The cold open seems to show Dr. Taylor the Lynwood hospital shrink, was lying to Caitlin and Lauren. I suppose we can imagine that as the scene closed Rebecca everted her collar, then killed everyone. I can't think why they'd do that, though. De mortuis nil nisi bonum? We are to believe Reeva and Lorna are simply manipulating Andy by agreeing with his feeling Rebecca was a victim. I suppose Reeva was sure Andy would try to rescue her the truth and she would then expose her true self, and then Andy would be committed. (The part to play she told Sage about.) But she didn't think Twist would actually get the drop on them. Andy skipping the meeting wasn't an announcement he was running with Rebecca.
There is a grave misunderstanding on the part of the producers when they give the big dramatic decision to Andy Strucker, who is still detested by all right-minded audience. I'm not sure they meant to, but they did.
They tried to parallel this with John's redemption from the path of evil in the name of necessity and return to the true morality of saving people you know. Unfortunately this is kind of small-minded, quasi-pacifist twaddle bordering on moral cowardice, and stupid to boot. Beating the Purifiers, then questioning a real source, Fade, could in principle have led to them tipping off the cops about the raid on Regimen. That way the Mutant Underground could have kept all those mutants in jail, nice and orderly, the way MU thinks it should be. So that's no counterweight.
There's also the big Strucker decision to forego the cure to save Reed's life (if you believe Risman Garber, which I wouldn't but I'm a malcontent who is baselessly suspicious of authority.) The thing is, it isn't at all clear why? Except they had Risman Garber get really mean, so clearly she needed to die. Reed and Caitlin are Good Guys, so when she mouths off to them, it justifies her death, unlike that jerk in the bank. (She should be dead, given what was said about Noah's power.) There's also some verbiage about genocide and a race. But the thing about the mutant metaphor is that mutants aren't a race, where ancestors and posterity are the same kind of people, where there is commonality between generations. The mutants are different people, new, not the old. Even worse, when the woman says Andy is a curse, everybody else in the audience is going to agree she has a point. They undermined their own point by forgetting their own metaphor. It's like True Blood "forgetting" that vampires really are monsters whenever they wanted. So that's no counterweight either. So far as making meaningful choices goes, we're stuck with Andy saving the Inner Circle.I thought it was affecting, but I have the poor taste to find all talk of the Speed Force more and more boring.
Technical issues: Why do the collars need to be centrally controlled? How can that actually work? We saw Weeks turn off the collars at the Trask massacre too.
The show says Reed's old treatment was an enzyme that neutralized the power protein (though it doesn't literally say "enzyme," that's what it is.) It is not at all clear how any toxic enzyme could become less toxic, lose it's potency due to "stress" or even survive without degradation for decades. We wish proteins like collagen wouldn't when we've looked into a mirror long enough.
Double X-genes somehow being taken from sibling? Most traits are actually polygenic. As technobabble this is about as senseless as Threshold's three-stranded DNA. Also, since Andy has run away, all talk about being drawn together is nonsense. It's not like Lauren really has any plans.
Lastly, is this a true game-changer? I don't think so. Team Red State is of course the hero. Pulp fiction, as I think Jack Williamson for one told us, is a matter of putting your hero up a tree, then throwing rocks at him. This is just more rocks, so far.
