Cade takes over a TV station in the hope of making his message known to a wider audience, but Cain is watching his every move.
Be warned, this review is going to contain spoilers, so if you don’t want to know how it ends, move on.
At last Cade becomes proactive. Playing on his notoriety as a criminal, taking over a TV station is an audacious but inspired plan to get the word out about the Gua. The only problem is, the studio is a restrictive environment for story telling, so a little too much time is taken up with Cade tracking one of the employees around the station, plugging in what she’s unplugged so that he can broadcast. It all smacks of padding, as does the ending (about which more later). Considering how long Cade is wandering about aimlessly, it also seems odd that Cain must be standing about outside wondering what to do with his time as well. When he makes his move, it’s hardly an inspired plan, and the inside operative he has such confidence in is no threat at all. Not to mention the fact that once Cain says his operative is the person you’d least expect, it totally gives away who the spy is.
Now, all season the Gua have been keeping Foster alive so that they can acquire Nostradamus’ big book of prophecies. It occurred to me watching this episode that as the prophecies refer to a Twice-Blessed Man, if Cade’s dead they’re going to be meaningless. So why don’t they just kill him?
Which leads us to the ending. Knowing full well that Sebastian Spence is filming season three as I watched this episode, it was clear that Cade’s not dead. The ending overplays the dramatic impact of this, minimalizing it by having Foster shot too soon and not knowing what to do without a lead other than pan around the corpse a few times. It makes what could have been a sudden and exciting finish drag on unnecessarily, which is a shame.
As to how and why, it appears that Eddie pulled the trigger. There are many ways to get out of this one, with Eddie being a Gua agent but Cade being wise to their ploy and finding some kind of substitute for himself, Eddie realizing it wasn’t really Cade (although that can’t be, as he didn’t dissolve), or maybe Cade and Eddie cooked up Cade’s shooting on live TV to bring more believers to the cause and to get the police off his back. We’ll have to wait until season three to find out, but I’m looking forward to seeing where the show goes from here.
****
Would you like to go to the First Wave Season Two guide, head back to the main TV reviews page, read older reviews in the Reviews Archive or return to the front page?
Get your own Free Home Page