Three soldiers, two white, one black, acquire a map to some lost ‘treasure’, in this case a cache of deutschmarks. When their unsanctioned mission to retrieve it goes awry, they appear to be heroes and Frank is authorized to backstep and help them complete their mission of saving refugees.

If certain elements of this premise seem familiar, there’s a damn good reason. Yes, we’re only on the second episode and already the Seven Days writers have decided that rather than have an idea of their own, they’re going to blatantly rip off a recent movie. This one, if you haven’t already worked it out, is Three Kings. Now, I’ve had a chip on my shoulder about this lazy concept of storytelling in the series for a long time, and the fact that three years in the writers still can’t come up with anything original is bordering on the ridiculous. Now, if done well, these kinds of episodes can still work, especially if Parker is involved in a way that couldn’t have happened in the movie.

That’s not the case here. Everything is almost exactly the same as Three Kings. The casting of the soldiers, the setting, the treasure, the place where the treasure is kept, the way the refugees carry the soldiers’ haul, the way bullets are heard in slo-mo slamming into the soldiers’ bodies. The only thing that’s new is Frank and Donovan, the later of which seems to have no good reason for being there except to bail Parker out when he’s about to be shot and to convince him not to take a new posting, something Don Franklin should be seriously thinking about considering how badly this show is treating him. Hell, he’s even started to talk ‘black’, which doesn’t sound right coming from him at all. Ballard is likewise sidelined early on and even Parker has little to do, getting knocked out and then wandering about toting a gun.

The soldiers after the money elicit no sympathy at all and deserve to die, even the sympathetic doctor on the team, the refugees are two-dimensional at best and far too much time is spent on seemingly endless shoot-outs. There’s no style, no substance, in fact no reason for anyone to bother watching this when they could be appreciating the far superior in every way Three Kings instead.

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