In
last week's episode, our gang expanded by two members, adding grifters Tony and Percy to the mix en route to locating Dr. Leo Bennett somewhere within the CRM headquarters in New York.
Thus, "Truth or Dare" begins by adding the finishing touches to our party of eight, as Felix and company roll up in their newfound transport to collect Huck, while she struggles with military flashbacks after collecting
an EGA from a fallen empty.
As Felix and Huck bond over their shared affinity for Mountain Dew, Tony uses his "magical insight" to locate hidden CRM fuel caches which promise to afford our gang the ability to complete their journey by vehicle.
However, Iris takes Tony's discovery a step further, using a map given to her in
the series premiere by Elizabeth Kublek to uncover her father's precise location -- it appears that Leo Bennett is (visually) stationed at a "double-helix" DNA strand in Ithaca, New York.
In celebration of their recent good fortune, alcohol begins flowing, and Percy invites his new teenage acquaintances to a friendly game of "Truth or Dare".
This sequence makes it painfully obvious that Percy is interested in Iris, though it is arguably more painful to watch Elton attempt to emulate Percy's behaviors with Hope -- Percy hands his gloves to Iris to help her keep warm, while Elton fruitlessly offers Hope his jacket.
Meanwhile, Silas appears a bit quieter than usual, exuding an enigmatic energy (say that three times fast) while attempting to process that Iris may no longer be interested in him.
Furthermore, the gang's friendly game quickly turns hostile when Percy asks Hope about "the worst thing she's ever done" and doesn't receive a satisfactory answer.
Feeling guilty about having killed Elton's mother as a child, Hope declares that the worst thing she's ever done is agreeing to play "Truth or Dare", before fleeing to the rooftop and encountering Huck, who is equally disgruntled and lost in thought.
Though flashbacks of supporting characters are frequently used to further
story development in
World Beyond, Huck's history in the Marines is especially haunting -- she recalls shooting empties in mass quantity at the beginning of the apocalypse, clinging desperately to the goal of escorting innocent civilians to safety.
Nonetheless, Hope snaps Huck out of her apocalyptic anti-reverie by confiding in her with a childhood trauma -- though
Hope recently told Iris that she killed a woman as a young child, Huck becomes the first to learn that her victim was actually Elton's mother.
Huck advises Hope not to tell Elton the truth, but to bear the weight of her actions to spare him from facing an inconsolable hurt -- this sequence is interlaced with Huck's memories of the apocalypse becoming increasingly dangerous, her military instructions altered to killing everyone she crosses, living or dead.
In the present, however, our gang's fuel cache mission quickly goes awry when Hope finds herself in a hostage situation with a man named Walter, who is pressing a gun to her head.
Convinced that Hope and Huck have pledged their allegiance to the CRM, Walter threatens to kill Hope as Huck attempts to talk him down -- viewers notice that Walter is bitten, and though Huck offers to help him if he releases Hope, she quickly double-crosses him with a fatal blow of her own.
Though Huck has taken Walter's life to spare Hope, her struggle with enacting mass genocide in the past has definitely affected her -- many years later, she still sports a scar across her cheek, having injured herself as a reminder of her guilt.
As tensions begin to dwindle, Hope "deceives" Elton by agreeing that his mother may still be alive, having realized that telling the truth would crush him -- though Hope feels guilty for holding his mother's necklace after a decade, Huck insists that she's a good person for keeping a tangible reminder of her actions.
While the episode seems to be concluding in hopeful fashion (Tony and Percy agree to help locate Dr. Leo Bennett upon their arrival in New York and Iris stumbles across a romantic, artsy set-up from Percy), the sound of literal breaking glass shatters this illusion into pieces.
Rather, the gang stumbles upon Tony's corpse, his head completely bashed in by Silas' blood-coated wrench, as its owner sits alone in a nearby stall, highly disturbed.
While Silas remains the obvious candidate for "Psychopath of the Year", this episode's final revelation leads to plenty of questions surrounding our resident grifters -- notably: where is Percy, and could he potentially be the forecasted "Madman Across the Water"?
One thing is certain: our gang has undoubtedly evolved since its first days outside of the Campus Colony.
What are your thoughts on this week's cliffhanger?
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