Episode Report Card Demian: B- | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT The Contrived, The Unrealistic, And The Overlong
By Demian | Season 3 | Episode 14 | Aired on 02.14.2001
And on and on and on.
I realize baldness runs in my family, but I know I still had a full head of hair when this sequence began. I wipe stray tufts of my now-grey locks off the keyboard to report that when this Tower of Malevolence, this Paragon of Menace, this, um, Acme of, uh, Moral Turpitude finally, at long last, swaggers his slow-moving ass into the bar, he drawls -- yes drawls -- out, "Whea-uh izz hee?" That's it. If this dirtbag is going to talk in slow motion too, you fine people are going to have to settle for a drastically-shortened version of any event in which he is involved. I don't have that much money in my pension fund, and I think I'll be looking into retirement communities in Coral Gables by the time this episode is over. Sutter -- for this is indeed The Man Himself -- mentions casually (read: drawls interminably) he "took the lih-buhh-tee" of preprinting that evening's newspaper, which he displays to the assemblage gathered in the saloon. The headline blares "HALF-BREED TO DIE AT SUNDOWN." I titter to myself, thinking it's about time someone stuck it to Cher. Then again, as she herself has noted, the only things that will be left on the planet in the event of a nuclear war are "cockroaches and Cher," so maybe we shouldn't get our hopes up.
Sutter catches sight of Miss Indian Territory 1869 and sidles over to her, flapping the paper in her face. He asks her for the whereabouts of her "little brother." She coolly tells him she wouldn't tell him if she knew, and adds that she's "not afraid of [Sutter]." Sutter replies that she would be afraid of him if she were smart, but "then again, [her] kind never are." Okay, so he's clad in black, southern, corrupt, racist, and Eeeevil. WE GET IT. Nominate and confirm him for Attorney General of the United States and get on with it already. Sutter zeroes in on an extremely pale yokel at the bar, who insists he hasn't seen Bo at all. Raising his coiled bullwhip threateningly, Sutter tells "Cal," "You lie to me again, and I'll do worse than this." An enforcer jams a hunting knife through Cal's hand into the bar. Prue slams the enforcer through a card table. She wraps her scarf around Cal's hand as she wonders aloud, "What's wrong with you people?" Sutter oozes more threats, this time aimed her way. Prue pronounces the entire situation "cliché," and since Shannen directed this episode, I suppose she knows of what she speaks. The toppled enforcer rises to his feet, surmising that it's okay for him to hit Prue, as she's "dressed like a man." Except for that slut top, of course, but then again, it does look like a blouse Emmett Honeycutt would try to get away with at Babylon, so who knows? She beats him to the ground and smashes a whiskey bottle over his head. The other two enforcers take aim, but Prue pulls one of those (clichéd) right-hand-over-left maneuvers with her six-shooters, blasting the gun out of one enforcer's hand. Cole -- in the only cool slo-mo shot of the evening, derivative though it is -- sweeps his right hand up from the bar and approaches the other enforcer with a nasty-looking shotgun. Sutter calls his boys off, telling them they'll "deal with these two later." More threats. More drawling. Sutter and the Boys leave. Miss Indian Territory 1869 beams broadly at Prue and Cole as Cole snorts, "So much for laying low."