Spoilers

Welcome to the loop. Now watch it break.

Wow. This feels like a series finale although I’m honestly glad it’s not. My issues with this season – namely the way a good half of the cast have been functionally ignored – are answered here and in doing so the show sets up a season 3 none of us saw coming, provides catharsis for season 2 and throws some surprises out along the way.

First off, Ty Tennant as Tom Gresham gets a lovely final moment before Bill heads off. Tennant is one of those legions of cast-members who’ve been functional redshirts this season so it was really nice to see him and Bill share a moment. Not only because Tom is a fun, gentle character in a series full of spiky bastards but because it shows how much Bill has changed. The war has been a crucible for him and he knows what he’s done and hopes he can do what he has to do.

He can and does and that’s where the series gets very odd and very interesting. Bill makes it to the past as do a handful of the invaders and Isla. Interestingly the ship they’re on seems not to and Bill is found collapsed outside and taken to hospital. There, in a moment which will make fans of late-season Lost punch the air (I know you’re out there, I’m one of them), he find Emily, Tom and Sarah Gresham and has a brief, emotional reunion with his very confused and extremely alive son. Nearby, Isla is treated for the gunshot wound she took just as they jumped. The handful of aliens on the ship prowl the hospital but never quite find him. They’re barely a day away from the invasion. Emily’s hearing things, seeing flashes of the future. She’s still blind and so when Bill takes her to one side she thinks he’s one of the doctors. He takes her to the roof, explains that everything she’s seeing is going to happen and apologizes.

Then he pushes her off the roof to her death.

I would say this is where the show is going to lose people, but given this episode opens with the Mechanicals building bonfires of the dead it’s entirely possible some folks will have stepped out earlier. It would be so easy for this to be sensationalist violence but, yet again, the show somehow manages to take the worst tools of grimdark and use them for the best purposes of it: to emphasize the fragility of humanity and the importance that goes hand in hand with it. While Bill wins and overwrites the future so the invasion never happens, the nightmarish future he’s prevented haunts characters like Banquo’s ghost. The invaders still remember it, he does too and we see other, non-alien characters have flashforwards as the show finishes. The consequences of everything, especially Emily’s death, power the show and that’s why it works. Nothing is easy, nothing is free and every death has consequences. As does every life, given the trouble Bill is in.

I have no idea how season 3 of this show is going to work and I mean that as a compliment. It’s endlessly bleak, desperately sad at times and has done a good half its cast dirty this season. But if the third season puts everyone who was killed back on the table (Ash or we riot!) then the final battle for the future is going to be fought in the present by some very surprising soldiers. I’m looking forward to seeing how it plays out. 9/10

Alasdair Stuart