Lesson one: Zack sucks.
What They Say:
Tainted Love – Fet and Quinlan must figure out how to get the nuclear bomb back to New York, while a desperate Eichhorst draws near; love-struck Zack tries to learn more about his new crush, but makes a devastating discovery.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
I’ll admit that as much as I enjoyed the little bit of backstory we got with Quinlan the last time around it felt like far too much fluff at a time when the show needed anything but that. Flashbacks have been engaging in past seasons but they’re not critical at the moment, unless this portends bigger things in some way, as they helped to show what was going on with the professor, Eichhorst, or the Master, so that we understood more of what was going on. That said, the flashback was a highlight of the episode filled with mindnumbing bits in the women as cattle piece and what we got elsewhere with Eph and the brief bits with Fet. The only real plus to it was that we didn’t get Zack, though his name was brought into it as a way to shock Eph just after the “shocking” discovery of the internment camp he and Alex discover.
The cold open for this episode puts us back in South Dakota with the guys that abandoned Fet and the rest after things went south pretty quick. They don’t have much in the way of a plan when you get down to it but it doesn’t matter once Eichhorst shows up in his search for Fet and Quinlan and doesn’t need to keep most of them alive. It’s a quick and brutal piece that shows us what Eichhorst is known for but it has a kind of weirdness to shift out here so quickly after seeing him last as things went down badly back in the hospital area where he was with Setrakian. Things aren’t going so well with Fet and his group as they’re getting closer to the nearby airport and trying to figure out their plan there. The problem is that Quinlan’s looking to thin their own ranks a bit a the mission moves forward and that means jettisoning Charlotte, which doesn’t sit well with Fet for obvious reasons.
That plays into the flashback side of things with how Quinlan was protecting the woman and her daughter there only to run up against the Master, causing things to go badly as one might expect. It’s amusing in the present, however, as Fet’s not going to get rid of Charlotte by any means but she’s already saying she’s not coming to New York since he called it a suicide mission anyway. And once they learn Eichhorst in the area that just makes everything else seem like it’s going to fall apart quickly. There’s some nice tension to these scenes as they slowly unfold but it’s like so much of the series in that it’s moving too slowly and it can’t maintain the tension properly. There are too many sidebars into areas that’s not necessary and doesn’t add enough color to things that feels like it’s earned.
The last act of the episode does bring us some decent little bits of action, with Eichhorst getting thrown for a loop and the flashback piece that has Quinlan going up against the Master and coming up short as expected. I definitely like that we get this incarnation of the Master as the current one isn’t all that threatening but the whole piece simply goes for too much easily familiarity. Similar can be said of Zack and his interest in Abby as he gets closer and closer to her and accidentally discovers that she’s actually got a boyfriend back at the youth housing she’s staying it. Yeah, it’s pure bad Zack material but it’s also some familiar reactions from a teenager here, one that feels very entitled with how he’s been raised. Zack ends up in full brat mode here, not that Abby de escalates the situation in the slightest, and it further pushes him down a dark path just like the Master wants. Zack sucks.
In Summary:
The show keeps its focus on just a couple of arcs and avoids dealing with Dutch’s story or Eph’s. The flashback material seems like a long way to go with little payoff, even if I did enjoy it, and all of the present day material is just too spread out with nowhere near enough tension to really make is stand strongly enough. I did like getting Eichhorst out in the world and some of what we got there and the time with Fet with both Charlotte and Quinlan made for some enjoyable time. But with us now down to the final batch of episodes after this it doesn’t feel like it has the push it needs to achieve what it must with what remains.
And Zack sucks.
Grade: C
