Pandora season 2, episode 7 recap – “A Fool Such As I”

This recap of Pandora season 2, episode 7, “A Fool Such As I”, contains spoilers. You can check out our thoughts on the previous episode by clicking these words.

Well, blimey, “A Fool Such As I” was a really stupid episode of Pandora, wasn’t it? I’m struggling to even know where to begin. It’s almost impressive that, so close to the end of the season and the supposed end of the universe, the show still doesn’t seem to have any idea what it’s doing, especially long-term. We haven’t seen Tierney or Eve or Harlan Fried for ages, despite them all ostensibly being the Big Bads, and despite the fact that Fried’s Parallax has been built up as the architect of many recent events. And we still seem to be constructing episodes around single ideas that the writers have – presumably on an off-day – that they just make happen without any real explanation; we actually get at least two of those in “A Fool Such As I”, including Jax having a baby and Xander finding a clone of his long-dead brother, neither of which makes any sense at all.

I can just about overlook dopey stuff like futuristic secessionist marauders being named after ancient Roman rebellions, and even those marauders being led by Bey Turhan, aka the Courier from the premiere, who turns up as though his return is a major twist. But the main storylines of this episode are just egregiously dopey, and the introduction of long-haul self-aggrandizing coward trucker Roy Scantron wasn’t enough to distract from that – based on how this season has introduced and then sidelined characters, we might not even see him again.

Jax suddenly becomes pregnant with a clone of herself here, and she gestates the nipper so rapidly that she’s conceived and born within a single episode. This development was so out of left field I genuinely thought it might have been a joke, especially with Jax turning up in scenes with an increasingly big, obviously fake baby bump, but no such luck. After spending a lot of the episode asking for an abortion and then deciding to give the kid up for adoption, Bloom – so-called because she grew so fast – was born off-camera, and Jax fell instantly, almost psychotically in love with her.

As far as I can tell, this entire subplot exists to give Zazie an excuse to steal Bloom, thus confirming her evilness, which she shouldn’t have had to do really since Jax has already been warned that she’s up to something and thus shouldn’t have left Bloom right there for her to take.

This is, somehow, not quite a silly as what happens with Xander, even though his anxieties about the death of his brother Zion have been brought up before. The way “A Fool Such As I” chooses to handle them, though, is bonkers, introducing a clone of Zion who a) Xander expects to somehow have the memories and experiences of the original and b) turns out to actually have the memories and experiences of the original. This makes considerably less than no sense, and for some reason, nobody calls out how dumb it is. In fact, to add insult to injury, Ralen seems even more inspired by Xander’s leadership after this than he did before!

So late in the season, I’m genuinely clueless as to how any of this is going to shake out. I assume that Zazie is taking Bloom to Tierney, which should hopefully fold her back into the main plot, but is Bloom going to keep growing at the same rate? And if not, why? Is the involvement of Parallax’s competitor TN5, which Jett uncovers, actually going to matter, or is this just some weird corporate sabotage on the part of Parallax to implicate them? If so, why bother implicating someone else now, when they haven’t before? I’m just so confused, and I don’t imagine anything is going to get any clearer anytime soon.

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