I’ll confess to being on the fence about Tommy’s new girlfriend. Based on her name and her behavior in the premiere, I was perhaps a bit hasty in starting to refer to her privately as ‘Captain Ice Nazi’ whenever she showed up on screen. While she certainly seems to be one of those who have clearly drunk the E-Rep flavored Kool-Aid, her exchange with Irisa definitely made her seem markedly less one-dimensional than she appeared to be in the premiere. To be fair, the show runners haven’t exactly portrayed the E-Rep in a very flattering light - most of the people aligned with it tend to turn out to be conniving, murdering D-Bags - and anyone associated with them who’s proven to be halfway decent has a tendency to end up shot in the face. I mean, I get it - the post-alien invasion, post-apocalyptic world isn’t exactly the ideal place to try establishing a better-constructed, less corrupt human government, especially since part of the planet is still occupied by the Votans. It’s just what happens in this kind of show where it’s not always clear who the real bad guys are.
As far as folks being pissed off about the E-Rep being there, it definitely seems like a pretty slow burn. Possibly alot of the town was just so demoralized about what had gone down in the first season that there wasn’t the energy for outrage about the hostile takeover. Plus it seems that the E-Rep, for all their bad reputation, did manage to get alot of things accomplished, building the rail line and rebuilding the stasis net…not to mention effectively bribing all the gulanite miners with what sounds like some fairly obscene pay raises.
