After sending the others to the Pennsylvania, Althea returns to her SWAT van alone, putting down a reanimated Riley and intending on resuming her solo journey of getting people's stories. Having deduced Althea's plan, Morgan arrives at the SWAT van just in time to witness the arrival of a CRM reclamation team searching for Althea's ex-girlfriend Isabelle who had gone AWOL after the blast. Despite Althea's attempts to warn Morgan and Grace off, they insist upon helping her while Morgan presses her to go after Isabelle.
Althea tricks Morgan and Grace into using the CRM helicopter's fuel to refuel the SWAT van while she lures the CRM to Fort San Vicente, where she sets up an old cannon to kill them. The CRM captures Morgan and Grace and force Althea to admit that Isabelle is at a cabin in the Great Smoky Mountains. Morgan and Grace escape and lead the CRM to the fort, where they work together to kill them. Althea gives Morgan an interview of her own for the first time and departs in the CRM helicopter. Arriving at the cabin, Althea tells Isabelle she is ready to start a new life with her, even though it means they will constantly be on the run from the CRM. The two women embrace.
The episode - entirely - seems like an addendum to the season. Not filler, exactly, but indeed an addendum, something haphazardly tacked onto the macro progression to wrap up Althea's arc, revisiting her obsession with interviews and filming, and her reluctance to embrace her love for Isabelle. As if that wasn't enough, we also get, as a bonus, good old Morgan as her therapist, which, of course, only makes everything more drawn-out, filled with pseudo-intellectual blah blah, devoid of any meaning beyond the blatantly obvious. It's almost humorous how we learn, in a rush, that Al took the forgotten side characters to Morgan's submarine and decided to return to her pilgrimage through the devastated lands in search of radioactive people to interview, and it's unbelievably annoying how she refuses to tell her colleagues about the CRM, even with the organization chasing them like a bloodhound.
Speaking of funny things, let's agree that the CRM duo is unbelievably incompetent, far beyond the worst scoring Stormtrooper at the Empire's academy in Star Wars. Watching Al and Morgan running from them as they spray bullets everywhere, hitting neither their targets nor grazing them (and, later, incongruously, they hit some zombies from much further away) and then getting easily beaten up by Morgan, despite having their gun barrels pointed at him and Grace, are moments only less memorable than when the dummies are blown up by the cannon Al had prepared in one of those sequences so meticulously set up and so ridiculously tensioned that I almost felt sorry for them.
But the worst part was the talk, with Morgan on one side telling her to run to Isabelle, and she, stubbornly, on the other, refusing to give up her camera, as if her obsession and her passion were mutually exclusive. I don't know how many times this scenario happened over the forty-some minutes of the episode, but what I do know is that, around the 28th time (or was it the 29th?), I was ready to throw my poor television out the window in despair. The script by Alex Delyle and Calaya Michelle Stallworth pays the greatest homage possible to Althea with this thematic repetition, since the character is basically characterized by saying the same thing always, like a scratched record (of bad music).
In the end, we are not even sure if I'm disappointed with this lackluster farewell to Althea from the series. After all, except for her mentioned solo episode with Isabelle, I can't really remember anything about the character that would truly be missed on the show. If I think about it too much, it's even risky to conclude that, perhaps, the series would have been better off without her, but let me wipe the venom dripping here before it spills over the keyboard.
Now that the season's addendum is over, I hope the normal story - which wasn't that great to begin with, just to use a mild euphemism - returns full force in the two episodes remaining until we reach the traditional mid-season hiatus (which I am immensely thankful for). Althea is late in leaving and I doubt she will be missed. Speaking of not being missed, she might as well have taken the opportunity to take Morgan (and Grace and Mo, of course) along with her and Isabelle, right.
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