The pilot opens in Los Angeles in the indeterminate future, with only a few layers of context unpeeling over the course of the episode (and presumably more left to come). The city is under occupation by alien forces—literal aliens, although as a character points out, “No one ever sees them,” perhaps because the budget was mostly spent on the show’s otherwise slick production values. During The Arrival, the aliens destroyed the city’s defense mechanisms in under eight hours and divided it into sections by building a vast silver wall around various neighborhoods. (Santa Monica is one, and a “green zone” for VIPs appears to be in the Hollywood Hills.) They also seem to have destroyed all modern technology, given that the only way people communicate in the show is via payphones. Many humans, accepting that the invaders are here to stay, have joined them, and are known as collaborators. Others have become part of the resistance. But most, it’s implied, are simply trying to get along, dealing with the food and drug shortages and the disappearances that are now part of daily life.

Colony borrows most heavily from the Nazi occupation of World War II, in both imagery and structure: The ruling “hosts” have covered the city in posters featuring their red-and-black logo, the “proxy” governor of the divided city lives in a mansion filled with looted masterpieces, people trade food and sundries in a black market, and order is maintained by an aggressive troop of “redhats,” or heavily armed, masked soldiers. Humans seen as weak or defective are deprived of medical care, forcing Katie to surreptitiously raid a hospital for insulin for her diabetic nephew. But there are also hints of 21st-century warfare in the aforementioned green zone and the IEDs the resistance plants all over the city.

In the first episode, which is available in its entirety online, Will attempts to smuggle himself across the wall into Santa Monica to find his son. But a rebel blows up the checkpoint while he’s hidden inside a truck, and he’s arrested, whereupon his background as a former special agent and ex-army ranger is uncovered by Proxy Governor Snyder (Peter Jacobson), who orders him to enter the resistance as a double agent and help reveal the identity of its leader, Geronimo. (The alternative is going with his wife and two remaining children to the “factories,” hinted to be a place you don’t return from.) Will agrees to the plan, and even seems to enjoy it, to the consternation of Katie, whom it’s revealed is an active member of the force trying to undermine the occupiers.

Holloway is charismatic as Will, in a floppy-haired, drawling kind of way. But he’s overshadowed by Callies, whose Katie is closely guarded and extremely tough (in one scene, she pulls a gun on a woman who tries to trade her crappy insulin for a bottle of Jameson). It’s hard not to think that this is deliberate—in a later episode, Will tries to patronize a young blonde who he believes is his underling, and is confused when she coolly replies, “Wait, were you under the impression that you were going to be in charge here? That’s funny.” The series subverts traditional gender stereotypes from genre shows as much as it shamelessly appropriates other elements. It channels HBO’s The Leftovers by picking up a year after significant events occurred, rather than letting the audience watch them play out, and it mimics The Americans in the ways in which it forces a husband and wife into a team and then pits them against each other.