Hey everyone!
Welcome to another long-winded review! This week we’re roasting "Immaterial Girl", so be warned that there are HUGE HONKIN’ spoilers ahead, and all ideas are my own. I haven’t stolen anyone else’s ideas, nor received messages from a dead relative.
Overall:
Haley Joel Osment is Darien Fawkes in "The Sixth Sense 2: Immaterial Girl". I kept expecting Darien to turn to Hobbes and whisper "I see dead people!" Or at least a crossover with John Edward...
All jokes aside, this episode was a strange mixture of things that worked and things that flopped. A lot of the character interaction was wonderful, perhaps because it was a return to a more "classic" episode; we got quite a bit of banter between Darien and Hobbes (always a plus), and a few great scenes with the whole gang. The characters just felt right again, and it was great to see.
Unfortunately the premise of the show didn’t quite measure up: Energy Mom helps daughter and Darien get revenge on the scientist who killed her. A bit out there, even for a show about an Invisible Man. Thought what really irked me was that there was no real resolution. So the Evil Scientist is dead, that’s supposed to make everything better? What about proving that they killed Lucy? What about finding those responsible in the energy industry for committing murder and hiding this potential new energy source? You’d think the Official would love to get his hands on a bit case like that! Revenge may be a very real and human reason to kill, but it sits wrong with me to see so many good people willing to accept that as a means to an end.
The Good:
-A Yiddish proverb, Francis Bacon, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge grace us with their wisdom this week.
-"Looks like things got kinda hot between you and HAL over here!"
-I like how good Hobbes is getting at distracting people so they don’t see Darien quicksilver.
-Great Scene 1: Darien tells Claire about the lights, only to be recommended to a shrink. It does bring up a point fans have long suspected...Darien hasn’t been getting out much. It was lots of fun to see both stammering through the idea that Darien is lonely and/or horny, although a bit realistically disturbing to think that Claire can so easily accept the idea that Darien is having psychological problems.
-Gotta love the emphasis Claire puts on "chick"...hrm, something tells me that’s not how she likes women to be referred to as.
-"Darien, you’re seeing an invisible woman with large
breasts."
"Who said anything about large?"
"Oh...well then I commend your good taste."
-There is a OUTSTANDING reaction shot as Darien is walking from the Keep, muttering under his breath about shrinks, when the lights start flashing. He stops dead, and the sudden look of surprise and fear is great!
-Once again Bobby Hobbes never bails on his partner, and it’s great to see it! Beyond that he does have a good theory for what’s going on, "I just happen to think it’s Arnaud with an invisible stuffed brassier." And doesn’t that mental image make you giggle? For extra fun watch the grin Darien gives Hobbes as they walk!
-While this could get old after a while, it was fun to see the police making fun of our boys for working for the BWM. And especially Darien and Hobbes faking a laugh at the jokes!
-...of course that sets up nicely the two of them walking into the Particle Accelerator lab trying to decide who gets to tell the next guy what agency they work for.
-I loved the twin lost looks Darien and Hobbes give the scientists when they’re talking about the GEV problems!
-I want to know what bookstore Darien went to to get "Particle Physics for Imbeciles" LOL!
-Great Scene 2: The Underfunded Five discuss if Darien is going nuts or if Lucy really is home. Claire gets pissed that Darien made the Official think this idea was hers, the Official gets to see Lucy, and Eberts just keeps lint-rolling the chair. I loved the shocked look on the Official’s face when he sees Lucy, and how freaked Claire looks as the electricity goes haywire. And if you take the time to watch it closely, check out the various looks everyone gives when they chorus "Shut up, Eberts!" It ranges from annoyance to anger to eye-rolling, and it’s so much fun to see!
-"Golda"? LOL! Hey, if Crichton can name his gun, then Hobbes can name his van!
-Fun New QS Effect: Darien using the Visine as a cover to let drops of quicksilver fall into Megan’s eyes.
-It’s great to see our little tiger in action again; Hobbes smells the ink on the back of the pictures, then easily takes out the two guards in the lab.
-"You sure you’re up to this?"
"No, but I’ll do what I have to do to get the bastard."
"My kind of girl."
The Bad:
-Usually the FX on this show are outstanding, but this week I was sorely disappointed. Just about every time someone had their eyes quicksilvered it was obvious when they were contacts (you can see lights reflecting off of them, as well as the eyes moving). On top of that when Darien was first driving and following Lucy you could clearly tell that was a blue screen behind him instead of him really driving.
-Why did that cop tell Darien and Hobbes anything about the case?
-So Darien quicksilvers and breaks through the glass in the front of the house. I had some problems believing he could do it that easily, but I would have accepted the quicksilver helped protect him....except a few seconds later he slams into a glass door and it knocks him flat! Wait a second...one or the other but not both!
-Why are the Oil, Electric and Gas companies major contributors to a project who’s practical applications could be a new, clean source of energy...especially since when they FOUND that formula they committed murder to hide it?
-Megan, "I know you killed her, I know why, and I know how."
Then a few seconds later in the conversation:
Scientist, "I thought you said I killed your mother."
Megan. "No. What I said was I knew how."
...no, you said you knew he killed her!
-Darien, while invisible, can’t get out of the way of a guy blindly swinging around a lamp?!
-When Darien gets knocked unconscious from the lamp, why doesn’t he almost immediately de-quicksilver? We’ve seen that happen before, seconds after falling unconscious he becomes visible...why not now?
Particle Accelerator Problems: I fully admit that this may not be knowledge the vast majority of the viewing audience knows about, so I won’t get too upset about these problems. But the science at the end with the particle accelerator was especially bad. I happen to live in Ithaca, just a mile or two from Cornell University where they have their own Particle Accelerator, so I’ve learned a bit about those things.
In order to accelerate the particles, the chamber they’re speed through has to be a vacuum. In real life most accelerators only get electrons or positrons moving at about 99% the speed of light (while the one on the show had them moving FASTER), and so to quote from the Cornell website: "This puts very strict demands on the precision of the ring of magnets and on the quality of the vacuum. The residual air in the path of the beam particles must be many billion times less dense than in the normal atmosphere. The vacuum chamber and all interconnections are made entirely of metal which can be heated up to 150 degrees Celsius to drive any trapped gas out." So the scientist couldn’t have just walked into the chamber and put Megan in there...he’d have ruined the vacuum and made the whole thing unopperational.
On top of that there would NEVER be only a glass wall and glass door separating the control room from the actual acceleration chamber. With the vacuum, the extreme heat, plus all the radiation those accelerated particles give off, anyone in that next room would have been killed! Darien and Megan should have been horribly burnt and dying of radiation at the end.
And lastly, it takes HOURS to get particles up to anywhere near the speed of light. There’d be no way the scientist could have been killed that quickly.
Come on guys...I’m a musician and I know about this!
The Crap Count:
-"Aw crap." Darien, hearing that Lucy was murdered.
-"Aw crap." Darien, realizing why Lucy was killed.
-"Oh crap." Hobbes, getting locked out.
The Nitpicky:
-So this must be the out of order episode, the one that was SUPPOSED to go before Germ Theory and The Choice. I know this for two reasons...first this is the episode where we are truly introduced to the Agency moving to the BWM. And second, Darien’s hair has apparently grown about 3 inches since last week. :-)
-So I know Vince is appearing as one of TV Guide’s "Sexiest Men of the Universe"...wow, all those shower scenes have paid off! The VVSB must be in ecstasy! Now if we can only get some shirtless Hobbes...
-*sigh* It’s the return of the gas station attendant jacket. And I was kinda hoping Darien had lost that or something...
-When Lucy makes the Official’s office go haywire, check out the stuffed monkey with the cymbals in the background! Not only is that funny...but I think that’s a Poltergeist reference!
-Darien’s excuse for not seeing the red light is kinda lame...yea he can’t see color. But the reason there are three lights stacked like they are is so that color blind people can see traffic lights. They know the top light is stop, the middle is slow down, and the bottom is go. You think Darien doesn’t know this?
-There’s something wonderfully ironic about Darien with Visine...you know it gets the red out!
"Damn, you’re smart!"
"And I’m blonde!"
-Darien and Claire
