What does it do to a person to take a life? Strange Empire’s “The Resistance” shows the agonizing conflict – young Neill, who is celebrated for killing a Chinese man; Franklyn Caze, who meant to kill Ling but instead kills his hidden mother; and Chase Sloat, who refuses to kill Mary, the mother of Isabelle’s purchased son.

John Slotter is, shall we say, slightly less conflicted, though he outsources his murders — to other men or to unsafe mine conditions.

So what does it do to a town when life is expendable? It makes the Janestown Slotter presides over not exactly a paradise found.

The dispute over those unsafe conditions has led to a town more sharply divided between Chinese and white, scabs and striking workers, with Ling and Slotter vying for supremacy, intrigue and broken promises and tangled relationships on all sides.

Mrs. Briggs is in league and in bed with Caze, Isabelle with Slotter and Ling, and Sloat with Mary in a weird and sweet and weird budding romance.

Kat – who has been relegated to the edges of the show in the last couple of episodes — wants Slotter to negotiate with the minors and end the fracturing of the town. “There is no town,” says Slotter. “There is me.” And when a man who can order the murder of a young woman —the mother of his son, in fact – is the town … yikes.

I doubt his silent partner Ling would bring harmony to Janestown, but he vows to take all that is Slotter’s, including his wife: “It’s in your nature to belong to yourself,” he tells Isabelle, “to be free of anyone who would hold you. I would show you freedom.”

The women of this strange empire are not unstrange themselves, and that seems like a fair description of headstrong, ingenious Isabelle, who seems to be inventing a pregnancy – protection from her violent husband? She’s terrified at Cornelius Slotter arriving to collect the money they owe, money she secured with sex. Hmm, could Cornelius be the father of her non-existent baby? How deep does Isabelle’s intrigue go?

When Rebecca tends to the shot Chinese man without hesitation and demonstrates her facility with languages, Ling becomes yet another person entreating her to be more “proper.” “A proper life seems not to suit me,” she says. Expressing her desire for travel, her dreams are quashed by Ling until he adds: “Stay here, doctor — the world will come to you.”

The music seems especially fitting in this episode, dissonant in accordance with the on-screen dissonance. Kat forces a settlement on Slotter by threatening to blow up his mansion, but her victory is short-lived when the mine blows in with workers trapped below. “Your spirit turns the earth,” Ling whispers to his dead mother, though with all the safety concerns we hardly need to reach for a spiritual explanation. Life in the Strange Empire is worth far less than money and power.

I’ve been away for a few weeks and it’s nice to come back to see that Rebecca is free from Thomas’ constant belittling  (I mean, RIP Thomas) and has found herself a nice young man. Wait, what?

Yes, Rebecca now knows what a sharp-eyed viewer alerted us to after Morgan Finn’s first appearance: her man is a woman.  Rebecca’s shock is equal only to Morgan’s after noting the young doctor’s literal interpretation of “he gave me his heart.”

With Thomas’ actual heart added to her study materials — the “seat of sin.” Slotter calls it — Rebecca accepts a deal with Captain Slotter to be the town’s doctor, set up in her own crib with her very own couch and gun as well as a steady supply of bodies to cut up, assuming she can’t save all the injured and sick . Plus she gets the bonus of the mysterious Slotter making creepy reference to her purity. At least she’s not married to this protector (“protector”?).

Strange Empire has slotted its unusual characters into supposedly familiar roles — Rebecca as town doctor, Kat as law(wo)man, Isabelle as both lady of the manor and madame — but the ways in which they subvert those stock roles adds to the surreality of the show. Rebecca is no Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman.

The financially strapped Slotter sees the newly arrived “prophet” Mr. Young as his savior, selling him on investing in the mine.  Young agrees only if he’s allowed to marry young Kelly, who’s willing until she discovers she’d be wife number three of the polygamist pedophile — the two “strays” Kat picked up earlier, mother and daughter, were both married to him after he killed their husband and father. “If he marries you he won’t come to me so much,” young Martha tells Kelly in a heartbreaking moment.

Is is possible Isabelle and maybe even Slotter’s sense of justice is roused by Mr. Young’s depravity? Or did Slotter kill him purely to get his money?  Either way, the vigilante justice came up empty, financially speaking, as Mr. Young was a financial fraud, too.  But Rebecca gets her first body and Kelly gets her freedom without her or Kat incurring the wrath of the Slotters.

With the investment a bust, Slotter is left to reluctantly accept Ling’s offer of a silent partnership. So now both Slotters are in bed with Ling. The deal allows him to hire Chinese workers to replace those who walked off the job over safety concerns, spurred on by Kat. When the two sides battle, she’s left to look on helplessly, a keeper of the peace where there is little.

There’s a sense of impotence throughout Janestown, as characters struggle to create a destiny and a community without ever quite gaining the freedom a new land promises — each new situation they find themselves in seems to come with its own type of trap.

“How Far Is Heaven” begins with an almost dreamy landscape shot, sepia with yellow flowers popping from the screen as Kat and her daughters discover Martha and her mother, and ends with the newcomers returning to that landscape to seek another prophet to follow, followed by the battle between factions for unsafe jobs digging up coal. The promise of the land remains, but so does the reality of the struggle.

Strange Empire airs Mondays at 9 p.m. on CBC.