As I write this, it’s just about a month from the much-anticipated premier date for Colony season 3, the best show on television and the jewel in the lineup of USA Network. I have lots of thoughts about what I think will happen and what I want to learn about mysteries that were brought up in previous episodes. I’m going to try to sort out my thoughts here.

What I want to learn more about

It’s going to be a different kind of story this year, because the Bowmans are not in the LA bloc anymore. And, if the little bit of footage involving Broussard from the trailer is an indication, Broussard may not be spending the whole season there, either. So we’re likely to have situations that bring up new mysteries. Regardless, I’m hoping we learn a bit more about some of the mysteries brought up in the first two seasons:

• I want to see more flashbacks. I’d like to see how the residents of the Green Zone were given houses. I’m curious — what happened to the people who lived in those houses before the arrival?
• I wonder what happened to people who were outside of the colonies when the walls came down. I’d love for this season to include someone who experienced that telling their story of what it was like. I’m assuming a lot of people were killed, but were some able to hide?
• I want to know more about how long earthlings knew about the Raps and how many people knew and how the preparation worked, from the standpoint of the humans. We have a hint that there were clues as early as the 70s. Did some humans figure it out? Did the Raps reach out and contact specific ones or did they interact with whichever ones figured out how to respond to the music/message they discovered?
• Along with the above, I want to know how the command chain works between the human collaborators and the Raps. Are the Raps just up there directing the big picture or do they get involved with day-to-day decisions? How many humans communicate directly with the Raps?
• And I’m also curious about the extent and effectiveness of the surveillance. Do they have cameras in every house? The terminal monitoring the camera at Jennifer McMahon’s house was unattended when she was taking all those pills, so are we to assume they don’t always see everything? And we presume they don’t hear what Will and Katie say when they’re walking Minnie. And there’s the logistics to consider, just as it is in our world. There isn’t enough manpower to watch everyone all the time, so who decides what gets priority? I want to know how all of this works.
• Along with the above, have they bothered to set up any kind of surveillance on the areas in between colonies? will this become a problem for Will and Katie in Colony season 3 or are the drones the only way they know what happens out in the wild areas?
• What do people in the Green Zone know that others don’t know? (more about my thoughts on this below)
• Where are the labor camps in relation to the colonies? how many of them are there? How does Charlie know about them?
• The people who were being rounded up in the Santa Monica bloc, like the woman Devon and Will turned over to Solomon’s crew, where do they go? Could some of them be the people who were put in those pod things?
• It goes without saying I want to know why Will and Broussard were not killed by the drones and why Will is on a special list (and presumably Broussard also). What criteria puts them on that list? Does Snyder know about the list? Did Phyllis?
• What about Bob? He seemed to have a level of allegiance to the Authority that was out of line with his position at Homeland. And we know he survived, so are we going to see him again?

The Greatest Day

I’m always interested in worldbuilding that concerns religion. I have a so many questions about this that I decided to make a separate section about what I want to know concerning The Greatest Day movement:

• Is the Greatest Day movement something the humans cooked up or do the Raps have something to do with it?
• Is it just confined to the LA bloc or is it in the other colonies too?
• What exactly is up with the vision Maddie saw during her initiation ceremony?
• I thought this was an interesting sub-plot and I hope we learn more about the Greatest Day in Colony season 3.

What will happen in Colony season 3

There are some things I know will happen, based on some internet investigation I’ve done. And there are other things I’m just hoping for.

What I know will happen

• Snyder and the Bowmans have spent 6 months in the woods. During this time, Will and Snyder grew beards and Bram’s hair got longer, but inexplicably, Bram managed to shave and Will got a haircut.
• We’re going to see Helena Goldwyn again.
• They go to a city, which I am pretty sure is Seattle (though it’s filmed in Vancouver).
• There is a tent city where I think a number of scenes will take place, because this set was in place for quite a long time in Vancouver when they were filming Colony season 3, to the point that residents were concerned that a homeless community was growing
• Seems like Will and Katie are finally coming to terms with Bram being pretty much a grown-up, allowing him to have a gun at least.
• Hexagons and triangle patterns — these seem to be popular with the aliens. Are they bees? Is that what they look like?

What I hope will happen in Colony season 3

• I’d like to see more about what goes on in the Factory
• I really hope we see Maddie Kenner again. I don’t know if she ended up in the Factory or if she managed to hide by running back into a building when the spaceships arrived. I kind of feel like going to the Factory is a one-way trip, that there’s no coming back from there, so I hope she’s still on earth and maybe she runs into Broussard in a pretty much empty LA bloc.
• I also hope we find out what happened to Hudson and that he’s okay. I don’t feel like we need to spend a lot of time with his character, but I hope he’s not dead. I did notice in the trailer that there’s a shot of some people who we see from the back who are looking toward a city that I think might be Seattle. Many of these people have some kind of purple headband thing. These people seem to be full grown, not kids Hudson’s age, but the way they dress seems like it could be that they’re a member of a cult or young people from a camp like the camp they sent Hudson to. So maybe these people are some of the people from that camp?
• I’m wondering about the other residents of the LA bloc. We know Broussard wasn’t going to report to the evacuation centers, and neither was the man whose house Katie and the family spent part of a day in before they left the bloc. So it stands to reason there will be others who will try to avoid the evacuation. So what happens then? Will they really be thoroughly searching the bloc for the gauntlet? Will they find everyone who went into hiding or will some of them escape? I feel like I want to know about this, even though the Bowmans will be elsewhere.
• I feel like Snyder is ultimately out for himself, but also that he’s not an evil person and he doesn’t want to save himself at the expense of the Bowman’s lives. So I’ve had this theory that his plan is to make a deal with the Bowmans that he gets the gauntlet, in order to turn it over to IGA in return for the promise of never wanting for anything, or whatever it was they told him toward the end of season 2, in in exchange he lets the Bowmans get away. But I’m not sure how this theory fits with Colony season 3 starting six months after the end of season 2. I can’t come up with a scenario that leaves that much time from when Snyder pressed the button that we’ve all assumed was some kind of tracker. I’m interested to see how that plays out.

What did we miss?

Fans are aware that one of the show’s creators says we’ve missed something that would give us a clue to one of these mysteries. I have some thoughts about this.

Will is Special? In the first season, Will and his team arrest a graphic artist and an advertising executive who have been creating the “Geronimo” posters and other propaganda. They interrogate them to try and find out who’s behind this insurgency and it’s concluded that they were waging a propaganda war, and that the insurgents may have been motivated by the message but they acted independently. The two people Will’s team detained were not directing the insurgency.

These two people lived in the Green Zone. I said before that I suspected that some or all of the Green Zone residents know things those in the general population are not privy to. They definitely enjoy special privileges. At least twice, residents are heard to say, “This is the Green Zone. You can’t just come in here and use force on us.”

During the interrogation, the graphic artist woman says to Will, “How are you doing what you’re doing? You’re not one of them [collaborators]. You’re one of us.” I’m thinking she knows about the list that Will is on, or she knows something about him, something more than just the keen observation that he’s not a bad guy.

Vocabulary: Colony. Rendition. A colony is a settlement where people live who have left another place and settled in a new location, as a way to establish a more permanent or official presence in that location in the future. The original 13 states of the US were colonies of Britain. Most of the continent of Africa was originally colonized by European nations. These areas already had their own inhabitants, but the colony, and the colonists, were the ones that came from Europe, not the native Americans or native Africans who already lived there. Think about this meaning when you think about the way Colony is used in the show. What are they trying to say? Is Earth a colony where the Raps intend to set up permanent residence once they eliminate the current inhabitants or reduce the population sufficiently that it will support their race?

Rendition is another word we’ve heard a number of times. Total Rendition seems to mean “sending the entire bloc to the factory.” Though we’re not 100% sure that’s the correct definition. There was also mention of a “Rendition House,” the house where they put Quayle when he was detained and where Will assassinated him. At other times, this house was referred to as a safe house. But what does “rendition” really mean? the main definition refers to a performance or interpretation, as in “the band played a rousing rendition of This Land is Your Land.” But there’s another meaning: “the practice of sending a foreign criminal or terrorist suspect covertly to be interrogated in a country with less rigorous regulations for the humane treatment of prisoners.” The term was used a lot during slavery. When a slave escaped, returning them involved rendition. The words “extradition” and “surrender” come from the same root word. So does Rendition mean surrendering a group of people to captivity by the Raps? Or are we going to learn that the Raps know something we ourselves don’t know about the origins of mankind — did we actually originate on another planet and were brought here in some distant past? Are we, or at least a select number of us humans, going to be returned from whence we came?

Something else going on? If you watch the season 2 finale with the captions on, just before Snyder approaches the “Commander” with whom he negotiates about helping them obtain the stolen gauntlet, you hear the Commander telling some of his troops that “finding them” is a priority; he doesn’t care what it takes. Does he mean Broussard and Katie? Will? The pilot? or is something else going on? He definitely says “them” and not “him” or “it.” Also, the Commander is one of the three people who were present when the “core” was transplanted into another Rap body. He seemed to be the one in charge, telling the doctor he had to follow instructions exactly and not to deviate. I don’t see any evidence that this character is coming back in season 3, but I’d like to learn more about him. It seems like he knows some important things that I’d like to learn more about. Add this to a very short scene when Maddie is in the evacuation center — a bunch of Red Hats are marched in at gunpoint with their hands on their heads, fingers interlaced, and then gunfire breaks out and the crowd panics so we don’t see what happens. But shouldn’t the Red Hats be the ones holding the weapons, not being herded like prisoners? Looks like some of them figured out what the real plan was and didn’t want to go along with it. None of this may have any importance in the future, but I’d love to know more

These are very interesting things to think about while we wait for Colony season 3, which starts May 2, 2018 on USA Network.