We’re definitely at the stage where Darwin Jihen starts to make sense. As a narrative entertainment most obviously. But also as a voice. It’s not an advocacy series as far as I can tell, but it does have things it wants to say and it’s only now found real clarity in saying them. There’s an interesting dichotomy playing out here, in that the series largely seems to be calling out extremism of all stripes. But it’s not anti-idealist in any way, at least I don’t think so. As with everything else it’s not easy to tell what The Darwin Incident stands for (or even more to the point, against) in this sense, apart perhaps in the belief that life doesn’t offer us easy answers to difficult questions.

This dichotomy extends to Charlie too, of course. His foster parents, especially Hannah, obsessively try and engage him as a normal teenage boy. And in some respects he plays the part – a man of few words, mostly camped in front of his computer or on his phone. But he’s not a normal kid, anything but. That talk Hannah has with him about Lucy has the superficial air of a normal (read, awkward) conversation in that context. But it’s just off – because Charlie is off. Not bad or evil, just different. “Alien” is even a word that comes to mind. Yet human enough (though even that may be chauvinistic notion on my part) to have special feelings for a girl his age. Even those feelings seem a bit different, though.

With the ALA’s obsession with Charlie, it’s inevitable that at some point they’re going to use Lucy to get to him. Lucy is not just another animal to him – enough so that he’s willing to calmly promise to kill Feyerabend and everyone involved if they hurt her. So far they haven’t, and there’s no evidence they intend to – the point is to lure Charlie to them, not make an eternal enemy out of him. But this is an ambush, make no mistake. As Feyerabend and Lucy hole up in a remote cabin, the Major leads his men – assigned code names from Animal Farm – on a mission to take Charlie alive.

Lucy is indeed quite bright, but she’s in way over her head here. So her reaction when Feyerabend explains his manifesto is perfectly understandable. What does he mean by “fast-forwarding Darwinism”? That’s not made explicit, but the extinction of the human race – or at least its utter toppling from the top of the ecosystem – is strongly implied. This is hardly the professed mission statement of the ALA, as Lucy points out to Lippman. He wryly notes that he’s well aware of that, and doesn’t care. As long as their goals are aligned he’s content to work with a sociopath like Feyerabend.

There’s more to that encounter in the cabin, especially Feyerabend’s bombshell about an incident in Lucy’s past which really seems to shake her up. But the real action is out in the woods, where Charlie is systematically making mincemeat of Snowball, Squealer, and their comrades. He still isn’t killing anybody, and he even releases one of the men from a bear trap he’s managed to stumble into. But this is a mismatch – six men with automatic weapons and night vision goggles against one teenager with nothing more than a flare gun. They never stood a chance against him.