Episode Report Card M. Giant: A- | 157 USERS: B+ YOU GRADE IT Day 8: 4:00 PM -- 5:00 PM
By M. Giant | Season 8 | Episode 1 | Aired on 2010.01.17
Why, he's breaking into a gray, late-model Pontiac sedan and hotwiring it, as any of us would do in this situation. He comes screaming out of the alley, making sure to attract the lookout's attention as he does so, because where's the fun in a clean getaway? The lookout takes to his heels, telling the sniper where their target is. The sniper's able to put a couple of rounds through the windshield, one of which goes through the driver's left shoulder. He skids around a lot, exchanges some gunfire with the lookout as he screeches past, and gets away with little more than some additional cosmetic damage to the car. The shooters have to give up the chase. But before they do, the lookout calls 911 to report a stolen car. And he got the license plates and everything. He's not the lookout for nothing.
So I suppose this is a good time to tell you that as with last season, one of my best Christmas presents came from the Fox Network in the form of an advance screener of these first four episodes. Which means I get to recap each episode before seeing the next one rather than waiting for the premiere and churning them out so fast they blur together in my sleep-deprived head. And on my birthday, no less. So this recap and the next three come to you totally unspoiled. No promises about number seven, though.
Oh, good, here's an adorable little towheaded girl of about three or four. Hard to see how this could possibly go wrong. Everything's nominal for now, though; she's parked on the black leather sofa of a chic furnished apartment, watching cartoons. She uses the nose of the stuffed polar bear she's holding to nuzzle the cheek of a dozing Kiefer. "Jack?" she says, and laughs as he jerks awake like the grizzled old killer he is, because she'll never know how close she came to losing her entire face just then. Complete with its Kiefer-esque chipmunk cheeks. As if to confirm that this is in fact Kim's daughter Teri, the fabled Spawn of Spawn, Kiefer reminds her to call him Grampa. "You don't look like a grampa," she points out. "Couldn't agree with you more," he grins. Already this is going far too well. She says this cartoon is boring, so he picks up the remote to find her another. On his way, he pauses at Fox News (because his cable operator clusters all the cartoon channels together like mine does) and hears some talking heads discussing a bold new peace initiative. I assume it grabs his attention because bold new peace initiatives are usually ideal times for him to leave the country. But it's not long before the little girl protests, "Grampa, this isn't a cartoon!" Doesn't miss a trick, that one, and it took her less than a minute. Clearly she got her brains from her father. Kiefer finds her a cartoon she likes better, and after a couple of seconds of bonding, during which we can look forward to this little girl one day sneaking out of the house after midnight for furtive dates with terrorist minions, Kiefer's phone rings. It's famous original Spawn, apologizing for her and her husband's lateness in picking up Spawn of Spawn, blaming U.N. traffic, and asking how their visit to the zoo was. Kiefer says it was rather bear-intensive. "She certainly knows what she wants," Kiefer says. "She reminds me of you." Spawn bounces the sentiment back to him and promises to be there soon. After she hangs up, her husband notices she seems thoughtful, and asks what's up, because a thoughtful Spawn is a dangerous Spawn. It seems Spawn broached the subject of Kiefer moving back to L.A. when they first arrived in New York, but he hasn't mentioned it since (even though his "treatment" for the horrible disease that was supposed to have killed him last season ended two weeks ago) and she's afraid to bring it up again. So Steven offers to do it for her. This certainly sounds like a potentially healthy new stage in the father-daughter relationship.