Killjoys: A Father’s Love Made Monstrous in “The Wolf You Feed” 

[Warning: MAJOR spoilers for “The Wolf You Feed.”]

Fathers and daughters are complicated on a good day, and when you compound misguided affection, genetic tampering, loneliness, and a dissociative disorder, well, all bets are off.

What we discovered tonight is that Aneela, the monster big bad this season, was essentially created at the hands of her father, Khlyen, who turned her into something monstrous when the Hullenization amplified her unstable personality, he locked her away, and she did something very, very drastic.

Left alone for what looks like months on end, in a pique of desperate loneliness, Aneela sought refuge in her memories, something we’ve seen her do in the present timeline. Only when she did it 20-ish years ago, after essentially repeatedly bleeding her green enough times to fill a tub so she could tap wholly in to that happy place and the true father she remembered, she brought something back. Someone. Yala, her younger self.

And then, for reasons we don’t quite have all the answers to, she confessed what she did to Khlyen and entrusted that younger, untainted self to the very same man who broke her in the first place. To fix her. To get a do-over. “She’s your good wolf, papa.” And he very nearly did the right thing by killing this shiny new version, but he couldn’t.

Instead, again, for reasons we don’t fully grasp, he turned her into a murderer, too. “Your father…sent me find you…to train you and protect you.” Only this still human daughter, Yala, was eventually flooded with remorse and anguish about her path and the death of her husband and she fled.

And her path corrected when she met a savior in the form of one Johnny Jaqobis. She found her North. And he’s there again when she comes out of the memory that tells everything she really didn’t want to know. “Are you OK? Did you get everything you needed?” he asks. She answers by weeping and hugging him tightly.

What this episode painfully revealed is that Dutch is a memory brought to life, so not a copy, not a clone, not a twin. She’s a literal reset button, perhaps for a version of herself that Aneela, in a moment of clarity within her madness, hoped could still be saved. And now we know that Aneela doesn’t have any idea about what she did because Khlyen took those memories, which begs the question of who she thinks Dutch actually is, other than the assassin of her father (thanks for that, Delle Seyah).

Dutch gets all of Aneela’s memories flooded back on her, which is A LOT, all at once, and it further upends her already fragile grip on whether she loved or hated Khlyen. It’s totally understandable that she surges out of the memories in tears and into Johnny’s arms. Suddenly this war that was so very important pales in comparison to an extremely complex identity crisis.

Just go ahead and bow down now at what Hannah John-Kamen did here, too. She’s played Aneela and Dutch as wholly separate entities who are aware of and loathe each other and now she has to layer that with a fully-informed Dutch who knows her true origin and has all the information at her disposal to make the big decisions. Will she actually be able to kill her older, less stable self?

It’s so beyond the idea of clones as separate, individual souls. Do Aneela and Dutch share a soul? They’re essentially the same being across two distinct timelines, and one was never real but was made flesh? If you make a 3D copy of a former version of yourself, what is that copy? See? This is why I couldn’t watch Episode 8 yet.

Thank the trees (and Michelle Lovretta and the whole motley crew at Killjoys) that we have three more episodes this season. Because leaving a season to end on this would have been way too angsty for us (okay, for me). We need a damn renewal already. What did y’all think? Hit me in the comments.

Killjoys airs Fridays at 8/7c on Syfy in the US and Space in Canada.