Review: Gen:Lock “When the Leaves Began to Turn”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

A few months following the end of the previous season, the Union has taken control of the entire United States save for California. Despite the Battle of Chicago showing the first time the Polity was able to push the Union forces back and saw the Gen:Lock team finally merge minds effectively to defeat a Nemesis Holon, the Union has since thrown dozens of other Nemeses at them, and now Chase is back to being against mind sharing again. Colonel Marin, now a General, is pressured by Marc Holcroft to hold the line, while she pressures Fatima Jha to use the copies of their Holon pilots to give them more soldiers, though she continues to avoid it because of the late Dr. Weller’s objections, even as the Union is due to arrive in Los Angeles in days to finish the job. Holcroft is also publicly pushing for the remaining Polity citizens to a colonized Mars, something Union spies discover is a total fabrication and tell their leader, Brother Tate. Also, Leon August, who made use of Sinclair’s spare Holon despite being too old to be compatible, dies while in a coma.

The Union arrives days later, throwing a squad of Nemeses at the Gen:Lock team, so Chase gets over his problems with mind sharing to save Kazu. Marin finds out that Fatima has been deliberately holding up using the copies and makes use of them anyway, sending them in suicide bomber Holon frames that seem to save the day but cause a lot of damage. Later, Chase and Cammie go talk to Dr. Weller’s remaining knowledge inside Caliban in order to ask about a big Nemesis looking door that has been bothering Chase. While they talk, Weller reveals offhandedly that the Polity were the ones who struck first in the war, not the Union.

OUR TAKE (EVEN MORE SPOILERS!)

Hooooooooo boy, there is a lot to unpack here. First off, Gen:Lock is finally back after a two and a half year wait since the first season ended in March 2019. Aside from a comic miniseries that kinda focused on Kazu and a novel that kinda focused on Cammie, it’s been pretty much radio silence on the story until now. This is for many good reasons, not the least of which being the ousting of series creator and former Head of Animation at Rooster Teeth, Gray G. Haddock, who ran a very troubled production of the first season to say the least. The main relevant point about that being that this show that was essentially his brainchild that he put much of himself has now been handed off to an entirely different team, since while it is still technically a Rooster Teeth show, WB and HBO Max have clearly put more of their own people behind it. So that (coupled with the years long wait that probably drained a lot of whatever hype remained from the end of the first season) left this series as a big question mark as to what it would be and what it would be doing under new direction.

For the most part, things look pretty much the same on first glance. They seem to have kept just about all of the existing cast aside from Matt Hullum, who played Holcroft…which makes the sudden and unceremonious death of Leon, played by Haddock, kind of…petty? Like they’re clearly not above recasting, but they still felt the need to kill Haddock’s character anyway in this manner. Not defending Haddock or his actions, but this still feels like an odd choice. Anyway, the old characters all look the same and we’re still clearly in the same setting, but there is a very clear change in the characters’ writing, which makes sense given that the head writer of last season has been changed out, but it is jarring. Characters like Marin or Holcroft or even Kazu, who at least felt potentially nuanced before, now seem to have been simplified to “angry desperate soldier”, “two faced tech mogul”, and “Japanese brute”. Likewise, other characters feel like they’ve had their character development from last season either rushed forward or pushed back, likely to facilitate the planned arcs they’re probably meant to have in THIS season. As mentioned, Chase rather suddenly gained and then resolved his issues with mind sharing in the finale, but now hates it again.

But that’s not the only thing that’s been backtracked rather suddenly. Remember how the last finale, the previous episode to this one, ended with a solid victory for the Vanguard and an optimistic sign that they’d begin pushing back to regain what ground they lost? Well, it’s been four to six months (according to the season’s accompanying podcast) and EVERYTHING has gone to shit in that time. A ton of battles that we apparently did not need to see past a brief montage at the beginning, all of which involving a bunch of Nemesis copies that the team were shown to have beaten before, and ended in major losses that conveniently did not kill off any of the characters we know even while the Polity seems to have been cornered in California. I am reminded of the First Order in the Star Wars sequel trilogy, who were treated as just some upstart group of radicals with very little influence or power who then inexplicably gained a huge advantage so that the situation could artificially end up feeling hopeless for the good guys. Instead of, I dunno, letting us see what tactics and choices on the Polity’s side may have led to this point and making it feel a bit more even.

And speaking of the Polity being “the good guys”, we are now learning, shock of all shocks, that they have their own morally gray ideas that they’re not as squeaky clean a faction as the first season tried to make them look. One of my and many others’ common complaints about the first season was that the conflict between the Union and Polity was never very clearly laid out. The former were just the invading evil looking empire while the latter seemed good by default by being the side all the main characters were on. And even then, I was dreading this “wow, the good guy side did bad things too because war is complicated!” twist because…well, it’s not a twist, it’s just the obvious. And now that we’re actually learning SOMETHING about these two sides that can actually flesh them out, all I’m getting is that the Union is vaguely religious about…something, while the Polity (or at least Holcroft) seem to be aggressively secular and are fully willing to lie to the public about a Mars base to keep hope alive…which no one really seems to be buying or care about anyway. So instead of feeling like I get why these two ideologies led to this conflict, I just dislike and am bored with both sides. Which I’m pretty sure is not the intenion. I don’t really care who started the war, I care about what the war was actually about.

There is a bit more I could get into from this episode, like the prolonged effects of the mind sharing between the pilots and the Holon copy suicide bombers, but I have a feeling we’ll get more chances to talk about that next episode. For now, I’ll end drawing attention to the fact that the “This Season on…” preview at the end of the episode seems to basically give away A TON of major plot points for the remaining seven episodes. And since they felt they were okay to show us, I’ll list what feel like major spoilers to me:

-Chase and the team defecting because they now know that the Polity started the war
-The team breaking into RTASA to kill the copy Holons
-Chase seeming to become more like Nemesis
-Chase’s mom saving his sister during the Battle of New York with a Union anti-nano badge (this was seen as a preview in the podcast too, I guess they didn’t know about how much was going to be given away)
-The Union using a ritual to digitize people
-An even more giant robot with a human face that looks creepy as hell
-And Chase getting back in his body

So yeah. This is gonna be a trip. Let’s see where it takes us. Let the good times…roll?