Colony

Colony is a new show on USA from Carlton Cuse that centers on a family living in a near-future Los Angeles that is occupied by some sort of outside invaders who have superior technology and have subverted some of the population into collaborating in exchange for positions of power and better living conditions. Martial law and a curfew are the new normal, and anyone who dissents is arrested and taken away to “The Factory”, a mysterious location that is rumored to be a labor camp but is likely much more sinister. Josh Holloway (LOST) and Sarah Wayne Callies (Walking Dead) star as the husband and wife, while Peter Jacobson (House) plays the “Proxy”, a governor-like leader of the collaborators.

So this premiered this week. I watched the pilot, and it was pretty decent. The production quality is top-notch, from the armored vehicles and menacing black & red SWAT style uniforms of the new “Homeland” security forces to the alien-like drones that patrol the streets after curfew, everything looked real and believable. The story is pretty fragmented so far. It seems that the invaders came swiftly and suddenly, locking down LA and the surrounding areas and causing families to be separated. At some point soon after a huge wall went up to protect the “Green Zone” (Santa Monica apparently), where those who collaborate with the invaders are allowed to live in luxury while those outside the walls struggle under the occupation. Vague references are made to “The Factory”, which everyone seems to think is some kind of gulag where those arrested for even minor crimes are sent to work until they die. At some point anyone with a military or security background was rounded up and either sent to the Factory or allowed to become a collaborator. Josh Holloway’s character, ex-military and former government agent, along with a few others, managed to escape detection and is living under a false name trying to lay low with his wife, teenage son and small daughter while trying to find out what happened to his other young son, separated from the family in the initial occupation.

The show is obviously set up for some big reveals and surprises later on. Obviously the invaders are not what they seem. Aliens would be the first guess, but that’s probably not going to be correct. Also, the walls that separate the Green Zone from the rest of LA, and the perimeter that separates LA from the rest of California, are going to play an important role. I suspect that not all is as it seems outside of the LA area, and that the rest of the world is either destroyed or not under the direct control of whomever the invaders are. There is lots of exposition yet to come and questions yet to be answered, but so far the show seems pretty promising and I think Holloway, Callies and Jacobson are doing a pretty good job with their characters. It was difficult watching the pilot and not thinking of Holloway’s character as Sawyer, though he’s not playing him anything like Sawyer. Also all I could think every time Callies was on screen was “shut up Lori!”. It will take awhile to get over that. Jacobson is perfect as the weasely guy from pre-occupation who sees an opportunity to grab power and influence working with the invaders.

One big plothole already though is Holloway’s new job. I think his neighbors and the resistance are going to figure out pretty quick who his new employer is when they see them eating bacon and eggs for breakfast and having all sorts of things everyone else is going without…but they sort of circumvented that a little with the end scene reveal.

I really enjoyed the first episode as well, and set up a season pass on my TiVo. I hope the quality of the pilot is maintained. Couldn’t figure out what Bowman (Holloway), the Proxy and his wife saw from the balcony.

I don’t think you are supposed to. Not yet, anyway.

It appeared to me to be a spaceship/starship/alien vessel taking off (from either on or under water). Started slow and then massively sped up into the cloud layer.

I’m assuming it has something to do with the line the Proxy guy tossed out about the occupation ending “when they get what they need”, which has all sorts of ominous overtones to it. I suspect “The Factory” will be directly involved in whatever it is the occupying force needs. Soylent Green perhaps? ;-)

I agree, thats what it seems to be to me but still, there are other possible explanations for what we saw beside a ship taking off.

Question/invitation to speculation:

End-of-episode

So: the “shower” scene reminiscent of the Nazi gas chambers where the prisoners ended up–they appear to have gotten zapped somehow with an audio signal that scrambled their brains, and then we saw them in scrubs and paper masks, right? Is that maybe the first step to them being the “red hats?”

End-of-episode

I think they’re going to be making iPads.

I liked the second episode more than my wife, which is unusual for genre TV - she has a higher mediocrity tolerance than I do. I like they way they’re developing not-Sawyer into someone whose heart lies with the resistance but whose ass belongs to the occupation. I’m not sure yet now not-Apollo Creed fits into the whole deal.

No need for spoiler tags since the thread is meant for discussion the show episode by episode.

The scene Papageno references made me curious as well. If The Factory is just a killing ground why even bother to clean anyone up? If everyone sent there becomes food for the overlords or something equally as hideous, then while I could see washing them (who wants to eat dirty food?!), why put them in the clean room clothes and masks? Something weird is going on in The Factory, and I’m curious to know what it is. All I can figure is that The Factory is growing/producing something the overlords need, and the prisoners are sent to work tending to this production without contaminating it. Or, like tgb123 says, the overlords are actually Apple and The Factory just uses cheap prisoner labor to crank out iPhones…

Yeah, I started thinking the Factory was really… a Factory! It’d be funny if the euphemism they use to describe being sent there turns out to be a factual statement.

Yeah, it certainly appears that they will be actually working on something, in a clean-room environment. I’m guessing that work slowly (or quickly) kills them though, which is why the aliens need constant replacements. It also explains why the aliens need humans at all, rather than just wiping them all out to get past the annoyance factor.

What it doesn’t explain is what humans could manufacture that the aliens can’t, or won’t. Is it just a labor force shortage by the aliens? Is there really only one alien, manning a huge and powerful ship (aka The Corbomite Maneuver)? And what on Earth could the aliens need that they couldn’t find elsewhere? Water (aka Colossus vs. The Crab)? All I can say is I hope this is well thought-out, because if it ends up being something stupid, I will be very disappointed and have to quit watching.

I am thinking the aliens need special care, and thats why the people were in scrubs.

Maybe the aliens are like the Navigators from Dune, and they require special sponge baths while their tanks are getting cleaned.

Is anyone else still watching this? I’m really enjoying this and see it as “Half Life 2: The Series.”

I’ve been watching it regularly and like it. Do we know how many episodes are left, and if it’s a one off yet? Inevitably I think of the Advent dudes in XCOM 2 as the “Redhats” in this series and vice-versa. The coloring of the uniforms is similar, even.

I was wondering whether there were any more of us viewers out there.

In this last episode, what made the dude that agreed to be the defendant in the show trial think for even a minute that Snyder wasn’t going to double-cross him?

I’m watching it. It got a second season already, so that’s good, I guess. But this is a Lindelof joint, so I worry that the big questions just won’t ever be answered. Who are the aliens, what’s the Factory, etc.

The wife and I watch it, and we are enjoying it. They have been surprisingly adept and making you sympathetic to the collaborators. Except the Provisonal, he’s just a slimy dick.

And except for Sarah Callies. I want her to die already.

I have not seen any of this, quickly put in my TODO list. I will try to avoid spoilers until them.

Still watching. This most recent episode was pretty good. I liked the Geronimo reveal, it was a cool twist you couldn’t really see coming. I also liked the glimpse into “Homeland Central” or whatever that was. It clearly showed that the provisional Proxy douchebag was only a bigshot within the L.A. bloc, and that in the grand scheme of things L.A. is pretty low on the Hosts priority list. Makes you wonder what else is going on around the other blocs and outside of them.

Also pretty crazy about everything in the area around the wall being completely abandoned. The show refers back to a lot of people being killed in the initial arrival of the Hosts, so I guess they just swept up all the survivors from the surrounding areas and put them inside the bloc (or sent them off to the Factory). There has to be a point though where it became impossible to round up everyone, so there must be survivors out there somewhere, just not that close to the walls.

I have only watched the fist episode, heres my theorycrafting:

  • The aliens seems ruthless, they killed not only people fighting againt them, but people that can potentially be effective fighting against them.

  • The aliens hide all too well. This could be a storytelling device, so maybe is not important.

  • The aliens could kill all humans, end human civilization. But they don’t do it. Why?

I think something stop the aliens from killing all humans. It could be a legal reasons (is against the galactic law), it could be a political reason (they have a alliance with other aliens that would hate it), it could be a economical reason (they want to experiment with the humans, learn everything about his culture, before wiping them).

The name of the serie “Colony” suggest … well… a Colony, duh… probably a alien colony (duh again) since a human colony would not make much sense.

So my theory is that the aliens are in some type of conflict (probably a war) and they need earth for strategical reasons and they have made a outpost here on earth. Since they are at war, they can’t have humans around making things complicate, so they have put them in “reserves” where the inferior, low tech humans can survive under they style of life. If the alien colony grown enough, perhaps the humans will be released, but by them they will be a racial minority in a planet terraformed to have the alien wildlife and climate.

The alien technology is more advanced than humans, but it don’t seems on a different level. They don’t seems to be able to teletransport stuff, and they don’t trust human agents with it… that tells me that they fear we could reverse engineer their stuff, so is actually maybe only 50 or 100 years more advances, not advanced enough that a smart engineer would not be able to understand. These drones, they are something current engineers would be able to break into parts, understand and reprogram. And this is my theory why they are so distant and remote overlords. They are not all that technological advanced, they fear they can lost his mojo if they share too much information with the petty stupid humans. On my theory, theres only 10 million aliens, or less. They have automated almost everything.

Of course, it can also be a surprise from the left. On the last episode we can discover that everyone is dead and this is limbo. Or that the aliens look like The Joker and believe in jesus. Or some standard retarded “I was a dream” type of shit.