Colony Season Finale Review: Gateway

This Colony review contains spoilers.

Colony Season 1, Episode 10

Colony played a clever joke on its audience in its first season finale. The show staged an attempted alien autopsy to tease us with big reveals about the extraterrestrial Hosts. What we got instead was a cheap looking space-suit prop. It looked shockingly out of place when set in the middle of all the high emotions and exploding buildings. I took this as a reminder that Colony isn’t about aliens. It never will be. The Hosts are just the metaphorical device fastened onto a quiet story about a marriage that’s falling apart. That won’t stop our endless curiosity with them though.

Here’s another connection Colony has to Lost: The Hosts are like The Others. They’re better off when you don’t know anything about them. The Mystery Box is more interesting when it remains closed and still, y’know, mysterious. The “autopsy” scene with Katie’s new friends was like watching the writers figure out details about the aliens in real time, only to get frustrated and give up because they aren’t as interested in that as they are in telling a story of a broken relationship.

Will and Katie are apart from each other now, at least for the foreseeable future. We’re left wondering if Will used the “get-out-of-this-colony-for-free” card (aka transit pass) to leave the LA bloc or not. I’d love to speculate on this, but I’d probably wind up being wrong again. I don’t see Will abandoning Katie that suddenly, no matter how much destruction she leaves in her wake. But that’s just me.

Katie’s journey this season has been up, down, up again, down again, down more, further than that … and in that sense, she has become the show’s main character. The very stressed out wife and mother has played both sides against each other out of the need to see her son Charlie again (who is just a cypher symbolizing “the way things used to be”) and destroyed most of Los Angeles in the process.

Throughout these ten episodes, I always felt as if we were on the same page as Katie. We understood her motivations and agreed with (some of) them. But now, in “Gateway,” the show punishes the character it spent all its time defending. Which is kind of a shame because it’s so damn depressing. Katie has lost what she was trying to protect in her efforts to protect it. She has no one left to turn to, and she can’t even trust herself anymore. That, my friends, is some serious noir shit.

Meanwhile, Will remains steadfast, regardless of the devastation happening all around him. He knows all of Katie’s secrets now. He knows about “the other man” (who Broussard’s character truly became), and he releases her to live her “other life,” which is darker than she expected.

Snyder has come a long way as well –or should I say, our perception of him has. We knew the guy was a rat, but he was right: he was the devil we knew. We don’t know who the next Proxy Governor will be, and we don’t know how totalitarian they are. At least, with Snyder, we knew that he was a weasel with a breaking point. We have no idea if the next one will or not.

And so Colony’s first season ends in a melancholic way as opposed to a cliffhanging one. I’m looking forward to the perils that season two will bring us, such as the new Proxy governor and the threat of bringing in a different status quo. I can’t wait to see what will become of the world that was built with one mysterious clue after another.