Since the season is near the halfway point, it will be
interesting to see where the future will lead. Obviously the first order of
business will be for our heroes to put the seeds to use, but just how Peter
Weller’s Paul Vellek will do so – with his newly revealed, and favoured son –
will look to be ominous indeed.
Part of the charm and suspension of disbelief involved in The Last Ship is to simply toss their
command structure off the ship and into harm’s way at any possible opportunity.
I remember hearing a lot of comparisons to Star Trek’s away teams (though I
must admit I have very little Star Trek experience). It’s obviously a creative
need to place the main cast in some form of participation that isn’t just
shouting orders in a bridge or CIC set, but again, the post-apocalyptic setting
works well to warrant the need, and the show is generally better as a result.
The show makes me wonder how much more world building is
possible at the moment however, when so much is still left in the air as the
crew leaves Sardinia . Every faction introduced
is still in play, but really only the Greeks are given any depth at the moment
now that they have been firmly placed in the spot where they stand to be any
true threat to the Nathan James.
Bread and Circuses
felt like a fairly myopic episode however, lacking much focus on anything
specific to cling onto. By the episode’s end it was clear it was waiting for
its conclusion in the next episode while many of the roadblocks put up lacked
any interest or immediate stakes. It was incredibly disjointed to see Chandler reason to his newly
reunited team that he should remain a double agent, only for literal moments
later to have to ghost out Giorgio's group to avoid being lynched by the mob.
Nostos proved to
be an interested but also long-winded conclusion for the Sardinia
adventure, trading time between the crew searching for Slattery, and his
attempts to evade capture, followed up by some drug-induced hallucinations. It’s
at this point it’s a little jarring to see though, some of the imagery was
interesting (Miller and Burk shooting in the campground hallucination, Slattery’s
son walking past the breached door – with a bad guy taking a headshot to boot)
but it just really raised the hilarious notion that Slattery’s background was a
known but non-specific fact through the show’s run. It was interesting to see
specifically why ‘nostos’ itself seemed to be such a powerful magic pill to
those starving at the hands of the Red Rust, but I hope it will be interesting
to see if they continue the thread by having Slattery face any lingering effects from it.
It will be interesting to see where the show moves on from here. The Mediterranean will likely be the setting this season will find itself in, but now that everyone is reunited, the burden of world building now lies with Weller's Vellek and his family to do the heavy lifting.
- Funny to see Tom Chandler invading everyone’s life again, but by the end it seems to send a different message; his crew have in many ways, moved on without him. Which in odd contrast, we see the ground team seem to fawn over him, with Sasha almost occasionally forgetting about Fletcher at moments.
- Equally funny to see that Giorgio and Lucia are essentially the black sheep of the family since their father has a son that actually wants to follow in his footsteps.
- Part of me thinks the genetic sample 'problem' is fairly easy to solve – maybe two episodes tops – that I wonder what obstacles the show will have to throw at the Nathan James to keep them from getting their homework done.
- In that same vein, I wonder what is the goal of keeping Omar alive will be, if anything more than a last ditch effort to recapture the seeds, given the 10-episode run.
- And Tom has abandoned his children again, but now that everyone knows who he is, it might be the last play Giorgio has.
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