Season 1, Episode 15--"Death Dive"

Scandal Jackson sez, "Take only pictures and leave only footprints!"

 SYNOPSIS
 We open with a lot of frantic cutting between old Stingray footage and a guy watching old Stingray footage. A guy named jim is taking a dive, trying to check on a species of shrimp that might be made extinct by a planned expansion of a nearby amusement park, the prosaically named "Seven Seas Amusement Park." While we're getting that level of exposition, two other divers sneak up on board the ship and fiddle with Jim's air compressor, which causes him to explode with such force that his helmet, which is mysteriously free of chunks of brain and head, almost as if someone had just blasted it out of the water with an air cannon or something.

 This brings in our people, as The System is clearly not equipped to handle spontaneous underwater combustion. A friend of Jim's, Krista, who is a friend of Danielle's from college that Scandal and Dallas have never met, and they rib Danielle about this for a bit, complaining that they never meet Danielle's friends or the men she dates and Danielle demurs that she never mixes her business and personal life, which we know from last week, is an awful lie. Krista works at the Oceanquest research station, which works in conjunction with the park, who bailed them out and as Dallas sharply observes, neutralsed Oceanquest as a critic of their development and keep them on a leash.

 Scandal goes to the amusement park to investigate the whole situation and finds  Jim's hidden dive diary and runs into Frank McClory, the park's dive boss, and the guy who caused Jim to a'splode in the pre-credits teaser. They get along as well as you'd expect (which is to say, not much) not least because Scandal found a bullet casing on the bottom of the boat and, following Jim's dive diary, finds the wreck of a ship on the ocean floor, the Morning Rose. The boat, as it turns out, belongs to another friend of Krista's who got the oil company on their side to block the park's expansion, and who mysteriously disappeared while out on his boat. Scandal digs another bullet out of the hull of the boat, while McClory watches and looks dyspeptic, because while Scandal found the bullet on the deck of the ship, he didn't find the tracking device that MClory tagged one of his tanks with.

 It's pretty clear what's happened: If you're friends with Krista, you will die. No, wait--that's not it. It's true, but that's not it. No wonder Danielle kept her friendship with Kirsta so quiet. Apparently Pike, who owns the park, is using McClory's dive team to eliminate any opposition to his plans for expansion in elaborate ways that can be uncovered with really simple stuff which is, I suppose, the best you can expect from a glorified carny. Danielle steals some blueprints for a nearby offshore oil rig and parse that out. Pike is apoplectic about that and orders McClory to take out the opposition. McClory, who seems like murder is a homicidal part of his complete breakfast, looks forward to the task.

 Meanwhile, Scandal is doing a rubbish job of infiltrating McClory's dive team, which his narration tries to paper over with "if he thinks I'm too stupid to be an infiltrator, it just might work!" McClory, in the best tradition of "Push It," puts Scandal in a shark cage and messes with his air pressure and threatens to blow him up if he doesn't tell him what he wants to know and Scandal persuades him enough to be on probation after Scandal blows up the wrecked ship, and it seems like it juuuuust might work . . .

 . . .and then Krista blows his cover in the very next scene and they get chained to a roller coaster, because rather than shoot them and burn the bodies or anything sensible, they handcuff them to a roller coaster, set the thing in motion, and then wander off because they're sure that everything will go OK. Krista, Murderer Of All, puts it all together--they're going to blow up the oil rig where there's a big charitable function happening they they mentioned exactly ONCE three acts ago. Thankfully, all that farting around with all the diving footage has taken so damn long that they really have to hustle to wrap this up, so scandal decides to lie down and let the coaster's cars break their cuffs and with one bound, they're free.

 We then cut to the same footage of Scandal take a dive from two acts ago, so we can get this to tie back in with the Stingray footage, wherein the divers are putting big ridiculous cartoon bombs on the oil rig and there's a fight, and in the best tradition of trying to make underwater might exciting it totally fails and looks ridiculous, especially with all the cutting back to Scandal and McClory standing in front of a fish tank so it looked like they were underwater and stuff and it totally doesn't match and anyways, Scandal attaches one of the cartoon bombs to McClory, who promptly explodes with a great sense of satisfaction.

 Cut again to THE SAME SCANDAL FOOTAGE OF HIM DIVING FOR THE THIRD TIME IN LESS THAN 30 MINUTES for the wrap-up, and I will trim down all the extraneous fat because I really want this to be over with. Basically there is a lot of stock footage and Scandal advises all of us not to pee in the ocean, because it's sacred. Or something.

 ANALYSIS
 Short of a Captain Planet episode here and there, this may be the most environmentally conscious TV show ever made, as it's comprised of an amazing amount of recycled stock footage. Most of it's from a Stingray episode called "Below The Line"

 but by about halfway through it becomes almost a game to prove that Ed Wood's theory that you could make a whole movie out of stock footage. The balance is made up from a bunch of stock footage of amusement park's (including footage of the Rebel Yell roller coaster from King's Dominion, which is just up the road from me) and, in a bit that soon gets pretty damn hilarious, the episode starts reusing the same footage from its own episode (like that scene of Scandal diving? HERE IT IS TWO MORE TIMES!) and the whole thing becomes surreal, especially when you tie all that up with all the scuba diving scenes, which, no matter what, always slow the story down, about halfway through it starts having this weird feeling of deja vu, that strange feeling we sometimes get

 

 Oh, and McClory is played by Bo Svenson, who has been in damn near everything, and I'm sure is prouder of Cobra above anything else. He does a good job seeming all pissed off about all this, except exploding, because that was probably how McClory always wanted to go out anyways.
 
 Being that the story is built around all the stock footage, it lurches from point to point and needs to go a lot faster than it does to paper over all the problems the episode has. But it's been awhile since had a pretty basic Cobra episode and the weird Frankenstein-y nature of the thing makes it oddly appealing.

 DAD WISDOM/THE QUOTABLE COBRA
 "Feels like I'm in a beer can."
 "Imported or domestic?"

 "What do rollercoasters have to do with saving the whales?"

 "Dani we'd be happy to help you're friend, even if we've never met her."

 "Either Jim ran out of desk space, or he was a little paranoid"

 "A flooded hallway full of dead fish meant that Danielle had a hot date."

 "I'm the dive-boss and this is my boat, and I don't particularly like the idea of some shaggy-ass biologist on my team. So watch you mouth or you'll be gumming your regulator."

 "My dad always said never jump with your eyes closed, and never dive unless you know how deep the water is."

 "Sometimes alone and out of sight can be the worst place to be."

 "Why does it feel like I'm watching a rerun?"

 "The only shark I can identify has three aces up his sleeve."

 "My dad worked as a cop for 20 years and never complained about the stress. Once I asked him how he coped with it, and he pointed at the ocean and smiled."

 NEXT WEEK
 It's a Danielle episode where she's not immediately marginalised, how 'bout that? Proving that under no circumstances should any of these people take vacations as it always ends in disaster. Anyways, Danielle gets caught in a deadly game of cat and mouse along with a load of Stingray stock footage in a episode they had to call "Caged Fury." Join us in seven y'all, as we begin the ho