Episode Recap: The Wolf You Feed

After the ordered destruction of several Rack outposts by Aneela, our heroes have no time to waste. And they don’t. When we return, Johnny and D’avin are in the middle of coordinating a multilateral flight test with a couple of Black Root ships. Unfortunately, neither Johnny nor D’avin (who can presumably control the ships with his mind) are prepared for a malfunction, and the two ships collide, killing the pilots. They think they’d fare much better if Dutch were there (as always).

But Dutch is off with Zeph getting to the bottom of the brain matter business inside the Remnant. They show traces of genetic material similar to Dutch’s, so they probably belong to Aneela — which means Dutch’s brain could likely process them. Zeph takes Dutch to an abandoned lab to conduct the very experimental procedure, hooks her up, and down the memory rabbit hole they go. The one caveat: if Dutch spends too much time cozying up with Aneela’s brain tissue…they might start to fuse.

No time for waffling! First stop on the Nostalgia Express is Aneela’s childhood. In this one, Dutch learns that Khlyen is from Qresh. Clues... Another memory, later in Aneela’s life, shows Aneela battling with her emotions, wanting the plasma to free her of feeling. When she consults the plasma, it tells her not to trust Khlyen anymore. Imagine that: green goo as family counselor.

Meanwhile, everyone and their mothers are asking D’avin where Dutch is, and he really doesn’t have a good explanation. Because he doesn’t know. Even the Ferran, who’ve joined the fray, are starting to lose their tempers. To placate the parties involved, D’avin agrees to go find Fancy Lee — who stormed off after his spat with Turin. He was Khlyen’s right hand dude, and could give some insight into the flight patterns for the ships. And Johnny manages to piece together the mystery of the missing Dutch and Zeph: he knows they’re pottering around with that Remnant. But when he tries to use Lucy’s GPS system to track them down, he’s confronted with a series of coding traps put in place by Zeph. It’s going to take him a while. Brew that coffee! 

Back down memory lane. Khlyen, seeking to protect Aneela from Qreshi persecution, keeps her locked up in the cube we saw earlier. It’s surprisingly roomy, but nonetheless confining. And D’avin finds Fancy Lee and manages to persuade him to dish on the ship issue: only Hullen, or Hullen-esque, pilots can control them. In exchange for rounding up 34 cleansed (ex-Hullen) pilots for the 34 ship fleet, Fancy Lee wants D’avin to provide back-up. It’s a deal.

In the memory chest: Aneela, still trapped in her 1 bedroom/1 bath cube, creates an incision in her neck to drain out the green plasma inside her. She stores it in a vessel to protect it from Khlyen, and so she can take baths in it. Definitely unusual bathing behavior. The procedure is taxing Dutch’s own brain, and she realizes what Khlyen was keeping hidden in those memories: Dutch. Baby Dutch shows up in Aneela’s memories, and Dutch hypothesizes that…Aneela is her mom?

Meanwhile D’avin then intercepts the Ferran emissary at Pree’s bar and attempts to convince him to stay on.

In his attempts to recruit cleansed mercenaries, Fancy Lee is having some difficulty. No one wants to help the Killjoys, especially when Killjoys are still organizing raids on ex-Hullen operatives. Like, right now. Elsewhere, Johnny is having slightly more success, and manages to break Lucy’s firewall in a matter of seconds.

Fancy Lee finds D’avin and the Ferran rep, and punches him in the face for what he thinks were Turin’s orders to round up more cleansed. That was a quick partnership. The Ferran emissary is not impressed with this show of ineptitude. Turns out, Turin used Fancy and D’avin as unknowing pawns to track down the cleansed, whom he could conscript into forced military service and further research. 

And inside Aneela’s memories, things are starting to heat up: child Dutch is the product of Aneela…and Khlyen. The revelation causes Dutch to panic, and she starts bopping around memories like a frog in a lily-pad pond — except death is imminent. Zeph tries to jolt her from subconscious, and plunges a syringe of adrenaline into her abdomen. But Dutch, who’s living out the memory of a former fight, takes that syringe and assaults Zeph with it before escaping from the lab. Johnny rushes in to revive Zeph and figure out where she’s going: Lucy, where she first met Johnny.

Back then, Johnny was a common thief and Dutch was an uppity princess. Modern-day Johnny steps in to return Dutch to her senses, and he plays the part well. But this time, Dutch goes off script and shoots Johnny in the chest. Wait, no, that was part of the script. Dutch is back.

Who is going off-script, though, is D’avin, as he’s just freed the imprisoned cleansed from the brig. It’s a very brief Spartacus moment. He was able to secure their vow to fight alongside the Killjoys, which gives him some leverage when he places Turin under arrest for war crimes. Oh snap! All the other races turn their backs on Turin, and place their allegiance firmly with D’avin, who becomes the de facto general of this uprising.

With Johnny at her side, Dutch makes a final foray into the memories. She watches as Aneela describes to Khlyen how she created Dutch: she extracted her own memories of herself from the goo, something Khlyen was never able to do. But Dutch isn’t just a clone of Aneela: she’s Aneela without all the suffering caused by being alone on a cube on Arkyn for so long. She’s quasi-normal. And Khlyen, who decides not to kill the child Dutch, proves he’s not a terrible guy. Dutch needed to see that. She also needed to remove herself from the grand military operations that are bound to go into effect in the coming days. She leaves D’avin to take care of that as she's got personal matters - by the name of Aneela, to deal with.