Post by Yuri Petrovitch on Dec 4, 2013 10:15:43 GMT -5
In today's episode, Cobra solves domestic violence by blasting it with a grenade launcher.
SYNOPSIS
Man, anytime you hear that bouncy "pleasant domestic" music" on this show, you know things are about to get bad. We open with a woman named Maria coming home from shopping only to be surprised by her estranged husband Jack Darlow, who shows up and acts all creepy. We are led to believe that Jack is abusive in addition to being a screaming jerk, though the episode is rather coy about spelling that out, which is really weird given what they ARE willing to spell out. Maria hits her silent alarm and the police show up and drag him off, but Jack, being a lawyer, knows how to play The System, and always gets out, always tracks her down.
Dallas says that they can't do much for her beyond what the courts can do, which is weird given that Cobra is supposed to be able to go beyond the justice system, but this show breezes past such logic problems with things like Scandal having another one of his ruminations about the themes of this episode of the episode, as he remembers his dad saving his babysitter from her abusive husband, which is supposed to neatly explain why he can't let this one slide. Meanwhile, as they plot to give Maria a new identity, Danielle takes her to their safe house, which she's in charge of and features tons of panic switches, alarms, and a rocking chair that will apparently kill you if you should use it.
Scandal, meanwhile, goes to see Jack and touch, talk him, because if you remember, that worked so brilliantly last week. Jack handles this with equanimity, by which I mean he makes a tense phone calls and two guys to deal with Scandal, who is busy having a soliloquy about sticking his hand in a hole and being bitten by a groundhog on his way to impersonating a lawyer and learning that despite Jack's law firm having been in allegedly good standing, they haven't really done anything for years, which means that Something Is Going On.
Meanwhile, Scandal gets braced by the people Jack called, who say "You're the knight protecting the princess? You're stepping into something bigger than you thought. Call it a cave full of dragons." Then they pistol-whip Scandal and declare the problem solved, because apparently whacking the main character over the head with a gun was how you dissuaded people in 1993. Dallas serves Maria and Danielle "dangerous eggs"--so named because they consist of eggs plus everything else in the fridge--Jack shows up at the safe house somehow, which causes Maria to flip out and flee, and Scandal shows up and kicks the crap out of Jack for bit to take us to commercial.
Because a simple domestic story is not enough for a Cobra episode, it's time to over-egg the pudding Maria is here on a green card, having married Jack to escape the death squads in her own country and find a better life (and a huge, foofy 90's perm) in America, for her and her son. Scandal and Maria have a heated debate about roses, weeds, and whether survival is all one can reasonably expect which aspires to be poetic, but kinda goes around and around while the wheels of the plot turn. Scandal suggests to the cop who showed up in the pre-credits teaser that he detain Jack for a bit with the hoary old "busted taillight is busted because I busted it" thing, and this gets Jack arrested again, however . . .
The the two toughs who've been bailing him out are retired federal agents (who are looking for feather their own nests--"We are the peace dividend," one of them says, as if that's supposed to explain everything) and they spring Jack from prison and detain Maria. Jack things this might be a wonderful opportunity for he and Maria to have some alone time, but not-agent #1 snarls that "if you release some steam, we got cable." Jack is apparently overseeing an arms deal (he's sort of like Saul from Breaking Bad, only he represents arms dealers) for a guy named Achmed Sabib (which--really, Cobra?) for what look like M-16s with grenade launchers. Jack has decided for some reason to kill everyone involved with the arms deal, and bale it on the FBI, and now that things have reached Peak Confusion, Scandal shows up and he and Jack shoot grenades at each other for a bit so thing can go boom and we can set up the latest instance of Scandal Vs. Stock Footage, as Jack orders the pilot to go around for one more pass and probably acts surprised when Scandal blows up him and his helicopter.
Then, in the wrap-up Maria gets her son and her citizenship, and Scandal gives it a shot of voiceover to paper over the astonishing amount of dislocation (yea, great, she can just live her life now, but didn't you guys just bow up a helicopter?) and we're out.
ANALYSIS
It is perhaps not altogether surprising that, for a how that taught us last week that the best way to get closure on emotional trauma was to throw dynamite at people, that this week, it suggests the best way to get past living a life terrorized by domestic abuse is to get Michael Dudikoff to shoot him with a grenade launcher. Once again, Cobra gives us an episode with a sound enough starting point, convolutes it to the point of near-madness, and wraps things up with something that seems like you dozed off in the middle of another episode and woke up in another.
In this case, it costs the episode more than a little bit of its gravity, as it's hard to take a story of a guy beating up and terrorizing a woman when you really don't commit to it for trying to work in your plot about busting up and arms shipment. Jack is just a garden variety jackass who we dislike from the beginning and who's irrational actions (especially when he goes all murder-happy in the last five minutes) are papered over with a shrug and the assumption that "well, dude's crazy and beats his wife. What do you want, logic?"
Maria is less a functioning character and more an agent of the plot, alternately at its mercy and complicating it due to that hoariest of plot complications: not divulging vital information for no other reason than if you didn't the plot wouldn't happen, which is a little much even for a genre show like this.
That said, I think I'd like to try "Dangerous Eggs" sometime. Or make it my new band name.
Jack is played by Terence Knox, who was on pretty much anything around this time, but I remember him most from a couple episodes of Lois and Clark where he tried to kill Superman with kryptonite. He does well enough with what he's given, but even the best actor wouldn't be able to make the 90-degree turns that this episode requires.
There's a great obvious gaffe there near the end when Scandal shoot the helicopter (which is quite plainly on the grind, despite having seen it in the air the past three minutes) which shows you the peril of trying to shoot around stock footage in ways that even Power Rangers did a better job of hiding.
It's probably the first real clunker of the series, as the logic problems are so pronounced you can't even really turn your brain off and have fun with it being empty and kind of dumb. Believe it or not, even in a low-rent genre exercise like this, there is a minimum amount of nonsensical you can get to and if you go beyond that, you lose the ability to successfully sustain the episode, and this is a little too facile to work.
NEXT WEEK
Scandal's past returns to haunt him, as apparently his friend from the Scouts and fellow Navy SEAL has sone around the bend and is murdering all the members of their former unit on the way to the deadliest nature hike of all. Join us in seven when Scandal gets all angsty, shoots Dallas' car, can't shoot a machine gun without blinking, and drives around thinking about his dark past and how it's terribly when Boy Scouts become mass murderers in the improbably-titled "The Gnome." See you then!
