Television Yak

God, Summer Glau is hot. You know what would make her even hotter, at least to the legions of nerds who got all sad when Firefly was canceled ? Stick a Bluetooth in her ear, drop her behind three giant touch-holograph computer monitors, and occasionally put her in some leather and let her kick ass and fight crime. Television show: created.

The Cape is the bizarro No Ordinary Family, and I respect that on a level I can’t totally wrap my head around — it’s retro without being regressive, dark without constant brooding a weekly dialogue about how we can never, ever tell anyone about our superpowers. In fact, The Cape kind of reminds of those shitty early 80′s jungle thrillers starring Michael Dudikoff, the ones where he’s a special forces soldier in some communist Dumbfuckistan jungle, his whole unit’s massacred and he’s left for dead, then some five-hundred year old goat herder and his ten-year-old apprentice goat herder find him and nurse him back to health and teach him magic karate and Dudikoff goes back into the jungle and fucking slaughters all those commies yay America! Not really sure why Dudikoff isn’t in this one, but David Lyons went to the same histrionic acting school, so whatever.

Lyons plays Vince, the only non-corrupt cop in Palm Cove or Pacific Bay or whatever city named after a residential condo complex The Cape takes place in. Every other cop in Pink River Estates either has a goatee, or dresses just a little too well, or has a big fat face but never smiles, so we know they’re all Officially Evil. There’s also a Evil Boss named “Chess” — no really, that’s how freaking lazy The Cape is. Let’s say you’re on crack and you just need to name your villain after a board game, and “Hungry Hungry Hippos” was already taken. Trouble. Mouse Trap. Monopoly — that would at least be thematically appropriate.

The Cape deserves some points for what happens next. There’s the PG-rated version of a terrorist attack and a Blackwater-esque private security company rolls into town with tanks and black helicopters and martial law. The Cape didn’t need to go this route — I’m thinking James Bond villains, or six of Buffy‘s seven seasons, or No Ordinary Family, where the Big Bad is evil for the sake of being evil, and we go along for the ride because someone cut us off in traffic yesterday for no good reason at all. Not that I’ll confuse a show with a midget strongman character for The Wire or anything, but when The Cape personifies an institution whose existence is predicated on feeding the shareholders, it’s stepping off with a political statement about how the world is, how it should be, and the gap in between. And yes, it’s clumsier than a hippie marching down the street with a ten-foot Papier-mâché puppet, but the outlook of No Ordinary Family is that even Vic Mackey alpha men are impotent pussies and what’s up with these modern women spending time at work instead of baking cookies for their kids’ schools and fucking their husbands?

In the second act, Vince accepts a job with ARK, the private security firm, and his old partner, Silky Tie Marty, takes Vince to meet the grand poobah at ARK HQ. Wouldn’t you know it, the president, CEO, and public face of the company is this sniveling British twat in a top-floor all-glass office, and Semiotics 101 teaches us how to disentangle all of those signifiers. Those of you without an elitist liberal arts doctorate in Euro-style wine and cheese abortion gay sex gay pot smoking peace-loving Saddam-blowing socialized health care pussies, you will need to wait till the next scene to learn that ARK is, in fact, morally questionable, not just shipping chemical weapons into Oceans Meadow Rainbow-Town but hiding the WMD inside little girls’ dolls. Also, Chess and Silky Tie Marty and that cop with a goatee have daily underground puppy-fights and feed the losers to their mutant bunnies.

Okay, we’re getting to Summer Glau, but first Vince needs to be rescued by bank-robbing carnival folk. There’s actually an ill-conceived scene of these carnies holding up a bank, which got edited out of the version in my mind, because it sort of undercuts the show’s otherwise admirable politics.

And there’s a training montage, which is as lame and poorly-lit, and I’m sure Dudikoff could relate.

Not to be too picky or anything, but I kind of preferred the nerdy one-armed Summer Glau of Dollhouse… but that holographic touch-screen triptych computer helps out with the nerd boner a bit. I hope Berlanti and the NOF crew are following along — upgrade Autumn Reeser’s single-holograph computer and then that hideous cow will suddenly become hot! …Oh, you know what would be awesome: casting Reeser as the sidekick in The Cape and freeing up Glau to do whatever gestates from Joss Whedon’s mind. And burning all remaining copies of No Ordinary Family. Reeser is the remaining shred of awesomeness in NOF, but she’s generic enough to fit right into the role of “sexy chick who uses her computer to shut down cell phone service in a ten block radius.” Glau is just pissing away geek cred here.

I miss Dollhouse. Joss Whedon, who I’m respecting more and more every time I see Julie Benz (or Amy Acker) in NOF, or now Summer Glau, or any of the other mediocre shit that the Joss Whedon players find themselves in. It’s not like Buffy or Angel or Dollhouse is intrinsically any less ridiculous than, say, Bones (hmm… another Whedon alum sharing a show with a holographic supercomputer. What the hell?) or Tru Calling, but he seems like the starkest example in the television landscape of someone who does a great job of fitting characters to actors. Nathan Fillion kept his natural Nathan Fillion-ness in the otherwise unremarkable role of Richard Castle, but everyone else… In the Whedonverse, Glau embodies this introspective and ultimately misplaced vessel of intellectual damage whose humanity is covered in a live-wire trigger, but in The Cape, she has to deliver the actual line, “Together we can take this city back,” you and your super-cape and me and my super-blog. I can imagine someone bubbly like Autumn Reeser delivering that line with innocuous excitement; Glau sounds duly bored.

I can’t bring myself to say that there’s a good, or even campy fun, superhero drama hidden somewhere underneath The Cape. I can’t bring myself to not say that, either, because I’m having sad, sad flashbacks to the ponderous Bionic Woman remake — and no, reversing the genders doesn’t help — and at least The Cape seems aware of its overall stupidity. I guess it’s no more or less of a time-waster than NOF, and it’s a liberal time-waster, so anything that can draw some of NOF‘s right-wing audience into the anti-corporate, anti-martial law fold is worth a few extra episodes.

Even though No Ordinary Family is as dopey as an Ayn Rand novel and gleefully portrays middle America as a regressive, isolated society where transcendent Randian heroes impose their own narcissistic values and morals on the community in the guise of the “safety” that the feckless, indifferent government can’t provide, I’m sticking with it for a little while longer. The characters are just so fucking one-dimensional and, save for Autumn Reeser’s lab tech, irritating, but anyone’s who’s read any Dan Brown can tell you, a compelling plot can attract audiences’ lizard brains just like moths to a flame. And for the first time in ten episodes, No Ordinary Family threw up a roadblock that Jim and family can’t just hop over. I’m curious to see how the Powells get out of the corner that’s Daphne’s three-month memory loss…

But I can’t say I’d be surprised if, next episode, Daphne re-discovers her telepathy at some inappropriate time, ha ha ha, and we’re back to the superpower status quo by the end of the day.

No Ordinary Family actually reminds me of one of those Teen Nick shows, where the world’s just a perfect fit for the characters — the same way iCarly is the world’s only teenager who lives on her own in a million dollar loft, in Pacific Bay, a shrimpy kid can use his super-trigonometry skills to make the varsity football team; and the local district attorney finds the time, energy, and flat-screen monitors to turn his garage into a lair; and someone with Autumn Reeser’s looks and personality can’t find a date. It’s lazy-as deus ex machina writing, reducing the characters to caricatures the writers can plug-and-play into the plot template for the week.

I bet the writer’s sit around a conference room table asking each other, “What kind of crisis would someone super-fast be able to solve?”

“Well, let’s say someone needed something, but in a hurry,” and they’d all high-five and head home for the day.

The next day, “What about a super-genius? What could we have him do?” Daphne, of course, gets the most banal storylines, because there’s just not a whole lot of action-heroics you can pull off when all you do is read your high school friends’ boring, single declarative sentence thoughts, thoughts which probably wind up on their blogs anyway. It’s the lowest of low-stakes roles, which is saying something when half the time, JJ’s using his super-brain and truculent Justin Bieber haircut to hit on chicks, because we all know that nothing gets you in a girl’s pants than showing off your mad calculus skills.

So we’re back to the scene where Sylar the Watcher confronts Daphne, first at her front door, trying to play down his hipster douchebag slash obvious rapist menace, and then in her house, playing it up and re-arranging the furniture with his mind. If Jim and Steph are rubes, then Daphne, who once tried to read a lost dog’s mind, who alienated Megan and Olivia and Mr. History Teacher by misreading their thoughts, and who apparently hasn’t told Katie that the Watcher knows about their superpowers and is actively keeping Daphne from hearing his thoughts, Daphne is clearly incapable of handling the situation. I mean, everyone knows you don’t point a knife at a telekinetic! That’s just stupid. The Watcher just forced Dr. Francis to commit suicide — oh, and I applaud the show’s not-quite-successful attempt at misdirection with Francis’s self-satisfied, “You sure got here fast,” line to no one in particular. And look at Josh Stewart and his dusky facial hair — Daphne’s all alone with this hipster douchebag slash obvious rapist menace.

Which I don’t think the producers quite appreciate, because smash cut to George accepting some stupid heroism award that he doesn’t deserve. There’s a lot of squirm-worthy No Ordinary Family, but they’re intentional. Jim humiliating himself. JJ humiliating himself. Daphne humiliating herself. George getting the key to the city, George’s speech calling everyone a hero: absolutely tone-deaf. Shut up, George.

Back to Daphne, and what happens next, and what just happened, and whether the show went there there. Heroes would’ve gone there there, more for some misbegotten shock value than anything else. Buffy had too much class for that sort of melodrama. And No Ordinary Family — it’s too cowardly to even consider it, which is kind of a shame. The Watcher is simply the only interesting character left on the show, but his evil top lieutenant behavior — if I’ve been counting right, he’s murdered four people since the series started — hasn’t really registered, mostly because his victims have all been tiresome secondary and tertiary jag-offs with — surprise, surprise — meaning to the plot but not really to the audience. He’s ominous, but he doesn’t seem like he’s beyond redemption, and with what we’ve seen of the guy, he could just as easily betray Dr. Reverend Camden King to Katie as he could betray Katie to Dr. Reverend Camden King. (But from the way he bolted out of their two minute date, it still looks like the latter is more likely.)

The Watcher has to go somewhere — Dr. Reverend Camden king is pushing harder on Steph and Katie’s pushing harder on Will, or Joshua, or whoever — and I’d like the character to be more than just an errand boy when the shit goes down. No Ordinary Family has already neutered a bunch of actors whose intensity really worked: Vic Mackey, for example, and Darla were freaking monsters, which made them heftier characters whether they were trying to do good or surrendering to their natures. Here’s the one character in No Ordinary Family that’s not a frivolous comic relief twerp, and since the comic relief never really works, they might as well try and create some drama.