Summary
“Most Likely to Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine)” was a fairly ludicrous episode full of gaping contrivances and inconsistencies, as well as a… puzzling Richard Blackwood performance.
This recap of Pandora Season 1, Episode 5, “Most Likely To Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine)”, contains spoilers. You can check out our thoughts on the previous episode by clicking these words.
“Most Likely to Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine)”, an excruciatingly bizarre episode of Pandora, begins with Xander (Oliver Dench) and Delaney (Banita Sandhu) discovering the flight recorder of the Tereshkova under the guise of a training exercise. Please, don’t ask the obvious questions — it just isn’t worth it. There’s a scene later on when Jax (Priscilla Quintana) asks them and realizes they hadn’t even occurred to Delaney, which I suppose is to be expected.
Nevertheless, Xander is instructed by Professor Osborn (Noah Huntley) to keep the retrieval of the black box a secret until it has been decrypted. This thing will return before the episode is over, but for now, we’ll leave it alone. We have bigger, much weirder fish to fry.
Telepathic Thomas (Martin Bobb-Semple) is still in a relationship with Atria Nine (Raechelle Banno), who, as pointed out by an astute commenter in my recap of the previous episode, is hopelessly naive for a clone of what is ostensibly a human being. But thankfully the romance takes a backseat in “Most Likely to Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine)” in favor of parental drama, as Thomas’s smooth-talking psychic huckster father, Billy D., has arrived on campus.
Billy is played with an incredibly inconsistent accent by English actor and comedian Richard Blackwood — it’s a notably bizarre and sometimes laughable performance that is unfortunately tasked with several scenes of genuine emotion and fails to be anything other than completely hysterical. Billy is apparently in deep with a criminal syndicate, and to pay off his debt he needs to recover an alien artifact from a local museum. To do it, he’ll need the help of his smoking-hot ladyfriend Tierney (Tina Casciani), who is later revealed to be his “handler” posing as his fiance, as well as Thomas, whose empathic abilities boost Billy’s, and Jax, who is immune to mind-reading.
You’d imagine that last point wouldn’t matter, but Pandora concocts a ludicrous heist sequence in which every single security measure is specifically tailored to the talents of the thieves; a sensor that detects brainwaves, an organic, thinking lock that can only be bypassed by a telepath who is being boosted by a relative, and a laser grid through which Tierney cartwheels and pirouettes as though we didn’t see Catherine Zeta-Jones do that very same thing in Entrapment. It is truly ludicrous, and Pandora allowing all its very worst elements to come to the forefront.
The alien artefact turns out to be the flight recorder from the Tereshkova; the key to unlocking the mystery of Jax’s parents’ death turns out to be a literal key; and of course Billy is forced to reject Thomas in order to protect him — though not without giving him a sly psychic clue, despite the fact that Tierney explicitly knows how his abilities work and should have been able to easily detect what he was doing. “Most Likely to Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine)” was, in no uncertain terms, very bad, and one can only hope that this was a low point of a series that surely has more to offer. Then again, perhaps it doesn’t.
