Post by Yuri Petrovitch on Nov 20, 2013 9:01:06 GMT -5
Despite lifting everything else from "Point Break," at no time does someone raise their gun and go AAAARRRRGGGHHHHH
SYNOPSIS
We begin with a burglary of some rare statues being committed by a bunch of thrill junkies, the main guy of which, Alex, says he's "been to the other side" and how he's "never felt so alive," which is pretty ironic because his friends, led by a guy named Eric Sharpe, kill him soon after her says this. Alex's wife goes to the police, but once again The System Has Failed (the police think he was killed drunk driving) and hand her a card for Cobra, and she enlists them to help her find the truth, because there's no more time for that pilot faffing about, this is a series now.
Wife-of-Alex explains that he was part of the Wild Cats, Goldie Hawn's--no, wait a motorcycle gang of bored executives led by Eric who go out for outrageous stunts and generally act like the early 90's version of what scriptwriters thought "thrill junkies" were like. Today, they look like they were ripped whole and bleeding from an ad for Axe Body Spray ad.
Scandal, is, of course, a natural for the job, seeing as how he is continually getting nicked for speeding (in stock footage of him taking the AC Cobra cobra around the highways of scenic British Columba, a b-roll we will be VERY familiar with by the time this series ends) and is something of an action junkie himself. He leaps into this case with great zest and other, deeper, zestier emotions, and there's a lot of stuff about how his dad taught him to test his limits and reach "The Zone--that place of seeming invincibility that we dream about in youth, that place where only your wildest imagination and steadiest nerves can take you. The only place where the impossible isn't, and no one's around to tell you it is." Scandal's ruminating about Dad-Scandal's wisdom is also kind of a thing.
Danielle thinks he suffers from poor impulse control and he's doing less investigating and using it as a license to be a thrill-junkie. She, scandal, and Dallas bicker about this through a good chunk of the episode and Dallas expresses a case of buyer's remorse about bringing Sandal in, because this wouldn't be a series about A Hero On The Edge without his boss tearing his nonexistent hair out at what a mavericky maverick he is.
Anyways: Scandal gets Cobra to buy him a Kawasaki Ninja (which, if you ever watched Babylon 5, is apparently the most important bike in human history. If you ever rode one, you know they're kinda shitty) and pay his speeding tickets, because he is a lovable scamp. Thus em-bikend, he meets Jennifer, a neophyte Wild Cat trying to get into Eric's inner circle.
A word or two about Jennifer if I may. She's our putative love interest of the episode and she looks like she stepped right out of one of those late-night phone sex ads that were all over TV in the early 90's where they were eager to tell you "beautiful girls are waiting to talk to you" but would never really tell you what they wanted to talk about.
Jennifer is an architect. It is only the vast number of credibility problems in this episode that prevents me from making a bigger deal out of this.
A line from their meet-cute: "Scandal? Is that what you're called or that what you cause?"
God, I love this show.
So Scandal meets Eric and we're meant to think they're forming some kind of connection, only Eric is a smarmy douchebro (into the S & L game, because the 90's) and Scandal isn't getting paid enough to play out divided loyalties in a low-key manner this week. Eric challenges Scandal to a game of chicken and wins and then chains Scandal to a chair and throws him and the key into the pool (which Scandal wins, thanks to the laws of main character immunity) Meanwhile, Dani and Dallas fret over Scandal being too into this assignment some more and Saga provides us with a Greek Chorus-esque hook, as if the gods themselves are cautioning Scandal not to get handcuffed to a chair and thrown in a swimming pool:
"I'm an adrenaline junkie/I just can't get enough"--man, what a subtle, deft touch!
It eventually transpires through a seriously ropey plot--apparently Eric, under all his bluster about "dares being the means to reach The Other Side," just wants to get people to steal shit then flee the country. To say this plot doesn't make a whole lot of sense is something of an understatement. It eventually all ties up in the ultimate game of chicken between Scandal, Eric, and some stock footage from Stingray, where Scandal runs over Eric's plane with a semi because Eric forgot that planes can go "up" and semis can't.
Then Scandal nods his head and there's a bit more of Dad Wisdom about "The key is not knowing when to push it, its knowing when to stop."
I have a feeling people said "Well, DUHHHHH" a lot to Dad Scandal at times.
ANALYSIS
To say this episode borrows heavily from Point Break (and from an episode of another Cannell show called Raven from a couple years ago) is a lot like me saying that we're carbon based life-forms that take in oxygen and need food. It also makes not a lick of a sense at any level.
Eric's plan for stealing a bunch of things and leaving the country doesn't make any sense. We're led to believe they're all interconnected somehow, but the episode isn't all that interested in telling us what that might be or where it's supposed to lead. The closest Eric gets to any kind of analysis is when he's sputtering off some windbag pronunciations like "When the gods created man, they saw death and saved life for themselves" which is supposed to explain everything, and really doesn't. We're supposed to think that Eric is either a fraud, a failed seeker, or intelligent enough to con a motorcycle gang full of early 90's cliches into doing all of his crimes for him (making him the most underachieving crime lord in history), but the episode isn't willing to do the work to give us a clear picture of what that is, so he's a little thinly drawn.
Dallas and Danielle are sidelined for most of the episode, and show up from time to time to wring their hands about what a Dangerous Loose Cannon Of Dangery Danger Scandal is, and wonder if he's The Right Man For The Job, which is funny because one, we just spent two episodes establishing that, and two, this isn't the only time that Cobra's ropey vetting processes come back to bite them in the ass. I suppose we're meat to contrast this with Scandal being all instinct with Danielle being all analysis and Dallas being all experience and forming a triad that encompasses a balanced mind. But as this is only the second episode proper and it's clear that the writers don't quite know this, or know how to use it, so we're just sputtering along for a bit while we get our series legs.
The stock footage from Stingray is pretty obvious this week, not just because of the transition from videotape to 35mm. Every time Scandal shifts the semi, he's wearing a jacket, but every time we cut to Dudkioff in the cab, he's not. It's also really obvious that both he and Eric aren't moving at all and their reaction shots are just spliced in.
Despite all this, this is a perfect example of lazy Saturday or Sunday entertainment, that place we dream of in youth that you can only reach for $6 at select Big Lots. That place where the logical doesn't exist and no one knows what's going on enough to tell you any different.
NEXT TIME
Someone's killing people at a honeymoon resort. My money's on the crazy-looking guy with the big knife from the pre-credit's teaser. It's "Honeymoon Hideaway," in seven!
