Season 1, Episode 10, "Playing With Fire"

FIRE! I AM! REBORN!

 SYNOPSIS

 So someone's burning down warehouses full of homeless people, and by "full," I mean "three." The arsonist is using the same modus operandi as the infamous Phoenix, a serial arsonist who terrorized Bay City five years back and of course, we're just hearing about it now. Apparently the Phoenix was reported dead on the Blue Area of the Moon burned alive in a building he'd already torched, which to me suggested he couldn't be all that and this is more a problem of the fire marshall's office, who apparently couldn't catch a guy who wears a big black trench-coat, goggles and does his arsoning with a HUGE-ASS FLAMETHROWER, which is weird to me because it feels like they would be very hard to miss.

 Given this show, however, I can see how someone like this could blend in invisibly.

 Anyways, the surviving homeless guys hire Cobra because The System Has Failed (of course) and they don't wanna be burned up either, and Scandal and Co. are on the case. Almost immediately they run up against the guy who owns the building Bryson and the fire marshall, Crawford, both of whom look at their presence as somewhat less welcome than a serial arsonist using the MO of another serial arsonist. It's more than that, of course, as Bryson had actually hired the Phoenix to burn some of his properties to the ground so he could recoup his insurance money and the fire marshall covered it up. Then, when they had no further use for the Phoenix, they let him be burnt up in one of his own fires. What's more, the arsonist seems to know this, because he torches Crawford in short order and leaves behind newspaper clippings indicating he knows about his complicity in the conspiracy.

 Scandal takes the case because his father rescued him from fire once, proving that there's nothing that Scandal can encounter that he doesn't have a ready-made Dad aphorism for.

 Scandal and Dani apparently need some help in parsing this twisty plot out so Dallas recommends they go see Doctor Mortimer T. Anton (and really, isn't that the BEST name EVER?), a psychologist who travestied a lot of pyromaniacs an finally became one himself and someone who is TOTALLY UTTERLY NOT MEANT TO BE HANNIBAL LECTOR, even though every attempt is made to that the budget will allow. the good Doctor's ams are crisscrossed with burn marks because he is the priest pyro that ever pyroed the pyro. There is a strained attempt at humor that he's given a crappy hot plate that never gets hot enough to burn anything. Apparently the good Doctor was on the Phoenix's fan mail list and knows how the Phoenix thinks and we're supposed to think this is all like Lector trying to get in Clarice's head, but it's really kind of an empty surface simulation because a serial arsonist is't a Grand Admiral Thrawn level strategist, as a rule. Of course, Anton knows the Phoenix, but that thread never gets pulled as tight as might do.

 Dallas pulls on the threads and naturally finds out that there was no body found in the fire that supposedly killed the Phoenix and that he's been chill in' in a flophouse in Bay City juicing up his flamethrower (I know how that sounds, but I assure you, it was all perfectly straightforward) this sets him on the Phoenix's hit list so he ties him and Bryson up in the same building (mostly because we're about ten minutes to the end) and the Phoenix decides to burn them alive in the wharf warehouse where he supposedly died. Thankfully, Scandal finally works out where they are, comes in, rescues Dallas and kills the Phoenix by shooting him in the flamethrower tank, which causes him to burn alive and fall in the water, but of course, no body was ever found, so we're treated to a . . ."OR IS IT?" shot of the flamethrower to button the episode because some poor fool thought there was a follow-up episode in this somewhere.


 ANALYSIS
 
 This episode desperately wants to be Silence of the Lambs for pyromaniacs, and it just isn't. Anton's not half the mastermind that Lector is and a serial arsonist you wouldn't think would need such detailed profiling, especially when you could just stake out the waterfront and look for the guy in the coat, the goggles, and the big honking' flamethrower.

 Though it does a good job of creating a rather nervy, dark, jangly mood which is a bit unusual for the series, and adds a lot of weight to the show that it usually doesn't attempt, even if it all falls apart if you think about it for longer for five minutes. They're trying. We can at least say that much for them. 

 I should mention that even though the whole Anton/Scandal conversations ultimately don't matter to the plot, they are full of hilarious purple prose as Anton waxes about how fire is always alive and waiting to be reborn and how you transcend pain once you start burning and eventually the episode so wholly commits to being ridiculous about everything fire that it becomes almost hilarious, really, and is one of my favorite episodes in the run because it's just so crazy. There's a few more still to get to ("Precious" is the ne plus ultra of Cobra episodes that went insane on the way to getting on the screen) but this is one of the reasons I started with this reviews.

 A word, if I might, about the song that plays whenever the Phoenix is getting ready to torch things: One, it is pretty much the Talking Heads' "Burning Down The House," but much more Canadian and full of chanting stuff like "FIRE! FIRE! FIRE! I AM! REBORN!" which, for this show, might count as a subtle for this show, but I totally cannot believe someone didn't get sued for because. . .it's pretty damn close. It's nearly "Push It" levels of diegetic music.

 The fire marshall is played by Garry Chalk, who you might remember as the second voice of He-Man when he had a ponytail and fought in space, the former Dum Dum Dugan in that SHIELD movie with David Hasselhoff we all collectively forgot about, but most familiar to me, he was the voice of Optimus Primal in Beast Wars/Beasties and Beast Machines, and the voice of Optimus Prime in Transformers Armada/Energon/Cybertron. He's been a pretty high-profile character and voice actor in Canada so for Cobra, this qualifies as a big "get," but NOT so much as entrant #2 . . .

  . . .Richard Lynch! Famed TV bad guy for most of the 80's when you wanted a John Colicos type but didn't want as much ham in there. Richard Lynch has been in more things than I can possibly list here, but if you had a TV show or movie in the 1980s, he was probably in it and he was probably a bad guy. Wiki has a pretty detailed list, but even then, they've probably left some things out. The most infamous thing he's been in was probably Werewolf, memorably lampooned on MST3k, and probably the nicest thing one can say is that he embarrassed himself the least, and he does about the same here, as he knows he's utterly vestigial to the overall plot, but has a lot of of fun being a smarts on the margins.

 DAD WISDOM/THE QUOTABLE COBRA

 "I saw his FLAME!"

 "The Phoenix was the soul of a man who burned alive five years ago and now he's back for revenge and he's not gonna stop until he's burned down the whole neighborhood and us along with it!"

 "You don't believe in ghosts, do you?"
 "I usually give 'em Halloween, then I land back on planet Earth."

 "If anyone's gonna kick anyone off the property, it ought be me"

 "You as well as I do he ghost thing is nothing but a short-sighted prank cooked up by the homeless community to scare off revitalization of the area. I think ghosts belong in comic books, not Bay City."

 "This thing is flammable enough to keep Lady Liberty lit up until the tricentennial"

 "You have someone in mind?"
 "Someone OUT of his mind!"

 "Quentin Avery is your father, yes? I've ignited several of his real estate holdings"

 "Musta burned his hands delivering the Devil's child."
  
 "Ghouls, goblins, and gasoline--all this talk of ghosts has my hair standing up on end."

 "Is this mood lighting or are you trying to contact Ms. O'leary's cow?"

 "You HAVE been in the flame now, haven't you, Mr. Jackson?"

 "Whaddaya think? I just hang around and smoke cigars all day?"

 "I've been telling you since the first moment you crossed my threshold."

 "You're a sweetheart, you know that?"
 "Yes I do."

 You can't kill me . . .I'm already dead!"

 NEXT WEEK

  Someone's targeting a radio call-in show host (No, not Diane Reihm) and the only solution is for Scandal to get married. It's "Death on the Line," in seven!