Colony recap: 'Lost Boy'

Well, this is new. This week’s episode of Colony branches into some unfamiliar territory with this chapter narrative style that swivels between each character’s perspective until we have a clearer picture of what’s actually happened. Whereas other installments have left us with questions about who’s telling half-truths and what wasn’t said in this moment or that, this structure pieces together a full picture of Bram’s first brush with the red hands in a satisfying and alarming new way.

Frankie Bloom’s “mother” is the leader of the red hands, and the labor yard sect that blew up the Raps’ ship was a part of that organization as well. Unlike Broussard’s Resistance, which has grown so scant that the only possible future for them is to escape, the red hands have numbers. And while she sings a nice song about humans uniting against the Raps, her soldiers are all too happy to play judge, jury, and executioner for everyone in the green zone. After all, their second most important mantra (behind “to liberty”) is: “You collaborate, you die.” But spilling so much human blood does seem a little hypocritical, no?

Andddd now Bram’s one of them, which should cause a spectacularly bad row with the rest of the Bowman brigade, two of whom (Will and Broussard) have collaborated in the recent past.

Let’s take it from the top, shall we?

When we first see Bram taking up arms with the red hands, he seems pretty slow to drink up with the rest before they set off on the day’s damage patrol mission. He’s paired up a man named Patrick, who takes him to the green zone hideaway they’ve built up in some gardener gear. The redhats at the gate are thoroughly checking everyone’s belongings and IDs and putting them through metal detectors, but that doesn’t mean they can avoid a melee by these men and women.

It seems they’ve amply prepared on the inside, with guns galore stowed away in their green zone hideout. Bram’s hesitant about it all at first — taking the traditional toast shot, arming up with a pistol, and heading into the house they’ve chosen. But when he’s presented an opportunity to carry out the day’s mission solo after Patrick’s gunned down, Bram’s reticence to act is nowhere to be found.

Of course, we only know that he has killed Ambassador King — a super duper VIP visiting from Europe, whom the Governor General sends Alan Snyder to ally with — once the final scene unfolds because Bram’s pants are on fire every time he talks about what has happened.

NEXT: What Bram said (and what he actually did)…

Patching together the timeline, it’s clear that Bram did the red hands’ deathly bidding that day, even putting their signature symbol on the door with King’s blood for good measure, and then scampered over to Maddie’s to hide out because he knew he’d be caught by the Authority if he didn’t find a way out of the green zone.

She sees right through his innocence act, of course. Already alarmed by the fact that there are bullets flying around her usually quaint, ritzy neighborhood, when Bram shows up amid the chaos in blue collar gear, she doesn’t trust him. Even so, she does help him. Maybe it’s because she feels a sting of guilt about what she’s done to Katie and the other kids, but she knows full well that Bram didn’t just hop the gate into the green zone after escaping the labor yard, like he says he did, and even though she’s presented with yet another opportunity to throw one of the Bowmans under the bus, she resists.

As soon as they’re past the gate, though, she throws Bram to the curb, quite literally. But still. She helped him escape. Points for progress? Or did she just condemn her sister again — accidentally, this time?

By the time Bram gets home, the whole family’s on high alert that he’s been sneaking out. We might’ve thought Charlie’s knowing glances at Bram as he took off from the bunker are/were indicators of some brotherly sympatico, but he rats Bram out to Will for sneaking around. He takes his time in doing so — he only brings it up after his father expresses concerns about his well-being and recuperation from the hell of the Santa Monica Bloc over a game of catch. But he tells on him nonetheless. He must know that Bram’s simply not on the level and poses a threat to everyone right now.

And he does. Let’s make no mistake about that. We’ve seen how ruthless and brutal the red hands can be, and since Will was a collaborator, he had a shiny target on his back. Who knows how they feel about Broussard, too. If the red hands find out who Bram is (and, more importantly, who he has access to), this could be a death sentence for everyone.

But his grim demeanor and texture-free expressions betray nothing to his parents, really.

They know that he snuck out, and that’s it. He fills in the blanks for them by telling them about Mya: that they were together, that she died, that they blew up the Raps’ ship in the labor yard and he escaped just before it was completely destroyed, that he wanted to tell her mom the truth about her passing, and that they were affiliated with the red hands, whom he now worships for their action-oriented approach to this anti-alien thing.

He eventually comes clean about the green zone invasion, too, but the one key piece of information he leaves out of the story is that he got his hands dirty by killing King during the massacre. Katie seems to believe his story that he didn’t — he couldn’t — kill the man, but does Will? And will Broussard?

This season’s been largely focused on Bram and his journey from the kid who was just kinda there into this duplicitous resistor. And considering we started out this season with Will’s mission to rescue Charlie, that might seem surprising. But whereas Charlie’s separation from the group was accidental and victimized him, Bram’s pretty much gotten himself into every negative situation he’s faced.

He’s always had that tinge of resistance — he was listening to Geronimo’s radio show long before anyone knew what Katie was up to. But now he’s resisting the Resistance, which is almost completely made up of his own family. Even Gracie seems more in tuned to reality than him right now. (Quick! Somebody spill the beans about that countdown for crying out loud to knock some sense into all of them!)

The Bowmans might want to escape the Bloc right now, but Bram might be the spoke in the wheels of their movement on that end — or, at the very least, might refuse to leave and become the factor that keeps them on this side of the wall.

Either way, Snyder and Helena are in quite a lurch right now, thanks to yet another unruly incident in the Los Angeles Bloc. Ambassador King was brought in to help ensure peace in the colony, but he won’t leave it alive now, which is a massive signal to the Global Authority that this place cannot be controlled. Helena’s been trying to stave off elimination of the colony, but the more this resistance grows, the faster that countdown clock ticks.

Her biggest problem, of course, is the fact that Proxy Alcala is insubordinate to her. Snyder doesn’t want his old job back, he says, but he does want to encourage the ouster of Alcala all the same. Before Ambassador King was gunned down, Snyder had actually been running around the neighborhood convincing VIPs, including King, that giving Alcala the boot wouldn’t be as tragic an upset as they might expect. But now that King’s dead (Snyder wisely ducked out in the woods ’til the coast was clear), and the Bloc’s in panic mode again, the mission to ouster Alcala seems less likely.

But, as always, Snyder’s got a little plan up his sleeve. The only person who really has an “in” with Alcala is Nolan Burgess, and given the recent pressure Burgess has been under with the Global Authority and Maddie’s connection to Katie, he might just be willing to bend on his true faith to Greatest Day cult members like Alcala.

It’s hard to know where this is going, but we’ve heard about this total rendition concept enough times to know that for the upcoming finale, things might just get explosive.