WARNING: The following contains spoilers for The Nevers, Episode 6, "True," which premiered Sunday on HBO.
The first 25 minutes or so of "True," The Nevers half-season finale, seems like a totally different show. Suddenly the series goes to a post-apocalyptic far future where it seems the whole world is at war after five weeks of Victorian steampunk. This is everything audiences need to know about what happens in this future-set part of the episode and how it connects to the main storyline.
When the episode begins, there are no known characters. A squad of soldiers from the Planetary Defense Coalition parachute into an area where their enemies from the Free Life Party have already landed. Both parties are trying to infiltrate a nearby building, and ultimately, the PDC squad prevails, taking a soldier from the Free Life Party captive along the way. They also team up with a fellow PDC soldier who got to the location before them. She swallowed several glowing, blue coolant pods to "possum" -- or play dead -- to avoid detection by Free Life's heat-seeking systems, although this kept her off the PDC's radar too.
To ensure she's can endure the body heat change after regurgitating the coolant pods, she goes to the sickbay with the medical officer known as Knitter. All of the PDC members are addressed by rank, not name, because the PDC feels their names are sacred and don't offer them freely. This is apparently not a belief shared by Free Life, as the squad's captive loudly introduces himself as Major Joseph Welling Greenbone before he's gagged. As a result of the PDC's attitude toward names, the woman who swallowed the coolant pods is addressed as Stripe, a fairly low-level rank in the PDC army.
In the sickbay, it becomes clear that, after 28 years of fighting, Stripe is disenchanted and fairly cynical about PDC's mission. She isn't all that concerned about her health, she's suffering from some sort of temporal issue that causes her to experience frequent flashbacks to the past, and she even attempts to steal drugs while helping Knitter treat a gunshot wound she sustained to the leg. Yet, it also becomes clear that this woman is also Amalia True. Even though she looks completely different, she unconsciously touches her thumb to her other four fingers, a gesture Amalia's made numerous times before.
Since the PDC squad's Stripe was taken out, the new Stripe is tasked with taking their place. Knitter is surprised Stripe hasn't ask what their mission is, but Stripe already knows: they're looking for a Galanthi. Stripe reasons they wouldn't be fighting over this building in the middle of nowhere if there wasn't a big prize to be had, and a Galanthi is pretty much the biggest prize there is. She figures both armies saw a spatial anomaly indicative of a portal a Galanthi used to get to the planet and sent soldiers.
Stripe also gleans that Knitter is a "spore" -- or as Knitter corrects her, "empathically enhanced" -- someone whose mind was altered by the Galanthi's spores to understand Galanthi language and technology. Of course, Knitter doesn't know if she can really do any of that because she's never actually encountered a Galanthi. However, she confirms the spores broadened her perspective.
As the two soldiers look around the room, they notice cupboards filled with old artifacts. Interestingly, Stripe recognizes the artifacts are from the Victorian era, implying that before she became a soldier, she studied this time period in some way. They also discover "sim-strips," technology that allows people to enter simulated worlds. If these were Victorian-era simulations, it suggests some members of the science team were preparing to travel to the Victorian era with the Galanthi by practicing in sims.
Stripe is perplexed by the project undertaken here, observing that Galanthi projects are usually huge and involve desperately needed infrastructures like pure water systems or tectonic stabilizers. This project is unlike those. However, Knitter shares that none of the Galanthi projects are happening anymore because Free Life bombed them all, killing the Galanthi. As a result, the Galanthi they believe is somewhere in the building may be the only one left on Earth.
Knitter and Stripe are interrupted by two younger soldiers screaming. They've encountered a vegetable garden in the middle of the building, a strange enough sight that it scares them. Stripe recognizes what it is though, and even picks a tomato and takes a bite. As the rest of the team arrives, they comment on how unusual it is. Apparently, food is almost completely manufactured in the future. Then Stripe notices a door at the other end of the garden that wasn't on the building's schematic.
They go through it into a cylindrical room with a large hole in the center. Above them, the murdered science team is strung up. Free Life killed them, and Stripe gleans this has something to do with whatever lies in the shaft below. They navigate to a room on the floor below and, in a glass dome in the ceiling, find the Galanthi, still alive but covered in blood. The Free Life captive fills in the blanks: the Free Life soldiers who initially infiltrated the location didn't have the firepower to kill the Galanthi, so they tortured it by killing the humans it cared for as a way to take away its hope.
The Free Life Major then informs them that he called in a full incursion when they landed and met resistance. Something the PDC squad did too, which means there will soon be a full-scale nuclear war going on above their heads that will kill both them and the Galanthi. The Major encourages them to kill the Galanthi, close the portal and end the war. The squad is tense and, as Crescent, their leader, goes to contact PDC Command, they split up.
In the sickbay, Knitter gives Stripe the drugs she wanted to get her to help defend the Galanthi. But Stripe is much less committed to the cause than Knitter. Knitter reveals that the portal the Galanthi came through is still open. The PDC thinks it's what the science team was building and that their goal was to bring more Galanthi to Earth. Knitter, a true believer in the PDC's cause to defend the Galanthi and the Galanthi's ability to help humanity, is desperate to ensure they protect the Galanthi and the portal, as she knows full well that others -- even those in her PDC squad -- are suspicious of the benevolent aliens.
Knitter brainstorms ideas to save the Galanthi, but Stripe shoots every one of them down. She tries to get Stripe to care by asking her to envision a world where they win the planet and make it livable again, a reality Knitter believes can happen if they can save the Galanthi. But Stripe counters that the Galanthi aren't exactly galloping through the open portal, plus they came to Earth way too late to save the five billion people that had already perished because of the planet's devestation.
Knitter asks Stripe to just have hope, but Stripe rejects the idea. After nearly three decades as a soldier, she's seen the PDC consistently get close to winning and then fold. She believes it's because change is too scary, which is why Free Life will always win. But Knitter counters she knows this isn't the case because she was born and raised Free Life. This surprises Stripe, and she finally starts listening to Knitter. Knitter explains that she changed sides when she was spored because it brought up a question that enabled her to envision a better world.
As they talk, the portal engages, and Knitter and Stripe hear gunshots. They go to the room with the Galanthi to find the Major has been set free and is shooting the team. He wants them to kill the Galanthi and close the portal, but one of the injured PDC soldiers, Byner, reveals what he saw on a nearby computer: there aren't more Galanthi coming, the Galanthi who's in the building is leaving the planet.
Stripe shoots her gun and hits the Major. The information that the Galanthi is leaving is devastating to Knitter who quietly begs the Galanthi to stay as she and Stripe enter the room. Byner calls for her, but Knitter ignores him. Instead, she turns to Stripe to inform her that she was right. Knitter's lost her faith in the Galanthi all at once. Just then, she's shot. It's the soldier who had been tasked with guarding the Major. He switched to the Major's side after the Free Life soldier played into the guard's uncertainty about the Galanthi, and he'd been playing dead to gain an element of surprise against the rest of his former allies.
Stripe quickly dispatches the traitorous PDC soldier and goes to help Knitter, but the gunshot wound she sustained is fatal. Knitter dies in despair, believing the Galanthi gave up on humanity. Devastated by the loss of the hope Knitter brought and everything else she's endured, Stripe takes two bottles of something toxic from the sickbay and drinks them by the garden. As she dies, the Galanthi's blue arms wrap around her and then it disappears through the portal, leaving Stripe's lifeless body behind.
What Knitter and the rest of the PDC squad don't know, but Stripe will soon find out, is that the Galanthi's portal isn't taking it back to its planet but is dropping it in a different time period on Earth; August 3, 1896, to be exact. While it's unclear why this time was chosen, this project was apparently a long time in the making based on the artifacts Stripe and Knitter found in the sickbay. And since the Galanthi was no longer able to bring the scientists it was originally working with to the past, perhaps it improvised and brought Stripe instead. While her rank may be low, she also demonstrated she was smart, brave and knowledgeable of the Victorian time period. So while she may not have been perfect, perhaps the Galanthi thought she was the next best thing. If this is the case, Amalia is correct that the Galanthi has given her a mission -- if only she had a bit more information about what it is.
Created by Joss Whedon, The Nevers stars Laura Donnelly, Olivia Williams, James Norton, Tom Riley, Ann Skelly, Ben Chaplin, Pip Torrens, Zackary Momoh, Amy Manson, Nick Frost, Rochelle Neil, Eleanor Tomlinson and Denis O’Hare. The first half of Season 1 is streaming on HBO Max.