Colony recap: 'Company Man'

Will’s always been very convincing about his desire to take down Broussard, and it’s gotten him this far, but the question now is, is he really even fooling anyone? And has he ever been? Or is his interest in rescuing his family from certain obliteration if even a whiff of resistance is smelled on them so high that he really would pull the trigger on taking down the rebels if he had the opportunity?

We know where Katie’s interests lie for sure now. She might be playing a certain part for the cameras — albeit, not always well — but she’s still got the instinct to push back against the Greatest Day allies, and she doesn’t hesitate to act on that. Will wants her to table her impulses to do her part in challenging the alien overlords (and the human hands that carry out their oppression), but she just … can’t. With that, we’re pretty much back to square one here, guys.

Let’s take it from the top.

Broussard and his underground team — that is, Morgan the tech wiz and Eckhart the complainer — are able to capture a drone and run a little recon on the device by planting a camera on it. This gives them a new window into what these drones see and do during their off-time — it seems they might have some sentience buried beneath all those robotics because they hibernate en masse in their wall cave after surveillance shifts and communicate using a similar language to what those government guys intercepted in the ’60s flashback.

Broussard has the good sense to recognize that those eerie squeal sounds aren’t just some techy turbulence and hands them off to another contact (hey, it’s the dad from Boy Meets World!) he meets above-ground at a movie theater. He wants an audio engineer to take a listen and see what he can parse out from the message because, even though there’s enough drones lurking in the wall to decimate the entire city’s population (is that what “Total Rendition” is?), if they can understand this language, there might be some hope to fighting these space creatures after all. It’s a pie in the sky sort of effort here, but it’s all they’ve got.

Broussard’s decision to go above might not be the wisest one — his face is plastered across wanted posters in every nook and cranny of the Bloc — but he’s got friends on that level who can help their cause, plus there’s a long-time lady friend whose company keeps him happy. D’aw. Everybody needs somebody. (Just don’t let Eckhart find out about that little tryst time because he’s already on a ledge about being removed from the sunshine right now.)

Meanwhile, Will’s successful at returning to his job at Homeland. It was a risk to return — if Jennifer McMahon had clued her colleagues into what she knew about the Bowman family, he’d be a goner for sure. But it’s even riskier for him to not show up because it’s a tacit admission of some kind of guilt on his part.

He meets with Bennett, Jennifer’s boss, and convinces him of a few things: (1) He doesn’t know how or why Beau ditched out and never heard of any resistance-friendly leanings on Beau’s part; (2) He had no part in Bram’s foiled under-the-wall run; and (3) He’s useful for the pursuit of Broussard. That last bit seems most important because that’s all Bennett wanted to hear from Jennifer in the first place. So, Will’s given back his badge and teamed up with the smarmy Burke.

Burke first tasks Will with using his supposed investigatory skills to ferret out the details of the recruitment center attack, and he’s not convinced it’s Broussard’s handiwork he’s looking at — his modus operandi doesn’t quite match the assault tactics used, even if the red hand symbolism is on display. Burke, however, thinks if they can convince all citizens Broussard’s the one to blame for everything happening to them, the public will become his proverbial executioner. Considering the fact that Broussard does seem to be keeping unwise company right now, maybe he’s right about that. Just as Will’s receiving his homework files on the case, though, an explosion wrecks the halls of Homeland and sends everyone scrambling.

Will seizes the opportunity of this confusion to check below in the surveillance decks for Jennifer. No one seems to know where she is — heck, most of these officers have been pretending to not even know who she is — so he wants to find out. (Even Lane Kim, er, Betsy, keeps good on her mantra to look after oneself first and scurries away at the mere mention of Jennifer’s name.) Will checks out the sprawling surveillance deck but doesn’t seem to find Jennifer within it, so he decides to check out her house next.

We viewers might’ve been expecting him to come across a body here to confirm our suspicions that she did, indeed, take her own life last episode, but we do not. Instead, we get more of a verbal confirmation of her fate, as Burke shows up outside of the house and informs Will that Jennifer wasn’t cut out to survive this kind of task force. So, yeah, either she’s dead or she’s been disposed of in some other manner, but right now, it doesn’t look like we’ll be seeing or hearing from her anymore.

Will’s obviously upset about the revelation, but he does recognize that there’s a silver lining to all of this. If Jennifer’s gone, and nobody’s shipping the Bowmans off to the Factory right now, that must mean that whatever intel she had on them has vanished as well. They’re safe, as long as they play by the rules.

NEXT: But Katie’s not fully on board …

Katie being Katie, she can’t totally abide by her own promise to play along. Not when Lindsay’s filling her daughter Gracie’s head with the teachings of the Greatest Day and banishing her younger son Charlie to his bedroom. That last bit is enough to get Katie fuming and she banishes Lindsay from the house, knowing full well that the cameras probably caught her little temper tantrum.

She acts fast by visiting Maddie during a fancy religious zealot fiesta at Nolan’s house and is surprised to discover that yes, her sister is completely serious about her belief in this otherworldly tenet. In fact, Maddie’s obstinate about any challenges to the Greatest Day and considers it a moral affront for Katie to be so brazen about her disrespect for the group, in her own house. The nerve!

Katie asks Maddie whether her information on Bram’s location is legitimate in light of her obvious allegiance to the others, and Maddie feels compelled to prove that she’s not lying about that. Conveniently, the office they’re chatting in has a computer with access to files on who’s in the labor camps — the meaning of the names on other columns is unclear, however — and when Maddie’s beckoned away to watch Nolan give his toast, Katie jumps at the chance to steal a thumb drive and download this intel to it. For what reason, it’s not clear, but if she’s anything like the Katie we used to know, she’s not gonna keep this new 411 to herself. Might this land in Broussard’s lap somehow? Or will she just use this to find out what happened to Jennifer?

Speaking of underhandedness, Bram is, as expected, playing both sides of the fence at the labor camp. After an explosion rocks the storage unit and kills the prisoner who was trying to make a bomb, the camp’s on high alert. Redbeard, a.k.a. Jenkins, prefers the traditional baton-to-kneecaps approach to courting info from the dead guy’s cohorts, but Snyder saves Bram from the wand and pulls him aside to discuss their situation.

If things don’t improve, the whole camp will be exterminated, so he wants Bram to deliver some information to him sooner than later. Bram’s friends have figured out what he is doing by now, based on the convenient timing of Snyder’s interference again, but Bram convinces them he’s still on the level of the resistance. He’s got to give Snyder something — that is, someone — but by providing that information, he can maintain the commander’s trust and hopefully get some information that the camp resistance can actually use.

He’s given the names Pinto and Lyons to pass along as the bomb-making associates, and when Snyder pulls them from the yard, he means to have them interrogated, but Jenkins usurps his authority and shoots them in the head point-blank as a lesson to the rest. Bram and his pals might’ve expected the two to be shipped off to the Factory for their crimes, but now they’ve paid the ultimate price for their insurgency, which comes as a shock to Bram and everyone else.

But it still worked. Thanks to his exposure to Snyder’s office dealings, he’s learned that there’s a very important shipment coming in to the distribution center soon, so he passes that information along to his friends in the underground. They’re even further emboldened by the loss of their two members because it only proves their point that these aliens have turned man against man based purely out of fear, and they aim to prove that the aliens aren’t invulnerable to human resistance.