Post by Yuri Petrovitch on Mar 26, 2014 10:25:55 GMT -5
This episode--Scandal reveals what a rotten jerk of a child he was!
SYNOPSIS
As with the last time we opened an episode with the it can only mean a pleasant, idyllic vision of early 90's suburbia is about to be horribly shattered. In this case, it's a picnic between a husband, his wife, and their son which gets broken up by a drive-by paintballing. The police shrug it (and the previous incidents) off as a prank, which means The System Has Failed yet again, and they go to approach Cobra. The wife, Anne Crocker pretends not to know what they could possibly want, the husband also doesn't know what they could want, and the kid is terrible from the free-throw line. Scandal teaches him a few tricks in terms of positive visualisation (which, thanks to a little cross-cutting, means he actually makes the basket) but soon stalks off, growling to Danielle, that they don't need protection, they need a marriage counselor: Anne is planning to leave her husband, so he says.
Danielle immediately twigs that there's something behind his overreaction, but Scandal drives off in a huff while we get some b-roll of Scandal driving around angsting, while a rather on-the-nose song (they even drop the episode's title in the name, for heaven's sake) and some back and white flashbacks inform us of a bit of Scandal's backstory we had heretofore not seen--apparently his mother left his father and him after he told her he hated her for making him stop practicing basketball (which we have, in fact never seen him do up until this episode) and it's obviously bringing back a load of bad memories for him that you can only properly express with musical montages.
When he finally returns to the Cobra HQ (it has been 4 episodes since our last break-in!) Danielle tells him that Anne's son thought he was great and believes that Scandal can find the people terrorising his family, and because this is the kind of show where that works, Scandal decides to help, only to find it's not terribly easy because Anne seems to be purposefully giving him the slip, especially when he catches her meeting someone she claims is a friend frim way back. Scandal is suspicious of this, and with good reason.
Meanwhile, Danielle, who's being nosy in an episode-convenient fashion, snoops around Scandal's biographical file, which he discovers and gets annoyed about, huffing at her to leave things be, but Danielle's all like "we NEED to maybe talk about it because it would imply intimacy without breaking the rigid 'will they or won't they?' relationship construct we're in. You really kinda think this is something they could have done before they even recruited them, but as we've seen, Cobra in general and Danielle specifically are not really swift on the uptick when it comes to vetting potential new hires.
Anyways, it comes out in the wash that Anne is actually a former agent of the East German Statsi who escaped Germany when the Berlin Wall came down. Making a new life and a new identity in the states, everything was going fine until the mysterious woman, Miranda, found her again. Miranda was her former spymaster and is now subcontracting out freelance jobs (because all the money and job security is in middle-management, I guess?) and is blackmailing Anne to get her to assassinate her next target. Scandal runs across Anne getting a weapons cache, and does the whole "you don't have to do this" spiel, which she kicks the crap out of him for, as you'd expect. They try one more time to get her to back down and let them help, and decide to set a trap where it looks like Anne will complete the assignment (Miranda, being a hands-on manager, likes to personally supervise the assassinations) but stop, and Miranda will move in and they can catch her. Thankfully this all works out, and Miranda is carried off and Anne and her family are free at last of the past, presumably free to pursue lives of religious fulfillment.
Scandal, meanwhile, decides he's not gonna fret about his mother anymore because the episode's over and somehow helping an escaped Communist spy put her past behind her allows you closure over your mommy issues. I should try that, maybe.
ANALYSIS
Man, what a weird episode.
These last handful of Cobra episodes share some things in common--namely they get really cavalier about dropping plot threads after they've served their purpose in the narrative (the pinnacle of this we'll see in two weeks wherein a story about mental illness suddenly turns into a zany story about Danielle's high school reunion) because their episode order's complete by this point and they really can't be arsed too much. Hence we have this weird kludge of an episode wherein Scandal's mom (who we've never heard anything about at all up to now) and how she mysteriously disappeared one day gets brought up and paralleled with Anne's life (which doesn't work, unless Scandal's mom was a spy, which as far as we learn is not the case) only to be dropped with a shrug in the button-scene for the episode. We never learn anything about what happens to Scandal's Mom, or what precipitated her leaving (given what a saint Scandal thinks his dad is, it raises a ton of questions, and it's a shame the episode doesn't have the time or interest to address them) The most we get is "saying 'Sometimes I hate you!' to your mom right before she disappears without having a chance to say you're sorry will mess you up for life.
The actual Anne Crocker story isn't too bad--it's nice to see (as with "Caged Fury") some women who aren't shrinking violets (though as with Jolene from that episode, they're somewhat misguided, because the episode can't help being very sexist even when it's trying to be a little less) and that she actually knocks out Scandal was pretty swank--you weren't seeing that every week, that's for sure. Also, the whole plot of "fleeing foreign agent becoming Suzy Homemaker" is a lovely quaint little throwback to those optimistic post Cold War "end of history" days when I think every movie and TV show seemed to grapple with during this time.
Which almost makes me forgive the fact that Miranda's plan to blackmail Anne to do an assassination she's going to supervise is the most ridiculously wasteful plan in the history everything. How much time and money does she spend on trying to get Anne to do this with the drive-by paintballing and the harassment when she coulda just walked up and shot the guy herself? I realise that she doesn't get her hands dirty, but geez.
In any event, it's probably adds up to about zero. The episode is generally good and moves a steady clip, and it's only later that you realise none of it makes a damn lick of sense.Lord knows, it's better than what follows, for sure.
DAD WISDOM/THE QUOTABLE COBRA
"When I was little I wasn't allowed to go into my dad's workshop. You see he had all these power tools and I wasn't allowed to use them. He always knew when I snuck in and before I could saw off my fingers or drill through my foot, he was there."
"Where's the light switch?"
"It's this little thing on the wall. We built that elaborate control console you just attacked to draw attention away from it."
"What's harder to get out of your laundry--paint pellets, or bloodstains?"
"Human nature always dictates that a kid will always look to his mother for safety. But when that kid's world is suddenly filled with violence and fear like Ryan's now was, he needs to know his mom will always be there. I was never that lucky, but I was sure as hell going to preserve that safety for Ryan."
"You never know when you're going to get assaulted by a strange man wearing his lunch."
NEXT WEEK
Scandal takes a ride with the most annoying guest star in the history of television not named Bret Somers, and apparently the budget for Stingray footage had a surplus that they were determined to blow completely in this episode. Join us in seven for "Lorinda."