Flashpoint: Never Kissed A Girl
By fred | September 12, 2008
(S01E08) After a little break the Canadian import Flashpoint was back on CBS, and continues to deliver a really high-quality season so far. Not all episodes might have been perfect, but they’re all been extremely well done, focusing on psychological aspect of things rather than pure action, tension is always very well played out and each episode proves why this series is liked by many.
In the last episode I’ve been saying how I wasn’t such a fan of the liberty they took with their opening of episodes : while it used to be a moment right in the middle of the action, before we flashback to how things began, the last episodes did not open with one moment but many, a succession of shots, all happening right in the middle of everything but not all at one, spread over some time.
I wasn’t really liking this, so I was pretty happy to see things “back to normal” this week. It just works better that way, in my opinion.
Rewinding a little, as is the case on this show, for once the pre-action bits were actually good. I’ve repeated how I feel this is the weakest part of the show, but this week it was better because it wasn’t about them training, joking or teasing one another, it was about that first case, back in the pilot, when Ed shot and killed someone. it was justified, he was only doing his job, we know that, but he was still being sued by the grieving family of the hostage taker, and now this is coming back as Ed must go to court and testify.
Which put him at the right place at the right time, given how he is a member of the Strategic Response Unit member of course. So when a young man came, grabbed a gun and began taking hostage, Ed was the first to rush in and get involved. Yes, this was yet another case of hostage situation at gun point (and something tells me we’ll see plenty more of that…), and yet it was different that before, because this time Ed wasn’t part of the SRU, he was hostage.
Once again the brilliance of this show came in illustrating how Ed managed to stay calm, exchange information with his team while at the same time trying to calm down the guy and working things out, and how even though from the start we knew he was indeed innocent and never killed anyone, we really believed that he was ready to kill someone today, because he had nothing to loose at this point.
One thing that surprised me, although it might actually be normal, was that Ed had his gun on him while in court. I know he’s a cop and all, but I’m guessing he wasn’t in duty, he was released to go deal with this case, and even I just thought it was odd that any cop could simply walk in with a loaded gun. If they work here, if they’re on duty, sure, but when cops needs to appear in court to testify or something like that, do they really do / are allowed to carry loaded gun on themselves ? Sure, it’s not a prison, but still I imagined they were invited to left them at home, or the entry gates…
If the basic plot of this episode was nothing new, it’s the way it was handled that made it work so well, we were grabbed into the situation, the tension was rising up, and because they do not always go for the happy ending, we had no guarantee that no one would die today, which makes things so much better obviously. (And for once, new guy willing to kill everyone as soon as he gets a chance worked, because it was just funny now… sort of a private joke or something.)
Not sure if I was just happy to see the show back, or it was was the return to a “better” introduction (in my opinion), or the lack of any real weak part, but right now I’m willing to call this the best episode of the season/series so far, no?
Posted in Reviews
Shows: Flashpoint
