The Unit“Inquisition”
Original Air Date: Nov 2, 2008
Brittany Wells – TwoCents Reviewer
brittanyw@twocentscorp.com
Occasionally, no matter how much you love a show, there’s guaranteed to be one episode that you absolutely don’t understand. When it comes to The Unit, this would be that episode.
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[photo: Cliff Lipson/CBS]
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The Unit
ReplyDelete“Inquisition”
Original Air Date: Nov 2, 2008
Brittany Wells – TwoCents Reviewer
brittanyw@twocentscorp.com
Occasionally, no matter how much you love a show, there’s guaranteed to be one episode that you absolutely don’t understand. When it comes to The Unit, this would be that episode.
In the ‘A’ story, our boys (sans Mack, plus Bridget) have defused a water bomb under the Ted Williams Tunnel in Boston, and nabbed one of the people responsible. Now they have to get him to give up his accomplices before the other guys notice the bomb hasn’t gone off and flee. Rather than just interrogate the guy, they decide to stage a whole production, pretending the bomb did go off and messing with his head. I was actually pretty okay with this until they pretended to kill Jonas and Charles, and Scott Foley started overacting. And then Nicole Steinwedell continued overacting, not that I can fault her when all they give her is to bat her eyelashes at somebody. You know a week is bad when I start making excuses for characters I don’t like.
But speaking of characters I love, where’s Mack, you ask? Well, in the ‘B’ story, he’s hanging around his house with a gun so he can shoot his wife…no, I’m kidding but I wish he would. Apparently, six episodes (and at least a month or so according to the information given us last week) after discovering his wife slept with his boss, he’s finally decided he’s had enough and wants to confront her. Wow. Talk about procrastinating. It’s easy to say that Mack is probably the most popular character on the show, in no small part to the fact that Max Martini sinks his teeth into everything he gets. This episode completely undoes that. In some of the most leaden dialogue I’ve heard on this show, he spends the entirety of the episode muttering about wiping his marriage clean like he’s just had some religious conversion. (Maybe he saw God when he was miraculously escaping from Colombia after episode four.) And he then decides to shoot himself instead.
Excuse me, what?
Well, as it turns out, he hasn’t been a saint either. During his whole rambling, he confesses to Tiffy that he actually cheated on her a lot. Which of course makes no sense with the rest of his character. If he cheated on her with “a couple” women, then why is he so upset when she does it right back to him? Is it because she slept with his boss? He’s equally as at fault as she is, yet we’ve watched him be vindictive over the last six weeks. Which, if he’s so angry about her cheating, why is he continually trying to hit on her? Trying to figure that out makes my brain hurt. We’ll leave that alone for a while.
In Boston, the coolest thing happens: MICHAEL IRBY GETS SERIOUS SCREEN TIME! After being pretty much nonexistant last week, Charles gets to lead the way as the team busts down some doors and does a little legwork. This makes me wonderfully happy. Not so good is the fact that the two accomplices are dead. That’s probably not going to help. Oh, and some guy from the State Department keeps turning up trying to take their prisoner to heaven knows where. Yeah, Jonas says, that’s not happening.
Hey, it’s another Allstate commercial.
You can basically guess what happens next. It turns out the guy they have in custody really is a terrorist, and after they pretend to spring him, they follow him to his boss. They’ve managed to make him paranoid enough to actually shoot his boss, which according to Bob was the plan all along. Sure it was.
Meanwhile, Mack tries to shoot himself at least twice, and doesn’t. And Tiffy does a lot of screaming. She finally tells him that she slept with Ryan and not much that we don’t already know. And after all that drama and six episodes of hate? HE FORGIVES HER. I’m sorry, what? He forgives her, but he’s going to put a hole in Ryan’s head. Which makes little sense considering Tiffy admitted she came after Ryan after he tried to break it off. (And then got spontaneously married, speaking of things in this show that fail to make any sense, but that’s a rant from season one.) That’s what we’ve been building towards? I don’t believe it. Especially when you’re using the best actor on the show, it seems a massive letdown to have such a big revelation – remember, she’s been unfaithful since at least the pilot episode, if not before – peter out so quietly.
You’ll probably notice I haven’t made any Robert Patrick quips and that’s because he’s hardly in this episode. He gets one scene, right at the end. You see, lost in this muddled story is the fact that Kim and Molly did a little more digging and found that the wife of the guy from last week is passing information to his accountant. A bunch of numbers. That’s right, accountants get numbers. Shocking, huh? Ryan is so supremely pissed at them working without cause that he flies out to California just to yell at them. That is, in fact, all he does this week. I have the feeling the writers forgot to write Robert Patrick in this week and so quickly taped a cameo onto the end of the episode.
The only cool thing about this week is that it was directed by David Paymer, who is also a fabulous actor, and who starred alongside Michael Irby in ABC’s short-lived Line of Fire. Hey, maybe I know why Michael Irby finally got something to do!
Next week is part one of a two-parter: Betsy Blane gets kidnapped, Mack tries to shoot his boss, almost everyone goes to Iraq, and Molly slaps Tiffy. You can guess which one I’m looking forward to. Actually, I think I’m going to go take some aspirin and forget this episode ever happened. We might all be better off that way.