EPISODE REVIEWS: Generator Rex: “Breach” (Season 1, Episode 8)

Another pretty solid episode.
Rex awakes in a creepy abandoned town, Greenville, Ohio, which disappeared several years before. He’s in a school with lots of deformed toys, and the town itself is no better, with detritus stacked everywhere, and levitating in the mist.
Meanwhile, Dr. Holiday has Breach in custody, strapped down, and is firing probes into her to try to figure out where Rex is. Whenever one gets close, it disappears, and ends up somewhere on earth. One gets through to Rex, but is promptly ejected again, without them being able to figure out where it is.
Turns out Breech has the whole town in an alternate dimension that only she can access, and is using it as her dollhouse. Rex starts trashing the place, enraging Breech as she throws out the ‘broken’ items she doesn’t want anymore, and ultimately Rex himself is able to escape along with some of this stuff. Completely apoplectic and heartbroken, Breech suffers some kind of breakdown and disappears.
The End.
Once again, no Noah, nor any mention of Noah. Is he gone? I think he’s gone. Once again, no opening voice-over narration explaining the premise.
Rex uses a couple Spanish words in this episode. He’s obviously supposed to be Hispanic now, but it’s interesting that they made no mention of it for the first six episodes. Nothing wrong with him being Hispanic, just an odd thing to drop halfway through the series, you know? “Oh, by the way, our protagonist is Chinese, and a midget. Forgot to mention that earlier.”
Breech is interestingly fragmented psychologically. She’s basically got a little girl’s intellect, and an obsession with keeping things clean and pretty (Despite the fact that Greenville was a shambles), and flying into a rage when she didn’t get her way. Also, her only friend (more like a subordinate) was a little girl about eight years old. Breech is clearly suffering from some kind of arrested development stemming from the trauma of being an Evo. I’d assume she was about eight or so when the Event happened and pulled her away from a normal life.
Her mention that “Van Kleis isn’t always in charge” was interesting. How much autonomy does “The Pack” have? Are they just going to music camp over the summer, or are they rampaging third world countries of their own accord?
Interesting that both female members of The Pack are roughly Rex’s age.
The subplot with Six and Bobo in the desert, being attacked by giant scorpions was pretty useless and more than a bit distracting.
I like how Rex - not the shiniest penny in the fountain - wasn’t able to figure out the situation on his own, but *was* able to figure out how to resolve it on his own. Likewise, I like how Holiday could figure out the situation, but had no clue how to resolve it. Nice dynamic teamwork there.
Hard to get past the fact that Rex was smacking the crap out of an eight year old girl. An evil eight year old girl monster, but a girl just the same.
Here’s the thing I like about this show: despite the creep factor and the somewhat thin characterization and everything, there’s a kind of emotion that underpins everything. I think it’s all in the animation: There’s a wide eyed hope in Rex. Not optomism, just hope. The kind of hope borne of lonliness. He wants a family, he wants friends, he’s been by himself for too long, only surrounded by adults, and he doesn’t know how to go about it, but there’s something about the way they draw his face. When he gets excited, it’s almost like a little kid, and when things go wrong, he’s heartbroken, almost like a little kid. In neither case is it as extreme, he’s suppressing a lot of it, most of it, but something about this show lets you know it’s there. He’s a bit jagged under the surface. Not dysfunctional or anything trendy, just a bit raw. It’s well done and it’s unexpectedly real in a show like this, and I respond to it.
I really, really like it.
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