Episode Report Card Miss Alli: B | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Paradise Lost
By Miss Alli | Season 1 | Episode 2 | Aired on 10.02.2007
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.So, you see, the reason why it's called "Paradise Lost" is that there's a whole town that gets all dead, and the town is called Paradise, see?
Okay, so Professor Dorkus, it seems, is real dead, which surprises me based on cast pictures I saw all summer, but which I'll happily accept for now. In the wake of his...wake, Jaime decides to stick it to the grieving process by visiting Miguel Ferrer and agreeing to become part of his shady government operation and catch bad guys. She spends some time being trained, during which she does phony-looking one-arm pull-ups and experiments with just how fast her CGI legs can be. When she feels like she's ready to get started, she accompanies Ruth to the site of the aforementioned everybody's-deadening, where they discover that a biological agent has wiped everybody out. Eventually, the whole thing gets wrapped up in a weirdly abrupt conclusion where the bad guys are caught and it's all over and THANK GOD they didn't annihilate Springfield!
Elsewhere, Starbot hooks up with Shadowy, because she's not hating him just because he shot her a couple of times. He seems highly skeptical of her, but he does it with her anyway. Not sure where they're going with this yet.
Overall, however, the show finally located a sense of humor about its robot self, and that's a big relief. Everybody was better and less annoying, and some of the ultra-serious epic feel they were straining so hard to achieve has apparently been abandoned, which is for the best. A better episode. Not a good episode, but not a howler this time around. Want more? The full recap starts right below!
Previously on They Un-Blinded Her With Science: Miss Jaime Sommers was busy caring for her punk-ass little sister and moistly dating the wafer-dry Professor Dorkus. She was pregnant besides. But then she got in a huge car accident, lost the baby, gained a few washing-machine parts, fought "the first bionic woman," watched Professor Dorkus get shot, showed off some mad skillz she picked up during a visit to the Ministry Of Silly Runs, and tried in vain to hold her own in a stony-glare-off with Miguel Ferrer. There was some backstory involving Dorkus's father, original bionic woman Starbot, Starbot's ex-boyfriend the girlfriend-shooting robot trainer, and a French-speaking dude who likes to sew his own arm up after mishaps and who ended the episode by breaking Dorkus Senior out of an underground prison.
We fade up on a cemetery, where the good news is delivered right away: everyone is gathered and dressed in black to mourn Professor Dorkus, who is quite emphatically dead as a result of what appeared at the time to be a superficial shoulder wound. Yay! I mean...you know. I would never cheer the demise of a real person, but he is not a real person. Even compared to other fictional characters, he was extra-unreal. Becca is at the cemetery with Jaime, which makes Becca already somewhat more sympathetic than she was last week, when she mostly listened to loud music and enjoyed not being deaf. Becca reaches out and takes Jaime's hand during the service as a saxophone plays mournfully (the music on this show sometimes feels weirdly '80s-inspired, like it's sex music from L.A. Law, only it's tension music here). Jaime looks over and locks eyes with Miguel Ferrer -- who is now entitled to his real character name, Jonas, now that I have learned it -- who is lurking about, just checking out the headstones. What comes of this, for the moment, is...nothing!
As Becca and Jaime leave the cemetery later, arm in arm, Becca asks Jaime if she's all right, and Jaime says she'll be fine. The most compelling thing about this episode so far is Jaime's belted coat, which is very nice and very flattering. I seem to spend a lot of time liking the coats on this show. Perhaps I'll like it better if I think of it as The Coat-Wearing Woman. Jonas calls out to Jaime from a few headstones away, and she dismisses Becca to go talk to him. Jaime tells Jonas that she's headed back to her old life as a bartender, and she's going to forget the whole thing. I don't know. If I had a hydraulic hinge in my shoulder and could hear conversations on the other side of Yankee Stadium, I don't think I'd be able to take a "carry on as if it never happened" approach. Jonas looks after her as she walks off, but he doesn't stop her. If you love your supercharged weapon, set her free. If she returns to you, she is yours forever. If she doesn't, her superfast finger will make a nice smoothie machine. Becca asks Jaime who that was, and she says it was "nobody."