Month: April 2009

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.