“Undesirables” is episode sixteen of season one of First Wave.
Joshua kicks in a door and enters a run-down building full of drug users. He is looking for someone specific and, when the man, Calvin, sees Joshua he runs. Joshua shoots and injures Calvin, then corners him. Calvin starts reaching into his pocket. he doesn’t have a gun; he has salt. Now, given that salt is hardly what you’d call expensive, why is Calvin living as if he has spent a fortune on drugs? Calvin is hooked on salt and tries to get Joshua to try it, because he’ll understand. Joshua, in his titular episode, did try it. He says that Calvin is no better than a junkie. Calvin just wants to go home but Joshua kills him.
Joshua reports in to another, Talia. He sees Calvin was an easy mark. He may have been an Acolyte warrior, one of their best, but that was prior to getting hooked on salt. Joshua is given his next target, to the annoyance of another who did all the work. Talia wants Joshua to take over. Joshua asks if it’s human or Gua; in the last six months he’s killed three Gua and he’s tired of killing their own. Talia doesn’t believe they were Gua any longer, recapping the three, one of whom was Elton in “Speaking in Tongues”. They went down the wrong path and it’s needed to discourage others. There’s a wave of human sympathy forming and it needs stopping. Joshua’s latest target has done something thought impossible – fallen in love with a human.
Cade is digging a hole as he and Eddie are burying the book of Nostradamus prophecies. In the previous episode, “The Box”, Cade discovered that the aliens are scared of the book and want it. If either Cade or Eddie falls into alien hands, they will have the book to bargain with.
Joshua is being briefed on the file of his next target. The Gua, Anita, live with James Dutton, an expert on non-Euclidean space-time geometry. He has theorised about using wormholes to travel between galaxies. If he proves the theory, humans could detect the Gua’s wormholes. Anita, who went undercover as Dutton’s teaching assistant, reported that his theory was wrong. They were going to pull her out until Dutton was overheard discussing his work. Anita was either misinformed or lying. Talia believes she weas lying to protect Dutton.
Eddie has divided the quatrains across four databases on the internet, one line per database. Cade thinks he’s figured one out. Eddie is not convinced and is dismissive. Cade says that a line reminds him of the white holes that Joshua mentioned. See of anyone local knows anything about wormholes. Eddie is not convinced – until he finds Dutton.
Dutton knows Anita is Gua. She thinks they are safe for a while. He does not; she’s never been in love before and love has a way of making everything wonderful. Anita realises he’s saying she isn’t thinking straight. No; if what Anita told Dutton is true, they are going to find out about them. And Joshua is setting off.
Joshua arrives at Dutton’s home but the only person there is Cade. Cade doesn’t know where Dutton is, only packed and left in a hurry. Cade accuses Joshua of lying to him about being tired of killing. Was Dutton getting too close? With Cade gone, Joshua searches the place, discovering that a tape has been taken from the answerphone. Cade took the tape and he and Eddie play it. Dutton had left a message to Anita on it; now they need to work out who Anita is and where she and Dutton have gone.
The other Acolyte thinks he can do better than Joshua, and also intervenes, seeming desperate to prove he is better. According to Talia, the Gua are close to launching the Second Wave. Neither Dutton nor Anita want to get involved with the conflict, but the Gua are not going to stop until they’re dead. Cade keeps bumping into Joshua.