Won't Someone Think Of How There Are Too Many Children?!

Mostly, I am a good Canadian social democrat: when I still lived there, I belonged to the NDP and was happy to give them my money. I'm still proud to be from Saskatchewan, just like Tommy Douglas, the father of Canadian socialized medicine. Now that I live in the U.S., I would cheerfully pay much more in taxes if I thought it would result in a social safety net as strong as the one I knew as the child of a single mother on welfare. (Don't worry: she's doing much better now.)

But...you know. I said "mostly." Because the current vogue for pop culture products about dystopias is really forcing me to reckon with the fact that my secret fascist streak is pretty wide and maybe getting wider? I'm the one who left Snowpiercer trying to explain how Wilford was actually right about some things. In the trailer for The Giver, Meryl Streep's character says, "When people have the freedom to choose, they choose wrong," and I'm like, "PREACH." And as this season of Utopia has progressed, as much as I might not like to admit that if I were in this show, I would be Wilson, I might be Wilson.

That's what makes Utopia so great: even as you ultimately have to side with the opponents of Janus, the pro-Janus side makes some pretty good points.

Look, I know it's not what any of us like to hear or even think about, but when Milner sits Wilson down and makes her whole case for a radical solution to overpopulation and resource use, all she really needs to do is lay out a bunch of actual facts -- about climate change, the death of the oceans, Peak Oil. (The last one happens to be my personal biggest apocalyptic fear, so it resonated particularly well with me. I mean, did you read that New Yorker article about the ITER project? Why isn't every government on earth throwing all the money at it by doubling gas taxes?!) As a childless person, my response to Milner's estimate of the human race's making it to 2080 before Peak Oil was, "Thank god, I'll be dead by then for sure." But that's ALSO why Terrence's speech at the beginning of the finale about how selfish it was for this stranger to have had a first-world baby kiiiiiind of made me want to high-five him? A little? Children are wonderful and everyone who wants one should have one, but on behalf of all the non-parents who've been called selfish for choosing not to reproduce, I appreciated that the other side got an airing, for once. Like Milner, Terrence just presents a list of facts that are indisputably true. Though his delivery could use some work, in that he undercuts his strong argument somewhat by ending it with an offer to slit the kid's throat. Always go out on top, Terrence!

Ultimately, of course, we can't really be rooting for mass deaths and sterility (...I guess), which is why Anton has to have ruined everything by turning Janus all racial and shit. And when you set aside the sociopolitical questions raised by the plot, Utopia is still an engrossing fugitive story (and a great companion show to Orphan Black, if you've read this far and wonder if you too should "fly to England" and check it out). People are getting murdered all over the place, generally pretty unceremoniously; I'm impressed that the characters involved in this battle seem to have gotten their hands on all four of Great Britain's guns. I'm glad that Becky's brave fight against Deel's has been dispensed with, since it always felt like kind of an afterthought; next they can wind down Jessica's "crazy putty" plotline and fix all of Series 2's biggest problems.

As much as I enjoyed the season, which is a lot, that fucking GREAT premiere made me a bit sad that we had to smash back to the present. I could have watched a whole season of The Adventures Of Young Milner And Her Closet Full Of Gorgeous '70s Looks. Did that one episode have to tell the entire story? I guess if it had been an entire prequel season, some people would have been pissed, but I'm not one of them. RIP Milner was bad enough -- that bad bitch never lost her nerve, unlike some people with mouths full of another dude's teeth that I could mention -- but RIP Young Milner is the true heartbreaker.