INTELLIGENCE REVIEWS-SEASON ONE

• Review of Season One: End of Season Review

  There was a lot to recommend in this show this season. The premise of having the protagonist be a high-level informant for a spy service in a post-9/11 intelligence world was great and new. The pace was fast and the cinematography slick, really showing off Vancouver and the Lower Mainland well. We saw some very intriguing glimpses into just how our intelligence is conducted in the "higher echelons of power" (as CBC so ponderously likes to put it), though I didn't buy all of the American-bashing. If these guys were so powerful and omniscient, why didn't the right hand ever know what the left hand was doing? Still, Ian Tracey and Klea Scott both turned in superlative performances. Scott especially had fun playing tough outsider Mary, beating her way up the ladder with every man and woman above her trying to hold her back down.

  Tracey had a much harder job. One problem with the show was that Mary had people who believed in her and supported her even when she was at rock bottom. Jimmy, however, had literally every person in his life constantly questioning his decisions and his competency to lead, from his right-hand man Ronnie to Mary to even his own daughter. Ironically, Jimmy is a very competent leader, but he's surrounded by naysayers and people who think that they can do better. It got beyond annoying about episode nine. Next season (assuming that there will be one), it would be nice to see Jimmy getting more support in his corner. There were some encouraging signs in that respect in the season finale--should Jimmy survive his cliffhanger, everyone around him will have had a good scare. Meanwhile, Ronnie has been doing his own thing and screwing up since the second Jimmy left for the border. One sincerely hopes this will signal a sea change in Jimmy's crew next season. You can only have other characters question your protagonist so many times and you can only hobble him so much before he stops being a compelling protagonist.

  Camille Sullivan was pretty amazing as Francine. Quite the shock to see her do a 180 from sweet and rather hapless Suki in Da Vinci to the Bitch Goddess Ex-Wife from Hell in Intelligence. Oh, my. After seeing Lola, I didn't find Sabrina Grdevich's swing from evil Mona in Da Vinci's season one to Jimmy's sister Maxine quite as jolting, though I was greatly disappointed to see that Maxine wasn't used more. I loved her straight talking to Jimmy and the way she played Francine while pretending to be played by her.

  Some things that were missing this season involved passion. This is truly strange when the male lead is so noted for his ability to play characters who basically run on high-octane gut emotion. We got a lot of anger and camaraderie and all that, but passion, whether in sex or for life or whatever, was distinctly lacking. There was a lot at the beginning (for example, Francine's corker of an attempted seduction scene with Jimmy at the strip club in ep three is straight out of a Stanwyck film noir and definitely a step in the right direction), but it drained off quickly. You'd think that with half of the show being set at a strip club, you'd at least see sex from the man's point of view, but nope. Aside from a few brief hints at lapdances, even the strippers seemed to keep it on, which was astonishing. Every scene of violence mentioned was not only spelled out but filmed in lurid, spasmodic detail--but the sex was, at best, hinted at, except for the very-well-done scene between Katarina and Royden. How...puritan.

  Now, let me get this straight---seeing whether or not Francine actually succeeded in seducing Jimmy in the second-to-last ep (and NO, Jimmy's coy reference to oversleeping is NOT enough), and if so, how she did it and what did it, is less important than seeing Colin or Johnny or Dante's nephew get shot? Wasn't it already clear from the context how and why those characters got shot? Was it really necessary to show these scenes and not show a scene that had been set up from the very beginning of the series? If Jimmy's dilemma over whether or not to get back together with Francine was so unimportant, why make it the central conflict between them? Stella certainly wasn't it because Jimmy always cared a lot more about her than Francine did. Why act as though Jimmy was practically a monk in the first several episodes, then present an offscreen girlfriend? Is she a stripper like Sweet? How did he meet her? How does Francine figure into all of that? Surely showing important connections between characters is just as important as showing people getting shot or having them say "fuck" several times in an episode.

  So, for next season--more sex. Stop having the characters talk about it and have them show it, instead, even if it's just your Hayes-Code-style makeout scene leading rather obviously to the bedroom door kind of thing. It doesn't have to be like outtakes from Bliss. The point should be showing their emotions, not showing what positions they use (or worse, having them sitting around yakking about it afterward over bad scotch--borrrring). And no more irony-laced beefcake shots straight out of Star Trek for Our Dope-Running Hero, please. It was only funny the first time.

  Dante and the Disciples. Hmm. The impression I've been increasingly getting is that the Disciples are not, strictly speaking, traditional bikers, but more a hybrid gang that uses skinheads to do its dirty work. Such gangs have been linked to White Supremacist terrorist movements south of the border in Seattle. Is it possible that next season we might get a major storyline about domestic terrorism where the terrorists are white supremacists? Christian fundamentalist terrorism of the apocalyptic variety has been conveniently swept under the rug by 9/11 and the whole "we always knew they'd come after us eventually!" attitude that places all terrorism and fundamentalism outside of Western culture. It would be fascinating to see Jimmy's laid-back, collaborative, multicultural, relatively feminist crew (hey, if a black stripper can get the kind of power and influence Sweet's been working up to, it's some kind of feminist) go head to head against Dante's large and octopuslike group of young Hitlers answering to his brutal authority alone over domestic terrorism at the ground level.

  Jimmy's character is an ongoing problem in a way that Mary (surprisingly enough) never was. It's not for lack of trying from Tracey, but watching him for most of the season was like watching Seabiscuit run with lead-weights and a martingale. Jimmy spent far too much time feeding lines to lesser characters in a way that Dominic Da Vinci really never did. I understand that this cast of too-many is awfully fun for the writers to work with, but it's not for your audience when your lead gets lost in the shuffle. This may appear to be an ensemble gig, but it's really not. If Jimmy were written out tomorrow, the reason for the show would disappear with him. He's the lead. He's not an anti-hero; he's the hero of the story. He's the only reason to watch both his crew and Mary and her snitches because he is one of her snitches. Otherwise, there'd be no real thematic reason to tie them together.

  Now, as much fun as Mary and Eddie and Martin et al. are, they spent far too much of this season focusing on pretty much everything but Reardon Shipping. Apparently, the only reason for Mary stupidly allowing one of her biggest assets to wander around essentially unobserved was to give Ted and George an opening to go after Jimmy. But since Ted never had anything approaching a good reason to go after Jimmy in the first place and the situation will obviously clear up once George realizes he's trying to arrest the one man he needs to be nice to in order to get his guns through Guatemalan Customs, who cares? The entire TedandGeorgeandWinstonandJimmy thing was stupid from beginning to end, especially when we had Jimmy hearing Ted's name in the season finale and not connecting it to the slimeball at the OCU that he'd talked to right after the failed kidnapping attempt on Stella at the end of the pilot (or did everybody just forget about that bit of continuity?). It was flaming obvious from the get-go that the situation existed solely to create a cliffhanger for Jimmy at the end of the season. Where's the fun when it's that obvious? The only wrinkle appeared at the very end when George (inexplicably) decided to shoot Jimmy extralegally, and very, very dead, instead of just arrest him. Apparently, George doesn't mind that only about twenty cops will be involved in this murderous little conspiracy. Yeah, I'm sure that secret will never get out.

  So, next season, it would really be nice to give this whole Mary-and-Jimmy alliance thing a serious test drive against a genuinely nasty enemy and unleash folks like Martin and Ronnie on a genuine national security breach. That being a large and largely neglected part of the original premise, and all. Speaking of which, why were Mary and Jimmy sniping at each other for most of the season when they started it off so friendly, again? How did that happen? I seem to have missed that scene.

  And speaking of flat characters that don't work--please, please, PLEASE don't bring back Casey. God, she's annoying. Randy, on the other hand, is really pretty interesting (in a wiggy, drug-addled, dirtbag, wife-beating sort of way). His interactions with Jimmy are downright hilarious. You can almost see Jimmy gagging back the urge to wipe the slime off his shoulder after Randy leaves. A few moments in the last few eps indicated that Ted might actually work as a character--but only if the writers give the usually fantastic Matt Frewer more to work with than the scraps he's currently getting. Come on, guys, help a motivation-starved actor out, here!

  George doesn't really work, either, being so far mainly a low-rent Sonny Crockett slumming on a boat in Vancouver and the Boss from Hell for Winston. But I'll reserve judgment until after the resolution of that cliffhanger and George finds out that he just grabbed the worst guy possible by the shorthairs. I'm looking forward to that moment.

  I'm still on the fence about Mike. It would help if he had a consistent personality (and I.Q.) that didn't change from week to week to suit the writers' needs.

  Similarly, Kristina didn't work out as well as I'd thought. I hate to say that since the actress is actually quite good--I can see why she has fans. But the character was really was quite annoying, though her banker boyfriend is just right in the easily corrupted department. On the other hand, Martin, Katarina, Eddie and Old Spy Guy in Mary's camp and Francine, Ronnie, Sweet and Bob in Jimmy's camp worked much, much better than expected. Royden was threatening to get as annoying as the Emperor Palpatine in Return of the Jedi, but fortunately did his own tumble down a space station shaft just as he hit his peak. So, that character worked out well in the end (and it was lots and lots of fun watching Mary unleash Katarina on him. "Girl talk," indeed.). The biggest problem with Royden was that he was Mary's, and only Mary's, enemy until a rather unbelievable power play involving head snitch Jimmy in the penultimate ep. Mary's battle to get into CSIS against Royden's sleazy opposition, therefore, left Jimmy too often out of the loop until the very end. Next season's Big Villain really should be someone who scares both Mary and Jimmy into playing better with each other and joining forces against said enemy from the beginning of the season. That gun-running storyline should help, especially if WMDs are involved. I should have known they were going to string us along and save the actual start of something that juicy for season two. If season two really happens [sigh].

  These aren't insurmountable problems, surely not any more insurmountable than the similar unevenness of tone during season one of DVI and much smoother than DVCH's dessication of the characters' personal lives. But they need work and hopefully, Haddock Entertainment will get a second season to do that.

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  Next week: Da Vinci's City Hall is still rerunning at 12:30 am (see the link to my reviews below) on Wednesday mornings and 11pm on Sunday nights.

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This page was last updated on 2/26/2007