Killjoys - S3E7 - The Wolf You Feed

Previously on Killjoys, “Necropolis Now”

This was a gut wrenching episode of Killjoys with the reveal of Dutch’s and Aneela’s connection to each other. From the reveal, to the return of Robert Stewart as Khlyen, “The Wolf You Feed”, checks off all the boxes of storytelling that I enjoy. We also get the majority of the series’ secondary characters with multiple storylines being told without it feeling weighed down.

“The Wolf You Feed” handles two distinct plot lines separating our main cast, with multiple themes ranging from leadership, discipline, and what motivates beneath the shadows — all tying back to the upcoming war.

Newly made allies gather alongside the J’acobi brothers to test out their acquired fleet ships, but growing pains lead to the deaths of two pilots early on. This gets us back to Fancy Lee, who has gone off the reservation since the ramp up of Turin’s dickish behavior towards him and the cleansed in episode five. It led to some great scenes between D’avin and Fancy, with the actors doing some of their best work in the series.

Bringing their inner conflicts as soldiers to the forefront, D’avin and Fancy bare their souls, both as soldiers who’ve been used in the causes of others, now becoming generals who are choosing their own cause.

Turin’s heel turn felt extreme and lacking of logic, but that’s bigotry in a nutshell. In the context of his behavior in season one, his antics in having the cleansed arrested makes his actions more consistent. But D’avin standing against him and arresting him for sedition, while earning the loyalty of all the groups, was an impressive and a well shot scene. Three seasons in and Turin’s way down on the list of worthy villains, so this wrap up of his role is hopefully final.

 Meanwhile, Dutch and Zeph run off to make sweet science with the extracted pieces of Aneela’s brains. The duo make quite a team, especially as Zeph was only recently introduced, but it’s with Zeph’s skills that we find out the connection between Aneela, Dutch, and Khlyen, and boy what an enjoyable doozy of a revelation.

Watching Hannah John-Kamen as Aneela, time and again, draining the green out of her body was effective in its cringe factor, and allows the viewer to see just how far she’s willing to go to cure her loneliness and out of control emotions. She’s been repeatedly abandoned and isolated by Khlyen as he looks to take over the Quad with the growing Hullen recruits. How that leads to her plucking a memory of her younger self out of the goo is baffling and not something I saw coming.

Jordana Blake who plays a young Aneela/Dutch had some of the cutest moments of the episode, regardless of which actor she was with, she simply shined. The scene of Aneela plucking her out seemed like an actual child birth scene. But for Khlyen, as Aneela’s levels of crazy kept climbing, the decision he makes to protect both his daughters as best as he could made sense. After trying all the ways he could to help Aneela hold on to her sanity, she proved that her emotions were always going to be unstable. Whether that was due to the age she was when she bonded with the Hullen, or something arbitrary, how we go from making memories a reality and the creation of a Hullen Armada and Khlyen’s exile is yet to be seen.

Seeing Aneela’s intense loneliness and gradual deterioration into madness, one can’t help but feel bad for her. In her loneliness, she saw Dutch as the good wolf she wished she could be but wasn’t, and Khlyen unable to kill a young Dutch, instead raised and protected and trained her as best he could. Although a case could be made that both Dutch and Aneela have both ended up on their paths ultimately because of Khlyen, a realization he himself looks to have come to.

The revelation that she is noting but a visage of Aneela is a hard one for Dutch to bear, and it leads to her running away from the weight of the discovery and the responsibility of the upcoming war. Luckily, everyone believes in D’avin’s leadership abilities; I’m sure Dutch’s absence will be tolerated for now.

Through this season we’ve gotten to enjoy some fantastic acting from Hannah John-Kamen, who plays three different characters to perfection this episode, and plenty of times it feels as if it’s a completely different actress. The J’acobi brothers and the ancillary characters around them continue to get fleshed out, with their own motivations and feelings, and we have no two dimensional villains. Altogether Killjoys continues to be a must-watch for the summer season.