Moonbase 8 season 1, episode 3 recap – “Quarantine”

By Jonathon Wilson
Published: November 22, 2020 (Last updated: December 28, 2023)
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Moonbase 8 season 1, episode 3 recap - "Quarantine"
3.5

Summary

“Quarantine” upends the dynamic with a new arrival who’s efficient and serious enough to cause difficulties for everyone.

This recap of Moonbase 8 season 1, episode 3, “Quarantine”, contains spoilers.


There’s a fairly simple new development that completely upends the entire dynamic of Moonbase 8 in “Quarantine”: The arrival of a new “base mate”, Alisha, a hyper-competent and buttoned-up aspiring astronaut played by Diandra Lyle, who quickly makes her presence felt by ordering a sickly Cap into quarantine and giving devoutly religious family man Rook a crisis of faith — among other things.

There’s a psychological component to all this since the existing team all answered “yes” or “no” on their evaluations when NASA really expected a bit more explication, and Alisha is constantly making notes and asking pointed questions about how everyone is dealing with the test. Needless to say, nobody is doing well, since they’re all complete idiots.

Cap, for instance, is coughing and spluttering all over the place, and in the current climate, it’s a must that he quarantines in the greenhouse. But when Skip comes down with the same symptoms and needs to quarantine too, Cap decides that would put him at risk of a double-strain superbug infection and so instead decides to build a sweat lodge outside, making him vulnerable to scorpions and Canadian holidaymakers.

Skip’s isolation is arguably even worse, since he begins to vividly hallucinate different versions of himself telling him how thoroughly useless he is — a feeling only exacerbated by the obvious competency of Alisha. That obvious competency might well be what attracts Rook to the new arrival, but perhaps it’s just baked-in sexism of a kind that she finds overly family and, on balance, rather mundane.

But Rook’s religious crisis forms a big overarching thread of the episode. He even visits Cap in the sweat lodge for advice about whether his feelings mean that God has opened up a new romantic path for him, even though scripture obviously cautions against philandering. He’s between a rock and a hard place, but both seem preferable to the actual outcome, which sees him make a move on Alisha, who Judo tosses him over a table and gives him a thorough dressing down to add insult to injury. Seeing him scurry around the morning after, clearly terrified, seems just.

But Alisha leaves all the same since she has completed the program and is going to the moon. She suggests she might see the guys up there, but I think we all know the chances of that are rather slim.

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