Families.  You can’t live with ’em, you can’t live without, ’em. Ammirite?

Kenneth and Eugene discuss Family Values.

Episode Synopsis:

Rudolfo monologs at the captive audience on the Trans-utopian, it is unclear if they are hearing a word he’s saying.  Time seems to weigh heavily upon them.  Dante shuts himself in his room and engages maximum privacy protocols.  There he hooks up to a neural device and enters a virtual world where his wife, Penny awaits.

Penny, it would seem, is an incomplete data simulation of Dante’s late wife.  This, too, is breaking down and will cease to function, but for now, it is their anniversary and Dante is feeling the loss.  Penny thinks she can feel their son, Travis, nearby.  “Please find him, Dante, so I can see him one last time before I die again.”

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Meanwhile, Percy, ignoring maximum privacy mode enters Dante’s room and seems him, seemingly unconscious, hooked up to the machine.  She leaves without alerting Dante to her presence.

They arrive at Mars and Rudolfo gives them something more useful than a monolog, he gives them an assignment.  Apprehend Etienne, a small time crook.

Etienne and his accomplice/lover Brad are running a computerized shell game, and cheating, of course.  Rumbled, just as Dante and Lucretia arrive, they flee for their lives out onto the terraformed desert of Mars, but to no avail, Dante and Lucretia catch them.

At the same time a Raider ship arrives, attacks and kills Brad.  Unable to communicate with the ship because of Mars’ turbulent terraformed atmosphere, they must flee – that is until Percy uses their Birdseye drone, specially modified with explosives, to destroy the Raider ship.  In the wreckage, Dante finds a wounded raider and his captive “son.”

Raiders are former Black Galaxy Marines that were used for secret biological testing.  Those that didn’t die became sterile and, apparently due to frustrated daddy issues, decided to become a force of privateers who steal children to raise as their own.

Dante immediately recognizes the 10ish year old child to be his son, Travis, who he last saw 10 years ago when he was a baby.  Never mind that it doesn’t make sense, dads just have a natural instinct about these things.  They take them all captive and continue to return to the city and their shuttle.  Unfortunately, more Raiders are on their trail.

Back on the Trans-utopian, having destroyed the Birdseye, Percy has nothing better to do that use this opportunity to break into Dante’s room and hook herself up to the Penny Arcade.  She comes face to face with her late Aunt, who compliments her, tells her she shouldn’t have come, and makes her forget everything she saw.  Caravaggio, aware of what has happened, uses fruit ripening gases to awaken Percy.

Back on Mars, they’ve got a problem.  The Raiders are coming, they don’t have weapons to fight them off, and, if they managed to get back to their six-seater shuttle, which easily flew four people in last week’s episode, they don’t have room to carry five people.

It is at this moment that Dante remembers he has a portable DNA paternity tester which takes only seconds to administer.  He tests the boy, but the device is broken… or is it?  He’ll definitely have to take the boy back to the ship, but they’ll never make it with the Raiders tracking them.

Etienne, disconsolate over the death of Brad, volunteers to stay behind with the injured Raider, waiting for the others to arrive, giving Dante, Lucretia and the boy time to get back to the shuttle.

When the Raiders arrive for them, Etienne actually has a weapon on him that both ruins the reception on my television, and also incapacitates – or possibly kills – all the Raiders, allowing him to escape.

Finally back at the Trans-utopian, DNA tests confirm what everybody except Dante already knew, the boy isn’t his.  They head out to return him to his real family, but before they get there, Dante and the boy share a bit of surrogate father/son time that Dante so desperately craves.

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