“As Steven and Michelle continue their search for the little boy, they encounter two of the dreaded Trainers!”

“Death Is All Relative” continues the time-bending (and thus mind-bending) course of the After Judgment narrative. The still-vague narrative is a liability for anyone still deciding whether or not to follow the series. But the episode itself poses an interesting thought: namely Steven’s comment that “We’re all dead, we just don’t know it yet.”

In this episode:

• Opens with Steven and Michelle recounting the events that ended the last episode
• They stumble across a dog feasting on a dead human
• Steven tells the dog to “move on” out of “respect for the dead”
• He says, “We’re all dead, we just don’t know it yet”
• Michelle says that “everyone’s gotta eat.”
• The episode shifts to “100 years 43 hours later”
• Michelle is standing alone
• Steven is in his apartment
• A woman screams out loud
• Steven grabs Michelle and brings her inside
• Michelle speculates that it was “trainers”
• Steven says that they chased him yesterday
• The episode ends with the trainers attacking the apartment

This episode establishes the dangerous specter of the “Trainers” as well as the fact that Michelle and Steven are seemingly invested in finding this mysterious boy. The scene immediately following the dog is, certainly, a highlight — featuring both character development as well as a bit of background on the nature of the world in which these characters inhabit. But unfortunately the story at this point is still a bit too vague and obscure to be of any intrinsic value. This will change as the series progresses, but it requires viewers to make a leap of faith that, considering the capricious nature of most web surfers, they may not be willing to make.

Even so, there’s still plenty here to enjoy and, given the fact that the next episodes of the series have already been released, the answers are just a click away …

Topics: Sci-Fi, Web Reviews
Filed under: After / Before Judgment

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