The TV show Colony has its problems, but it’s still a great show. There are no easy choices, no magical outs, for any of the main characters — choose one thing, a lot of people die. Choose another, some other people die — just maybe you don’t know them as well. Join the Resistance, die a horrible death and get your friends and family killed.

Don’t join the Resistance, also die a horrible death — just more slowly in a soft genocide.

It’s a grim show, but not quite as merciless as I am making it sound. It is, however, one of the few shows that forces its characters make tough choices where it’s guaranteed that there is no good outcome, just less worse ones.

And the Resistance isn’t portrayed as some benevolent group who is always morally upstanding. For instance, a common Resistance technique is for an attractive Resistance woman to lure weaker or unattractive men with the promise or actuality of sex, love, or companionship, get them to ferry a backpack full of explosives somewhere that’s a target, and then detonate them remotely. Brutal, effective, completely fucking immoral…but also a tactic that works and that I can guarantee would be used in such a desperate situation.

Every decision you make, if you decide to live, is going to make you into a monster of some sort. All you get to choose is what kind of monster you want to be.

Thus, its verisimilitude to similar real-life situations of its nature is a bit too apt (in a good way) and quite uncomfortable at times. If the show weren’t so realistic in this respect, I bet it’d be more popular.