| BLASSREITER, Episode 10: The Bowels of Conspiracy |
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| Thursday, 03 July 2008 | |
 It's taken far longer than it should have, but BLASSREITER finally seems to be getting into its stride, as the background information needed to make sense of the series finally begins to trickle through - and it's up to Amanda and Hermann to try and make sense of it all, as XAT appears to be compromised...Joseph and Malek are taken into custody and held in a XAT laboratory. In an attempt to protect Malek, Amanda goes against orders to transfer them to a different government agency and starts to analyze Joseph's data with the aid of Herman and a XAT researcher - after all, if Joseph can so clearly control his Amalgam nature, then there must be hope that Malek can do the same. Meanwhile, some other members of XAT are beginning to suspect that Amalgams are an artificial creation, while a trawl through the records reveals the involvement of XAT's Director in a top-secret programme, Blassreiter...   Okay, so we're still none the wiser as to what "Blassreiter" actually is, but at least the term is being used now and we know it's central to what's going on - and if the interactions of our mysterious blonde woman and Wolf are anything to go by, we're talking nothing less than the potential end of the world here. Makes you wonder what the point of triggering accelerated evolution is, if the end result is just going to be global disaster (although Childhood's End played that card in a way that really worked, I somehow doubt that BLASSREITER is on quite the same lever), but at least we have a talking point. We also have Amanda finally standing up and putting herself on the line, as much in an effort to try and do something for Malek as to find out what's really going on. She and Hermann are the only ones who are really making an effort to dig behind events and find the truth, although for different reasons - and by the end of this episode, those efforts have already landed them in serious trouble. As it turns out, the Blassreiter programme has more to do with XAT itself than anyone had realised until now, and that's information that XAT's controllers don't want to reach the public domain. All told, then, this episode actually managed to interest me - which given the show's record up until now is something of an achievement. It's still got a way to go before I get to the stage where I'm actively looking forward to the next episode, but at least I'm not dreading Saturday night coming around again. The information is still coming in a trickle, but there's enough for you to begin to get an idea of what's going on and there's plenty of time left in the series to deal with the remaining mysteries, should the writers actually want to do that. Hopefully they will. In the meantime - still nothing great, but BLASSREITER is finally beginning to get there...  |
