My Kind of Enjoyment: A Review of Season 1 of Killjoys

So I’m spending more time hanging out at home these days, and more time seeking serious distraction from real-world worries, as one does.

Just before the shelter-in-place order came down, I had (thankfully) stopped by the library and picked up a slew of (frankly disappointing!) books, and one wildcard TV choice: season 1 of Killjoys.

Why Killjoys?

Hannah John-Kamen. I’ve been repeat-watching Ant-Man and the Wasp, and in a movie stuffed with appealing actors, she stands out. When I looked her up, she showed up as the lead in Killjoys, a show I vaguely remembered from K. Ceres Wright’s post of favorite things some time ago. It sparked my interest, but I didn’t have Syfy at the time. So I forgot about it.

That was a mistake, but it’s one I’m okay with because I get to discover it now.

Spoilers below!

The premise is simple: Dutch (Hannah John-Kamen) and Johnny (Aaron Ashmore) are killjoys — bounty hunters for the RAC, an offshoot of the Company that runs a four-planet system called the Quad. One of the planets is nice (Leith), and is dangled as a reward for those who work for the Company. If your family works for the Company for seven generations, the seventh gen will be allowed to emigrate to the luxurious lifestyle on Leith.

There is a would-be revolution spearheaded by a religious order, the Scarbacks, who I found utterly fascinating. Their belief seems to be that the brothers (and sisters) of the Scarbacks take on the pains of the average person by acts of self-torment. Blessings are given in blood, but steeped in a weirdly gentle context of roots and trees.

The story kicks into action when Johnny learns there is a kill warrant for his brother D’avin. Johnny breaks the rules in two important ways: he takes on a kill warrant with no intention of following through, and he forges Dutch’s name to do it. This action brings Dutch’s evil mentor back into her life. And to take on the warrant for D’avin yet refuse kill him brings Johnny and Dutch into complicated Company politics.

The politics are ugly but interesting, and they peel back in layers. We’re given basic facts that the characters understand to be true: The fourth planet Arkyn is an abandoned wreck incapable of supporting life; there are only five killjoy levels; warrants can not be altered. By the end of the first season, the characters learn that none of those things are true. I love it when the characters learn more about the world as they go, even when they’ve been living in it their whole lives.

At the end of Season 1, I can say this is my kind of television.

In my recent review of Machina, I talked about kinder, gentler SF, and as peculiar as it sounds given all the mayhem, torture, and inequity, Killjoys really fits that mold for me.

Why?

Because it centers on three main protagonists all trying to be better people. Dutch, our heroine, comes from a past where she’s been molded to be a lethal weapon. D’avin, a soldier, was used against his will to kill his teammates. And Johnny is a man who has a burning need to fix things. And people. And injustice. They’re not reveling in their capacities for violence; they’re not gloating over how dangerous they can be.

It feels like the creator of the series, Michelle Lovretta, watched all the same SF shows I loved before and then said, “now how can I make these shows more emotionally savvy yet still fun?”

Basically, this is not so much a review as a list of things that I really liked about the show.

I love the smoothness of the tech getting introduced. Lovretta is excellent about putting a whole series of guns on the mantel and firing them off later. An illusion shield is used to hide a secret building in the desert mid-season in a way that feels natural and not really worthy of comment — just the usual sort of SF trappings. Then, in the final episode, we see an illusion shield hiding an entire (evil) settlement on the “abandoned” planet Arkyn.  Another example: Dutch wears a necklace in the first episode that turns into a weapon: a series of drones that attack on her command. Later, a Scarback monk about to be executed for a crime he didn’t commit reveals that his rosary is of the same manufacture — tiny, murderous drones. When Dutch uses the necklace, it’s just cool SF stuff. When Alvis the monk uses it, it’s a laugh-out-loud moment of delight.

Not really an attractive necklace, mind you, but so useful.

There are just a lot of little examples like that: a standard SF trope is used in a small way, unnoticed, then comes back in a big way later on.

I love that the setting is weirdly small for space opera. I’m sure it helped the budget, but what it also does is really make the surroundings feel fleshed out. Sure, the characters might have an awesome ship, but dirty, hardscrabble Old Town is also their home. It also keeps the stories tight. Everything relates to something else. There’s no “new galaxy, new civilization” every episode.

Old Town. A lovely place to live and work.

I mentioned that I liked the characters trying to be better people. But I also love their interactions. I love that Johnny and Dutch are ride-or-die best friends and found family with each other. I love that Dutch is trained to be a killer, and thinks that her evil mentor must die for her to be free. Yet, she has doubts she can do it. She’s spent the last decade avoiding killing if at all possible. In fact, she’s never taken a kill warrant until Johnny forges her name on one. She’s not a fluffy bunny: she will kill people in self-defense, but prefers not to. She’s a trained killer who appreciates the sanctity of life.

I love that Lovretta wrote Dutch as someone who wants to live a full life. It would have been so easy and standard to have her backstory (trained child killer! on the run!) result in a person who was the lone wolf, a defiantly suspicious, hostile person who keeps people at arm’s length. Instead, Dutch has constantly reached out to form healthy relationships. Johnny as the most obvious, the brother of her heart. But she also has made friends with Alvis, the Scarback monk; Pree, the bartender; Bellus, her RAC agent; even the local Company military head, Hills. And of course, there’s D’avin, her new and dangerous love interest.

Johnny could easily be a cliché: the super competent mechanic/hacker sidekick who is unquestioningly loyal to Dutch. But the writers give him a fully fleshed out life, and a decently complex inner one. He’s a good man, but he can also be an angry one. He’s compassionate and curious and for god’s sakes, that is my personal catnip. Johnny may be my favorite character. He loves Dutch, is always on her side, but isn’t afraid to confront her on issues that they disagree on.

I also adore that Johnny is no Xander Harris: he’s not secretly lusting after Dutch, or sabotaging her relationships, even when he’s not thrilled about her taking up with D’avin.

D’avin is the least fleshed out: the man with something to prove, the closest thing to the gloating badass. He makes attempts at being “the lone wolf,” but never succeeds because Lovretta’s theme is that we all need each other. So really, it’s in his interactions with others that D’avin’s personality really shines. He’s not always right, but he’s not always wrong either.

There’s a point where they are sent to collect one girl from a surrogacy center which is under attack. D’avin is left with the girls while Dutch deals with the woman running the place. It’s sort of set up for a laugh: the big soldier left behind with the girls and a flippant comment about not scaring them too much. By the time Dutch gets back, D’avin has befriended each of the girls, learned their names and their interests. He sees them all as people, not just dumb girls buying into the “special position” as surrogate breeders for the upper class. The joke has turned: it’s not the big bad man scaring the sheltered girls. It’s a joke on the viewers: you thought these girls didn’t have personalities of their own?

I love that bringing D’avin into the team is complicated and tips toward failure as often as it tips toward success. But because they all genuinely want to do the best they can, they muddle through.

I love that the side characters have their own messed-up, complicated lives. They’re not set pieces trotted out to give information to Dutch as needed. Two of them really shine. First, Pawter, the upper class doctor who’s come to work in Old Town. She genuinely wants to help people, but she’s also a drug addict who makes really terrible decisions that she always has to deal with. And Alvis Akari, the Scarback leader of the revolution. (I love Alvis!) Alvis won me over with his philosophy.

“War” is what they call it when the big dogs win. I want a revolution.

D’avin and Alvis, that creepy little dude.

Usually, I’m bored when too much attention slips to the side characters, but these people all feel like they’re leading their own amazing lives when the protagonists aren’t around.

In some ways, Killjoys feels like a rebuttal to Firefly. Don’t get me wrong. I loved Firefly — like 80% of it — wholeheartedly. But there’s just so much less institutional misogyny in Killjoys. Yeah, “bitch” gets thrown around in some episodes, but the general tenor is just more positive. Dutch sleeps around, with sexy skills presumably taught in her harem school, and there’s no Mal to label her a whore. The only man who consistently decides he knows what she needs and what’s best for her is the season 1 villain: Khlyen.

The man thinking “I know what’s best for you.”

There’s a moment I really love where the brothers find her huddled up, hurt on the ship, and instead of demanding to know who did this to her (keeping in mind she’s excellent at fighting), they ask what happened. When she tells Johnny that Khlyen has found her again, they ask “what do you need?” instead of roaring into offended man-mode that someone has hurt their friend/love interest.

There’s a Buffy/Angel moment where D’avin turns on Dutch after they sleep together, and tries to kill her because his mind control has been turned back on. They all survive this, but it’s not just brushed under the rug to move on to the next episode. It’s a chewy exploration of how they all cope with this event: Dutch and Johnny, both hurt by D’avin. D’avin, beaten unconscious by a desperate Dutch who understands, even as she’s beating him down, that he’s not in control of his own actions. They’re all scared of each other and themselves.

In fact, Dutch gives me one thing that the Buffy/Angel relationship never did: the acknowledgment that even though there were extenuating circumstances, beating the hell out of your lover is never okay. Dutch breaks up with D’avin, partly because she was afraid of him, but partly because she laid hands on him in violence and can’t undo it, and can’t forget it. He might have been out of his mind, but she wasn’t, and that makes all the difference to her.

Probably the only things that bugged me were some of the musical choices (I adore July Talk, but that was a weird mash-up that got jammed into an episode, neither thematically relevant or musically apt). And maybe that it ended on a cliffhanger. That’s all right. I was going to find the other seasons anyway. Maybe they won’t be good, maybe the showrunner change will be bad, who knows. But I wish I’d picked up all five seasons while the library was open.

Especially since it ended on a cliffhanger.