The 'Killjoys' Get "Schooled" on SyFy

Last week on Killjoys, we saw the gang (and Alvis (Morgan Kelly)) head into the mines and come face-to-uh…angry, fang-filled mouth (?) with some man-eating, green goo-filled, trippy spit moss. Pawter (Sarah Power) also put a bomb in a guy’s heart and strolled out of the Company’s Spring Hill house arrest looking the very picture of cool and collected right before she was knocked unconscious and dragged away.

This week, we went back to school. “Schooled” finds Dutch (Hannah John-Kamen) and D’avin (Luke Macfarlane) tracking down their escort warrants: three kids who’ve been selected for Prodigy — an elite school off-moon for gifted Westerlans. Johnny (Aaron Ashmore) finds Pawter in the Salt Plains, arm-wrestling a woman named Big Borna (Natasha Bromfield) for her freedom and winning, thanks to a little nerve-pinching trick she picked up from all that fancy Qreshi book-learning. Upon learning that she’s a doctor, Borna more or less proposes to Pawter on behalf of her sons and Johnny incites a bar brawl to get them away from Borna and on their way to tracking down the rest of the kids so they can get off of Westerley and get to Prodigy.

When the team plus Pawter and the kids arrive at Prodigy, though, something’s very clearly amiss. The school is as empty as a bar at sunup. The kids are missing but before the gang can figure out where they’ve gone, Delle Seyah (Mayko Nguyen) shows up and, as things tend to do when Delle Seyahs in the mix, this warrant just got a lot more complicated.

Turns out the kids aren’t missing at all. They were sort of…liquified. A huge data transmission that more or less overloaded their pods and brains. One student, Olan (Ricardo Hoyos) — older brother of Killjoy charge Jake (Jack Fulton) — is the only one who made it out alive, and thanks to Chambers. Now Olan’s plan is to get himself and Jake far, far away from the Company, the Nine, and Prodigy. Problem is this plan involves shutting down life support to Prodigy and taking Lucy (Tamsen McDonough), which doesn’t fly with Johnny. Using the “little brother guilt card,” Johnny talks Olan down.

Elsewhere, following a confession that Prodigy is actually living human seed bank created to safeguard Qreshi culture and knowledge, Dutch is casually carrying a nearly unconscious Delle Seyah around bridal style as they make their way to Prodigy HQ to kick life support back on so that they don’t, you know, die.

When the arrive, Delle Seyah kisses a surprised Dutch, then explains that the all-important Try Not To Die switch to restore life support requires biometric authentication. Sure! There might’ve been an easier way to achieve the whole thing, but we’re not complaining and neither, as it turns out, is Dutch.

With almost everybody alive, we return to Lucy to figure out where we go from here. Delle Seyah, in typical Delle Seyah fashion, gets kinda sorta flirty/threatening with Dutch as they work out what to do with Jake and Olan (who, it turns out, has Khlyen’s all-important final transmission from Red 17 in his noggin). It also looks like Pawter’s going to be hanging out on Lucy for awhile, which is becoming more and more of a revolving door for our favorite supporting characters. Look, we’re not complaining. Any excuse to see our faves killjoy-ing up is fine by us.

One of the best parts of “Schooled” was the return of Delle Seyah, who’s one of the most interesting and layered baddies on the show. Her tense relationship with Dutch all but guarantees that their scenes together are electric, and the elements that she and Dutch bring out in one another make it clear that there’s still plenty to discover about these characters. Always devious and devastatingly clever, Delle Seyah is such a rich character that every time we see her she has us wanting more.

Killjoys and women doing cool shit go together like Pree and The Royale. There isn’t a single episode that doesn’t have women like Dutch, Pawter, Clara, or Delle Seyah Making Shit Happen. But watching the Dutch/Delle Seyah power struggle has been one of the elements of Killjoys that’s been utterly magnetic from the get-go. Putting that dynamic in the context of an uneasy alliance, a fight for survival and something of a really dark murder mystery on a school/space station made for a great ride. It was also a lot like my favorite episode of Boy Meets World in which there’s a killer on the loose in an empty John Adams High. Except, you know, we’re in space. And the killer wasn’t wearing a Scream mask.

What’s more, it’s always a great episode when we get more Pawter. Though she didn’t put a bomb in anyone’s heart this time around, we’re continuously treated to these little moments that give us more insight into who Pawter is, where she comes from, and what lies beneath that cool, unflappable exterior. The way in which we’re getting to discover Pawter and watch her evolve has been a highlight of the last several episodes.

Not everybody’s quite as stoked as I am to see more Pawter, though — Dutch isn’t thrilled to have her on board Lucy, afraid that her presence is going to interfere with their work and with Johnny’s total focus on making sense of Khlyen’s transmission. Am I the only one hoping that we get to see Dutch and Pawter team up in the near future?

New episodes of Killjoys air on Fridays on Syfy at 9 EST.