Post by Yuri Petrovitch on Mar 12, 2014 10:56:13 GMT -5
This week--Scandal barely shows up!
SYNOPSIS
Our story begins with Jolene, our guest star of the week being hunted by the police of Britannia Creek, only to get arrested and driven off to jail. Despite the fact that Bay City has generally been assumed to be a standing in for (or near) Seattle, the twangy guitar on the soundtrack and slip-sliding "southern" (let's be charitable and assume that's what they were trying to do) inflection means that like Springfield it has apparently shifted in space and time and is now close to the south that only really exists in TV and movies (where there are people actually named "Buford," for God's sake), even though the scenery is pretty plainly the surrounding environs of British Columbia.
Jolene has been constantly harassed by the police because (and I'm jumping ahead here in the name of clarity) because her father was an armoured car driver who disappeared during a payroll run. The cops, who are deeply corrupt, killed the driver and sank the armoured car to the bottom of a lagoon to recover the money later, because they took the concept of "money laundering" somewhat literally, I suppose. Jolene, tracking her father, had been snooping around town looking for what happened to him, and found his badge, which she kept, and the armored car, from which she took the money and hid it. Ever since, the police have been trying to beat the location of the money out of her, because that's what corrupt cops do, I guess.
Anyways, while all that is going on, Danielle is getting ready for a much-needed vacation from work by . . .doing more work. Dallas and Scandal shove her out the door, assuring her that they will continue with her plans to sort out the filing system, and if you think that's not gonna come up in the stinger for the episode, you've been watching the wrong show. They finally get Danielle out the door and she zooms off in her company car (a Ford Probe? Jesus, Cobra) toward the hinterlands.
About the time she's crossing into the plot of the episode, Jolene kicks her way out of the police cruiser and escapes from the cops, only to get run over by Danielle. Jolene, thinking fast, carjacks Danielle's car and tries to get her to run a roadblock. Unfortunately, a Ford Probe doesn't have the same immunity from police that, say, a black Trans-Am has, and the cops shoot it up and take Danielle and Jolene both into custody where they do that sort of "indefinite detention stuff" that had a whole different context before 9/11 than it does now as they stonewall Danielle's call for her lawyer and try to extract the information from Jolene.
Meanwhile, Dallas and Scandal start to panic as Danielle hasn't arrived and they've barely been in this episode despite being in the opening credits. After a few bits of business, they finally get to Britannia Creek, where the sheriff, Macon ( the head of our little conspiracy) says he's never seen Danielle, but says he'll keep an eye out, and Scandal twigs to the fact that he has seen her, because he knew Danielle's car was white despite the fact Scandal and Dallas never told him.
While that's going on, Jolene and Danielle escape from the jail by Jolene pretending she's dead, and because this show is what it is, it works, and they get out. Of course, we learn later that Macon planned all this so that they could wait for Jolene to lead them to the money on her way out of town. Danielle seems to question Jolene's obsession with the money, but Jolene shuts her up by pistol-whipping her and drives off for the money.
Turns out she hid it at the stables, and Macon ambushes her there. Rather than shoot her (apparently she was carrying around an unloaded guy the whole time, but he isn't) he's planning to make her dead look like she was kicked by a rowdy horse, which seems like an odd way of covering one's tracks, given everything that's about to break loose--the State Troopers are on the way and money or not, Macon's going down. Anyways, Scandal walks in, kicks ass, and a wild car chase from Stingray appears and Macon runs his car off a cliff into a lagoon because he can't understand why his car suddenly changed into a gigantic Oldsmobile from the mid-1980s, and somehow that wraps everything up.
To button the episode, Danielle returns from an actual vacation where she lay on the beach and read War and Peace in the original Russian (because lol nerds) and Scandal and Dallas have well and truly borked her filing system, because men don't know nothin' bout no secretary work, do they?
ANALYSIS
We're in the home stretch of episodes now, y'all. This is my last DVDs worth of episodes.
I'll say this for "Caged Fury"--for a Danielle episode they actually manage not to sideline her so much. Mind you, she's still left with very little to do apart from act pissy and sit in a jail cell for long periods of time, but that's more than she's been allowed to do in previous episodes that feature her. It's undercut quite a bit by the fact that everyone gets the drop on her or fools her and Scandal and Dallas have to show up to do most of the heavy lifting and sort out all the plot mechanics, and really, Jolene gets to kick way more ass than Danielle ever does (and Jolene can apparently do all this with massive internal injuries--remember she spends most of this episode recovering from Danielle hitting her with the car) but it's . . .well, for Cobra, it's almost progressive, but remember all motion is relative and thus, it can seem like it's standing still.
The business with the armoured car is, as is typical for Cobra, WAY more byzantine than it really needs to be, and the whole thing of killing an armoured car driver, sinking the armoured car, and then . . .kinda waiting for all the investigation to blow over (which seems a bit odd, as I'm sure there'd be many levels of investigatory red tape to hurdle over before they could retire on the money, never mind there's probably be some means of tracking it, and uh, this is all WAY too complicated for a bunch of backwoods cops, really.
Problem is, the episode is too slow-paced to be able to successfully paper over these problems, so you have no choice to dwell on this while you're waiting for Jolene and Danielle to get out of that damn jail cell and in the meantime, chew over the more daft parts of this episode. It's not really a great Cobra episode, but if you're not paying attention to it and just want some background noise, I suppose it would succeed on that level, maybe.
DAD WISDOM/THE QUOTABLE COBRA
"Dead or alive, Jolene--its all the same to he people who print the 'Wanted' posters."
"Look, there's a simple solution--I go on vacation."
"Morning must be different on your side of the cell."
"The word is "work." With Danielle gone, you have twice as much to do."
"I have a cel phone."
"Well, if y'all wanna hang around for six years until we get service, be my guest"
"I'm Danielle LaPointe. I'm the one who ran into you."
"We give you better hospitality in our jail than in most hotels"
"It doesn't matter if she's telling the truth or not Buford . . .the young lady has to die"
"I'm talking about Danielle LaPointe. Have you ever known her to do something spontaneous?"
"He can't beat it outta me and they sure as hell can't get it out of me by sticking Barbie in here."
NEXT WEEK
Marines are killing Marines, and when I say "Marines," I mean "a load of Canadian actors and Major Briggs from Twin Peaks." Naturally, this is far more complicated than it has any business being. Also, Scandal gets arrested and Danielle jabs a needle in his ass, which is actually pretty straightforward. Join us for "A Few Dead Men," in seven!