the weakness of The Chosen is (Turns out, it’s bullets. Unfortunately, a working gun is harder to find than kryptonite in New Zealand).
Bray agrees to join The Chosen in order to save the Mallrats, and apparently is savvy enough to know not to lie to the Guardian, so he outright tells him that he’s going to go along with them in order to save the Mallrats. Jaffa, however, finds this close enough, and lets Bray talk to the Mallrats
Bray does exactly what we expected, and gets two-thirds of the way through telling the tribe to submit, then has a crisis of conscience and tells them to fight back, so he’s next for the chop.
Later, when Lex meets up with Ryan on a chain gang, Ryan reports that all the Mallrats are okay, except for Bray,. who faces execution, and Jack, who has been taken off to Dick Cheney’s Undisclosed Location. Ryan has gotten the memo that Katy Perry is no longer part of the cast, so she doesn’t count.
They take Bray out to the beach, which close as I can tell is the only actually scenic place reachable by bus from the studio, since all the climactic outdoor scenes are set here, and prepare to burn him at the stake. With thousands of Chosen surrounding him, armed to the teeth, they have absolutely no trouble executing Bray. Just kidding, it’s totally going to come crashing down.
Ryan returns to the mall and tells everyone about Lex and Ebony, because, so close as Leah and I can tell, the Chosen can only hear you if you address them by name, like NPCs in an Infocom game. May continues to make herself unlikable.
Trudy is ordered to kill Bray, as proof of her loyalty to Zoot, and Bray begs for his life like a little girl. Trudy just about turns, but it turns out that she’s just crazy enough to do it anyway. With the surprise help of Edward Scissorhands and a cassette of “Listen to the Scary Sounds of Jungle Animals”, enough of a distraction happens that Bray and Dal escape. Though The Guardian just tells everyone that they’re both dead anyway.
Bray freaks out when he finds Edward Scissorhands wearing the ring he’d left on Amber’s grave. Which leads to the entirely unsurprising and frankly not well done revelation that — yes — “Eagle”, the leader of Edward Scissorhands’s tribe — is really — (wait for it) — Zandra!
Nah, just kidding. The show’s gotten kind of tedious at this point, frankly, though I’ll say this: I totally expected them to string us along until they actually showed Amber, instead of just having Edward Scissorhands blurt it out.
May and Selene are edging toward joining the Chosen, May because she’s a little bitch, and Selene because she’s with child, and thinks that starvation might be bad for that.
Dal reveals that he’s had prophetic dreams about Amber still being alive. Lex reveals that he’s had that dream too, as has Bray. So, despite Ebony’s protests, they set out for Eagle Mountain, in order to check that she’s still in her grave. Well, until Ebony actually does talk Bray out of it. So Dal has to set off on his own.
Leah points out that when Bray was given the ring, he was doing Amber, and we may draw what conclusions we like from the fact that Edward Scissorhands has it now. They notice that Dal’s gone like eight hours later, but fortunately, Dal for some reason climbed not Eagle Mountain, but the next mountain over, so I imagine they have time to overtake him.
We also get a name for The Blue Haired Number Two Chosen Guy, which is Luke, so I shall call him “Sideshow Luke Perry”. He seems like a True Believer, but he’s not devoid of compassion and love and goodness and so forth. Which I suspect means that he’s going to make a last-second noble sacrifice.
Dal finds the grave empty, causing them to notice that no one actually remembers who buried her. So they follow Edward Scissorhands back to the Ewok Villiage, where they finally meet Amber, who looks angry, possibly because of her ridiculous Eagle costume.
Intermission: The wacky adventures of Mentos the Freshmaker
Leah has discovered that the Dance Remix CD of the Tribe Soundtrack CD contains music videos for Abe Messiah and two of the songs that aren’t as good. You can find them on YouTube, but I kinda suggest that you don’t. They’re a weird mix of Kids Incorporated, Riverdance, and that David Hasslehoff music video where he’s dancing around the world, with the selfsame Video Toaster effects. The Abe Messiah video includes most of the scenes from the end credits that we were never able to make sense of, including the Mystery Blonde Guy with whom Trudy is dancing in the rave bit from the credits. We only get a clear look at him in the Bye Bye Bye This Is The Place, and if the YouTube comments are to be believed, this is “Good Zoot”, some sort of hypothetical Zoot who had decided to reform and stay with the Mall Rats, to which there has never been any indication in the show.
I like to think that somewhere out there is an entire alternative second season, complete with a radically different continuity. Maybe this hypothetical one makes more sense.
There exists a second version of the Abe Messiah video, which just features Bray, Ebony, Tyson, and Lex Luthor dancing in weird symbolic poses as if they’re about to shout their names and totem animals, then turn into Power Rangers. Which is utterly ludicrous, since we all know that only one of them is going to turn into a Power Ranger.
5… 4… 3… 2… 1…
Amber wants the others gone, because she’s pissed for reasons she isn’t yet willing to go into in detail. Bray has a feverish night of flashbacks, brough on by the stress of finding Amber still alive, or possibly the fact that he’s been wearing the same knitted wifebeater since last season.
Dal is the first to notice that Ebony was conspicuously unsurprised when Amber turned up not dead. Lex discovers that Edward Scissorhands’s tribe is called the “Gaians”, and they all take their names from animals, except for Pride (Edward), who didn’t understand the rules.
Amber gives Dal a flashback, in which she wakes up after having been buried, gets found by Edward Scissorhands, and gets adopted by the Gaians. He teaches her how to hunt and fish, and she teaches him about this earth thing they call “Kissing”, and she is shocked, shocked, when Dal tells her that Bray and Ebony haven’t gotten together.
Ebony tries to talk Bray into doing a runner, but this is unconvincing since he’s actually in a location shot, while she’s in front of a greenscreen. Well, actually, I wanted to say that, but Ebony totally convinces him… Until Bray goes ballistic and fights his way to her, demanding an explanation.
Amber does her usual “You know what you did so I will not tell you!” bit, and manages to tell him her entire life story about six times without hitting on it.
After repeating the flashback from Dal, she adds that Ebony saved her, then told her that she’d had Bray’s baby. And, because this is Ebony, when she’s lying, everyone believes her, and when she’s telling the truth, no one does. So Amber faked her own death, believing the lie.
Bray should just kill Ebony. He should just break her neck. Like Tirol did to Tory. But instead, he just yells at her a little and believes her when she swears that that Amber hallucinated the whole thing.
Alice and Ellie plot mutiny, loudly enough that even the Chosen who’s guarding them has a hard time not hearing them.
Lex, who knows of only one way to resolve conflict, calls Edward Scissorhands a pussy, so they have a big steel cage match.

• Leah: Pride cometh before the fall
• Ross: Pride also cometh before Amber two times out of three, which is why she’s going to kick his ass to the curb in favor of Bray.

But seriously, Lex gets his ass handed to him, because, as we have previously established, Lex gets always gets his ass kicked. But that means that he and Edward Scissorhands get to be friends now. Of course, Lex was practically gay for nature-boy before.
Episode 7 ends on the startling revelation that Bray and Ebony didn’t have a baby! Wait. We knew that. And Bray’s “proof” is that he found the picture Ebony showed Amber, and he’s got… A good explanation! Wait. Does Bray have some kind of plan here? Seriously? If his word was going to work, oughtn’t it have worked by now?
Actually, his “proof” is that he rips up the photo, which Amber accepts as proof, since Bray would never tear up a photo of his own son. Ebony has another ace up her sleeve, of course, with the metnion of Katy Perry, which basically moves amber from “Jealous and Self-Righteous Anger” to “Ambivalent”
Meanwhile, Selene and May are going to join the Chosen, which makes them look like total bitches, because Selene is determined that no one find out that she’s pregnant and in pretty serious danger of miscarrying if she doesn’t start getting regular meals. May, on the other hand, is just a bitch, at least until the writers decide they like her.
The Guardian and Tyson have the sexiest discussion on theology since the confessions of St. Augustine of Hippo, and Edward Scissorhands shames Amber over the fact that she’s clearly letting her personal feelings get in the way of the fact that helping the city tribes is totally the right thing to do.
Selene, May, and Patsy all agree to join the Chosen, Patsy under duress, May happily, and Selene with reluctance. But Ryan backs out and tells them to get stuffed when they get to the whole “Renounce your former tribe” bit.
The Gaians hole up in a church to plot the retaking of the mall, where Bray and Edward Scissorhands whip them out and compare sizes:
Amber: (To Bray) Pride’s got skills you don’t.
Brainwashing 101 starts out with the Guardian asking the novices to remember how their parents died, share their pain with him, and draw strength from it. Selene ends up brainwashed almost instantly.
Ebony and Lex, who have returned to the city on their own ahead of the Gaians, buy some poison from a young Peter Lorre, as part of their complex plan to kill the Guardian and seize control of the Chosen.
Immediately before invading the mall, Bray asks Edward Scissorhands just how close he is with Amber, and finds out, though he would almost certainly prefer otherwise once Edward Scissorhands explains that they’re New Agey Gaian-Married.
Lex and Ebony corner the Guardian, and are just about to execute him — well, Ebony is, then the Guardian overpowers her, then Lex overpowers him, but he just sort of hmms and haws over the actual murder — when Bray shows up, and Selene decides it would be a good time to scream, thus ruining the whole “surprise” thing.
The battle doesn’t really go anywhere; the Guardian stabs Ebony, the Gaians fight, they see Tyson, then they leave. It’s not clear what they were trying to accomplish, nor whether they actually did it. The Guardian decids to enjoy his favorite pasttimes: reveling in being hated, and threatening Trudy. Afterward, Lex sneaks up for a bit of a cuddle with his wife. Tyson, by the way, has a smallpox innoculation scar. Just thought I’d mention.
Back at the church, Edward Scissorhands explains that both Bray’s plan and Ebony’s were good, but they ought not to have executed them simultaneously. He also is cutely uncomprending of why Ebony is such a bitch.
May is a little too enthusiastic about wanting to catch the traitor the Guardian has imagined is among them, which causes him to suspect her, and accuse her baselessly. I suspect that we’re being shown that Jaffa’s just as crazy as the rest of them, and not just an evil manipulative bastard. Later, May tries to come up with a way to throw suspicion off herself. I suspect that she’s planning to sell out Selene for a pack of smokes, which makes me notice that no one in New Zealand smokes. Funny that. I thought unruly teenagers loved to smoke.

While Trudy makes pronouncements to Patsy about the coming new age, Seline turns down Ryan’s proposal of marriage, and the Chosen’s careful plan to lull everyone into a false sense of security falls apart because they just can’t stop kidnapping people, whose kidnappings get noticed.
Or, it would ruin their plan, except that everyone is too caught up in themselves to notice. Lex and Tyson have become a couple, but have to keep it on the DL because Alice thinks Lex likes her, and no one wants to risk upsetting Alice. Dal’s lusting after Ellie, so it’s a good thing that Jack isn’t nearby. Chloe’s going crazy with abandonment issues. And Trudy convinces Ryan that Bray talked Seline out of marrying him.
When Trudy reveals that Ebony sold her out to the Chosen, it occurs to Bray and Katy Perry that maybe the Chosen haven’t really broken up, and this has all been a smokescreen to lull them into a false sense of security… And Ebony’s behind it all! Because Trudy is entirely trustworthy!
Also, Patsy creepily imitates Trudy’s speech and movement patterns, which I think suggests that she’s a much better actress than the rest of the cast.
While the Chosen kidnap people using the van from The A-Team, Trudy goes to meet with Jaffa, whereupon they reveal to us that the baby Trudy’s been carrying around isn’t really Brady, who the Chosen still have.
The Chosen know that there’s one thing that always works: planting evidence on someone. So thye stick some evidence in Ebony’s pool in order to make it look like she’s behind the kidnappings. That something is Spike’s corpse
As usual, this works like a charm, resulting in civil war.
Seline runs away from home, deciding that Ryan’s too good for her, and happens upon May, the girl who stole Lex’s shoes, while running from a gang of Sharells who appear to be a crossbreed of High School Musical characters and leftover mooks from Power Rangers. Seline throws up, for once without actually meaning to, and May deduces that she’s pregnant. Because basically, there are only three reasons in the world that anyone would throw up. And the virus has died down, so that only leaves pregnancy and bulimia, and Seline’s on a diet.
The Sharells show up at the Mall and accuse Lex of killing their leader, that guy who lived in a tanning booth and wore tinfoil, which prompts Katy Perry to decide that they’re being set up to create civil disorder, but, again, she won’t even consider the possibility that it was anyone but Ebony behind it. Ryan proves he’s still in love with Seline by kicking their asses when he finds out that they were the ones who chased her.
Also, May recognizes Trudy as the Supreme Mother of the Chosen. Of course, if anyone believed her, that might foil their plans. But they don’t, not after Trudy claims that she was just playing along to keep them from taking her baby away.
KC, who hasn’t been paying attention, hires the Sharelles to play at Ryan and Seline’s wedding while he’s stealing a ring for Ryan. All the love and whatnot makes Lex decide to propose to Tyson. She doesn’t believe in marriage, and Leah agrees that in the post-apocalypse, marriage is kind of pointless, especially the sort of fakey and frivolous marriages they have around here. But Tyson comes around when Lex explains it purely in terms of love.
Trudy, by the way, is going to perform the ceremony for Ryan and Seline. Though the Chosen plan to crash the wedding and take over the city.
During the wedding. Patsy leads Ebony to her own murder, wherein the Chosen drive their truck at her, forcing her off a pier into the water, on the theory that, since Ebony basically spent the whole first season in the pool, she probably can’t swim. Trudy performs a ceremony that weirdly oozes with evil that no one notices.
And then they decide they have to kill Patsy too. So if she didn’t get that the Chosen might not be as benevolent as Trudy had been claiming by now, she might have a suspicion now.
Patsy predictably runs back to Trudy, who tips her hand that she’d been playing her the whole time, but Patsy still doesn’t quite get it.
Alice gets herself captured when she bursts in on the Chosen who are in the process of converting or murdering the Locos. She challenges Jaffa to single combat or something, he responds by trying to brainwash her.
Seline forces herself to sleep with Ryan, despite the fact that she now finds him repellant, so that she can sell the idea that the baby’s just a couple of weeks early, instead of the only reason she married him.
The unsurprisingly still-alive Ebony confronts Patsy, and helps her down the road to recovery from evil. Chloe changes Brady since Patsy is too zoned out to notice, causing her to notice Brady’s shiny new penis.
The newly reformed Patsy and Chloe warn Bray that the tribal meeting is a trap, showing up about 5 seconds before the Chosen do so that they’re absolutely no help, except that they manage to stop Bray going in.
The Chosen capture the tribal leaders, then they take the mall because no one believes Alice when she shows up, predictably, ten seconds before the chosen.
Patsy denounces Trudy, at which point, everyone just stands around debating what to do until the Chosen show up and capture them.
The Chosen threaten to execute Katy Perry unless Bray surrenders himself, which he does, but not without bringing a small army with him to kick some ass. The captured mallrats are rescued, but they misplace Ryan in the process (Leah and I think Lex beat him up by accident, as he was wearing a Chosen costume). Finding him unconscious, Selene gives every indication of actually loving him for once.
Bray corners the Guardian and the Chosen, but can’t bring himself to kill the Guardian. Which is unfortunate, because he reveals that he’s actually got an army of what looks like about a thousand men he’s been hiding. Having forced everyone into submission, The GUardian just sits there and looks confused when Lex shows up up in a go-kart and rescues… Bray. Bray?
Anyway, by the time you’ve got your head around this one, Lex has already crashed the go-kart, apparently killing the both of them.
And thus does our season end, not with a bang, but with frakking Ebony looking on from the distance.

Episode 31 is a rave, and my hatred of raves is prevents further comment. In episode 32, however, everyone falls off the wagon: Lex, having cleaned up his act, has a drink with Ryan who is getting drunk to deal with Selene’s refusal to have a baby with him, and this causes him to regress into full-on alcoholic asshole mode. Meanwhile, Ebony confesses her love for Bray, and he rejects her, causing her to fall off the “goodness” wagon and go back to full-on evil mode. And the rest of the tribes decide that they’ve had about enough of the Mallrats trying to restore order and everything, and return to lawlessness.
Which is, of course, the perfect time for Trudy to come back, quite obviously brainwashed and crazy. Also, we get to see Katy Perry in bed with Bray.
No one is at all suspicious of Trudy’s return, despite the fact that thus far, they have always been suspicious of everyone for everything.
By the way, for some reason, Ebony has “Aba Messiah” tattooed on her arm. That’s the name of the closing theme music. They really like their own soundtrack.
Alice returns to the farm out of anger at Lex’s claims to have gotten back on the wagon, where she is crushed by the only thing larger than herself, a barn.
Between sex and sloppy makeouts, Katy Perry decides to organize a tribal forum to prepare a defense against the Chosen, while Selene yells at Ryan for not coming up with a better way to reconcile with her despite the fact that she never gives him a chance to speak.
Bray and Katy Perry have some pillow talk about Bray’s reluctance to bed her on the morning of the Tribal Forum, now that Trudy is back.

• Katy Perry: It means that you were obviously glad to see her, and it means I know that you and her have some kind of history
• Leah: True and true.
• Katy Perry: … And it means I’m being a jealous cow.
• Leah and Ross: True!

Later, Katy Perry catches Bray calming Selene down when she freaks out about Ryan going out into the big scary city where the Chosen might nab him. Katy Perry decides that “Jealous Cow” works for her, so she becomes jealous and mean.
Speaking of Ryan, he’s out in the big scary city with Ellie, tracking down a rumor about a Chosen in “sector 13”. Do cities anywhere have numbered sectors like that? (Fun Fact: Paris does.) He decides not to come home with her, and instead, to go climb a mountain and off himself.
Katy Perry and Bray fight, then make up, which makes Selene sad, as she’s realized that she’s secretly still in love with Bray. Meanwhile, Chloe has noticed that Trudy isn’t herself any more, but no one else really believes her despite her creepy weirdness.
Bray goes to visit a tribe who wear silly costumes and live in a place lit entirely by blacklight, causing me to wonder why I haven’t noticed so far that everyone is evolving into extras from The Warriors.
Alice goes on a date with Lex, to Lex’s chagrin, because he can’t muster the balls to forthrightly reject her. Personally, I think Lex should just try showing her some affection — she’ll run a mile. Or kill him, since as we know, Lex can only show affection in the form of rape attempts.
Patsy makes cryptic comments that imply she’s being brainwashed by Trudy. then gives Chloe a scary jack-in-the-box. Ellie meets a cute boy who convinces her that the Chosen have broken up. She prints it in the newsletter, and everyone believes it since if you see it in the Sun, it’s so.
Episode 30 ends with the guy who convinced Ellie that the Chosen had broken up meeting with someone who is obviously a Chosen in the sewers to be told that it is Time To Put Their Evil Plans In Action. Shadowy figure? Well, if you haven’t worked out who it is by now, I’m not going to tell you.

Selene tries to talk Lex out of being a drunk, and Lex opens up to her, then tries to sleep with her. Which finally makes Ryan grow a pair and confront Lex. Lex’s Jack Sparrow imitation doesn’t help matters and it’s only Bray’s intervention that stops Ryan from out and out murdering him.
This ends with Lex getting thrown out of the Mall, leavign Ebony one step closer to her evil plan of total domination. By the way. she more or less explicltly told Katy Perry that she set her up in order to get rid of her as a threat to her power over Bray.
Ryan, who, in spite of being a moron, is probably the nicest guy on the show and may even be the most emotionally stable, declares that he doesn’t blame Selene, and that he does want to sleep with her, but he’s concerned that if he submits to his lust, it makes him no better than Lex. Ryan, if you think about Lex every time you get an erection, you’ve probably got some other issues to work out. But Selene will have none of Ryan’s homoerotic fixations, and beds him.
Ebony gives the prosecutorial speech at Katy Perry’s trial. Everyone finds her very convincing, because no one has noticed that everything Ebony has EVER said has been a lie. Bray, for the defense, gives a terrible speech, causing the episode to devolve into a clip show.
When Alice accuses Ebony outright, everyone is so pleased that someone has finally said the most obvious thing ever that it triggers a flashback to Ebony buying the poison. Now, we all knew that Ebony did the poisoning, so it’s not like we didn’t see this coming. Leah works it out for me: They’re trying to do a CSI thing. Thus, when Ebony accuses Katy Perry of being a spy for the Chosen, we have a flashback of the Chosen. And everyone finds this unsubstantiated accusation very compelling, because, as close as I can tell, they can see the same flashbacks as we do.
In fact, Katy Perry’s tissue of lies of a backstory turns out to be motivated by the fact that her dad created the Virus. Bray, to his credit, does not get confused and think that Katy Perry has just claimed that her father was a comet. Good thing it wasn’t Ryan taking her confession.
Leah thinks Katy Perry is overreacting, because it’s not like she created the virus, and I point out that we’re basically the only civilization in the history of mankind who hasn’t held children responsible for the sins of their fathers.
Bray tries to save Katy Perry by confessing to having told Ebony the formula, which for some reason makes her look even more guilty and gives Ebony even more power. (Some reason == “Because Bray is terrible, terrible at explaining things”)
Chloe and Patsy decided Katy Perry did it right away and haven’t been listening to the trial, really, because that might cause them to learn something that makes them reconsider their knee-jerk reaction. So the republican party will survive the apocalypse. So when the “not guilty” verdict comes in, they decide they’ll never trust Bray again, and run away or something.
Spike either takes the fall for the frame-up job, or Ebony frames him instead, they don’t specify which. He definitely leaves on some evil mission at Ebony’s order, but it’s not specified whether his mission is to take the fall, or sending him away was just an excuse to get him out of the way so he’d be a good fall guy.
Katy Perry puts her hair down, which makes her look less like Katy Perry. Also, she’s actually looked much more like Zooey Deschanel this whole time, but I can’t see myself spelling that name more than once.
Oh, I had a revelation in the shower last night. Pre-Zoot Martin looks exactly like Nick Stahl, circa Disturbing Behavior (I just discovered he was also John Connor in Terminator 3, but I did not recognize him at that).
Lex gives his last watch to Vanilla Ice in order to get into a bar, and promptly gets thrown out because Lex is unable to show affection in any form other than attempted rape.
Ryan and Selene are just about to do it when Dal reveals that he’s traded for some diesel and wants them to help him learn to drive a tractor, a distraction which gives Ryan a chance to — well, he’s about to have sex, so let’s guess what he thinks about. Seriously, every time this guy gets wood. Ryan’s consumed with guilt over Lex, and Seline sends him off to go find him.
Once everyone finds out Katy Perry’s deep dark secret, they decide that while they don’t actually hate her because her father ended civilization, they find her lying about it to be the same class of bad as the adults used to wipe themselves out. And since they can’t trust Bray, and they can’t trust Katy Perry, and they can’t trust Lex Luthor, Ebony suggests that she’d be a great leader, as she can be trusted.
Katy Perry decides to do a runner, and Bray tries to talk her down,. She doesn’t believe the others will ever forgive and forget, because she’s new to the cast — as Bray well knows, the Mallrats have the collective memory of a goldfish with head trauma.
Captain Jack Sparrow — sorry, Lex — pours his heart out to some strays in order to allow his healing process to begin. They steal the nothing he has, including his shoes.
Dal’s found a pentacle on the farm, causing Tyson for the first time to notice that the symbol of their tribe is a pentacl. She takes it as a sign that the symbol on the amulet Dal found just happens to be the same as the symbol of the Mall Rats which just happens to be one of the most ancient and common symbols in the history of western civilization.
Lex’s return beings with it the alarming news that it now appears the virus has run its course and the antidote is no longer a pressing need, which is a problem, since the need to get the antidote is basically the only thing holding civilization together at this point.
They decide to resolve this issue by not telling anyone, with leads to the series changing into a kind of absurdist political drama, with the gang organizing urban renewal, and Katy Perry granting divorces to ten-year-olds. Poor Lex finds himself confused by the sudden calling everyone finds to do real work, while Dal and Ryan moon over their first pumpkin, which is introduced along with a romantic remix of the theme music, which, as I have mentioned, is the only piece of incidental music they have.
Spike has decided he’s unhappy with having been framed, and begins to plot revenge. As people to have plotting your downfall go, I would totally want it to be Spike.
Spike has his legion of Michael Meyers impersonators grab Ebony when she shows up to intimidate him into submission. Like Trudy before him, once he’s got Ebony completely in his power, the first thing he wants is to make her shut up. I hope this becomes a pattern.
Leah points out that in the post-apocalypse, people have given up surnames. This makes me think about the tendency of people not to have last names in kids’ shows.
KC skips school in order to buy rotten tomatoes with which to feed the crazy kleptomaniac they keep locked up in the basement. Lex and Alice both take note of this, and at this point, I discover that Lex is the guy they’re talking about when they claim that there are people who say “to-mah-toe”.
In bondage, Ebony flashes back to Zoot, who apparently abused her in weird ways, giving Tyson a vision, which leads her to gather the Mallrats to go rescue her, which is complicated by the fact that (a) they don’t believe in her psychic visions, and (2) they don’t especially want Ebony back.
When Ellie and Jack catch Patsy, Chloe, and KC making book on which of the resident couples will have the longest snog of the day, she yells at them, causing Patsy to realize that she really needs to find herself a man. Yes. Really.
Since it appears that the virus has died out and no one needs the antidote any more, civilization is sort of hanging on by a thread, what with the threat of the virus being the only thing keeping everyone in line. Fortunately, the Mallrats carefully avoid letting anyone cotton on to this and thwart the rumors. Except for Lex. who gets in a fight with someone and shouts that he doesn’t need the antidote.
Which leads to everyone deciding that they don’t need the antidote, which basically ends civilization. Fortunately, Tyson and Alice rescue Ebony, which is fortunate, um, for some reason. But she’s been reduced to a gibbering wreck from being locked in a closet. No one’s interested in trade or farming or urban renewal or anything now that they don’t need the antidote. So, for example, thye trash Dal’s milk, because they don’t trust that it’s not secretly antidote, which they don’t need. Instead it’s food, which they also think they don’t need. Because the human race does not deserve to live.
And in case you missed the memo on how being locked in a dark place and ordered to beg for her freedom was linked to a traumatic incident in her past, and that’s why she cracked up like this, Tyson poorly summarizes the end of 1984 to make it explicit.
As Ebony suffers from a bad case of Zoot Flashbacks, an angry pitchfork-weilding mob descends on the mall, shouting that the Mallrats conned them out of the nothing they’d been paying for antidote. Fortunately, mention of Bray brings Ebony around, who promptly shouts down the angry mob by pointing out that the Mallrats gave them the antidote for free, climbed through a minefield, found the antidote, created trade, promoted the arts, and, the way she tells it, was experimenting on themselves to be sure that no one needed the antidote.
Bray whines that everyone listens to Ebony but not to him.

• Leah: That’s because she hasn’t lied to them so much.
• Ross: Everything Ebony has ever said has been a lie!
• Leah: She’s better at it.
• Ross: At least she’s consistent.

Tyson explains to Ebony that the key to her recovery is to admit her feelings for Bray, as if somehow Ebony had ever made any sort of secret about wanting Bray.
Meanwhile, back in reality, a thirty year old man (me) is sitting in his armchair with a pain in his back, humming “Aba Messiah”, the end theme to this show. His fiancee (that’s Leah) is in the kitchen, getting two glasses of plum wine. She suddenly shouts in that she really wanted me to pause the show and is annoyed that I haven’t. I explain that I have, some time ago. She says that it doesn’t sound like I did. This story should serve to illustrate that this show has no repitoire of incidental music.
Ellie wants to publish everything they know about the virus, but she knows that Katy Perry will be anathematized. But she really wants to publish, so she decides to ask Ebony’s opinion, because either Ellie is an idiot, or because she knows Ebony will tell her to fuck over Katy Perry.
Unimaginably, Ebony tells her not to publish, which either means that she’s really turned over a new leaf, or this is the most complex gambit ever.
Katy Perry and Bray have decided to invent money again. The system is this: At the beginning of the day, they loan each trader ten tokens. All day. they trade and make profit. At the end of the day. they reclaim ten tokens from each trader.
Leah actually makes me stop the video at this point so we can discuss the flaws with this system. I come to the conclusion that: ‘Yes, this system is based on the idea that if you just move money around fast enough, it will reproduce. However, I feel the need to point out that this is also the basis of our economic system.”
Episode 30 ends with Lex having let their entire economy be stolen while he’s sleeping it off, Ellie tearing up her newsletter because Katy Perry had to go and make herself seem like a real person who could get hurt instead of an abstract concept to betray in the name of journalism, and, um, there’s something up with Ebony.

Ryan sleeps not just fully clothed, but in combat gear. This is because Ryan has impure thoughts when he shares a bed with Selene, and is spooks him.
Ebony (to Bray): If I have to be under a leader, I’d rather be under you than under any guy I know.
Amber’s death has turned Bray into a giant pussy and, um, well, Morrissey, I think. he’s too busy moping to do anything remotely useful.
Tyson keeps getting uglier. I wonder if they’re trying to incrementally replace her with another actress.
After rescuing Trudy from some ruffians who take advantage of her just wandering around randomly asking people if they’ve seen her baby, Selene has a heart-to-heart with Ellie, who makes her question whether her cozy relationship with Ryan is deficient.
Katy Perry has written a draft of their bill of rights, in the form of a piece of paper with the word “BILL OF RIGHTS” written on it, and she freaks out when Jack starts to worry about the possibility that “It was a deadly space comet” is actually not a very convincing explanation. He also fails to notice when Ellie walks in wearing what looks like a cheerleader uniform. Maybe that’s not a big deal in New Zealand.
Tyson’s obsession with making Bray get the formula right seems to be an attempt to cockblock Bray from getting it on with Kary Perry.
The Chosen reveal themselves to be called “The Chosen” and to worship Zoot, and have kidnapped Trudy’s baby, who they somehow know is Zoot’s son, when they rough up Dal.
Having decided that the Chosen have probably got Brady, Bray immediately wnats to go out to fight them, but everyone points out that as he now knows the secret of the antidote, he can’t be let out. He insists that he wouldn’t reveal the secret under torture, Ellie points out that he might talk if they threatened one of the other Mallrats, or Brady. Which I believe proves that only Lex and Ebony could be trusted with the formula. Huh.
Selene’s sexy negligee totally fails to attract Ryan, raising my suspicion that he’s actually an eunuch following a tragic incident as a child involving a mechanical rice-picker, and prompting Lex to tell Patsy and Chloe that Ryan’s a virgin.
Jack, rewatching the tape, finds that no one told the president (of wherever) that his mic was still on when, immediately afterward, he talks to someone unseen about how the whole press release was a lie. But, of course, the tape breaks before he can show anyone else.
Ebony hits KC upside the head with a baseball bat for no clear reason, then listens in during a recitication of The Chosen’s FAQ:

• Q. Who am I?
• A. You are the guardian of Zoot’s legacy.
• Q.Who are you?
• A. We are The Chosen
• Q. What will you inherit?
• A. Power and Chaos
• Q. Who is number one?
• A. You are number six
• Q. Who do you serve, and who do you trust?

Also, “The Guardian”‘s real name is “Jaffa”. Kree!
Ryan’s total inability to notice that Selene has done everything shy of stripping naked and spreading eagle has finally made Selene fall off the wagon.
Meanwhile Ebony, having found Brady, decides the best thing to do is lure Trudy to the Chosen instead of rescuing Brady.
Ryan makes the mistake of going to Lex Luthor for advise on sex. Lex tells her the same advice my roommate summer after sophomore year told me: “Be a total jackass. Women secretly love that.”
Later, the Chosen have named Trudy to be their holy mother, and tell her that while they won’t let her go, they otherwise kinda have to do as she says, starting with killing Ebony if she so chooses, which serves as an excuse for a whole-episode flashback to back when Zoot was Martin, Bray didn’t have a rattail, and Trudy was a shy girl with a red headscarf and a crush on Bray.
They seem to attend some sort of weird fascist school where everyone wears a barcode, a headscarf, and a purple triangle or yellow circle on their shirt. Except for Ebony, the new girl, who dresses slutty and no one seems to notice. I will point out that for all I know, that is now schools work in New Zealand.
All whored up for the school dance, Trudy looks kind of like someone, but I can’t recall who. Turns out that Trudy ended up with Pre-Zoot Martin (Who was a total loser) because Ebony convinced Bray that poor Martin might become suicidal if Trudy ended up with the older, cuter brother.
The flashback also gives us a chance to finally see that three second clip of news footage they show during the titles. It’s still pre-fall, and the collapse of civilization seems to be happening very slowly, despite all the claims of the virus happening “too fast”. We get to see Zoot found his movement, and, while we never actually saw what happened, it’s at this point that Martin’s eyes turned all creepy. I assume that with his mother dead, there was no one left to tell him not to look into the eyes of the sun (‘Coz momma, that’s where the fun is).
We get to see poor Bray angsting over his dying father. He’s got the original form of the virus, which causes festering sores instead of fake-old.
And now we have a definitive timeline for the virus. Bray and Martin lost their parents nine months before the beginning of the series, and there were still adults left at that point. The collapse of civilization took no more than, let’s say, six months. We may also conclude that Bray’s rattail nine months older than Brady.
Ebony gets sick of Trudy’s yammering at the same time as I do, so Trudy has Jaffa send her away to be placed in bondage.
Fun Fact: The flashback episode, Season 2, episode 14, is the only episode of The Tribe in which Lex does not appear.
Ryan and Selene, having decided that they do indeed love each other, but are not going to cave to the pressure of having sex until they’re both ready, decide that they’re both ready and should have sex. Except that this is when everyone notices that Trudy has disappeared.
Trudy decides to trust Ebony to go get the others and helps her escape. This is because Trudy, like everyone else in this show, is utterly unable to learn from the past.
Ellie confides her desire to be jumped by Jack to her sister, who suggests that Ellie just swallow her pride and jump Jack herself (By the way, in case you missed it, Jack is the kid I used to call “Kiwi Love Actually Kid”, but I’ve gotten tired of that). Then Alice snogs Jack just to make him uncomfortable.
At the final showdown, the Mall Rats corner the Chosen, and Trudy escapes by the simple expedient of shoving them a bit. But Lex, eager to start a fight, has gotten himself captured, and when they threaten to kill him, Trudy for some reason gives herself and her baby up to the crazy death cultists.
Five mintues into episode 17, Leah asks me who the slutty-looking young girl is. It turns out to be Patsy, who has by now whored herself up so much that Leah can’t recognize her any more.
Lex and Bray beat each other up. The next morning, Tyson cockblocks Katy Perry to give Bray some herbal tea for his bruises.

• Leah: (Tyson voice) Actually, you’re not supposed to drink it
• Ross: (For the 100th time this series) (Professor Farnsworth voice) It’s a suppository

Bray makes Ebony joint leader because she threatens to destroy civilization by releasing the antidote. The others go along with this, because they are about as good at voting in their own interests as the state of Kansas. This comes to a head in the form of Tyson and Ebony reciting platitudes at each other.
Ryan relates the story of why Lex is such a jackass, revealing that in the days before the adults died, big kids like himself were all conscripted and sent to boot camp. In this boot camp, everyone wears barcode armbands, all the drill sergeants are women, and the boys wear black headscarfs. Leah feels sympathy for Lex after his backstory, in which we see that lex was an asshole at boot camp, and was punished for it.
Jack tries to profess his love for Ellie in the form of a flash animation, but she misses it because she’s had to go to the farm with Dal to help a sheep give birth. When the legs are in the wrong position, though, we are treated to the worst analogy ever: “It’s like trying to pull a half-open umbrella through a drain pipe.” Dal successfully delivers the lamb, a scene which would have grossed me out a lot more if I hadn’t watched All Creatures Great and Small.
The stress of recent events sends Lex Luthor on a drunken bender. Meanwhile, Bray tries to set down a bill of rights for the tribes, but Ebony wants the death penalty, and Tyson doesn’t want rules, because they crimp everyone following their own destiny and doing whatever they feel is best.
Ebony pours some home-made bromo-seltzer into someone’s supply of Antidote as part of what is either a brilliant master plan, or, more likely, her just randomly acting evil just to be contrary.
After signing the bill of rights, everyone throws a rave, because that’s how things work in the new future. Did I mention how much the rave scene from The Matrix Reloaded pissed me off?
Lex’s drunken antics ruin the party, which prompts everyone to realize that, as fellow Mallrats, it’s their duty to help Lex get over his addiction. At this point, it occurs to me that the symbol Selene wears on her head these days is, if I’m recalling correctly, Metatron’s Circle.

• Leah: You know what this show teaches me? Being a leader is hard.
• Ross: Especially when you’re terrible at it.

Unfortunately, Tyson doesn’t feel that it’s her destiny to clean up after herself when she spills her poisoned antidote, which is sad because I do not like Tyson and would not mind if she died. Instead, Mr. Checkov fires his gun by having the dog who has developed a taste for antidote thanks to Panty and Chloe slipping him some on the DL, be nearby and willing to help.
Episode 20, therefore, begins with the funeral of Bob, including a Really Dead Montage to drive the point home, along with the power chord version of the theme song, because this show has no incidental music other than various arrangements of the theme song.
Tyson sorts out that Bob’s death was by poison meant for her, and Bray confronts Ebony about it. Her excuse is that she could not possibly have tried to kill Tyson, since she’s way better at murder than that, and had she wanted to kill her, she’d have been more direct, and not fucked it up. Bray believes this, because Bray has a radically inaccurate estimate of Ebony’s effectiveness as a villain.
Ebony keeps pausing to sound threatening in the middle of sentences. It makes her sound like Shatner. She finds the poison in Katy Perry’s room, and everyone thinks this is a fair cop, because they have fallen for this exact set-up before.

And the message is: “There is an antidote. It’s in all the major cities. Go find it.” So, um, thanks. It also triggers Eagle Mountain’s self destruct. When will they ever learn? Meanwhile, a bunch of creepy guys and their white-robed leader take the satellite as a sign that the time is upon them. For whatever. Also, they’re Zoot-worshippers. Yeah. Zoot’s got himself a cult. It took Jesus longer to get a religion.
When the smoke clears, Bray’s out cold, and Amber and Zandra are both dead. Or, at least, they bury them. As this is a soap opera, it’s entirely possible that they’re just in comas and will wake up with amnesia. Also, where did the Zoot-worshipers find a supply of Sci Fi Robes And Togas.
Losing his wife and potential child has made Lex Luthor a lot less argumentative. The cultists, meanwhile, have a flashback to Zoot’s funeral pyre, which they weren’t at, and grafitti in the background reveals that the Locos spell their name “Loco’s”, so even after the apocalypse, people still can’t use frakking apostrophes properly.
Ebony offers to let Lex Luthor be the king to her queen when they find the antidote and use it to rule the world. I want to make a “queen” joke, but in New Zealand, all the men are far too butch for this to work. Lex tips his hand to Ebony about his illiteracy when he goes out for food and comes back with escargots and capers. With the help of Tyson, they find the antidote, brewing in a glowing slurpee machine.
Bray finds a swanky room in a govenrment building full of Egyptian artifacts, marble columns, and taxidermied animals. What exactly does the New Zealand government do? He meets replacement Amber there, who has a crossbow. What does the New Zealand government do, exactly?
The hatless wonder is now wandering about the mall in a fugue. When Patsy wakes up in the middle of the night and sees him, everyone thinks she’s just imagining things. Leah is by now shouting at the screen about them leaving the doors unlocked. KC beats the shit out of him with a big stick, finally. But Asshat’s got the virus, saving them the trouble of killing him.
Everyone but Lex and Ebony want to give the antidote away rather than selling it. Everyone else has forgotten that they don’t actually have, like, food, water, or anything worth speaking of. This makes Replacement Amber (Who appears to be played by Katy Perry as she would have appeared in the 1980s) angry.
Cloey keeps trying to sneak some antidote for the dog, even though animals don’t get the virus. This won’t end well. Meanwhile, Lex starts freaking out that he needs more antidote. Jack and Dal go to find the formula, but the folder is empty, because Tyson is a crazy bitch and took the formula, as she still thinks that the real cure is meditation. So she burns it.
I have never used the phrase “Meanwhile, back at the ranch” more aproposly, but meanwhile, back at the ranch, the fat girl and the blonde girl we’ve never seen before have a spirited exchange which indicates that she may become a regular in the near future. Also, they’ve cleaned her up a bit to make her more acceptable as a character than her initial filthy hick appearance.
Meanwhile, Tyson is going to try to cure the virus using ancient chinese medicine, in order to prove its superiority to western medicine. In New Zealand, the fact that the Chinese girl disapproves of western medicine and is willing to sell out mankind’s last hope in order to prove the superiority of chinese culture doesn’t seem quite as racially insensitive. Katy Perry is concerned that maybe they should give the last of the antidote and give it to Lex instead of trying to have Jack reverse engineer it, but she’s outvoted. Instead, they go out to get lab equipment, and are chased by a mob of small children in old age makeup who insist that even though the Mall Rats freely gave it away before, the fact that now they won’t means that they’re hiding it.
Lex catches Jack and Bray trying to formulate more antidote, and quaffs it, sure that it’s all he needs. Of course, if it turns out that he actually needs a weekly dose for six months, oh well. When the fat girl shows up, though, Lex decides that it’s serious, and makes some fake antidote to appease them. It occurs to Bray, though, that there is only so long before the angry mob comes back, angrier for being conned, but Leah and I are hoping that the poster paint they used for color turns out to be the secret ingredient in the real antidote.
The Cult of Zoot is still on the way to their destiny. They’ve now been traveling for, I think, seven years. I think they must be coming from Melbourne. I hear Zoot’s big there.
Tyson succeeds in making the antidote from roots and berries, though, so the day might be saved. Which is good news for them, except that Tyson is going to keep her ancient chinese wisdom to herself, so they all have to defend her. I think the idea is actually that she’s memorized the formula, and somehow worked out how to reproduce it from plants. This is bullshit, of course, but prophetic visions also work in this world.
Bob the Dog looks sort of ill. Also, Lex decides to celebrate his recovery by deciding he’s mourned his dead wife long enough and it’s time to put the moves on Tyson. Also, someone breaks it to him that there’s every chance he’s going to need to keep taking the antidote for the rest of his life.
Tyson reveals that the writers have totally changed their mind about her characterization, by making her degenerate into a tinpot dictator with her newfound power. It takes thirty seconds for the Locos to break into the mall and they finally show some of that can-do spirit by beating the dog to death with a baseball bat and threatening to break Magenta’s neck. Ebony resolves the situation by hiring them.
Fat girl realizes she’s been had, and either decks herself out in war-paint or just besmirches herself with mud, depending on your point of view. More on her later.
Ebony decides that she wants Lex, either for sex (Which seems unimaginable) or to somehow advance her power base, so she gives him the Locos as a present, then tries to seduce him during his spongebath. His spongebath which does not remove his makeup goatee. Leah would like to remind you that the makeup goatee looks really, really stupid.
Episode 4 ends with a gorilla arm grabbing Lex Luthor, which Leah tells me is Alice, the Fat Chyk. She forces Lex to take her up to Tyson, who Alice kidnaps along with some antidote for the afforementioned little sister. Everyone points out that for this entire season, Lex has not succeeded at his job of “Head of Security” all season.
Somehow during the night, Magenta has changed her haircut, focing me to start calling her Selene, which has been her name all along. Ryan changes his hair too, adding patches of blue, because he’s uncomfortable with the idea of sleeping with Selene, despite the fact that she’s moved in with him.
Ebony has changed her hair by the morning.

• Ross: When do they have time to keep changing their hair?
• Leah: They have nothing better to do all day.
• Ross: Except survival

Incidentally, Tyson’s instant brewing of the antidote undermines the theory I came up at work today about why the antidote didn’t save mankind. I mean, that whole ‘There is antidote in every city in the world, but the virus spread too fast for us to save the populace, not a single adult bothered taking the antidote, dying of it even as they ferried it to every city in the world. I reckon that, as Lex and Ebony found it brewing in a percolator, maybe the stuff took, say, six weeks to brew. Jossed.
When Alice’s sister gets better, she pledges her undying fidelity to Tyson, in a creepy “more than friends” way. Lex Luthor and Ebony have already set out to rescue her, with Katy Perry following to make sure they don’t try to just kidnap Tyson and use her to corner the antidote market. Ebony and Lex decide to discuss their plan to kidnap Tyson and use her to corner the antidote market while standing about three feet ahead of them. Fortunately, Alice and her sister who looks sort of like someone but I haven’t worked out who yet follow them home, having decided to be Tyson’s personal bodyguard.
Patsy and Cloey, having redone their makeup to make themselves look like a couple of whores, tend to Bob, who turns out to not quite be dead yet, but we can hope. The gang makesa lucrative living giving the antidote away for free (And by “free”, I mean “We don’t charge you, but we do take away any weapons you have on you. Also KC walks the line conning people out of anything fun.”)
Leah agrees that Ellie (Alice’s sister) looks like someone, and can’t recall who either. Also, she points out that the cars are still burning. They get to be part of the Tribe, in return for which the less interesting characters (Dal, Ryan, Selene, Patsy, and Chloe) will get shipped out to the farm, to avoid the shift in the earth’s gravitational field caused by Alice moving.
Meanwhile, the evil cultists, clad in what I think are a combination of a fencing mask, jawa costume, and a Snuggee, have finally reached a hill overlooking the city. This portents something. Maybe someday we’ll find out what.
Leah has deduced that the person Ellie looks like is George Lass from Dead Like Me. Lex Luthor’s beard has retracted to a single stripe, but he’s grown a stripe vertically through one eye.
Alice: I’m your bodyguard. I’m supposed to take care iof… your body.
Alice, for what it’s worth, looks like, um, a pirate queen of some sort. Jack is sweet on Ellie, who offers to teach him about this earth thing we call “girls”.
Bray and Katy Perry propose a new tribe leader meeting, since the last one went so well. Leah points out that Bray’s rat-tail is so long that it is totally infeasible that he only started growing it after the apocalypse.

• Ryan: I’m sorry about that dumb thing I said.
• Selene: Which one, Ryan?

Ryan reveals to Selene that he’s terrified that horniness will make him a jackass like Lex. This is the most reasonable thing Ryan has ever said.
Ellie and Jack move toward this earth thing we call “kissing” after she gets him a brand new 1999 iMac, which is sweet and all, and possibly more interesting than Bray’s inter-tribe meeting, where he manages to get everyone, even this “amazon” tribe whose leader fills the screen with hideousness, to agree to peace just before the crazy cultists, who the credits tell me are “The Guardians”, show up to do their “Kneel Before Zod” routine.
Or rather, they come in, take off their masks, stand there silently as Katy Perry tries to give them the antidote, then leave. This creeps out the other tribes enough that they all up and abandon the meeting.
Ryan doesn’t enjoy farming, and Freema Ageyman starts making strange cryptic comments about earth goddess-y type stuff.
Patsy and Cloey, now in full-on prostitot form, have found a way to rationalize away accepting bribes for the antidote even after condemning KC for doing pretty much the same thing.
The guy who refused the antidote dies, allowing us to discover that “The Chosen” are a death cult, who are in favor of everyone dying. They also have Zoot’s hat, which prompts a flashback to Zoot, reminding me that in the throes of plague fever, Ellie also had a Zoot flashback. This guy gets around.
Tyson’s new ‘do in episode 8 makes her look like Sharon “Athena” Agathon (Not that whore Sharon “Boomer” Valerii). Alice takes one look at her and decides that her listlessness and stuffed nose are textbook symptoms of The Virus, which is strange, because previously, the only symptom they ever noted in anyone was the Incurable Cough of Death and a bad case of Old.
After eight hours of gambling, Lex cottons on to the fact that they’ve been letting him win, and for some reason this upsets him.
Meanwhile, Jack and Ellie have found a VHS cassette documenting the evil which led to the virus, which makes Katy Perry freak out, indicating that she was somehow behidn the release of the virus.
Because he’s evil and sneaky, KC breaks into the lab and fiddles with stuff, lookign to find the missing details they need to make the antidote on their own. Because he’s an idiot, he turns on a bunsen burner and leaves it on. Because the writers forgot that you need a gas supply for a bunsen burner to work, this starts filling the mall with deadly gas. Because Tyson has a cold, she doesn’t smell the gas. Because she’s also apparently deaf, she can’t hear the 100 dB hissing sound it makes. Consequentially, she gets blown up.
Meanwhile, having hired Patsy The Tween Whore as Brady’s babysitter, Trudy proceeds to mack on Bray, causing everyone to leave the baby unattended long enough for the Jawas to kidnap her.
It occurs to Lex Luthor that Tyson blowing herself up is not merely inconvenient for him, it’s also kind of sad and unfortunate. The explosion seems to have made Ryan turn blonde, and the stress of the baby going missing has changed Bray’s makeup.
KC proposes himself to go scout around to find out if anyone took Brady to ransom for the antidote, I think because, stupid though he is, he knows he oughtn’t to be anywhere near Alice for a while. Especially as ALice has inspected the propane tank and deduced that the valve didn’t fail, but was left open. Because Alice is Sherlock Holmes, and, so close as I can tell, is totally in love with Tyson.
Bray catches Ebony searching Tyson’s lab and accuses her of not being very good at security in a conversation where, for no clear reason, Ebony decides to rapidly cycle between a cockney and a southern belle accent.
While trying to cheer up Cloey, Ryan tries to interest her in a jigsaw puzzle, but, because it’s dramatically handy to say it, he notes upon opening the box that there’s a piece missing. I don’t know if you’ve ever opened the box that a jigsaw puzzle comes in, but the ability to see that a piece is missing like that, it now appears that Ryan is some sort of Savant.
Ebony and the ex-Locos return from their search to reveal that they have done nothing all day except lose the dog.
Tyson awakens from her coma, and reveals that the thing I have been waiting for since I determined that this is a soap opera: she has… AMNESIA! (Duh-dun-DUN!)
Trudy is pretty good at portraying a mother who is going out of her mind with pain at the disappearance of her baby. In fact, when she’s playing crazy is really when this actress is at her best. Except… Well… Maybe Kiwi Culture is different. But I think if there was a time to use profanity, this would be it.
Jack manages to play the video take he recovered from evil HQ, wherein the Kiwi president, pasty Barack Obama (He may be meant to be the American president, since there’s a red phone and a globe on his Ikea desk and I think he’s faking an American accent, but not very well.) He reveals that the plague came from… A comet. Yes. A comet. From space. This is like the explanation they tack on to Japanese release of Night of the Living Dead. Jack and Ellie consider this huge information, despite the fact that it basically does nopt resolve to anything actionable. And what the hell does it have to do with the anti-aging experiments on Hope Island? And why was Katy Perry so worried about jack seeing the tape? Everyone thinks that this somehow “explains everything”. Explains everything? Really? Well, “At least we didn’t do it to ourselves.” Because that would actually be some kind of moral, and this show doesn’t have morals.
Unbelievably, Tyson’s amnesia goes away all on its own by the end of the episode, and prompts her to give herself a new and terrible makeup job. Also, her face still looks kind of puffy. She gets to end the episode on the amazing cliffhanger that she’s realized that it’s not safe to keep the formula to herself, so she’s going to tell it to….
Bray.
Not much of a cliffhanger, actually.

• Sir Toppum Hat leads his merry band in their attack on the Mall, facing Jack’s many ineffectual Home Alone-style traps. They cause some comical pratfalls, but don’t actually slow them down or hurt any of them
• A bunch of (literally) clowns have just totally owned the mall rats.
• Hey, I wonder what became of all the actual weapons. Maybe New Zealand doesn’t have any.
• Zandra, being the calm, rational sort, decides that it’s all Tyson’s fault for trying to cure Lex, and decides that instead of trying to stop the invasion, she’ll just try to kill Tyson instead.
• Their best trap, dropping the gate to imprison Evil Boy George, nearly works, except that the gate gets stuck. Ryan just stands there watching in terror instead of, say, kicking the mad clown’s brains in.
• Leah notes that the music during the fight, basically the only piece of incidental music in the show, is a terrible fit. I think it’s the tribal chanting bit from the background vocals to the song “Return to Innocence”. When that runs out, for no clear reason, they just switch to the instumental version of the theme music. Wait. Now they’ve introduced a new piece of music, an ass-kicking guitar version… of the same fucking song.
• Using the last remaining plot twist from Captain Power evil Boy George turns the tables by revealing that… Contrary to expectations, none of the clowns are actually hurt. At which point everyone gives up
• Top Hat’s version of tormenting his slaves seems to jsut be shaking them a bit and acting crazy. Seriously, they would not have lost if they’d proved willing to actually try to hurt someone.
• Top Hat appears to be taking a shine to Zandra. Unfortunately, Top Hat shows affection the same way Lex Luthor does.
• KC saves Zandra from a fate worse than being married to Lex by tugging on Boy George a bit until he falls off of Zandra. Again, hit him in the head until he stops moving. Instead, he just annoys Boy George, who locks up the tribe and leaves them to die when he sets the mall on fire.
• At least the pile of junk Tophat sets on fire isn’t made of cars. Those burn forever
• I’ve just figured out what the clown tribe’s fighting style reminds me of. Grover Dill from A Christmas Story. The way neither he nor his toady ever actually did anything, just sort of snarled menacingly and pushed people a little. Soon as someone tried to actually hurt them instead of inciting playground terror, they totally folded.
• Note to kids: this only works on TV. Real bullies punch back. Real bullies are not cowards who cave when you stand up to them. Real bullies don’t think the way normal people do: they don’t comprehend that what they are doing is wrong, and will not comprehend that their actions have negative consequences.
• Lex Luthor manages to convince Ebony to help by… Getting old at her. Seriously. The prospect that he’s been hanging around there infecting all of them with the virus makes Ebony get off her ass and come to save them all.
• Ebony makes creepy suggestions to the tune of wanting to kidnap Brady while the Locos toss the joint.
• After KLA ponies up the antidote, the others make a plan to recapture it from Ebony since they can’t possibly risk losing it. I am still hoping it turns out that the lab they raided was working on viagra.
• Of course, they’re recaptured after three seconds, so Amber threatens to destroy it, up until Ebony threatens to toss Bray off the balcony, which is as close to killing someone as anyone can do.
• Lex still doesn’t want to take the antidote, of course, even though he’s got a bad case of old, so Ebony forces it on her before buggering off with Bray and Lex in tow, Lex so they can see if he gets better, and Bray entirely to piss Amber off.
• If they had an antidote, why did everyone die? I mean, it hardly seems like, when everyone in the world is about to die, you’d really have much to lose by not just trying it.
• Also, if this turns out to be the antidote to a virus that has no cure, in a mutant strain that didn’t exist at the time, I am going to spank them
• Ryan rescues their menagerie of pets from the broken-down lift using physical force. So far, violence has been the answer to everything
• Ebony forces Lex to take more antidote. He drinks it
  • Leah: Unfortunately…
  • Ross: (Professor Farnsworth voice) It’s a suppository
• Zandra decides to sell all her designer clothes and jewelry for food and stuff, and start being responsible and grown-up. If I didn’t dislike her so much, that’d be touching. Ryan, however, liked the vapid unpleasant Zandra.
• The password protecting the virus files is “please”. Jackasses
• Just want to remind you, this password goes to files found on CDs found in a lab that was set to self destruct if you didn’t give it the password.
• The virus has stopped making Lex old, it’s just made him scrufty and covered in sores
• Ebony has a swimming pool. I don’t know how New Zealand works, but if you left my parents’ pool unattended for a year, it’d be green.
• Tyson announces that mirrors in the sleeping place is bad Feng Shuay, prompting me to give Leah a look over the fact that there are like four mirrors in our bedroom.
• The toy helicopter that Dal took some batteries for earlier. It’s clearly a gas-powered helicopter
  • Leah: Maybe they needed the batteries for the remote.
  • Ross: Eight D-cell batteries?
  • Leah: They needed a lot of batteries to make up for not having any gas
• Ebony insists that she’s changed, grown as a person. She explains this to Bray, who she is holding hostage. I guess she means that she’s changed, say, her pants.
• It was polite of ConEvilCo to use full citations in the paper on the antidote to the virus that is as they were all dying of it
• An apparently passed-out Lex is attacked by a Loco who appears to be wearing a leftover stillsuit from Dune
• To help quench KC’s love of gambling, they bet on whether the dog or the pig will find a hidden cracker first. The pig’s skills lead it to the hidden treat on the couch first. Which is fine, because pigs are indeed good at tracking by scent. But… How did the pig climb up on the couch?
• Lex Luthor makes it back to the mall, where his is promptly blown up by their newest boobytrap.
• After Bray discovers that Lex has gone:
  • Ebony: What would you do? Hold him in your arms and nurse him tenderly until the end?
  • Bray: (pained) Yes!
• Of course, the surveillance footage they manage to get inside Locoland shows Ebony on top of a Bray whose anger at the situation is not visible on the film. So Amber instantly decides that he’s decided he likes Ebony and has forgotten all about his tribe.
• Leah’s leaving to visit her family over the weekend early Saturday morning, which has prompted us to consume this show with a sick obsessiveness, trying desperately to reach the season finale before she heads out. THis is kind of creepy.
• Nice of the evil scientists to thoroughly footnote their journal article on the antidote (Viruses don’t have antidotes). This mentions something called “Eagle”. Which prompts them to say “Eagle”. Which, in Kiwi, is pronounced “Eggle”. Since I had to read the wikipedia article on characters in this show in order to remember their names, I happen to know that at some point in the future, Amber is going to be called “Eagle”. The thought of people calling her “Eggle” makes me smile.
• Meanwhile, of all the people in the world to get cured, Lex Luthor is starting to look less like he’s wearing really unconvincing old-age makeup. Man, I and I was hoping he’d die.
• Meanwhile, “eggle” turns out to refer to a mountain. As usual, KLA works out something important, and everyone else’s reaction is to assume he’s crazy and making shit up.
• Ryan goes to apologize to Magenta for macking on Zandra, and asks if she’s asleep. She says yes, and Ryan believes her.
• Lex Luthor’s hair turns ungray. Which would be silly, except that it went gray overnight. So its silliness is all used up
• Ebony decides to go off and kill Amber as punishment for Bray not liking her. Won’t Amber be surprised.
• Lex Luthor celebrates his recovery by reverting to being a total douchebag. Also, he draws a beard on himself.
• Tyson finds Lex recovered, and declares it to be the work of her spiritual visions. She also had a vision of an eagle and a mountain. KLA they ignore. Groovy New Age Spiritual Girl, they believe.
• Zandra again does her “I’d rather we all die of the virus than we do something Tyson wants to do.”
• KC Tells Lex how Sir Toppum Hat tried to have his way with Zandra, and Lex Luthor gets all angry and wants to launch a suicide attack on the crazy-eyed psycho. Lex is an asshole when he’s mad… And also all the rest of the time
• And, woohoo, Ryan and Magenta smoochies.
• And so the gang sets out for Eagle Mountain, prompting a montage of the season’s exciting clips so far.
• Ebony is deposed by a coup led by a Loco whose voice has been replaced in post-processing by a much larger man. She’s bravely defended by Bray.
• Trudy goes missing for about 30 seconds, then shows up again.
  • Ross: She’s leaving a note for Bray.
  • Lex Luthor and Ryan run off to “scout ahead”
  • Ross: He’s up to something
  • Leah: He’s leaving a note for Bray too.
• The tribe’s cart breaks down (!) in the territory of some crazies. Fortunately, at an opportune moment, Lex returns, on a motorcycle, Wearing Tophat’s Top Hat
• Bray finds the mall abandoned, his car keys abandoned by Amber, and a note saying “Gone to Eagle Mountain”. He gets all depressed, but Ebony has a plan. Leah: (Ebony voice) Let’s go steal Tophat’s motorcycle
• Leah would like me to reiterate that Lex looks really stupid with his makeup goatee
• When the tribe is stopped by extras from The Road Warrior, Ebony (!) save the day by showing up with on a bus.
• Typically, Amber refuses to let Bray explain about that little scene by the pool. Because Bray has always turned out to be duplicitous and selfish, and has time and again proven that he can’t be trusted.
• Bray asks Ebony to explain that there’s nothing going on between them. Ebony, of course, agrees, but would he mind putting his arm around her as she’s cold. Bray, of course, forgets that Ebony wants to kill Amber and mutilate her corpse.
• But then, for some reason, Ebony actually does try to convince Amber that Bray won’t have her. I can’t tell if she’s incredibly unconvincing on purpose, or because her actress isn’t a very good actress.
• At Eagle Mountain, they immediately start wandering around pushing buttons, because the last time they went to a place run by this evil corporation, it blew up. Jack turns on the lights to reveal — I think it may be a TARDIS.
• When Ebony outs Lex for dumping the antidote, Bray takes the fall. Because Lex and Bray have always been such good friends.
• Eagle mountain turns out to be a satellite tracking station, which fails to find its satellite, which they all find intensely disappointing, and a sure sign that they are all going to die. I’d be disappointed too, since it failed to find the satellite while showing footage that was shot from a satellite
• Lex Luthor does Bray a sold by telling Amber what a dumbass she’s being for thinking Bray likes Ebony. They kiss and make up
• And then the satellite shows up, visible to the naked eye in broad daylight. This prompts a recorded voice to make booming pronouncements about how the tribe here is the last hope for mankind, and it’s vitally important that they do exactly what it says, which is to….

And that’s season one. We’ll pick this up, um, whenever I feel like it.

• Ryan does not comprehend that he has bought himself a a whore. This is because Ryan is a moron. Fortunately, Magenta’s pimp is a femmy guy who a stiff breeze could kick the ass of. Violence has been the answer to everything in this show.
• Ryan has never heard of bulimia and worries that it’s contagious. He explains that he’s run away from the tribe because he’s sick of Lex Luthor treating him like he’s stupid. Ryan, if you don’t want to be treated like you’re stupid, you’d do best to forsake the company of man. I understand that in New Zealand, there are quite a lot of sheep. Some, but not all, of them are dumber than you are.
• That said, it looks like Ryan and Magenta are about to fall in love over his watching that she doesn’t throw up.
• Amber decides to forsake responsibility and run off with Sasha Baron Cohen as he walks the earth being a free spirit. Wonder how long this will last.
• Meanwhile, Magenta and Ryan have got themselves a pet pig, which they name “Porky”, because in New Zealand, trademark laws work differently.
• In a consistent show of the writers not paying attention to the passage of time, Bray’s trial is now days ago, despite it only being about half an hour since the proceedings were interrupted by Glenn showing up.
• Lex decides to kill a hen for a special honeymoon dinner. As I recall, though, the whole reason they went to visit the farm girls is that they didn’t want to kill the chickens.
• Amber comes back to tell everyone that she’s decided to be carefree and irresponsible and run off. But she can’t leave without being passive agressive about how they’ve let the place go to pot in the three days she’d been gone. Amber, the high horse doesn’t work like that.
• Lex Luthor offers a piece of chicken to the little girls. Who are distraught about the disappearance of their favorite hen. Because Lex is a douche.
• Everyone decides to forgive Magenta when she comes out of the closet about her bulimia, but they’re all little bitches to Amber for wanting to leave. Except for Sasha who is a total dick to everyone for daring to think that you should take responsibility for others
• Five minutes after they leave the mall forever, Amber decides to go back. Ten minutes after that, she has some misty watercolored flashbacks about how much she misses him.
• For Patsy’s birthday, they hold a party and play Incidental Music From The Tribe on the boom box. It is the only CD they have left.
• Amber, deciding that she must stay at the mall and can’t shirk her responsibility in favor of love, has wandered off to angst over Sasha and shirk her responsibilities
• Patsy has an episode over the fact that she’s one year closer to the age of certain death. Which reminds me that we don’t know much about this virus. We know that it spread “too fast” for any adults to have survived (Bad survival trait for a virus), it doesn’t infect children. We’re not told what the age of consent is for viral relations — the oldest anyone seems to be is about 16. Since half of them are past puberty, it’s not puberty (I could believe that it was indeed puberty and the virus burned itself out a year or so ago — about the time Trudy was getting herself impregnated by Zoot. Bad Zoot. Naughty Zoot.). The virus is still around (at least, they think it is) and is probably airborn. In short, virus of plot convenience, which does not behave like real-world viruses would.
• Magenta’s off the wagon the instant everyone starts fighting again.
• Kiwi Love Actually sees an adult man on the security camera footage, but everyone thinks he’s crazy, and can’t determine anything from the grainy, staticky, black and white video other than that it was probably a person, and had gray hair. On a black and white video.
• Zandra is of course jealous that Ryan is happy for once. Because she is, let’s face it, the least sympathetic character in the series
• Lex Luthor’s plan to get Bray kicked out by hiding water bottles in his room works instantly. As always. It takes 0 seconds for everyone to turn on Bray.
• Lex immediately tells his wife about his evil plot, meanwhile Ryan and Kiwi Love Actually already know that it’s a setup. Kiwi Love Actually convinces Ryan to grow a pair and confront Lex, whose response is to pimp his wife out. Magnificent Bastard.
• Magenta, of course, walks in on Ryan with Zandra draped over him. Before running off to binge and purge, she asks Ryan if he needs any help. Did she just suggest a threesome?
• • Leah: (About the mystery adult) Or maybe it’s a mutant
  • Ross: Because it’s after the apocalypse. They have those.
• The “Adult” is a kid in old-age makeup. I am not yet sure whether this is his schtick or just the craziest casting decision ever
• Ryan predictably folds, and Lex just threatens KLA into not speaking up. See? Violence is the answer to Everything
• So, Lex Luthor’s plan is to get rid og Bray, then of Amber. He also plans to kill Jack, and I think he means to get rid of Magenta too. Does Lex want to be the ruler of a tribe consisting of his wife and a bunch of ten year olds? Really?
• No Grown-ups for thirty-nine episodes and now two all at once.
• I believe Bray calls Lex Luthor a “Filthy lying piece of dart.”
• And the weakest link is… Bray. He decides to run away. That’ll show them.
• But when KLA decides to give Lex up, KC jumps on the grenade, which will of course, prompt Lex Luthor to try to contrive a reason why Bray should have been exiled byt KC shouldn’t
• Which becomes a moot point when the Old Dude shows up, and turns out to be Lex Luthor’s old buddy Glenn, who we had previously seen back in episode 1 being thrown to the dogs, then durign the tribal gathering kicking Lex’s everloving ass. So, new fact about the virus: it makes you look like you’re wearing unconvincing old age makeup. It also gives you facial hair.
• Speaking of which… Eveyrone’s clean-shaven. I get that they’re all kids, but I started drowing stubble at 12.
• Lex Luthor does the first responsible thing he’s ever done, and voluntarily goes into isolation since he’s been exposed to the virus. Maybe this will finally mark him not being a douchebag just for its own sake…. Nah.
• By the way, Patsy’s also quarantined, for exposure to Glenn. Who she found when she went out to look for him because she alone believed Jack, out of her desperate need for there to be an adult still around, as it means there’s hope for not getting the virus. So if there’s one thing the writers do get, it’s irony.
• They have used the word “idea” four times in two minutes. Being Kiwis, they pronounce it “idear”. It is the single most grating thing about their accent.
• In a show that they have more solidarity than brains, the tribe decides to take turns grabbing Patsy, the idea being that they’d rather all be infected together
• So they’re gonna have a go at curing the virus. Yes. Really
• The threat of the virus scares off the Locos, worsened by KC misquoting Dirty Harry. “Do you feel lucky?”
• KLA discovers from a medical CD that viruses can mutate. “Just like computer viruses.” I think I am going to cry.
• Tyson is upset that no one’s listening to her and everyone is trying to find a cure using science and stuff instead of by meditation and spirituality.
• Everyone loves the pig more than the dog. The dog will now get depressed and run away.
• Zandra promises Glenn that she’ll run away with him if he gets better. Unfortunately, he starts getting better. Now Zandra is hoping he kicks, because boy would that be awkward.
• Good news, everyone…
• KC’s words on returning: “Who died?” Ah, Lex’s protogee.
• So, the virus has something to do with an anti-aging experiment… Holy crap, this isn’t our Earth, it’s the parallel earth from the Star Trek episode “Miri”.
• The gang goes to “Hope Island”, where Evil Inc. set up their virus creation lab. The fence is not electrified, but they have a frakking minefield in front of the gate.
• Lex Luthor checks if the fence is electrified by touching it with a dry stick. WOOD DOES NOT CONDUCT ELECTRICITY AND COMPUTER VIRUSES DO NOT MUTATE
• Tyson sneezes. twice. This means she’s got the virus. Where’s your buddha now, bitch?
• Upon entering the lab of evil, they start deciding that random test tubes might be the antidote for the virus (VIRUSES DO NOT HAVE ANTIDOTES AND COMPUTER VIRUSES DO NOT MUTATE). Won’t they be surprised when it turns out they want the next lab on the left, and Bray has just found the cure for male pattern baldness. Had viagra been invented yet in 1999?
• So Bray and Amber, having come all the way to Hope Island to penetrate the evil lab, immediately leave Dal, Lex Luthor, and the dog to find the cure while they have a long, meaningful walk on the beach.
• Oh, and if you enter the wrong password to the lab computer, the lab kills you. Let me get this straight. The governent of New Zealand contracted out to a company apparently run by Doctor No to make them an anti-aging serum, and when it turned out to be an uber-palgue, they decided to go out of their way to ensure that if everyone got wiped out, the cure to the plague would be protected by automated defense systems to murder all intruders? Maybe Ryan will turn out to be the president’s son.
• Lex Luthor, showing the most sense he’s ever shown, points out that this can’t possibly be an inescapable death trap, since there’s a countdown, and it doesn’t make any sense to have a countdown if there’s no way out.
• The batteries KC swipes to use to pay for his gambling habit, the batteries which must logically have been depleted and recharged, are still in the original plastic wrap.
• While trapped in the lab, Lex is forced to reveal to Bray that he can’t read. Lex has now told 2/3 of the tribe that he’s illiterate, but they’re not to tell anyone.
• Desperate, they decide to short out the breaker box, by touching the two conveniently pre-bared wires.
• As the timer hits zero, they manage to open the door and escape. Leah remembered that there’s three more security doors. The writers didn’t.
• The explosion of Hope Island uses a leftover explosion sequence from Captain Power
• They reckon that the random vial they found is the cure, so they try to make Tyson take it. She refuses on religious grounds, even though they’re pretty sure it’s the cure. Despite not having found any sort of notes or explanation, or any files or documentation, or a label saying “this is the cure”, or a sign saying “This is a lab where we work on the cure,” or even whether the cure is meant to be administered orally, intravenously or, say, as a suppository.
• Jack is still crippled from having his ankle fractured during Lex Luthor’s bachelor party. I have no idea how time passes in this show, so he’s either been on crutches for two days or four years by now.
• Lex, by the way, has the virus. And he’s not going to risk taking the antidote, despite wanting to force Tyson to take it.
• Bray tells Amber that he’s into her, and then, I believe, picks fleas off of her.
• KC gambles away the pig at the convenient underground casino, so Cloey decides that poker is a sucker’s game, and insists that they win back the money playing a game which actually has some strategy — roulette.
• The prospect of his impending death makes Lex Luthor act all noble and patch things up with Ryan, open his soul to Zandra, and generally seems like a nice guy. Either he’s really dying, or this is a convoluted scheme of some sort.
• Tyson cures herself using karma, meditation, and honesty, and offers to help Lex Luthor do the same, provided he can be pure of heart and soul. So Lex is basically fucked.
• So, when Lex decides to remake himself as less of a dick, Zandra decided to put her foot down and not support him, because it was Tyson’s idea. Better to die of the virus than to cure yourself using a technique endorsed by the girl who slept with before you got married.
• KLA freaks out when Lex Luthor is nice to them but doesn’t want them to keep trying to decrypt the evil computer from the lab, and shouts “Is this the 21st century or the dark ages?” Actually, it looks like the 80s.
• As part of Lex Luthor’s purification process, he burns his clothes, but promptly finds a new short with PVC strips across the nipples. Are these common in New Zealand?
• Lex’s apologies are probably going to take the next ten or eleven episodes
• So, it’s kinda touching and all, with Lex Luthor confessing all the crimes that everyone already knew he’d committed, but I think telling his wife that he married her just for the sex was probably an unsound move.
• Since KC has been gone for days now, it occurs to Ryan that this could be a problem, as the gamblers might force him to tell them where his tribe is holed up so they can rob them. Meanwhile, KC is being beaten by the gangsters to find out where the tribe is holed up so they can rob them.
• Amber and Bray have been doing nothing but each other for days, and this is the first they’ve heard of it. So, when Amber’s happy, she neglects her leadership duty. When she’s sad, she neglects her leadership duty. Why was it that Amber decided to stick around again? Oh. Right. Duty.
• The Gambling den is run by a gang called “Tribe Clowns”, run by an escaped Boy George impersonator and sometime Bat-Villain called “Top Hat”, who apparently makes the Locos look sane.
• He gives KC a villain speech about how much he loves burning things, and how he will set anything on fire. So that’s who keeps setting the cars on fire!
• Those people who had “Episode 45” in the office pool for “How long before Trudy decides to become a jealous little bitch again, you may collect.
• Lex Luthor decides to forge an alliance with Ebony to save the Mall Rats from Boy George and his Legion of Clowns. Yes. Lex Luthor, their resident villain, wants an alliance with Ebony, the big bad, to save our heroes from the Giant Space Flea From Nowhere.

There’s just 7 more episodes this season, so I assume they’re building up to something. Hopefully, we’ll get to see it before Leah makes me stop watching for the weekend…

• Magenta is resorting to increasingly desperate means to fuel her puking addiction.
• Amber likes Sasha, which is hard to believe, because Sasha is singularly unlikable.
• The new wind turbine charges some batteries, so they immediately decide to put on the Soundtrack from The Tribe and hold a rave.
• Remember how Amber liked Sasha? This has resulted in the first instance of Bray turning into a jealous little bitch all season
• In search of supplies for the wedding, the men all decide to trade with a group of roughneck lesbians on a farm, led by the fat coarse one, who becomes the first woman in the series Lex Luthor actively dreads sleeping with. She’s accompanied by the really butch one and, close as I can tell, Freema Agyeman.
• I hope they shout “Kill the pig / Spill its blood.” when they butcher the pig they bought. Which I suspect won’t happen, because Ryan nearly offers his body to Lex in gratitude when he sees it.
• Meanwhile, Zandra reveals a diamond necklace which Magenta will later steal to trade for binging supplies.
  • Trudy: Are those real diamonds
  • Zandra: (words to the effect of “yes”)
  • Leah:Really? They don’t look real.
  • Ross:Neither did the handcuffs.
• Lex Luthor throws in his favorite CD in exchange for some hard cider, which the leader of the farm girls says will “Put hair on his chest.” I assume she is speaking from experience. Also, I believe this marks the first time that it’s been the characters and not the audience that has needed to drink to get through the episode.
• Sasha and Amber have at least a snog before he leaves, but she’s looking kind of post-coital in the next episode.
• Tyson appears to wear her underwear on the outside of her pants.
• Zandra appears to use the term “on the grog” to refer to Lex Luthor’s drunkenness (which it appears, has been a problem in the past). Is this a real Kiwi term, or some sort of Way Cool Totally Radical post-apocalypse term?
• Unfortunately for Magenta (but possibly fortunate for Zandra), Zandra’s diamonds are indeed fake, and Magenta can’t trade them for a fix of that sweet, sweet beefaroni.
• They’ve pulled the Name That Tune trick so often that I can’t tell if the music at the wedding is the incidental music, or if they’re using the soundtrack as her processional.
• So Lex Luthor and Zandra are now married. The vows he needs Ryan to write for him because he’s illiterate turn out to be better than Zandra’s “And I vow the same,” bullshit. Seriously, what’s her excuse?
• Much of the next episode is devoted to Lex and Zandra, two patently dislikable people, and their pillow talk.
• Increasing the creepiness of this nightlong marathon, Leah and I simultanteously made the “Spam, spam, spam, spam, eggs, and spam” joke when Zandra suggests “Beans and beans, beans and eggs, eggs and beans, or eggs and eggs,” for breakfast.
• After a night of sex, and a morning of sex, Lex gets out of bed still wearing pants, and I believe Zandra is now less naked than when she got married.
• Sasha reminds Leah of her ex. I have never felt more secure in my masculinity,
• As of Episode 33, Magenta’s scavenging for a binge, Kiwi Kid From Love Actually has a broken ankle, Bray is being a little bitch, Ryan has decided to run away from home and has taken up with Beavis and Butthead, KC is hung over, and Amber has gone off to frolic in the park with Sasha. Yes. Frolic.
• Apparently, there is a thriving economy supporting bulimics in the future, as Magenta appears to have an actual dealer who will trade her for food. When Magenta has nothing to trade, the dealer appears to be willing to set her up for a life of whoring out her body in exchange for binge food.
• Amber goes for a walk on the beach wearing a sports bra and sarong, which I believe makes her less clothed than Zandra right now.
• I realize that infants aren’t meant to be great actors, but the foley of the baby cooing is overlaid on footage of a baby who clearly is not making any sort of noise.
• Lex and KC bond over their mutual illiteracy. Getting laid regularly has made Lex Luthor a much nicer person.
• KC has decided for some reason to murder Kiwi Love Actually Kid. I kinda think that KC had a thing for Jack, and now that he’s got Dal back, he’s all kinds of jealous
• Ryan happens upon Magenta’s drug dealer (who is now helping her get over her bulimia), who takes him in and is very nice to him, offering him sex with this redheaded chyk they’ve added to their lucrative cottage brothel industry

• Dalek gets himself locked up by the evil crazy nomads, and still can’t quite get that they’re evil
• Meanwhile, Magenta finally starts to feel guilty about leaving Trudy to die.
• The all-consuming plot-arc for this set of episodes is an impending meeting of all the tribes, wherein a bunch of tribes which are mostly psychopaths will all hang out together and make peace. This can’t possibly go wrong.
• Zandra makes Lex Luthor “dump” Tyson, which, of course, surprises her, as she didn’t actually think they were going out.
• In this week’s “Remembering Zoot”, Bray flashes back to Himself crying out in anguish over his brother’s death.
• The head of the evil nomads is outright offended by the supposition that he’s a cannibal, and says, as if he’s doing the explanation scene at the end of an episode of Three’s Company where they explain that the crazy scheming everyone’s been doing all episode has been predicated on someone having mis-over-heard a conversation, that they’re not cannibals: they’re slave traders.
• Big market for slaves? I guess.
• The cars. Are still. On fire.
• Bray goes to meet with Ebony, who convinces him that the impending intertribal meeting is on the level, by explaining, in better diction than most adults, that times are tough, and she’d rather rebuild civilization than be the lord of the flies. Bray instantly believes her, since he is, as previously established, a moron.
• Bray returns and is chewed out for meeting with Ebony, Zandra points out that he always runs off without telling anyone to do his own thing, ignoring all the consequences for the others. Zandra does not point out that nothing he’s done has had any negative consequences.
• At the meeting, there will be a dance-off. Yes. Really.
• When Amber goes to see Tyson about the dancing and the trouble she’s caused what with the sleeping with Lex Luthor, Tyson is practicing her dance moves to a cassette. Of the incidental music from The Tribe.
• Lex Luthor gives Zandra a ring he made from bits of an alternator, and she goes all gooey and agrees to move in with him but not have sex. Given that it is after the apocalypse, this seems like a raw deal.
• Part of Zandra’s plan here is that she will “test” Lex. He passes if he can live with her while not getting sex. Given Lex’s track record, I gather that failure on this test would take the form of raping Zandra. Zandra has not thought this plan all the way through.
• Zandra also, offhandedly, announces that she’ll marry Ryan if Lex fails to not have sex with her. Now, I know I’ve mentioned that these people are stupid. But Ryan has told Zandra at point-blank range that he is in love with her. They are really making me feel sympathy for this girl.
• Bray tries to sell windmill technology at the intertribal meeting, because Kiwi Kid From Love Actually hasn’t told him that the damned thing doesn’t work. (Probably because Lex Luthor nicked a bit of the alternator to make a ring. He offers it up by saying “Unlimited. Free. Power. We have the technology.”
  • Leah and Ross: We can rebuild him
• The major sticking point of the meeting seems to be that everyone is perfectly happy with their slavery-based economy, which operates on the basis of whipping kids while they pedal on stationary bikes hooked to cassette players. Dystopia, right, so everyone’s got 80s boom boxes.
• In other news, Magenta appears to be Bulimic. Which seems outright rude when it’s the post-apocalypse and food is scarce.
• Poor Ryan. Someone just let him know that the ten thousand dollars he’s been hoarding is missing.
• Lex Luthor, who had been convinced that the meeting was a bad idea, seems to be determined to make this be true. First, he gets jumped by the guy he sold out way back in episode 1, then the bit he stole from the alternator means that the tribe is sure to get ripped into tiny little pieces by the big kids.
• Just noticed. The power walk in the end credits, which shows the characters sort of playing on the beach — Zoot’s in it. Which means that it’s not, strictly speaking, in continuity, like the power walk at the end of Buckaroo Banzai
• Leah posits an alternate possibility: Maybe in the season finale, they discover Cylon ressurection. All this has happened before.
• “The Locos pride themselves on their breakdancing.”
• Have I mentioned lately that I am sick and tired of the “I’m so sure I’m going to win that I will cheat.” The Locos win the danceoff by threatening to murder the Emcee. Which means that Amber loses her side-bet and is now a slave. Meanwhile, Zandra tries to return the missing copper wire, drops it down a hole in the ground, and this gives the Locos time to smash the turbine as punishment for daring to try to make life a bit less terrible.
• But as it turns out, violence is the answer to this one. Lex Luthor starts a fight and everyone escapes.
• Trudy thinks Magenta’s having morning sickness as she’s carrying Bray’s child. This is the same mistake Leah made because, come on. Bulimia?
• The handcuffs restraining Dal are quite clearly made of plastic
• KC takes about 5 minutes longer getting back from the escape, so they assume he’s dead.
  • Dal: Who’s KC?
  • Leah and Ross: Your replacement
• Magenta (whose name, by the way, is actually “Saline”, I think) finally tells Trudy about how she’d left her to die when she’d poisoned herself. This will undoubtedly make Trudy have some kind of weird angry episode. But I just want to point out: At the time this happened, Trudy wanted to die, and Magenta is the only one who even came close to respecting her wishes.
• Sasha Baron Cohen, the newest Mallrat, is a wandering jester who followed Dal home because they were chained to each other. He’s trying to compose the theme song from The Tribe
• Sasha sends the kids off to get “hair combs”. Are there some other kind of combs in New Zealand?
• Speaking of Sasha playing the theme song… I wonder if the intro will encode the co-ordinates for real earth
• Lex Luthor turns out to be illiterate. This is supposed to explain some of his actions