Summary
“Tell Me That It Isn’t True” seems to have no idea what’s going on as we hurtle towards the finale, but then again, is anyone still watching this show for it to matter?
Is anyone but even watching Pandora at this point? I have no idea, but since it’s my job to keep doing so no matter how bizarre and convoluted the whole thing gets, an episode like “Tell Me That It Isn’t True” is both a gift and a curse. On the one hand, it includes a lot of helpful explanation and justification for certain plot beats that seemed to spring up out of nowhere and not make much sense. On the other, it just isn’t very good, and as has been the way since this show began, it absolutely cannot help but squander its few good ideas by sandwiching them between several bad ideas or with just plain old woeful execution.
The most daring decision this episode makes, for instance, is in trying to redeem Zazie by justifying her baby-snatching – a character turn that, frankly, I’m not sure we needed, and that seems almost impossible to buy into anyway. I know they did the same thing with Jett and that has turned out okay, but Jett was just a d*ck – Zazie was a sneaky manipulator who inseminated her so-called friend with a genetically modified clone of herself and then stole that clone once it was birthed.
A huge portion of “Tell Me That It Isn’t True” is devoted to that clone, and Bloom has continued her rapid growth such that now she looks exactly like Priscilla Quintana but has a childlike attitude and understanding of the world. This plays really weird because a) Jax has always been presented as an implausibly beautiful interstellar hottie and b) both Ralen and Xander are forced to interact with her as men who are or at least have been super into her, but Bloom is essentially a child, so it’s just really bizarre to see it all play out. Nobody seems to totally understand what this character is supposed to be or how they’re supposed to interact with her; at one point Bloom gets a bit flirty with Ralen and he’s dead happy about it. Admittedly he doesn’t know at the time that this is a days-old kiddo, but we do!
Now that I mention it, she could have been chilling with Zazie on Earth 2.0 for a while, even though Jax only seems to have discovered Bloom missing moments prior in her timeline/reality/whatever, and Bloom has random access to all the clones’ genetic memories, which has some precedent in the canon – this isn’t like Clone Zion somehow recalling childhood memories with Xander – but doesn’t help to clear up our basic understanding of time and space and logic. Part of this is, I suspect, intentional, but part of it is also clearly bad writing.
The problem with all this – sorry, the main problem with all this – is that Jax, who has a world-saving quest to complete, is barely even in the episode, and ends up getting arrested for meeting Osborn, whose arrival, more or less out of nowhere, is discovered because Shral has been tailed for several days.
And then there’s the matter of Tierney and Eve not exactly being on the same page either. At this point, virtually nobody, least of all the show’s writers, seems to have any idea what’s going on or what anybody should be doing. If nobody is bothering to watch Pandora anymore, well… maybe it’s for good reason.
Thanks for reading our recap of Pandora season 2, episode 8, “Tell Me That It Isn’t True”. For more recaps, reviews, and original features covering the world of entertainment, why not follow us on Twitter and like our Facebook page?
