*Episode premise spoilers, which involves an important beat from the season 1 finale.*
This is a fun episode, a nice adventure romp featuring our favorite aliens teaming up to help one of their own. It offers up a good blend of action and comedy while wrapping up a couple things from the end of season 1.
Last week, Aja and Krel discovered that Varvatos survived his big “pawn sacrifice” in the season 1 finale—he hasn’t gotten that glorious death just yet. Instead, he was captured by the last surviving Zeron bounty hunter and taken to an outpost on the moon. So, the Tarrons have hatched a plan with Stuart to rescue him.
Quickly, our character of the week is Colonel Kubritz, voiced by Uzo Aduba (a.k.a. Suzanne from Orange is the New Black!) The director of Arena 49B, we first met Kubritz last season in “The Arcadian Job.” She only appears briefly here—unable to take Mother to the moon, our heroes fly in Stuart’s janky old spaceship, which he liberates from Area 49B at the start of the episode—but we’ll see more of her this season. She’s militantly anti-alien and has a xenophobic fervor for locking up beings she doesn’t understand.
But again, we don’t see much of her here. This episode is all about the mission to rescue Varvatos and it’s tons of fun. Where do I start? There are the sight gags that come from the moon’s low gravity, like the way it instantly cuts the tension of being chased by bounty hunters. There are the mechanized rabbit bounty hunters that all have names like “Foo Foo the Destroyer” and “Foo Foo the Mighty,” complete with jokes about how they seem to be multiplying when no one’s looking. There’s Varvatos doing one-handed handstand pushups in his cell, and we learn that he calls his serrator “sweet mistress of death.” In short, it’s fast, it’s funny, it’s got some terrific action scenes, and all in all, it’s just a great romp.
Krel gets in on the fun as well. While Aja tries to free Varvatos, he and Stuart distract the bounty hunters with the old Wookiee prisoner routine, with Krel playing the part of the prisoner. Since there currently is a bounty on his head, he doesn’t want to be recognized, so he’s borrowed the school’s mascot costume and wanders around for much of the episode dressed as a giant mole. This puts him at a disadvantage when it comes to the fighting, in no small part because he can barely see in the costume.
But my favorite bit of Diego Luna’s performance here comes before our heroes reach the moon. Stuart’s spaceship is far below Krel’s standards; as it sputters smoke, he sighs, “That doesn’t inspire confidence.” As the ship practically crawls to the moon, Luna and Tatiana Maslany have an utterly delightful tag-team as bored-out-of-their-mind teenagers stuck on a long trip. Their whiny complaining is hilarious, especially when they ask Stuart how much longer they have to wait:
“Like ten mekrons?” (the Akiridion equivalent to minutes)
“No.”
“Twenty mekrons?”
“No.”
“Thirty mekrons?”
“No!”
They’re simple lines, but Luna and Maslany’s delivery, paired with Nick Frost’s increasingly exasperated responses, is just *chef’s kiss*
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