Review: The Sand Whale And Me “Day Four – The Sandman”

Hush little baby, don’t say a word.

Spoilers Below

I learned something. Our heroines name is KFC. I’m not quite sure I missed that until this point but cool. I swear… if Colonel Sanders makes an appearance at the end of the last episode I will lose my mind. Anyway, KFC must feel like she is making progress in her survival as slowly as the random snail we are shown footage of, but at least she is still alive for the time being.

It seems like just another day of foraging until she comes across another person… and they are alive! What a surprise! I wonder, was this other character, known as Sandman, one of KFC’s enemy pilots before they both landed on this planet? It seems so, as they both quickly scramble for their weapons after the relief of seeing another living person wears off. Even though both characters have each other held at point blank range, it doesn’t take long for the two’s sense of survival to kick in. Realizing they now have a team, they realize they should cast aside their differences for survival sake and set their combined sights on the Sandwhales, rather than trying to kill each other. You can almost see this lightbulb go on in KFC’s and Sandman’s head at the same time. With their combined efforts surely they can kill one of these monsters, right? Wrong. At the end of the day, they are both eating cans of Green Peace. But perhaps not all is lost as they now have each other and are not as a lone as they once were.

This episode gave us something that the previous episodes did not, and that is a sense of hope that there may be a light end of this tunnel, or at least the “comfort” of not dying alone. Instead of the usual gloom and doldrums that comes along with wandering across a barren landscape, the entire episode energy changes once Sandman enters the scene. Last episode – Day Three – felt so hopeless that I thought this series was an extended metaphor for the five stages of grief and questioning whether KFC would die or not. With this episode we learn a different lesson instead, and the value of companionship. You could see that in KFC’s face, there was a light there that had not been present in any of the previous episodes. I imagine that entire planet feels a whole lot smaller now that they have each other. I’m fairly certain that if the two work together they can manage to snag some of that delicious Sand Whale meat eventually. For now a bigger question remains. Will these two find a way off of the planet together? Or will they end up playing the role of Adam and Eve? Should this show be renamed “The Sand Whale and Us”?

 

SCORE
8.5/10

Not only do we learn a lesson in the value of companionship, but we also get some comedic moments between our protagonists and the depressing vibe from the last episode has been lifted and replaced with hope. I also have a theory that Sand Whale meat tastes like – you guessed it – Kentucky Fried Chicken.