Season 1, Episode 11 "Death On The Line"

This week--Scandal gets married!
 
SYNOPSIS
 We open with a sexy voice on the radio motivating a guy to be more assertive with women and motivating them while someone's getting strangled in the background and if you can't really see where this is going already, you're not paying attention. Anyways, the strangler, Tyler, calls in to the radio show, the host of which, Wendy, butters him up and calls him special because yeah, this wasn't troubling enough. It turns out the man murdered is one of the show's sponsors, who was just having lunch with Wendy right before the murder happened and the last call from his hotel room was to her her radio show, so obviously, Something Is Going On.

 Meanwhile, Scandal falls out with Renee, the taxidermist, who leaved him with a dead animal. Some strained and painful romantic dialogue happens because after you've just seen a brutal murder before the opening credits, it's important to lighten the mood.

 Shockingly, it turns out the radio station wants to hire Cobra to protect Wendy (if they didn't we wouldn't have a show this week) Scandal and Wendy have a bit of flirty-flirty, and Danielle teases Scandal about the fact that apparently he listens to Wendy's radio show a lot, and Scandal looks mildly annoyed, then goes off for an Introspective Drive and prevents Tyler from running down Wendy's lunch date.

 In any event, the structure of the episode is pretty clear--find this Tyler and prevent him from killing Wendy. Unusually for Cobra this will not reveal him being a arms dealer or breaking into HQ or anything like that. 

 Wendy and Scandal have some more plot-fleshing-out dialogue, and also some obliquely flirtatious stuff with Scandal vowing to protect her and never leaving her side, inadvertently fessing up to her that yes, he DOES listen to the show and man, this whole episode is like a Jezebel article.

 So they do the whole thing of trying to keep him on the trace, but when they get there, it turns out that he routed the number through to the wrong house (but given that we were 20 minutes into the episode, they weren't gonna catch him THAT fast) But we DO find out that Tyler is, in fact, a telephone lineman and tapped into the phone system. Scandal decides to draw him out and play human target and Danielle gets all jealous because that it what passes for romantic chemistry on this show, if you remember.

 Meanwhile, Dallas and Danielle meet with the phone company's Head of Exposition and are surprised to find that Tyler is, in fact, not the the assailant's real name. They are just not trying at ALL this week, are they?

 Meanwhile, Scandal takes Wendy to the juice bar for a comically oversized banana split, so they can get in some character development and Scandal can be ruggedly distant and Wendy can complain about being tired of packing and unpacking town to town up and down the dial. They kiss and we pan down to Tyler peeking at them through the bushes, just in case the jeopardy in this episode went a little slack or whatever. Scandal suggests that she talk about her on the radio to further antagonize him and draw him out.

 Tyler's roommate fails to put two and two together when Tyler's listening to the radio show and stabbing a knife repeatedly into the table (making him officially the stupidest person ever) and since we're a half-hour into this episode, it's working as we ratchet a little closer to the endgame. Scandal decides to further antagonize Tyler by telling the radio show to hang up on him whenever he calls, because as we've learned, when confronted with someone who's completely irrational and prone to violence, Scandal's first instinct is to run up and punch them. 

 This results in Scandal getting drive-by'ed by Tyler while he's at a hot dog stand and I bet Scandal really wishes that he hadn't worn white that day. Meanwhile, Danielle affects a ridiculous Southern accent and pretends to have car trouble and wouldn't you know it, the guy who fixes her car is Tyler's roommate (you remember, the stupidest person ever?) and they break into his apartment and find out that Tyler's real name is Metzger and he's been crazy as a soup sandwich for a long time. 

 So it's time for Plan C, which is to have Scandal and Wendy get married in order to draw him out for good. Dallas and Danielle rib Scandal about his impending nuptials, and Tyler responds by machine-gunning a radio just in case we hadn't been reminded since the last thirty seconds that he is crammed full'a cray. Tyler follows this up by machine-gunning the limo, only to kill a couple dummies (no, not Scandal and Wendy) and Scandal kung-fus the guy and smacks him around and finally declares "it's over," and because we're five minutes to the end.

 However, as the episode closes, Wendy moves on to another job in New York, and Scandal and she part over the phone on their radio show, and it may be that they were never meant to be, perhaps they'll think of each other once in awhile.

 

ANALYSIS

 Wow, this episode is . . .ew. Its gender politics are jaw-dropping as hell (women are routinely looked at as distant objects to be won and fought over, and men can easily be moved to murder at the first sign of concern that they are shown by a beautiful woman) and women are just gosh-darn bubble-headed to know what kinda dust-up they inflame when rubbing a man's rhubarb. Seriously, the implications are pretty offensive, and I'm not even sure they're subtle enough to be implications.

 Maybe they're more "plications."

 Wendy is more possession than character, and couldn't be less empowered if she were hooked up to a hydroelectric plant. Tyler doesn't exist except as an antagonist utterly defined by the fact that he kills people for Wendy-related reasons and is brilliant and unstoppable until the plot decides he's not, and yes, that is pretty much exactly what they did in "Honeymoon Hideaway." 

 Are taxidermists really that sexy? And do they really give people mounted and stuffed animals as break gifts? This show makes any and all human relationships horrifically terrifying neurotic minefields.

 If you watch this, be prepared to facepalm your way through it. God knows I did.  

 Even weirder is that this episode is some pretty thin gruel, which is surprising, as typically, Cobra adds up all sorts of convolutions to a plot. It's not enough that a guy beats his wife, he has to e an arms dealer on top of that and double cross his arms dealer buddies and everything ends in a shootout with grenade launchers, so really there's nothing to do but focus on the icky gender politics and maybe only fret a little that this was perfectly OK as recently as 20 years ago. 

 Oh, little bit of trivia--When Tyler gets knocked out the camera lingers on his license plate, which says "beautiful evergreen state," which is a portmanteau of British Columbia's licence plate ("beautiful British Columbia") where Cobra was filmed, and Washington state's license plate ("Evergreen State") where Cobra is supposed to take place.

 


DAD WISDOM/THE QUOTABLE COBRA

 "Then she took me home to meet her Dobermans."
 "Mean and vicious?"
 Stuffed and mounted."

 "You reach out into the darkness, you never know who or what you're going to touch."

 "I'm not some Circe luring men to their doom."

 "Wendy, you don't have any unusual hobbies like . . .taxidermy, do you?"

 "What about the guy who wanted to buy your underwear to line his coffin?"

 "This lady's lighten' fuses out there!"

 "Once the fuse is lit there's no point in blown out the match, you gotta find the dynamite!"

 "YOU'RE not the gardner!"

 "The phone company never sleeps."
 "Yeah, I haven't had too many winks myself."


 NEXT WEEK

 Someone's ripping stuff off from a museum, and despite Cobra's best security, they're stumped. If you think this DOESN'T end up with a sexy cat burglar in black leather, then you missed way I said above about this show's gender politics. Crosses, double crosses, a Gilligan's Island marathon, and women in gaudy leotards doing calisthenics for no reason all wait for us here next week in a little something-something called "Diamond in the Rough." I would like to tell you the portrayal of women gets better on this show. I would really like to be able to tell you that.