Cade enters a dimensional pocket where he discovers Playland, an amusement park inhabited by runaway teenage kids who are made to fight for a Gua experiment with the promise of food.

A slightly more hi-tech version of Lord of the Flies, this is a big step down from last episode. Containing every cliché imaginable about how kids would react to being in a non-adult environment, it goes on with no real plot until it reaches the end. This ending is actually the only highlight of the episode, as the way it finishes is totally unexpected and more dark than this show normally is.

That doesn’t make up for the rest of it, however. The kids are straight out of the aforementioned book, including a tough leader and a geeky guy who you expect to be dead before the episode ends. They’ve also made up their own ridiculous language (each night they set out to ‘brawl’, and they hate A-dults) for no readily discernible reason. There are a series of face-offs, most of which lead nowhere, Cade is put in jeopardy when one gang ties him to a rollercoaster track (a scene in which all tension is killed by seeing that Cade has a knife handy beforehand).

Then there’s the escape. Despite earlier protestations, all the kids agree to return to the real world, Cade finds an easy way of doing it without having to do anything clever and the Gua don’t really figure in at all. Surely one of them must be monitoring the experiment, but not a single one makes an appearance. After the previous episode, it makes you wonder how Chris Brancato can write something rather good and follow it with this drivel.

**

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