The Rig – Season 2 Episode 2 Recap & Review

Episode 2

Episode 2 of The Rig season 2 starts with Dale Cameron hitting a Sonar pulse, which appears to hurt the Entity. However, this shockwave heads all the way across and hits Fulmer too, who starts to become more in-tune with the Ancestor, as the pair are connected.

The Rover is in a rough way and the glass may well be cracking soon, so the surface team come up with a plan. They intend to hit charges and drill down through the ice and hit charges so they can move the rig and get the rovers back. They have over 20 charges to hit and mark, but eventually the group on the ice do just that.

However, there’s a big problem. The ice is not stable and unfortunately Magnus and Fulmer are forced to try and save their comrade, who falls in the freezing ice. He doesn’t suffer from hyperthermia though, but they do lose their radio in the process. We know the water is cold because Magnus ends up freezing his hand, but when the camera pans across his suit, it’s not even wet. Well, that’s a relief, I guess?

Anyway, all the charges are placed and Rose is the one who signals for them to blow the ice, allowing the Rig to move across to them and then they’re saved. We don’t see Ester and Dale come up though, nor do we see the Rover saved, as we just cut to us back in the technical area. They also retrieve the other Rover too, along with the deceased team members.

There’s some tension involving Dale and Magnus in the midst of this, with the former not happy that he wasn’t given some praise and believing Magnus only looks out for himself.

While this is going on, Hutton and Kat fly with Kat over the UK and see the devastation up high for themselves. There’s a huge relief effort for those from the coastal areas, with casualties from the city moved across to a clearance centre, where they’re triaged before moved along to the hospitals.

Edinburgh is off-limits right now, and so this is the only place to start to hunt for Kat’s family and Casey. Kat wants to go out looking but Lennox pulls the strings and has her do a press conference for the public instead. This comes right off the back of a call from Darian York, who I’m sure we’ll learn more about as the season progresses!

Back on the Pictor Rig though, and Rose is not happy. It would appear that Pictor has nothing on the Entity and what’s going on, and she’s convinced that Lennox is not a bad guy. She thinks Coake is working with people at the top and that this goes all the way up to shady executives. Except for Lennox of course, whom Rose trusts completely.

Magnus speaks to Coake, who brings up that what he’s doing is actually for the good of humanity. Magnus though does not believe that greedily taking resources from Mother Nature is the right way of playing things, and he thinks that humanity have become way too dependent on this.

Rose shows up and explains that Mother Nature is fighting back and there’s no stopping that, despite Coake’s arrogance. However, she does learn that Fulmer is still attached to the entity so whatever is happening down there, Fulmer could be the key.

With tensions high, things are made all the worse when they tune in to the broadcast from Kat, who reads out the PR puff piece for everyone in attendance. Those on the rig are not happy and believes she’s betrayed them. Rose is not sure and still sticks by the “Lennox believes in green energy so she’s a good guy” story.

With Lennox distracted, Kat and Hutton head in to the various tents, trying to find Casey. Kat refuses to help anybody, but is shocked when she finds so many others looking for loved ones, with signs placed up everywhere on steel railings. This really shows the level of devastation and how widespread this all is. Hutton is there to comfort hr and tries to encourage her to keep fighting.

Back on the rig, Dale and Easter notice something awry with the mining operation on the sea floor. It would appear that there’s no evidence of mining whatsoever as there weren’t any minerals on the ground when the team head in to try and recover the crew. So what were they doing down there?

Rose is struggling to get through to Lennox in the midst of this, but she’s also suspicious of Fulmer too, who is obviously keeping secrets from her. With secrets everywhere, Dale Cameron lies about dropping the safety log, which he happens to have on his person.

As for Coake, he reprimands the scientist in the lab, before the latter gives more explanation over what’s happening here. The entity they’ve been calling the “Ancestor” is actually an ancient living network threaded through the sea-bed. Having analyzed the samples from the North Sea, it’s the same as that from the Arctic so it would appear it’s all connected across the globe.

Pictor need to “deal” with the Ancestor in order to continue mining, as Mother Nature is fighting back. Pictor’s intention here is to kill the swarm by destroying the hive and, subsequently, the Queen. The system presumably holds Nodes that keep everything together, and they intend to poison it and destroy the entire Ancestor in the process. This explains what the Survey team are after and they may have found it. This also recontextualizes what happened, as it would seem that The Ancestor was actually defending itself, rather than attacking.

Coake overhears all of this and sets out trying to get rid of the weak link here. That being, of course, Fulmer. As the episode closes out, Cameron looks over the log from the Rover and notices that the ongoing project is something called Cirein. Alas, the plot thickens!

The Episode Review

So the second episode starts to divide the group up into factions for those for and against Pictor’s operation. It’s certainly a nice way of setting up tension for the series to follow, but it does seem painfully obvious, even this early on, that Lennox is not the saint that everybody is making her out to be. There’s definitely something suspect with her.

As for the rest of the group, we’ve got the scientist actually as an exposition dump device, but it at least does the trick here to explain more about the Ancestor and how everything is connected. However, the other bits of drama do feel quite clunky and superficial, especially the tensions between Dale and Magnus.

Through all of this though, we’ll have to wait and see how this affects the balance of the series going forward!