Red Manu-Ed Redemption

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Toth and the Dandy Lions sullenly return to the Oasis to the bittersweet news: The Nomad has finally been captured!…by Red Manuel, who has now taken Toth’s position. Don Paragon is all too ready to hand the poor guy over, but not before he throws the perfect shindig to celebrate. Toth is understandably skeptical about this, especially hearing that Skout was apparently helping him, but what’s even worse is that deal with the Don is null and void since she wasn’t the one to make the capture.

Desperate now, she goes to see the imprisoned Skout (who is miraculously still alive) with a new plan to steal the Nomad back from Paragon and take him directly to El Rey. But Skout isn’t budging from her recent change of heart, so even though she has feelings for Toth, she locks her in the prison and goes off to find the Nomad.

The Nomad himself has also managed to escape using the old “pretend to be injured” trick and tries to make a break for it. However, his old memories compel him to commit to his true purpose of protecting. Using a piñata stead, he confronts Don Paragon.

OUR TAKE

This is the first of a two-part story (the third two-parter of the season, it seems), so a lot of this is probably going to be paid off next week, but there are still plenty of major developments to dissect, and each come from our core cast. The first worth talking about is Toth, who has now seen her deal with Don Paragon completely crumble in front of her. I expected her to actually capture the Nomad more or less successfully by the end only for Paragon to weasel out and turn on her, but this failure turned out to be on her. She DID have multiple chances to capture her target, but most were hindered by Skout or Toth’s own obsessive temper. The first episode even showed she was about to leave her men to die in a fire if not for the fact that her poor decision making made her about to suffer the same fate. Put bluntly, she’s a bad leader and always has been, and I honestly don’t know how Red Maneul could possibly be worse now that he’s taken her place.

But I do understand the intent of her scenes and what they mean for her own personal arc. She’s tried constraining herself to rules to pursue a singular goal, that being helping her people. How exactly that works out is unclear, but the fact that she has been willing to go these lengths says more about her than that plan at this point. And now that following those rules has failed her, she’s willing to break them at the cost of even more lives (breaking the water reservoir, which will probably doom most of the people who need that to live), and even manipulate Skout’s feelings to her own ends. Essentially, with nowhere and no one to turn for help, Toth has now gone off the deep end. It’s probably heartbreaking to see for any shippers of her and Skout when they’ve finally gotten such a tender moment, but as of now, they’re enemies.

Speaking of Skout, how the hell is she still alive?! Last we saw her, she was giving Red Manuel every reason in the world to shoot her dead for helping the Nomad and ZERO reason to NOT do it. For one, they’ve never liked each other (well, no one likes Red Manuel, but that’s beside the point), she’s a confessed traitor, she’s not in any way a valuable enough asset to keep imprisoned, no one but Toth cares if she lives or dies, and hauling her body back is just doubling the work for Manuel. And it’s not like he ran out of bullets when he knocked out the Nomad. The absolute greatest cost he’d have for just shooting her is having one less bullet and MAYBE getting punched by Toth before she’s overtaken by security and executed. There’s not even a handwave for WHY he kept her alive either, it’s just not mentioned at all. The only explanation for this miraculous survival is plot armor, plain and simple, and it’s not a good look for a show to have when they introduce life-threatening scenarios to a character, pull that character out of it through no in-story solution, and then expect us to ever believe the stakes will matter in that story ever again.

And yet, this does allow us to see that Skout’s turning of a new leaf was not a bluff since she’ll even turn on her love for Toth in order to make sure that the Nomad isn’t unjustly captured. It’s not like she had a whole lot to lose in giving up her Spitoon Girl position, but the one thing that did matter was Toth, and now she’s no longer someone Skout can depend on. I’m not even sure she has a longterm plan beyond simply making sure the Nomad is safe to travel, but she’s committed to the good he might bring over the corrupt government she knows won’t.

Lastly, the Nomad himself seems to also be committing to the role he was born to be, that of a protector. His memories returning means he knows what he was meant to do, though it’s hard to say exactly how he intends to go about that. He doesn’t know Skout has freed herself, so maybe he’s trying to protect her? Or maybe protect the people of the Oasis by “stopping” Don Paragon like Melinda wanted to “stop” El Rey? I guess we need a proper final battle for our first season finale, but I am genuinely curious how this is all going to shape out. Still, it’s clear enough that there are plenty of bugs still being worked out in this story, and I’ll be pretty surprised if the finale has anything that can assuage my concerns at this point.

Score 5/10