August 19, 2011

The Middle Men (2011)

The second half of this series sees the appearance of Ernie ‘Ghostbusters’ Hudson who is the most significant member of PhiCorp that we have yet met. The story starts off with Ernie (Stuart Owens) calling someone in Shangai who whilst investigating speaks to Owens some hours later and then falling off the top of a building. I want to say death but considering no one dies its just category one. We also learn of something called the 45 club. It’s mentioned at the beginning but never mentioned again. I presume that this is going to be something important else why would they bother introducing it. Another thing is ‘The Blessing’. This is something else that is mentioned breiefly and its hopefully going to answer who or what is behind all of this.

The main point of this episode is to tidy up the stuff from the previous episode where Vera was incinerated and Colin Maloney is trying to cover up what he did. I would say that Marc Vann stole the episode with his performance. It staggered between horror at his actions and pure evil. The best scene was between Colin and Esther when they have that fight and it leads to putting Maloney into category one.

The performances in this episode are fantastic. The best belongs to Ernie Hudson who steals every scene that he is in and I never thought that I was watching Winston from the Ghostbusters films but the most senior man from PhiCorp that we have met. I thought the highlight was his scene between himself and Jack where Owens gives us the impression that there is something or someone higher up and all that PhiCorp is guilty of is making money out of the situation. Due to Hudson’s performance I cant quite make up my mind whether this is a red herring or whether its genuine but I don’t mind and it’ll be fun finding out one way or the other.

The major issue I have is with the Gwen stuff. I don’t give a rats ass about her dad or her stupid attempts to get him out of the camp. I still cant forgive them for copping out when they tried to get the dad out just as he was having his heart attack. Whilst all the stuff in the San Pedro camp was going on, we were forced to have to go back to Gwen and her demands to get her dad transferred. Gwen seems to have taken several steps back in such a short space of time. She thinks that if she speaks to people in a certain tone then they will roll over and give her whatever she wants. It’s like we went back to season one Gwen when she tried to take the moral high ground but the problem is that Eve Myles goes overboard and it just comes across as annoying and that’s a shame.

It seems there are lapses into lazyness. Why if Gwen had spent so many episodes pretending to be someone else then why oh why did she pick up the phone when her real name was used? This is another instance of stupid plot stuff which in wouldn’t happen in any other drama but its like they got done with one part of the plot and couldn’t think of another way out so they went for this one and didn’t care about how it looked. It was only as I wrote this review that I realised that there was no Bill Pullman and so I cant say that he stole the show. The fact that I didn’t realise this until now shows how much action there was. This is credit to the writing and to the action in the US side of the story. It’s probably the best thing because it means that its freshens things up and when his character returns then it’ll be back to normal. This is arguably the best episode the season so far and its when things really start to get going and I think that as newer characters are bought in these final few episodes will make this season be a success.

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