A powerful Gua leader lashes out at the human sympathizers in the aliens' invasion force, and Joshua is his weapon of choice.

Written by Chris Brancato and Albert J. Salke
Directed by Michael Robison

MacKenzie Gray – The Minister
Mark Humphrey – Trent
Alex Zahara – Gregory
William deVry – Karl
Sarah Deakins – Alicia

The Gua are holding their annual meeting to assess their progress and promote interaction between the three divisions of Empiricists, Acolytes, and Osmosis. As Karl extols the Gua’s recent achievements, one of the Gua’s most revered leaders visits their luxurious headquarters.

He is "The Minister", Commandant of Extraterrestrial Conquest Agenda and second-in-command to the Guahead himself. Karl introduces the Minister to the assembled Gua – and the Minister snaps his neck.

"These are dark days," he tells the crowd. "My visit will mean death to anyone who hinders the enslavement of this planet." (more spoilers)

Unfortunately, that complexity is mostly wasted here. "The Purge" is a potentially entertaining premise that never takes flight.

While there’s no shortage of sex and innuendo, there’s little action, and Joshua’s search for the assassin bogs down in interview after interview.

We pick up a lot of information about the Gua, but it’s all from talking heads. First Wave’s relatively low budget really hurts it here – the show can’t afford show us the Gua homeworld, so even when interesting events happen there, we can only hear about them second-hand.

Joshua’s methodical nature doesn’t help. His calm, restrained approach plays well as a contrast to the mercurial Cade Foster, but it also makes it difficult to write him as an exciting central character.

"The Purge" isn’t a bad episode, just dull. Its one big twist comes at the end, and while it’s an appropriate resolution to a mystery that turns on body switching, the preceding 40 minutes make it hard to care.

Setting Joshua up as the day-to-day leader of the invasion is an important development, and Brancato and Salke deserve credit for creating an episode that doesn’t even mention their series leads. It’s just too bad that the whole isn’t live up to the parts.

The Gua have infiltrated branches of the military in 23 countries.

Gua have a lifespan of 1,000 human years.

Sex is painful to Gua in their natural form, which is why the pleasures of human sex have such a destabilizing effect upon them.

The current Guahead does not have a good reputation among some of his subjects.

Joshua isn’t the only Gua who wants to stop the invasion. There’s a growing movement of human sympathizers on Earth and the Gua homeworld.

Joshua is now the leader of the Gua invasion force and will report directly to "The Minister," who is secretly human sympathizer Trent, Joshua’s old friend.

How will Joshua use his new position as head of the invasion? Will he actually get more active?

Does this mean First Wave is moving toward a more mythology-intensive arc rather than the usual run of disconnected alien plots of the week?

Cade investigates what he believes to be an alien experiment in human preservation in "Lost Souls".