First Wave: Terminal City

To beat Mabus, Cade must acquire the hammer of Thor. To this end, Eddie sets up a tracking portal and Cade passes through, finding himself in a future wasteland, years after the Gua have invaded. Mabus has followed him, however, and with some help from Eddie and Joshua, who have followed him, Cade must get the hammer before the Gua leader does.

We've had this kind of concept before, in season two's Tomorrow and season one's The Aftertime, oddly enough the penultimate episode each time. This time it's not done by hearsay or hallucination but is real, with a battered and miserable Cade Foster leading the last few pockets of resistance and still depressed over the death of Jordan, who he had to kill to stop Mabus. Or did he? Now, we know this future can never come to pass as that would mean the Gua will win, but it shouldn't allow Joshua and Eddie to die as they do. Surely when Cade returned he'd just find them gone; he's just lucky he apparently returns moments after he left.

Sebastian Spence plays the world-weary Cade well, but the older Cade isn't a strong enough character to provide much of a threat to what 'our' Cade wants to do. Mabus/Jordan spends most of his/her time wandering about being threatening but little more than that. The futuristic setting would be better if it wasn't so minimalist, looking like countless junkyard sets from the show already and with no sign of a Gua presence. It just all seems a little lazy.

But it's the ending that really lets it down. I'd been expecting a no-holds-barred confrontation with Mabus as the season finale with Jordan as the prize, but here the alien life force leaves her for no apparent reason. It's not clear where it goes, how it takes the hammer or why it decides to leave Jordan, and when Cade returns and everything's okay again you feel you've been robbed of a dramatic conclusion. But we'll have to wait and see...

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