Post by Yuri Petrovitch on Apr 2, 2014 9:22:36 GMT -5
For as much stock footage as they use for this ep, the joke works.
SYNOPSIS
We begin at the Belmont Hospital, which so far as I am aware, has nothing to do with Simon. Giuseppe, head of the mob (as all people on TV shows who are named "Giuseppe" are, apparently, accoridng to TV writers) by his sons, who if they are made guys, may be the youngest made guys in history. Seriously, they look like the Mob JROTC. The doctor initially balks at committing Giuseppe, but then he gets flashed a huge wad of bills in a way that I suspect no mobster outside of TV has ever done and suddenly he's OK with throwing him into a home.
After the intro, Scandal is musing in his usual B-roll way about the fallout of the Winslow kidnapping case and how it was really annoying, shook his faith in humanity, but he got to go off with the housekeeper and "wax her skis" (I suspect this is a euphemism) in Aspen. Upon the completion of his Fletch-like monologue, he gets called into the carpet by Dallas and Danielle, who want to talk to him about his starkly minimalist approach to paperwork (his summation of the Winslow kidnapping case was "The kid did it.") but before this little bit of business can wear out its welcome (though given what we get, I'd sooner we just had some chuckles about the paperwork) we throw to the main plot of the episode Scandal has to jet to Seattle (which is suddenly NOT Bay City and now is far away enough to where they have to take a jet. Bay City, like Springfield is now moving all over the country)to escort Lorinda McClure, who was Giuseppe's maid for many years and kept exacting records of every single mob deal that went down that she saw, because apparently that's what mob maids do.
Scandal meets Lorinda, and immediately they hit it off in the way you'd expect--Lorinda is an old, apparently befuddled busy-body too absent-minded (willfully or not) to even remember Scandal's name, and we set the tone of the episode pretty early--Scandal tries to keep them from being killed by the JROTC Mob, Lorinda does something stupid, old-woman-y or passive-aggressive that makes Scandal crazy, but somehow extricates them from the immediate situation, then they do it over and over again a few times. Also, all the hoary, classic jokes about women having too much luggage and old-lady drivers amirite and . . .god, this is making me glad there's just two more of these to go.
The spine of the episode involves Lorinda's insistence they drive her black 1965 Stingray to Bay City for her court date. This is actually a somewhat pallid justification (even moreso than usual) for them to use a lot of Stingray footage this episode, because really, Lorinda and Scandal's hijinks (especially the awful scene where Lorinda threatens to take a dump on everyone , and no, that's not an exaggeration) are not thick enough to spread over the entirety of the running time of this episode. The in-episode reason for why they need to do this is that the diary is sewn into the driver's seat, because a classic black Corvette is a perfectly innocuous way to hide critical evidence of organized crime activities.
Thankfully, Lorinda finally forces a confrontation with the Mob JROTC and it ends with a helicopter case from the pilot from Stingray (the big set-piece of which is actually in the intro to Cobra) and they blow up real good, which sorta negates the need for Lorinda to testify, but that's OK, since at the end of the episode, in the name of helping with Scandal's terrible paperwork skills, Cobra has hired Lorinda to be his secretary and oh my God that you end credits for showing up, because I feared this nightmare would never end.
ANALYSIS
You might have guessed I sorta hate this episode (so much so that I'm skipping the "Dad Wisdom" section this week because it would require watching the episode again and my God I just don't have the strength.)
With the possible exception of that episode of Battlestar Galactica back in the 70's wherein Bret Somers kept trying to sexually molest Lorne Greene while they were on Planet Western and fighting pig aliens, Lorinda and Scandal trading tired shitck while driving or being tied up or whatever is some of the most painful TV-watching I have ever seen. Couple that with the fact that it is padded out to hell with so many different parts of Stingray episodes that barely make sense in the context of this episode. Plus the JROTC mob is perhaps the least credible television mob ever put on screen. I don't know much about organized crime, good knows (you're shocked by this, I can tell) but I feel like any massive organized crime structure needs some senior experience at the top, and two 20 years old's with ponytails screams "leadership vacuum" to me.
The main problem with the episode is that Scandal is not really that funny--I mean no slight against Dudikoff, but comedy is not one of his gifts. That said, he is a virtual master of the form next to Lorinda, who has two comedy gears: "Irritating and "candidate for strangulation." You don't really have any reason to care about her, she's utterly capricious and unlikable and lurches in whatever direction that the thin gruel of the plot needs to resolve itself, and the late-episode revelation that she loves Don Giuseppe makes no sense and certainly isn't borne out by her behaviour and ultimately doesn't amount to anything, and if you have a plot herein I spend a lot of time wondering "why" things are happening and whether they make any logical sense your plot has failed.
So, yes, this is the worst episode of all of Cobra's run. Thankfully I survived it and there's two left, one of which is inoffensive but not bad, and one that is bad, but is incredibly schizophrenic and features a killer dummy, so I got that to look froward to, which is nice.
NEXT WEEK
Someone's killing off unfunny jerk-ass comedians and it may or may not have something to do with a ventriloquist recovering from nervous breakdown (is there any other kind?) and the fact that her ventriloquist dummy is talking to her. Meanwhile, Danielle gets all grumpy because her high school reunion is coming up.
Join us in seven for the penultimate episode of Cobra, "Precious."