Post by Yuri Petrovitch on Apr 9, 2014 13:56:55 GMT -5
AHHHH CREEPY VENTRILOQUIST'S DUMMY
SYNOPSIS
Our story opens with a little peek into the world of Al Winters, stand-up comedian and national sensation (so we are told) who is doing at set a comedy club called Yuk-Yuks (oh, the late 80's early 90's and their obsession with comedy clubs!) Al is a bit in the Andrew Dice Clay/Bill Hicks/Lenny Bruce mold, despite being painfully unfunny, though his manager, Nick Calodi, joining us thanks to a generous grant from the Stereotype Council, is a caricature ripped whole and bleeding of what people thought showbiz agents were in the 1960s.
Al seems to have annoyed someone (and give we learn what a hateful little troll he is two minutes, one wonders how this could be) because when he returns to his dressing room, someone's written "AL MUST DIE" on the mirror. Nick decides that The System could not POSSIBLY handle the critical job of protecting the nation's hottest comic and decides to give Cobra a call in what is surely the shortest throw to credits in this show's history.
After the credits, we get a scene with Scandal and Danielle setting up the B-Plot for the episode--Danielle's 10-year high school reunion is coming up and she's looking grumpy because everyone else is married (that she was and seems to have forgotten about it should tell you how this show feels about continuity) but she's eager to go to revisit Rocky Tinderbrook, "the first man she was ever close to." This plot thread will get really creepy and weird before all is said and done.
Anyways, Dallas comes in and gets everyone on the same page plot-wise--apparently Cobra is being asked to come down to the comedy club (featuring 100% less comedy than an actual comedy club) to look into these death threats Al's been getting. Al is his usual charming self when they meet him, blowing off Stan, his jokewriter, for writing crap, and laughing in the face of the death threats because he's a loner, Dottie. A rebel. Upon retiring to his dressing room for his set, Nick is accosted by Precious, which is the titular dummy of the episode. Precious is welded by Phyllis, Nick's former girlfriend and recovering schizophrenic, who begs him for help, as she appears to be going crazy, in ways other than carrying around a ventriloquist's dummy in public, I suppose. Nick handles this with his usual light touch, but Scandal spies the dummy (indeed, how could you miss her?) and Nick takes the stage, delivers a set that is as funny as genocide isn't, and dies thanks to his cigar being laced with rat poison.
Afterwards, everyone's terribly sad about this--Nick even dresses down in a style best described as "mourning pimp" and the gang tries to figure out who could be responsible. Dallas questions Stan, who, predilection for thinking man's comedy aside, is also not funny and sort of a weirdo professes an unending gratitude to Al for giving him a break and letting him write jokes for him and pushing him to be better. Meanwhile, Dani and Scandal visit with Phyllis, who is having lunch with Precious, the way healthy, recovering schizophrenics don't. Precious insults Dani about not being a spring chicken and laying claim to Scandal because women's be nothin' without a man, obviously. Later on Phyllis returns home, and Precious starts speaking to her on it's own, because as Chekhov's Dummy tells us, you can't have a dummy in an episode without it talking on its own. It's the rules.
Dallas digs around and finds a VHS full of exposition wherein Al is interviewed and talks about his days as a class clown in high school with his other friends who used to call themselves the Three Musketeers. Almost immediately after this, Nick calls up Cobra HQ and asks to speak to them, but when Scandal and Dani get there, Nick's been stabbed, tied to an office chair, tagged with a punishingly unfunny joke, and wheeled down a parking garage ramp in a murder that must have been a cinch to work.
We pause for a moment for the high school reunion subplot to work itself over, Dani runs into Dolores, a friend from school who mistakes Scandal for her husband, shows off pictures of her babies, and generally sets feminism back further than Superman did when he spun the Earth backwards. Dani looks dismayed about this, but we quickly dash back to the main plot so they can interview Tony Gaynor, who is hostile and sarcastic, but drops a few more clues to be had--for one, Al and Nick were related (Nick was his uncle) and Tony is very protective of Phyllis. Scandal tests him to see if he's the killer, but he doesn't bite. He reveals that Al and Phyllis were lovers in addition to being clients and when she was dumped by both, that triggered her nervous breakdown.
While that's happening, Phyllis puts a panicked call to Cobra while Precious urges her to jump out the window. Phyllis does, but helpfully waits until Dani and Scandal get there to jump and even more considerately, she stammers out that "we were supposed to be . . .all for one . . ." before dying, and, hastening to wrap it up so they can go the high school reunion (like you thought they weren't going to) they assume that obviously Phyllis was the murder because women be cray. However, Scandal makes a convoluted leap of logic while reading Danielle's high school yearbook and realises that Phyllis was talking about the third Musketeer. Scandal goes to Phyllis apartment and run into Tony, who shows up determined to throw away the meds she'd been taking for her schizophrenia because he doesn't want her remembered as a crazy lunatic who was on psycho-drugs, but if she's remembered as a person who wandered around with a dummy, that's OK, I guess? They discover that Precious has been wired to speak remotely and obviously someone had been driving Phyllis insane . . .and that person is the Third Musketeer.
That person is Stan, who they set up at the comedy club with Precious on stage. Stan helpfully confesses everything and Scandal throws a chair at him and justice is served, which is a lucky thing, as it's time to pay off the high school reunion subplot. Danielle does decide to go with, Scandal, and they meet Rocky Tinderbook, who it turns out was Danielle's professor, which is sweet, except she said he was the first guy she was ever close to, so that throws some rather icky shade over the whole thing. However, it doesn't matter, because this episode is over and ended the way it began--weird, unfunny, and totally schizo.
ANALYSIS
Can this episode be the best worst episode of Cobra? I think it should be, because it is just full-on insane. Apparently the writers thought that sure, you can weld a story about a series of murders at a comedy club, a ventriloquist losing her mind, and a zany b-plot about Danielle being sad about her high school reunion and thought a coherent episode would fall out. This is, if course, exactly what didn't happen, and the result is pretty bizarre with more shifts in tone two boxers fighting in a piano, and the result is, the tragic bits aren't tragic and the funny bits aren't funny, but rather than being a painful disaster like "Lorinda" was, you almost sort of marvel at how totally dysfunctional and misbegotten the whole thing is.
The main plot is utterly baffling. If Stan's smart enough to rig up a dummy that can speak and emote remotely and rig up two nearly invisible murders, then why in the world is he writing jokes, which he's clearly awful at? It doesn't make sense even by the extraordinarily thin strand of reality on which Cobra hangs.
We're repeatedly told Al is a genius and knows a lot about comedy, but he really just seems like a conceited unfunny jackass who treats people like dirt, so when he dies it hardly feels like a loss to the world at large or in the microcosm. Tony seems like he would be vaguely interesting character, but he's only developed just enough to be a red herring, but is one of the more decent people in the episode, even if he is an abrasive jerk.
Of the characters on the comedy club, Phyllis really comes off as the most sympathetic, and not just because she's set up as a patsy and carrying around a creepy dummy until she jumps out of the window. For all that the episode does wrong, it does make her seem pretty pitiable, which is amazing, considering how odious the rest of the regular cast is (Nick's Borscht-belt tackiness is so awful I not even gonna give it the time of day)
But the real ". . .huh?" moment is the high school reunion subplot. Not just because it really doesn't belong in an episode with multiple homicides, not only because it portrays Danielle, who has been our imprimatur of intelligent feminism who can do all these amazing things and doesn't need a man (save for all the times she needs Scandal to bail her out because Cobra is terrible at follow-through) but because the punchline for the Rocky Tinderbrook thing is . . .apparently, she fooled around with her professor? She could have said "he was my mentor right away," of course, but then we we would be able to drag this tedious thread out until the end of the episode.
For all of these problems, tho, this one is surprisingly entertaining, if only for being so very very weird. When I started writing about Cobra, this was one of the episodes I most wanted to get to, and I'm glad I finally got a chance to write it up.
DAD WISDOM/THE QUOTABLE COBRA
"What's another word for 'thesaurus?'"
"Cute. Not funny, but definitely cute."
"You read The Three Musketeers?"
"Don't get cute."
"Rocky Tinderbrook must have been one ugly guy to get axed outta the yearbook."
"What do you call a backstabbing agent who's been stabbed in the back? Shiska-Nick."
"He's gonna have a big funeral. Showbiz loves a happy ending."
"You're no spring chicken and if you don't grab 'im soon, this rooster might fly the coop!"
"The best comedy comes from good, honest, suffering."
"I can't go wettin' my shorts every time some punk says "ouch""
"Right now, there's a demon pokin' at the back of my brain"
"Air's the least of his worries. This man's dead."
"Death is only funny when it's not your own"
"I remember my reunion--everyone was fat, nasty or dead. The worst part is that the hors d'ourves were cold."
"Ten percent of mean is nice."
"And ten percent of dead is nothing"
NEXT WEEK
It's the end of the line, as Scandal gets involved with a gorgeous poker player on a mission of revenge and muses about his dad and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Join me in seven for the final episode of Cobra--"Aces and Eights."