In Plain Sight: Hoosier Daddy
By fred | June 9, 2008
(S01E02) Last week was the introduction of USA latest series, In Plain Sight, and while I wasn’t really pleased with what we got to see, at least USA can be happy about the start for the show, one of their best in a while with over 5 million viewers !
Things have started well, and now comes the real test as we’re heading into the second episode, an episode which will also have some competition to face. But for the moment let’s focus on the episode itself, and how it went. As I said I was really not impressed with the pilot, which looked more like a collection of clichéd scenes and characters than anything else, and in the end wasn’t really good really wasn’t good.
Now we have a second episode, and things are getting a little better. Well, a little less terrible to be exact…
There’s been some improvements made, that’s undeniable, but unfortunately things still aren’t really good. This week we see a 10 years old boy joining the WITSEC on his own, as odd as it may sound. And of course we have to go through some silly “jokes” I wish writers would really avoid, like Mary wondering “what’s the deal with babies? I don’t get ‘em!” Oh please…
Of course that might not be as bad as the scene where she hits Marshall, so he hits her back, so he then tries to hit her back only to have their boss spill coffee all over his shirt, because that’s so funny, right? Right?
But that’s not the worst part, the real problem with this episode was how predictable it was. I don’t want to say it was boring, but when you can see what’s going to happen all the way through, from beginning to end, when you’re never left wondering what’s coming next or who’s done what, it’s really hard to find a reason not to fall asleep while watching the show.
Which might be why they decided to throw in an explosion and a little “action” scene at some point, to wake us up. Sadly, it didn’t really work. Not really because there wasn’t much action, but because once again everything was oh-so predictable. As soon as you heard it, your first thought right there was what ? Bad guys going after the kid, trying to wack him so he wouldn’t testify.
It’s freaking obvious, yet it took Mary about 30 seconds to realize this, and then while we all know what’s going on we’re left witnessing the stupidest thing ever : only one person on the show actually realizes what’s going on, Mary, and at the last minute she gets the kids out of the way ! How come no other agent knew about the security issues going on there ? How the Hell is it possible that her very own partner Marshall didn’t had a clue about this ? Is he her partner, or just a moron who walks by her side and occasionally tells a joke or spills coffee her their boss ?
She might be a lonesome cowgirl, but they decided to team Mary with a partner, and the least they could do is to actually have them work together as a real team, where both of them have a functioning brain and are good at their job, otherwise there’s really no point. Especially when we have lots of stupid useless secondary characters already, but more on Mary’s family in a moment.
First, I just want to add how even further than the predictability of the entire episode, I wish sometimes not everything would go for the best cause everybody really is a good guy willing to do the right thing. One little thing I’m not sure I understood this episode too, but that may be me, is when the new family for Leo suddenly became his adoptive family exactly ?? I thought they needed to put the boy somewhere safe, and so he had to be put with a family inside the program because they knew & understood how it worked, but that never really meant to me they actually had to adopt the kid…
Of course I’ll end mentioning Mary’s family, because that’s another thing that really doesn’t work with this show. We don’t care about any of them, especially since they’re all the clichés we’ve known they were from day one. Of course the mother was gonna blow everything up, you knew that from the start, even long before all that crappy “rehearsal”, all those scenes were completely useless, annoying boring filler.
And I just can’t believe Mary would actually give her mom money, for that ? It’s not a job she found, and Mary isn’t an idiot so she knows better, or she should. This is only the second episode yet it was obvious to me things would go wrong, so Mary had to know it. Why would she give her mother $2,500 or even $500 for that ? Can she really afford to waste that much on nothing ? How stupid were all those scenes, from Mary’s sleepless night to her mother calling the day off cause she made $10 to the sister and her mysterious boyfriend, while she sits on a pile of drugs, I really don’t see any of this going anywhere good, sadly.
In the end, and while less terrible than the first, this episode still wasn’t a good one, it was boring, predictable, and pretty much useless in the end.
Posted in Reviews
Shows: In Plain Sight
