‘The Last Ship’ season 2, episode 5 review: The Nathan James’ latest threat

When you are “The Last Ship,” you probably develop a tendency at a certain point to spend the majority of your time looking over your shoulder. There are a variety of different threats coming at you at almost every second, and you just have to continue to brace yourself for them.

What we found especially interesting about tonight’s episode “Achilles” is how it managed to establish so effectively a very dangerous threat for Chandler, Nathan James, and really the world at large: A group of immune people who feel like the world is meant to be for them, and therefore they want to infect and destroy everyone else who is not worthy. It’s a terrifying presence, and that is something that they had to contend with somewhat in this episode. Next week the journey will take the crew to Florida in an attempt to better understand what they are up against; for now, this feels like something that could take the crew all season to resolve.

These people now have a submarine, and to make matters even worse, they’ve also destroyed many labs. We don’t blame really anyone on the Nathan James too much for what happens; you’re talking here about a small crew, trying to figure out a way to play hero in a very difficult world. How do you expect them to contend with all of this? It’s an almost-impossible task to brace yourself for a variety of different opponents, especially while at sea and when someone is using a submarine.

We still like to call this episode foundational, at least in that almost everything that we saw tonight is going to inevitably carry over to everything moving forward the rest of the season. Still, as far as that goes, this has to be one of the best episodes of its kind this season. Relentless and intense from start to finish. Grade: B+.

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