The End?
It all comes down to this. After 12 episodes of build-up, Emergence delivers an enjoyable but ultimately underwhelming finale, as the fate of the world is in the balance as the android threat of Helen looms. With plenty of scope for a second season and a pretty frantic pacing throughout the episode, Emergence leaves a lot of questions unanswered and yet another antagonist entering the game at the end. The season finale begins with Brooks and Jo trying to evade Helen. As she materialises into the room, Piper arrives at the police station and, with the disc in hand, visits Benny in his cell and somehow frees him. As they present their idea for saving Jo to Chris, he reluctantly lets them go. Benny and the others arrive at the facility and manage to meet up with Jo and Brooks. There’s no time for reunions though as the group scramble inside an air-locked room that should keep them safe from Helen. As tensions begin to escalate, Benny pleads with them to let him go and confront Helen alone but Jo refuses. Meanwhile, a man called Sawyer who works for the government arrives at Ed’s house with a search warrant, intent on finding the yellow disk that was stored in a safe there earlier in the episode. As the officers enter and begin looking around, they turn their attention on the safe. When they open it, they find nothing inside the envelope of value, aside from Mia’s necklace, which Piper clearly switched for the disk before leaving the house. Benny shuts off the power in the facility and pleads with Jo to let him sacrifice himself to try and stop Helen. She reluctantly agrees and hides, as Helen confronts Benny and the two talk. As she lets her guard down and turns her back, he injects the kill-shot into her spine but it doesn’t seem to work. Instead, Benny collapses on the floor and starts hyper-ventilating, subsequently dying as Helen leaves the room. Piper then finds herself face to face with Helen and as the group work together they stop Helen by distracting her long enough to let Jo arrive and place the disk into Helen’s wrist. Unfortunately in the process they also break the box housing the unstable metalic orb which threatens to destroy the world. Piper hands over the disk to Jo and sacrifices herself to save the others. In the aftermath of this, Jo uses Piper’s disk and places it in Helen’s wrist. As they do, the nanobots transform her into Piper. With everything seemingly resolved for now, the family head home and celebrate their victory. Alex tells Jo he’s accepted the job out of town and will be moving. She tells him not to go but he calls her out for it, telling her that if she loves him they can talk but otherwise, their will they/won’t they can’t continue as it has done. As the episode closes out, yet another antagonist comes forward in the form of Sawyer, who talks to Loretta about Piper and together intend to wake Helen up remotely. As Piper opens her eyes, the episode ends. Aside from a few continuity errors (how did Helen miss the group arriving in the room so quickly after Benny died? How did Benny get free from his cell without officers realizing?) Emergence delivers an enjoyable but ultimately predictable finale. With the Helen threat seemingly resolved, I can’t help but feel Piper’s sacrifice should have remained that way without the cop-out resolution of bringing her back so soon – especially with things lined up for a possible second season. This future planning is something the show in general has had a big issue with over the weeks and between Richard Kindred, Emily, Helen, Benny, Brooks and now Sawyer, Emergence has had almost as many antagonists come forward this season as there are episodes. It’s pretty crazy to think the show has juggled this many villains and not really done a good enough job to get you invested in any of them. With the promise of a second season and plenty of scope to pick up on Channel 4’s Humans storyline (which did a far better job depicting the android threat I may add) things could well improve next time around if this is renewed and the show sticks to a single antagonist. Whether it’ll survive the brutal chopping block of cancellations however is another matter, especially given the dwindling viewership numbers of the weeks. Still, for now though Emergence bows things out with a pretty resolute ending but its renewal remains a big question mark over the future of this show.
