Killjoys

Killjoys was one of the other space opera shows SyFy debuted when network officials in effect "apologized" to science fiction fans for feeding them CGI critters and '80s television stars mired in movies that stretched the definition of "creative idea" to event-horizon levels. Its initial outing was fun although a little light on narrative heft.  It also labored to created its own identity from its dozens of action-show antecedents, not always successfully.

It just finished its third season and SyFy ordered 20 more episodes, to air over two seasons and bring the story to a conclusion.

Killjoys keeps the same strengths it brought in the first season, building on them as showrunners, writers and actors become more and more familiar with their world and their characters. Our three leads are no longer bounty hunters but now work to build an army to thwart the invasion of an alien species called the Hullen. These parasitically bond with human hosts and take over their bodies. The aliens are led by a woman named Aneela who is a dead ringer for our heroine Dutch, and solving that mystery will occupy a large part of their work to find a way to defeat the Hullen.

As before, the show features some really good work by the cast, especially Luke Macfarlane as D'avin Jaqobis. Storylines for the other two leads -- his brother John and Dutch herself -- lean heavily on him and he anchors them well while building his own character too. Aaron Ashmore as John and Hannah John-Kamen as Dutch are good but a notch or two below Macfarlane, and the supporting cast ranges from solid to "able to keep up."

Killjoys is fast and funny, quippy and quick-witted, featuring likeable leads well-supported by the other characters. The acting, as mentioned, is good to very, very good.

And it makes not a lick of sense.

Entire episodes this season wind up as throw-aways, resolving or re-setting characters who haven't mattered yet and won't matter later to the main plot of fighting against the Hullen. Neither the first season's corporate oligarchy nor the second season's shadowy conspiracy nor this season's advancing armada fit together in any kind of solid backdrop against which to project real tension. The image of an onion is often used to evoke the idea that a subject or person is multi-layered, with each outer layer removed revealing a new inner layer. Killjoys is an onion made of smoke, with each removed layer showing nothing more than another impenetrable fog. Showrunners wisely limited each season to 10 episodes apiece, because even the funniest jokes wear thin when that's all that's there.

Sci-fi fandom being what it is and the internet and 2017 being what they are, devotees of the now-canceled Dark Matter have thrown shade on shows the network did renew. But Matter creator Joseph Mallozzi points out that as a SyFy-acquired rather than a SyFy-produced show, Matter's bubble was a little more fragile than the others and it was always going to be the first to go if the network wanted a change. Dark Matter's cancellation didn't make Killjoys a weaker show; it was that already in spite of hints about what it might be if showrunners spent some time connecting all of their pretty moving parts.

But whatever the opinion one has of it, Killjoys now has 20 episodes to see if it can hammer some sense out of its mare's nest of a universe and cure its narrative ADD to bring about the finish that its hardest workers have earned for it.