Seriously, if you have the villain at a disadvantage, don't let him or her start monologuing and trying to explain stuff. For most of the last 10 minutes of last night's Tomorrow People, I was yelling "Just shoot him already!" at the screen.


Spoilers ahead...

The crux of last night's episode seems to come down to which one of the Ultra bosses is evil: the Founder or Jedikiah. But I wasn't ever sure why this had to be an either-or situation.


In "Endgame," we pick up with Stephen having just found his father's cryo-frozen body in a secret Ultra facility, and Jedikiah explains that he had to stash Roger down there because the Founder wanted to use Roger's powers to activate an evil super-machine that would do something Very Bad. (Nobody ever even asks what this machine is or what it does, because who cares about such trivialities?)

Jedikiah convinces Stephen, who's practically becoming an honorary Winchester Brother at this point in terms of gullibility and willingness to go off half-cocked, that the only way to bring Stephen's dad back from the dead is to kill the Founder. Because otherwise, the Founder will just want to use Roger in his machine again, which is why Roger needed to be put out of the way in the first place. With the Founder gone, they can all live happily and eat s'mores every day.

Because Stephen can't kill, he needs to enlist the aid of John, which takes a big chunk of the episode. Meanwhile, Stephen rescues the Founder's daughter Cassie from the facility where she's been tortured for weeks (with Stephen not expressing much concern about her until now.)

And in a series of flashbacks, we see how Roger saved Jedikiah from his own reckless gunshot, using his telekinesis, and the two of them started studying Roger's paranormal powers together. This led them to a hilariously-wigged Founder, who convinced Roger that they could use their powers to make the world a better place... through EVIL. (He didn't say that last part out loud.) But Jedikiah got in the way, by demanding that they focus some of their research on how to give ordinary humans (like Jedikiah) paranormal abilities.


The whole thing culminates in one of those scenes I always hate — where the heroes have the baddie at their mercy, but they let him talk. And talk. And talk and talk and talk. I'm still not entirely sure what the Founder's version of events is, but it boils down to "Jedikiah was jealous of Roger's powers and he just wants them for himself, and by the way the machine is really awesome even though I still won't tell you what it does. Help me deal with Jedikiah, and we'll have s'mores every day."

Eventually they do shoot the Founder, but by then it's too late — he's overcome the power suppresser they planted on him and destroyed it. He diverts the bullets, killing his own daughter. And then while he's shocked by his daughter's death, they don't take advantage of his distraction to try and shoot him a dozen more times.


Here's the crucial fact that nobody points out while the Founder is stalling and spinning a story about how Jedikiah is the real bad guy — this is Jedikiah's boss. If he disapproved of anything Jedikiah was doing, he could presumably put a stop to it. He definitely wouldn't need to tiptoe around Jedikiah. Plus we already saw a scene earlier in the episode where the Founder twirled his mustache and said they were going to use the machine on Stephen, and that Jedikiah's concern for family is a weakness.

Like I said, why is it a choice: Why can't they both be evil?

Oh, and when Jedikiah goes on the run, he tells Stephen that his powers won't save everybody, but rather his humanity will.


In the "B" plot, Cara tracks a breakout that she feels an unusually strong connection to, and it turns out to be her sister. Who's a ballerina, with no desire to become a paranormal freedom fighter instead. This part of the episode is surprisingly entertaining, partly because Cara gets to be more sympathetic for once and partly because the sister points out the terrible fashion sense and interior décor of the Tomorrow People.

And in the end, Cara has to admit that not everybody who has the chance to become a super-mutant actually needs to jump at it. After months of treating mutant powers as a heroic destiny that you have no choice but to respond to, she finally admits that there's another way, giving her sister a power-suppression cuff to wear. In an episode whose main plot is all about either-or choices — you're either with Villain A or Villain B — it's refreshing to see a plotline that's about realizing that these binaries are often false.