Ronnie: Welcome again to the pain train that is Night Man. In the 9th episode of 44 episodes–yes, 44 episodes–Night Man…falls in love? Maybe! He’s definitely taken with the mysterious woman he witnesses getting beat on in a parking garage. Petra Medved, no relation to Michael, is a Russian emigre with a mysterious past and more importantly a rockin’ bod. She does a “George Costanza leave behind” of her hotel key so Johnny would come calling because he’s a shallow horn dog and true to form… Meanwhile, Frank continues his flagrant flouting of the law by doing off the books investigations of Petra’s associates, one of whom is named Stepov. You gotta come up with a better name than that, because every right thinking person will immediately think of Elaine’s mimbo boyfriend telling George to “step off”. (I can and will cram in as many Seinfeld references as possible in this article. Who’s gonna stop me, fuckin’ Donald Trump?) This snooping lands Frank a beat down and a trip to the hospital while Johnny and Petra are cavorting on the beach like a couple of Baywatch Nights characters.
“Johnny, before you do anything… Delete my Internet search history.”
Johnny uses his frequency of evil powers as a party trick and finds out from that that not only is she an ex-KGB assassin, she killed Sean Archer’s kid at the beginning of Face/Off…or something pretty similar to it. This doesn’t dissuade Johnny from wanting to fuck her, you see, because she’s a victim of circumstance: Heywood Jablomeoff threatens her sister whenever she doesn’t agree to take an assignment. So what if she shot a kid? She didn’t mean it, and that’s all that matters. It’s all very stereotypical, with talk of May Day parades and the old country. Look, it was 1997, the Soviet Union had fallen and capitalism was hollowing out Russia, so storytellers felt obliged to tell one of like three stories they had about post-Soviet life. Everyone’s either an assassin or nursing a dangerous alcohol dependency or both.
If this isn’t about Johnny trying to redeem a trained killer with his dick and his superheroics, “Lady in Red” highlights the dangerous dependency that has taken root in Johnny and Frank’s relationship. Johnny misses a baseball game the pair were meant to attend so instead of assuming his son is looking for strange or shooting up like any decent jazz musician would be, Frank tails Stepov and ends up getting the shit kicked out of him for snooping on organized criminals just because his son didn’t catch a mid-August Giants game. This combined with Frank pretending he’s still a cop without the aegis of official employment makes him a dangerous and delusional old man. No wonder Kim Coates would eventually be able to kill him via a phony “sheriff of the Ultraweb” job offer. (Spoilers, I know, but also who cares.) In the hospital, Frank asks Johnny “son, what is it about this girl that has you so fascinated”? Well, it’s like how Batman is attracted to Catwoman and Talia al Ghul: good guys love the bad girl, especially if they think they can “fix” her.
Fix her Johnny does, or tries to do, as he uses his superheroic persona to fight a number of Russian gangsters who exploit “The Ice Lady of Petrovia”. As is typical the fight scenes are really poorly choreographed, though Night Man does say “drinks are on me” and then he smashes a couple of vodka bottles over some goons’ heads. That’s probably his funniest one-liner yet in the series, partially because he also may have killed those men with blunt force trauma to the head. Night Man kills some people in this episode, as he does most episodes. It sure is alarming given most superheroes circa 1997 still adhered to a no killing code. Perhaps disgraced rapist Warren Ellis saw Night Man and that inspired the brutal interventionist ways of The Authority. Prove me wrong, you limey groomer fuck!
Chris: I love how incoherent the opening credits for Night Man are. Every episode begins with a wordless, saxophone-scored sequence that starts closeup of Johnny Domino AKA Night Man’s eyes, followed by a short montage of shots of a city at night intercut with footage of him driving in his car, which ends with him pulling up in front of a jazz club. Then it cuts inside the club where Johnny, who is standing next to an empty stage, pulls a garage door opener looking object out of his pocket, it cuts to a close-up of the doohickey in his hand so we can see him push a button, then cuts wide again to where a copy of Johnny holding a saxophone appears on stage (with the OG Johnny still in shot so we see that it’s a double) who begins to play the sax. They then cut to a reverse of the previous angle so the musician Johnny is in the foreground and original Johnny, now in the background, smiles with satisfaction and walks out of frame. It’s only then that they cut to him suiting up, doing action things, and including footage of other characters. It’s seventeen seconds (the first seventeen seconds) of a minute-long sequence devoted entirely to establishing how Night Man gets out of going to work. And after all that, the show cuts to a different montage, this one narrated, that explains who Night Man is, how his powers work and what the deal with his special equipment is. It’s information that would’ve been super useful in that sequence too, because no one tuning in blind would see that opening and think “oh yeah, okay, he’s one of those jazzman who has his own portable three dimensional hard light hologram of himself in case he needs to establish an alibi while fighting crime”. We spend a lot of time in this column guessing which contemporaneous pop culture nonsense the BTS Night Man crew were familiar with, but I refuse to believe none of them had seen Quantum Leap. We all know they’re perfectly aware of the fact that it was possible to open a TV show with a credits sequence that begins with expository narration explaining the premise and then segues into wordless montage. Everybody knows that.
As for the episode itself, I have to say it feels like a step backwards. I understand the thinking behind trying to do a smaller, more intimate episode of your TV show after a broad mythology episode and then one that takes a stab at social relevance, but the problem with small and intimate is you need actors for that and the producers of Night Man never got around to actually doing that. Say what you will about Lois & Clark (and we’ve said more than anyone ever should), but they had a TV ringer in Teri Hatcher and as for Dean Cain, well, he’s a better actor than Gestapo Storm Trooper. He didn’t have a whole lot of range and had a tendency to look confused and/or constipated when he was supposed to be angry or intense, but he pulled off the affectionate Clark stuff with a fair amount of aplomb (this is the nicest thing I will ever say about anyone who ever got a volunteer job with ICE). Matt McColm is a very handsome man who’s good at kicking and wears the hell out of a white t-shirt, but he is in no way shape or form an actor. At the end of the ep he has to do some narration and he delivers it with the intensity of a belligerent eight grader being forced to read an essay he wrote about his grandmother to the entire class. I swear I could see him glaring at the floor while I listened to it. And as for the actress who played Petra, do you know how bad you have to be for your own accent to sound fake?
I think the trick for the kind of bad that Night Man is that it needs to be going a hundred miles an hour from soup to nuts. And I don’t mean like the hundred miles an hour that a pro like Tony Scott could pull off, I mean it needs to be the manic, panicky, are-we-gonna-cross-the-finish-line-before-this-shakes-apart hundred miles an hour energy of the amateur who is in over their head and is on the verge of tears. Like the previous two eps. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed watching Johnny and his new girlfriend frolicking on the beach like a couple of assholes as much as the next guy, but that should just be the baseline for a show like this. I want to see them playing volleyball and that game where they’re in the water with another couple and the girls are on the boys shoulders trying to shove each other into the surf. They should be eating ice-cream and one of them boops the other on the nose with the ice-cream and then the booper mashes their entire cone into the face of the boopee and then both fall down laughing. There should have been a moment where they got to play frisbee with a dog. And it all needed to be cut to “Something Tells Me I’m into Something Good” like in the original Naked Gun. You know, sick-o shit.
Raleigh, this is a costume party, not a freakin’ Pride float.
Ronnie: I think “Lady in Red” is interesting in how it depicts post-Soviet collapse Russia, by which I mean Russia is portrayed as being full of thieves and assassins. It’s Orientalism by any other name to be sure. It’s an exotic and mysterious place of intrigue, and that is in keeping with the perception at the time. Something tells me Glen A. Larson and company did not have a firm grasp on 90s Russia and how the influx of Western capitalism created severe income inequality and a precipitous drop in life expectancy among the citizenry. I could go on and quote some issues of The eXile but I don’t think that’s necessary. It’s just funny that Night Man is given an opportunity to maybe say something about anything and that is stymied by the program’s own adherence to its bullshit formula of jazzman nonsense.
I transcribed Johnny’s final spiel about his lost lady love for posterity’s sake. “People have been asked to do things in the name of honor, country, even God, for thousands of years. All too often the deeds demand sacrifices, which in the harsh light of dawn, are meaningless. Such was the life of Petra Medved, who died for her country twenty years after it seized [sic–I know it should be “ceased” but that dummy Matt McColm DEFINITELY says “seized”) to exist. I’ve only known her three days, but my life would be changed forever.” All while this interior monologue is going on the jagoff is playing saxophone on the roof of the House of Soul. When in doubt, sax the shit out of things. I like his sendoff to Petra because it’s like when Ricky from Trailer Park Boys tries to sound intellectual. That’s about the level of intellectual rigor that Johnny espouses. As for Petra changing Johnny’s life forever, I’ll bet my Cabin Boy blu-ray that she’s never brought up again in the series. That’s not hollow either, cause that Cabin Boy disc runs for like $90 on eBay now.
Is that really considered front page news in Bay City? Jesus H.
Chris: One of my very favorite MST3K bits was from the It Conquered the World episode. The (Roger Corman directed) movie closes with this hilariously overwrought Peter Graves speech about Lee Van Cleef’s doomed anti-hero: “He learned almost too late that man is a feeling creature… and because of it, the greatest in the universe. He learned too late for himself that men have to find their own way, to make their own mistakes. There can’t be any gift of perfection from outside ourselves. And when men seek such perfection, they find only death… fire… loss… disillusionment… the end of everything that’s gone forward. Men have always sought an end to the toil and misery, but it can’t be given, it has to be achieved! There is hope, but it has to come from inside, from man himself.” They don’t riff the speech or anything, it just plays and that’s the end of the movie (Joel makes some bland wow, makes you think style comment when they’re leaving the theater but that’s about it). Afterward, the post movie segment is Joel and the Bots watching the end of the movie on a little TV while wearing matching after-show-cool-off-style robes and picking at TV dinners. They play the whole speech again except this time you’re not watching the scene you’re hearing it while you watch Joel and the Bots watching. Then, they cut to Mads and they’re watching it and you hear the speech again. All the way through. Then they cut to the credits and instead of the usual theme music you get the entire speech again. They even start it again for the little post-credit button. They play it four times in a row. Four. And there are no jokes. There are no jokes or dialogue of any kind. It’s just the speech over and over and over and over again.
I don’t think they were making fun of the speech exactly? Like, they clearly think it’s goofy and melodramatic, but I never got the sense the show was shitting on or looking down on it. Instead, it’s almost like they’re impressed that a Z grade sci-fi movie about a giant, psychic, space cucumber looking alien that tries to take over Earth would have the audacity to try and close by making its audience think about the fractured nature of man? I don’t think the speech moved them at all, but I do wonder if the people behind the scenes of that weird little, gonzo premised, no-budget, Minneapolis based, puppet sci-fi/comedy show didn’t feel a kind of kinship with the galaxy brained ambition of guys like Corman. And, kind of ironically, I don’t think MST had even the slightest interest in making any kind of comment on the nature of man, fractured or otherwise, but that show is something like thirty five years old and it’s still around and has spawned a whole bunch of spin-offs and became one of the most influential comedy shows of its era and I don’t know if you last that long and make that big an impression on the larger culture without tapping into something about the nature of man (or women, or anyone)?
Imagine if Matt McColm cameoed in Doomsday or Secret Wars. Disney would make 3 billion dollars easy.
I can’t help but think about that when Night Man makes its own little stab at profundity, and how without MST you and I wouldn’t be wasting our time picking on this dumb little show and its outsized ambitions. Night Man’s janky, DIY, best-actors-we-could-find-at-the-bus-depot cast are so in over their heads and it’s a miracle they were able to scrape together anything that even remotely resembles conventional television. The average Night Man production budget was probably less than the catering budget of an episode of Lois & Clark, and I have it on good authority that the catering budget for L&C was a plastic red cup full of quarters on a folding chair in between two vending machines a couple of lots over. Night Man wasn’t working with much is what I’m saying. So should I maybe go easier on them? Try not to be so smug and superior? Should I rein in the cheap shots about the community theater understudy level of acting, stop pointing out how cheap it all looks and narratively incoherent it all is? Yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes. I’m not going to, but, you know, that doesn’t mean that I don’t know that I should. And isn’t that, in its own way, the really important thing?
Odds & Ends
-Tubi should not allow “skip intro” as an option. Not for this show. That’s a load bearing theme song there, guys. Why the fuck would you skip it? It’s like skipping a blow job or ice cream or some sort of horrific amalgamation called an ice cream blowjob.
-IMDB trivia dutifully informs that “Lady in Red” is a song by Chris DeBurgh from 1986. I guess all the episode names are titles of songs? I guess if NewsRadio can name a season after Led Zeppelin albums, so too can Night Man derive titles from popular and not so popular music. Man, I should rewatch NewsRadio…
-Do they come up with the titles beforehand or after the script is completed? Is it Marvel Method where Glen A. Larson says “have it be about a lady in red” and then the scriptwriter makes sure to include a lady wearing red? (Petra wears red in the first, but not any subsequent, scene.) I really want to know how these things get made. Thankfully, we’ll learn some about the creative process once we get to the episodes comics creator Steve Englehart wrote.
-”I have my sources”, Johnny tells Lt. Dann, when asked where he got info about an assassination at the annual costume party. I want to know what sources a freelance jazz musician has.
-When your last name is Domino and you name your kid Johnny, he’s Johnny for life, isn’t he? Like, you’re not calling someone John Domino or Jonathan Domino. The fuck out of here with that nonsense. It’s Johnny from the womb to the tomb.
-He learned almost too late that man is a feeling creature… and because of it, the greatest in the universe. He learned too late for himself that men have to find their own way, to make their own mistakes. There can’t be any gift of perfection from outside ourselves. And when men seek such perfection, they find only death… fire… loss… disillusionment… the end of everything that’s gone forward. Men have always sought an end to the toil and misery, but it can’t be given, it has to be achieved! There is hope, but it has to come from inside, from man himself.
1X10 “THAT OL’ GANG OF MINE”
Ronnie: “Good artists borrow, great artists steal” is how the saying goes, I believe. Well, Glen A. Larson might be the greatest artist of all time by that metric, because he has a long and storied history of plagiarism over the course of his 300 television shows. Wikipedia says James Garner punched him through a motor home once after a dispute over Larson cribbing from The Rockford Files. The plagiarism manifests in Larson recycling his old shows in new shows, like an upcoming Night Man that incorporates footage from The Highwayman, as well as ripping off other people’s programs. “That Ol’ Gang of Mine” seems to be taking heavy inspiration from Lois & Clark’s episode “That Ol’ Gang of Mine”, in which a scientist creates clones of Bonnie, Clyde, Capone and Dillinger. In Night Man’s “That Ol’ Gang of Mine”, Capone, Dillinger and Bonnie (but NOT Clyde) are brought back via suspended animation. The Lois & Clark show predates this one by three years, so it’s pretty evident that by episode 10 of Night Man they already had to purloin ideas from better shows. That Lois & Clark is a “better show” is a stunning indictment of Night Man.
Polito is thinking “if only I hadn’t squabbled with Tom Fontana. I could be acting against Andre Braugher right now!”
If you told me that I was going to watch and write about the reanimated Bonnie Parker wanting the Johnny Domino D… well honestly it’s the kind of off the wall stupid shit I ought to expect from Night Man at this point. To be fair, Lois & Clark never thought to have Bonnie joy ride the Prowler, probably because L&C was staffed by normal TV writers and not deranged maniacs. How else do you explain the decision that when Johnny reads her mind, her exploits are in black and white? There’s a more than zero chance the person who wrote this episode thinks the past took place without color. J. Edgar Hoover’s son has revived these gangsters I guess in an effort to get back at his old man’s reputation. Hoover created the fiction that Dillinger, Capone and Parker all died whereas they were just cryogenically frozen like a common Theodore Williams or Walter Disney, and he used said fiction to become a beloved American statesman. Would a loser be portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio in a Clint Eastwood joint? Whereas on L&CRolling Thunder’s William Devane portrayed Capone, Night Man has its own ringer: Jon Polito. The year before he provided a voice in Homeward Bound II: Judgment Day and the year after he was in both The Big Lebowski and Seinfeld. I think if confronted, Polito would’ve quoted Fight Club and said “You met me at a very strange time in my life”. Who cares if Fight Club was 2 years later, we’re talking TV about reanimated Dillinger fighting fucking Night Man. Time, space, none of that shit matters. IT’S ALL BULLSHIT.
I’ll cut this short and leave it to Chris lest I have a mental breakdown trying to tease out anything comprehensible from this shit. Eventually Johnny gets into hot soup when the authorities find his Prowler as a heist getaway ride and he’s abducted by DOJ goons whose job had been to monitor the gangsters in stasis. The show never gives a good answer for why the government bothered keeping notorious criminals on ice for 70 years. The government essentially entrusts a jazz musician to sort this situation out, which sounds about right for the “hey man whatever” malaise of the scandal filled second Clinton administration. Who needs highly skilled government agents doing their jobs when you have a dipshit with a saxophone? You know who else is a dipshit with a saxophone–WILLIAM JEFFERSON CLINTON. So Johnny becomes a triple agent, working with the gangsters by putting his hair into a ponytail and pretending to be their representative while dealing with the Colombians. Lot of ins, lot of outs. “That Ol’ Gang of Mine” seems to want to make Bonnie Parker into a sympathetic character based on her affection for Johnny. Isn’t it a little soon for him to have moved on considering a woman he claimed to have loved died in his arms, uh, LAST EPISODE? I hope this isn’t like Seinfeld and Domino has a new girlfriend every week. I do hope this is like Seinfeld in that everybody winds up in jail. The amount of interference with police business should at least land Johnny, Frank and Raleigh in the hoosegow for a while.
We’re not blessed with that, unfortunately. We are blessed, however, with a pretty spectacular warehouse fight that ends with Bonnie giving Night Man a kiss “for Johnny” after he tells her that Johnny’s secured her a lifetime supply of “Hooverade” so she can start fresh. So Bonnie Parker is just out in the world? It’s fine, though, as the Men in Black still have three corpsicles to watch after: Capone, Dillinger and Hoover. Hoover is in cryogenic stasis after being shot approximately 40 times by Capone and Dillinger. Why? None of this makes any sense. I have a headache.
Chris: So, if I had to describe “That Ol’ Gang of Mine” in one word, it would probably be what the fuck. I honestly don’t know where to start this blisteringly incoherent mess, but I guess maybe the best place is the basic premise. The government has Bonnie Parker, Al Capone, and John Dillinger secretly on ice in the basement of a house somewhere in San Fran- excuse me, Bay City? And they’re being stored in upright, see-through, coffin shaped freezer units like you might have if you were displaying them at Disney World or The Mutter Museum? And they’re under the watch of former head of the FBI but long since dead J Edgar Hoover’s secret illegitimate son? And this secret son (named J Edgar Hoover, not a great first step to burying your association with the boy, J Edgar) was hidden from the public because even though Hoover liked wearing women’s clothes he also enjoyed heterosexual sex so when he had a kid he never acknowledged him so as not to undermine his reputation as a gay cross-dresser? Yeah, alright. Whatever.
Except, no, not whatever, because let’s think about this for a second. J Edgar Hoover was a real person whose private life was widely speculated about but in actuality very little was known about. That said, it’s probably bullshit that he was a cross-dresser (or at least our good friend the internet seems to doubt it). But was he gay? That seems a little murkier and a lot of people seem to think there was evidence he was. This only matters insofar as why would Night Man go out of its way to confirm that Hoover was a cross-dresser (which he wasn’t) but also insist that he was a committed lady-humper (also probably not true)? Why correct for something that didn’t happen at all? Why not just ignore it or have someone be surprised at the fact that Hoover would have a kid in an understated if-you-know-you-know fashion? Like remember in Seinfeld when Elaine was a beard for the gay guy and his boss and his boss’s wife were like oh, we didn’t expect him to have a girlfriend, and when Elaine asked why they just went no reason? Just do that.
Anyway.
More like John DULLinger
J Edgar Jr (The kids called him Jedjr!) falls in love with the frozen Bonnie, for reasons. And decides to whip up one of those cure-for-death tonics that would, like in the corresponding Lois & Clark episode, foundationally change the lives of every man, woman and child on Earth, but is instead used as a throwaway to set up a story about a trio of bank robbers running around for a while. There’s a weird little aside where J Edgar Jr suggests that the public explanations for what happened to Parker, Dillinger, and Capone were just cover stories, which I guess is supposed to suggest that Parker wasn’t shot 26 times in what can only be described as a turkey shoot and Capone didn’t die as an enfeebled stroke debilitated syphilitic madman. And that, in turn wouldn’t require the make-up department to affix Bonnie actress (and Saved by the Bell alum) Kiersten Warren with scars from the multiple gunshots wounds her character took to the face and allowed Polito to physically intimidating while also speaking in complete sentences and being aware of what he was and what he was doing at any given moment. And Dillinger’s death was covered up because, I dunno, I guess they didn’t want him to feel left out of the fun or something.
This is one of those episodes that’s hard to parse because no one moment connects to any other in any kind of logical way. We already covered how there’s no explanation for why these three famous gangsters are in deep freeze, and how J Edgar Jr’s motivation for thawing them is also pretty flimsy, but we also can’t dwell on any of it because there’s a lot more nuttiness to come. Bonnie wakes up from her deep freeze and immediately wants to go clubbing, which, yeah, maybe, if I was hibernating for sixty years I might want to take the sights in too. So they head to Ye Old Jazz Clubbe, presumably so she could experience a modern spin on a culture she would have already been familiar with. Also so they could get to the next beat in the story. But Bonnie doesn’t seem particularly dazzled or confused by any of the innovations she missed; the only thing that dazzles her are Johnny’s arms, which, also fair. But if the writers wanted to set up an attraction between the two there were a lot of straightforward ways they could have gone about it. Instead, then have her request a song from Johnny and then dance with Raleigh which, talk about a big matzah ball. You do a TV show where you resurrect a white woman from the early twentieth century who was born in TEXAS and have her go to a jazz club and dance with a black guy? I have questions.
And none of that matters! Bonnie (who talks like she’s from Fargo fucking Minnesota), dances with Raleigh but only has eyes for Johnny (and again, I get it, the man is super hunky). So why insert such an obviously charged sequence into the episode and then just drop it? Do you think the original idea was for her to have the relationship with Raleigh but then it was rewritten at the last minute to make Johnny the focal point so he could go on pretty much exactly the same emotional journey he took in the previous episode? Inquiring minds want to know.
Ronnie: So on the basis of the diverging plotlines I think we can safely say that “That Ol’ Gang of Mine” the Night Man episode is not a word for word recreation of “That Ol’ Gang of Mine” the Lois & Clark episode. What probably happened was someone on staff saw the L&C show and thought it was a rollicking jumping off point for our hero to have a pseudo-romance with famed criminal Bonnie Parker. Is this going to become a recurring thing? Is Johnny Domino going to go through girlfriends like Jerry Seinfeld? I guess we’ll see, but I hope not because Matt McColm isn’t the kind of actor that has chemistry with other actors. He’s best at accomplishing stunts; approximating human emotions such as love, attraction, those sorts of things are not within his skill set. Anyway, I don’t think strictly this episode should be considered plagiarism but it’s a little close for comfort. Like, at least change the title. “Bonnie & Johnny” would be a good one.
The greatest sin the show commits this hour is a waste of Jon Polito. Polito is a wonderful actor as seen in everything from Homicide: Life on the Street to Miller’s Crossing (and a number of other Coen Bros movies) and when I saw he was playing Al Capone I had expectations that of course Night Man could never begin to meet. Polito isn’t terrible but he’s not noteworthy either. Usually Night Man casts actors that meet the level of quality of the show (Donald Trump, for instance) so when they luck into an actual good one it’s annoying that they’re squandered. Ah well. Forget it, Jake, it’s Glen A. Larson-town.
“You’ll have to speak up, I’m wearing a towel.”
Chris: Yeah, I’m almost more likely to chalk the whole thing up to weird coincidence than lazy plagiarism simply because so many of the details of the story are different between the two episodes. Maybe one of the writers saw the L&C episode and then forgot it but the super broad strokes and title stuck in his mind such that it seemed more like an original idea than rip-off or homage or whatever else you might call it when it sprung to mind again. Because, think about it, why would you change so much about the first version of “That Ol’ Gang of Mine” and then keep such an obvious marker as the title? The whole thing makes more sense if you think of it more as being like when Elaine inadvertently ripped Ziggy off due to a toxic combination of deadline panic and subconscious, bedsheet related inspiration than any kind willful Nina-Copies-The-Letter-From-Chapter-Two style deception.
And while we’re on the subject of plagiarism vs homage vs shit-the-writer-forgot-he-saw, let’s all welcome, I guess, the Men in Black to the Night Man Television Universe? I’ve spoken at length in previous L&C&C&R entries of my deep and abiding affection for plotlines where you can tell what movie or TV show the writer was watching in an effort to avoid work right before their deadline. The Tempus L&C episodes were usually fertile ground for that kind of bullshit. And the in “That Ol’ Gang” we’re introduced to two, nameless, suited and sunglassed government agents who are responsible for guarding and then recapturing the frozen gangsters who are clearly intended to parody Agents J and K from what was at the time, the highest grossing film of that year (Titanic wouldn’t drop for another month). But the thing about the Men in Black is, they’re already parodies? Like, that’s the whole idea? They’re a comedic riff on the idea of the anonymous, super competent, all knowing government agent/bureaucrat that was so big at the time? The 90s were rife with weirdo conspiracies involving government agencies covering up presidential assassinations and coups in faroff lands and either fighting off or aiding and abetting alien invasions. Men In Black was an ultra dry comedic riff on that trope, and in “That Ol’ Gang”, Night Man is trying to riff on the riff. Do you know how good you have to be to successfully parody a parody?
The bridge is a place for couples to make out, not for people to commit suicide as you assumed.
No really, I’m asking, because however good that is, Night Man not only doesn’t hurtle the bar, it trips over its own shoelaces in the run up, falls on its face and farts in front of God, the viewing audience and everyone.
I will say that I did genuinely smile at Bonnie using the phrase “High Hat” in conversation with Capone. A nice, subtle, reference in a sea of loud, blunt ones.
Odds & Ends
-The credited writer, Doug Heyes Jr., is a real piece of work, by which I mean he’s a lunatic. The “about the author” section of a book he wrote describes his life as such: “Following a life-changing personal healing,Doug Heyes discovered “The Touch” – the gift for healing he describes as “the natural birthright of all human beings. ” He left a successful career in show business to plunge headlong into the waters of holistic health and healing“. The question of whether ten Silk Stalkings scripts makes for a “successful career in show business” aside, building an entire framework from that song from Transformers: The Movie is no way to go through life.
-“Alcohol neutralizes the effect of the serum” – Hoover Jr. to Bonnie. I want to see an alternate version where Night Man wins the day by getting the gangsters hammered.
-Not a Bonnie Parker aficionado but I’m reasonably certain she’d never call anyone a “big palooka”. Yet again Night Man is confusing people with Fantastic Four’s The Thing.
-Dillinger calls Night Man “a flying flashlight”, which is great.
Night Man Nights: “Lady in Red”/”That Ol’ Gang of Mine”
1X09 “LADY IN RED”
Ronnie: Welcome again to the pain train that is Night Man. In the 9th episode of 44 episodes–yes, 44 episodes–Night Man…falls in love? Maybe! He’s definitely taken with the mysterious woman he witnesses getting beat on in a parking garage. Petra Medved, no relation to Michael, is a Russian emigre with a mysterious past and more importantly a rockin’ bod. She does a “George Costanza leave behind” of her hotel key so Johnny would come calling because he’s a shallow horn dog and true to form… Meanwhile, Frank continues his flagrant flouting of the law by doing off the books investigations of Petra’s associates, one of whom is named Stepov. You gotta come up with a better name than that, because every right thinking person will immediately think of Elaine’s mimbo boyfriend telling George to “step off”. (I can and will cram in as many Seinfeld references as possible in this article. Who’s gonna stop me, fuckin’ Donald Trump?) This snooping lands Frank a beat down and a trip to the hospital while Johnny and Petra are cavorting on the beach like a couple of Baywatch Nights characters.
“Johnny, before you do anything… Delete my Internet search history.”
Johnny uses his frequency of evil powers as a party trick and finds out from that that not only is she an ex-KGB assassin, she killed Sean Archer’s kid at the beginning of Face/Off…or something pretty similar to it. This doesn’t dissuade Johnny from wanting to fuck her, you see, because she’s a victim of circumstance: Heywood Jablomeoff threatens her sister whenever she doesn’t agree to take an assignment. So what if she shot a kid? She didn’t mean it, and that’s all that matters. It’s all very stereotypical, with talk of May Day parades and the old country. Look, it was 1997, the Soviet Union had fallen and capitalism was hollowing out Russia, so storytellers felt obliged to tell one of like three stories they had about post-Soviet life. Everyone’s either an assassin or nursing a dangerous alcohol dependency or both.
If this isn’t about Johnny trying to redeem a trained killer with his dick and his superheroics, “Lady in Red” highlights the dangerous dependency that has taken root in Johnny and Frank’s relationship. Johnny misses a baseball game the pair were meant to attend so instead of assuming his son is looking for strange or shooting up like any decent jazz musician would be, Frank tails Stepov and ends up getting the shit kicked out of him for snooping on organized criminals just because his son didn’t catch a mid-August Giants game. This combined with Frank pretending he’s still a cop without the aegis of official employment makes him a dangerous and delusional old man. No wonder Kim Coates would eventually be able to kill him via a phony “sheriff of the Ultraweb” job offer. (Spoilers, I know, but also who cares.) In the hospital, Frank asks Johnny “son, what is it about this girl that has you so fascinated”? Well, it’s like how Batman is attracted to Catwoman and Talia al Ghul: good guys love the bad girl, especially if they think they can “fix” her.
Fix her Johnny does, or tries to do, as he uses his superheroic persona to fight a number of Russian gangsters who exploit “The Ice Lady of Petrovia”. As is typical the fight scenes are really poorly choreographed, though Night Man does say “drinks are on me” and then he smashes a couple of vodka bottles over some goons’ heads. That’s probably his funniest one-liner yet in the series, partially because he also may have killed those men with blunt force trauma to the head. Night Man kills some people in this episode, as he does most episodes. It sure is alarming given most superheroes circa 1997 still adhered to a no killing code. Perhaps disgraced rapist Warren Ellis saw Night Man and that inspired the brutal interventionist ways of The Authority. Prove me wrong, you limey groomer fuck!
Chris: I love how incoherent the opening credits for Night Man are. Every episode begins with a wordless, saxophone-scored sequence that starts closeup of Johnny Domino AKA Night Man’s eyes, followed by a short montage of shots of a city at night intercut with footage of him driving in his car, which ends with him pulling up in front of a jazz club. Then it cuts inside the club where Johnny, who is standing next to an empty stage, pulls a garage door opener looking object out of his pocket, it cuts to a close-up of the doohickey in his hand so we can see him push a button, then cuts wide again to where a copy of Johnny holding a saxophone appears on stage (with the OG Johnny still in shot so we see that it’s a double) who begins to play the sax. They then cut to a reverse of the previous angle so the musician Johnny is in the foreground and original Johnny, now in the background, smiles with satisfaction and walks out of frame. It’s only then that they cut to him suiting up, doing action things, and including footage of other characters. It’s seventeen seconds (the first seventeen seconds) of a minute-long sequence devoted entirely to establishing how Night Man gets out of going to work. And after all that, the show cuts to a different montage, this one narrated, that explains who Night Man is, how his powers work and what the deal with his special equipment is. It’s information that would’ve been super useful in that sequence too, because no one tuning in blind would see that opening and think “oh yeah, okay, he’s one of those jazzman who has his own portable three dimensional hard light hologram of himself in case he needs to establish an alibi while fighting crime”. We spend a lot of time in this column guessing which contemporaneous pop culture nonsense the BTS Night Man crew were familiar with, but I refuse to believe none of them had seen Quantum Leap. We all know they’re perfectly aware of the fact that it was possible to open a TV show with a credits sequence that begins with expository narration explaining the premise and then segues into wordless montage. Everybody knows that.
As for the episode itself, I have to say it feels like a step backwards. I understand the thinking behind trying to do a smaller, more intimate episode of your TV show after a broad mythology episode and then one that takes a stab at social relevance, but the problem with small and intimate is you need actors for that and the producers of Night Man never got around to actually doing that. Say what you will about Lois & Clark (and we’ve said more than anyone ever should), but they had a TV ringer in Teri Hatcher and as for Dean Cain, well, he’s a better actor than Gestapo Storm Trooper. He didn’t have a whole lot of range and had a tendency to look confused and/or constipated when he was supposed to be angry or intense, but he pulled off the affectionate Clark stuff with a fair amount of aplomb (this is the nicest thing I will ever say about anyone who ever got a volunteer job with ICE). Matt McColm is a very handsome man who’s good at kicking and wears the hell out of a white t-shirt, but he is in no way shape or form an actor. At the end of the ep he has to do some narration and he delivers it with the intensity of a belligerent eight grader being forced to read an essay he wrote about his grandmother to the entire class. I swear I could see him glaring at the floor while I listened to it. And as for the actress who played Petra, do you know how bad you have to be for your own accent to sound fake?
I think the trick for the kind of bad that Night Man is that it needs to be going a hundred miles an hour from soup to nuts. And I don’t mean like the hundred miles an hour that a pro like Tony Scott could pull off, I mean it needs to be the manic, panicky, are-we-gonna-cross-the-finish-line-before-this-shakes-apart hundred miles an hour energy of the amateur who is in over their head and is on the verge of tears. Like the previous two eps. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed watching Johnny and his new girlfriend frolicking on the beach like a couple of assholes as much as the next guy, but that should just be the baseline for a show like this. I want to see them playing volleyball and that game where they’re in the water with another couple and the girls are on the boys shoulders trying to shove each other into the surf. They should be eating ice-cream and one of them boops the other on the nose with the ice-cream and then the booper mashes their entire cone into the face of the boopee and then both fall down laughing. There should have been a moment where they got to play frisbee with a dog. And it all needed to be cut to “Something Tells Me I’m into Something Good” like in the original Naked Gun. You know, sick-o shit.
Raleigh, this is a costume party, not a freakin’ Pride float.
Ronnie: I think “Lady in Red” is interesting in how it depicts post-Soviet collapse Russia, by which I mean Russia is portrayed as being full of thieves and assassins. It’s Orientalism by any other name to be sure. It’s an exotic and mysterious place of intrigue, and that is in keeping with the perception at the time. Something tells me Glen A. Larson and company did not have a firm grasp on 90s Russia and how the influx of Western capitalism created severe income inequality and a precipitous drop in life expectancy among the citizenry. I could go on and quote some issues of The eXile but I don’t think that’s necessary. It’s just funny that Night Man is given an opportunity to maybe say something about anything and that is stymied by the program’s own adherence to its bullshit formula of jazzman nonsense.
I transcribed Johnny’s final spiel about his lost lady love for posterity’s sake. “People have been asked to do things in the name of honor, country, even God, for thousands of years. All too often the deeds demand sacrifices, which in the harsh light of dawn, are meaningless. Such was the life of Petra Medved, who died for her country twenty years after it seized [sic–I know it should be “ceased” but that dummy Matt McColm DEFINITELY says “seized”) to exist. I’ve only known her three days, but my life would be changed forever.” All while this interior monologue is going on the jagoff is playing saxophone on the roof of the House of Soul. When in doubt, sax the shit out of things. I like his sendoff to Petra because it’s like when Ricky from Trailer Park Boys tries to sound intellectual. That’s about the level of intellectual rigor that Johnny espouses. As for Petra changing Johnny’s life forever, I’ll bet my Cabin Boy blu-ray that she’s never brought up again in the series. That’s not hollow either, cause that Cabin Boy disc runs for like $90 on eBay now.
Is that really considered front page news in Bay City? Jesus H.
Chris: One of my very favorite MST3K bits was from the It Conquered the World episode. The (Roger Corman directed) movie closes with this hilariously overwrought Peter Graves speech about Lee Van Cleef’s doomed anti-hero: “He learned almost too late that man is a feeling creature… and because of it, the greatest in the universe. He learned too late for himself that men have to find their own way, to make their own mistakes. There can’t be any gift of perfection from outside ourselves. And when men seek such perfection, they find only death… fire… loss… disillusionment… the end of everything that’s gone forward. Men have always sought an end to the toil and misery, but it can’t be given, it has to be achieved! There is hope, but it has to come from inside, from man himself.” They don’t riff the speech or anything, it just plays and that’s the end of the movie (Joel makes some bland wow, makes you think style comment when they’re leaving the theater but that’s about it). Afterward, the post movie segment is Joel and the Bots watching the end of the movie on a little TV while wearing matching after-show-cool-off-style robes and picking at TV dinners. They play the whole speech again except this time you’re not watching the scene you’re hearing it while you watch Joel and the Bots watching. Then, they cut to Mads and they’re watching it and you hear the speech again. All the way through. Then they cut to the credits and instead of the usual theme music you get the entire speech again. They even start it again for the little post-credit button. They play it four times in a row. Four. And there are no jokes. There are no jokes or dialogue of any kind. It’s just the speech over and over and over and over again.
I don’t think they were making fun of the speech exactly? Like, they clearly think it’s goofy and melodramatic, but I never got the sense the show was shitting on or looking down on it. Instead, it’s almost like they’re impressed that a Z grade sci-fi movie about a giant, psychic, space cucumber looking alien that tries to take over Earth would have the audacity to try and close by making its audience think about the fractured nature of man? I don’t think the speech moved them at all, but I do wonder if the people behind the scenes of that weird little, gonzo premised, no-budget, Minneapolis based, puppet sci-fi/comedy show didn’t feel a kind of kinship with the galaxy brained ambition of guys like Corman. And, kind of ironically, I don’t think MST had even the slightest interest in making any kind of comment on the nature of man, fractured or otherwise, but that show is something like thirty five years old and it’s still around and has spawned a whole bunch of spin-offs and became one of the most influential comedy shows of its era and I don’t know if you last that long and make that big an impression on the larger culture without tapping into something about the nature of man (or women, or anyone)?
Imagine if Matt McColm cameoed in Doomsday or Secret Wars. Disney would make 3 billion dollars easy.
I can’t help but think about that when Night Man makes its own little stab at profundity, and how without MST you and I wouldn’t be wasting our time picking on this dumb little show and its outsized ambitions. Night Man’s janky, DIY, best-actors-we-could-find-at-the-bus-depot cast are so in over their heads and it’s a miracle they were able to scrape together anything that even remotely resembles conventional television. The average Night Man production budget was probably less than the catering budget of an episode of Lois & Clark, and I have it on good authority that the catering budget for L&C was a plastic red cup full of quarters on a folding chair in between two vending machines a couple of lots over. Night Man wasn’t working with much is what I’m saying. So should I maybe go easier on them? Try not to be so smug and superior? Should I rein in the cheap shots about the community theater understudy level of acting, stop pointing out how cheap it all looks and narratively incoherent it all is? Yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes. I’m not going to, but, you know, that doesn’t mean that I don’t know that I should. And isn’t that, in its own way, the really important thing?
Odds & Ends
-Tubi should not allow “skip intro” as an option. Not for this show. That’s a load bearing theme song there, guys. Why the fuck would you skip it? It’s like skipping a blow job or ice cream or some sort of horrific amalgamation called an ice cream blowjob.
-IMDB trivia dutifully informs that “Lady in Red” is a song by Chris DeBurgh from 1986. I guess all the episode names are titles of songs? I guess if NewsRadio can name a season after Led Zeppelin albums, so too can Night Man derive titles from popular and not so popular music. Man, I should rewatch NewsRadio…
-Do they come up with the titles beforehand or after the script is completed? Is it Marvel Method where Glen A. Larson says “have it be about a lady in red” and then the scriptwriter makes sure to include a lady wearing red? (Petra wears red in the first, but not any subsequent, scene.) I really want to know how these things get made. Thankfully, we’ll learn some about the creative process once we get to the episodes comics creator Steve Englehart wrote.
-”I have my sources”, Johnny tells Lt. Dann, when asked where he got info about an assassination at the annual costume party. I want to know what sources a freelance jazz musician has.
-When your last name is Domino and you name your kid Johnny, he’s Johnny for life, isn’t he? Like, you’re not calling someone John Domino or Jonathan Domino. The fuck out of here with that nonsense. It’s Johnny from the womb to the tomb.
-He learned almost too late that man is a feeling creature… and because of it, the greatest in the universe. He learned too late for himself that men have to find their own way, to make their own mistakes. There can’t be any gift of perfection from outside ourselves. And when men seek such perfection, they find only death… fire… loss… disillusionment… the end of everything that’s gone forward. Men have always sought an end to the toil and misery, but it can’t be given, it has to be achieved! There is hope, but it has to come from inside, from man himself.
1X10 “THAT OL’ GANG OF MINE”
Ronnie: “Good artists borrow, great artists steal” is how the saying goes, I believe. Well, Glen A. Larson might be the greatest artist of all time by that metric, because he has a long and storied history of plagiarism over the course of his 300 television shows. Wikipedia says James Garner punched him through a motor home once after a dispute over Larson cribbing from The Rockford Files. The plagiarism manifests in Larson recycling his old shows in new shows, like an upcoming Night Man that incorporates footage from The Highwayman, as well as ripping off other people’s programs. “That Ol’ Gang of Mine” seems to be taking heavy inspiration from Lois & Clark’s episode “That Ol’ Gang of Mine”, in which a scientist creates clones of Bonnie, Clyde, Capone and Dillinger. In Night Man’s “That Ol’ Gang of Mine”, Capone, Dillinger and Bonnie (but NOT Clyde) are brought back via suspended animation. The Lois & Clark show predates this one by three years, so it’s pretty evident that by episode 10 of Night Man they already had to purloin ideas from better shows. That Lois & Clark is a “better show” is a stunning indictment of Night Man.
Polito is thinking “if only I hadn’t squabbled with Tom Fontana. I could be acting against Andre Braugher right now!”
If you told me that I was going to watch and write about the reanimated Bonnie Parker wanting the Johnny Domino D… well honestly it’s the kind of off the wall stupid shit I ought to expect from Night Man at this point. To be fair, Lois & Clark never thought to have Bonnie joy ride the Prowler, probably because L&C was staffed by normal TV writers and not deranged maniacs. How else do you explain the decision that when Johnny reads her mind, her exploits are in black and white? There’s a more than zero chance the person who wrote this episode thinks the past took place without color. J. Edgar Hoover’s son has revived these gangsters I guess in an effort to get back at his old man’s reputation. Hoover created the fiction that Dillinger, Capone and Parker all died whereas they were just cryogenically frozen like a common Theodore Williams or Walter Disney, and he used said fiction to become a beloved American statesman. Would a loser be portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio in a Clint Eastwood joint? Whereas on L&C Rolling Thunder’s William Devane portrayed Capone, Night Man has its own ringer: Jon Polito. The year before he provided a voice in Homeward Bound II: Judgment Day and the year after he was in both The Big Lebowski and Seinfeld. I think if confronted, Polito would’ve quoted Fight Club and said “You met me at a very strange time in my life”. Who cares if Fight Club was 2 years later, we’re talking TV about reanimated Dillinger fighting fucking Night Man. Time, space, none of that shit matters. IT’S ALL BULLSHIT.
I’ll cut this short and leave it to Chris lest I have a mental breakdown trying to tease out anything comprehensible from this shit. Eventually Johnny gets into hot soup when the authorities find his Prowler as a heist getaway ride and he’s abducted by DOJ goons whose job had been to monitor the gangsters in stasis. The show never gives a good answer for why the government bothered keeping notorious criminals on ice for 70 years. The government essentially entrusts a jazz musician to sort this situation out, which sounds about right for the “hey man whatever” malaise of the scandal filled second Clinton administration. Who needs highly skilled government agents doing their jobs when you have a dipshit with a saxophone? You know who else is a dipshit with a saxophone–WILLIAM JEFFERSON CLINTON. So Johnny becomes a triple agent, working with the gangsters by putting his hair into a ponytail and pretending to be their representative while dealing with the Colombians. Lot of ins, lot of outs. “That Ol’ Gang of Mine” seems to want to make Bonnie Parker into a sympathetic character based on her affection for Johnny. Isn’t it a little soon for him to have moved on considering a woman he claimed to have loved died in his arms, uh, LAST EPISODE? I hope this isn’t like Seinfeld and Domino has a new girlfriend every week. I do hope this is like Seinfeld in that everybody winds up in jail. The amount of interference with police business should at least land Johnny, Frank and Raleigh in the hoosegow for a while.
We’re not blessed with that, unfortunately. We are blessed, however, with a pretty spectacular warehouse fight that ends with Bonnie giving Night Man a kiss “for Johnny” after he tells her that Johnny’s secured her a lifetime supply of “Hooverade” so she can start fresh. So Bonnie Parker is just out in the world? It’s fine, though, as the Men in Black still have three corpsicles to watch after: Capone, Dillinger and Hoover. Hoover is in cryogenic stasis after being shot approximately 40 times by Capone and Dillinger. Why? None of this makes any sense. I have a headache.
Chris: So, if I had to describe “That Ol’ Gang of Mine” in one word, it would probably be what the fuck. I honestly don’t know where to start this blisteringly incoherent mess, but I guess maybe the best place is the basic premise. The government has Bonnie Parker, Al Capone, and John Dillinger secretly on ice in the basement of a house somewhere in San Fran- excuse me, Bay City? And they’re being stored in upright, see-through, coffin shaped freezer units like you might have if you were displaying them at Disney World or The Mutter Museum? And they’re under the watch of former head of the FBI but long since dead J Edgar Hoover’s secret illegitimate son? And this secret son (named J Edgar Hoover, not a great first step to burying your association with the boy, J Edgar) was hidden from the public because even though Hoover liked wearing women’s clothes he also enjoyed heterosexual sex so when he had a kid he never acknowledged him so as not to undermine his reputation as a gay cross-dresser? Yeah, alright. Whatever.
Except, no, not whatever, because let’s think about this for a second. J Edgar Hoover was a real person whose private life was widely speculated about but in actuality very little was known about. That said, it’s probably bullshit that he was a cross-dresser (or at least our good friend the internet seems to doubt it). But was he gay? That seems a little murkier and a lot of people seem to think there was evidence he was. This only matters insofar as why would Night Man go out of its way to confirm that Hoover was a cross-dresser (which he wasn’t) but also insist that he was a committed lady-humper (also probably not true)? Why correct for something that didn’t happen at all? Why not just ignore it or have someone be surprised at the fact that Hoover would have a kid in an understated if-you-know-you-know fashion? Like remember in Seinfeld when Elaine was a beard for the gay guy and his boss and his boss’s wife were like oh, we didn’t expect him to have a girlfriend, and when Elaine asked why they just went no reason? Just do that.
Anyway.
More like John DULLinger
J Edgar Jr (The kids called him Jedjr!) falls in love with the frozen Bonnie, for reasons. And decides to whip up one of those cure-for-death tonics that would, like in the corresponding Lois & Clark episode, foundationally change the lives of every man, woman and child on Earth, but is instead used as a throwaway to set up a story about a trio of bank robbers running around for a while. There’s a weird little aside where J Edgar Jr suggests that the public explanations for what happened to Parker, Dillinger, and Capone were just cover stories, which I guess is supposed to suggest that Parker wasn’t shot 26 times in what can only be described as a turkey shoot and Capone didn’t die as an enfeebled stroke debilitated syphilitic madman. And that, in turn wouldn’t require the make-up department to affix Bonnie actress (and Saved by the Bell alum) Kiersten Warren with scars from the multiple gunshots wounds her character took to the face and allowed Polito to physically intimidating while also speaking in complete sentences and being aware of what he was and what he was doing at any given moment. And Dillinger’s death was covered up because, I dunno, I guess they didn’t want him to feel left out of the fun or something.
This is one of those episodes that’s hard to parse because no one moment connects to any other in any kind of logical way. We already covered how there’s no explanation for why these three famous gangsters are in deep freeze, and how J Edgar Jr’s motivation for thawing them is also pretty flimsy, but we also can’t dwell on any of it because there’s a lot more nuttiness to come. Bonnie wakes up from her deep freeze and immediately wants to go clubbing, which, yeah, maybe, if I was hibernating for sixty years I might want to take the sights in too. So they head to Ye Old Jazz Clubbe, presumably so she could experience a modern spin on a culture she would have already been familiar with. Also so they could get to the next beat in the story. But Bonnie doesn’t seem particularly dazzled or confused by any of the innovations she missed; the only thing that dazzles her are Johnny’s arms, which, also fair. But if the writers wanted to set up an attraction between the two there were a lot of straightforward ways they could have gone about it. Instead, then have her request a song from Johnny and then dance with Raleigh which, talk about a big matzah ball. You do a TV show where you resurrect a white woman from the early twentieth century who was born in TEXAS and have her go to a jazz club and dance with a black guy? I have questions.
And none of that matters! Bonnie (who talks like she’s from Fargo fucking Minnesota), dances with Raleigh but only has eyes for Johnny (and again, I get it, the man is super hunky). So why insert such an obviously charged sequence into the episode and then just drop it? Do you think the original idea was for her to have the relationship with Raleigh but then it was rewritten at the last minute to make Johnny the focal point so he could go on pretty much exactly the same emotional journey he took in the previous episode? Inquiring minds want to know.
Ronnie: So on the basis of the diverging plotlines I think we can safely say that “That Ol’ Gang of Mine” the Night Man episode is not a word for word recreation of “That Ol’ Gang of Mine” the Lois & Clark episode. What probably happened was someone on staff saw the L&C show and thought it was a rollicking jumping off point for our hero to have a pseudo-romance with famed criminal Bonnie Parker. Is this going to become a recurring thing? Is Johnny Domino going to go through girlfriends like Jerry Seinfeld? I guess we’ll see, but I hope not because Matt McColm isn’t the kind of actor that has chemistry with other actors. He’s best at accomplishing stunts; approximating human emotions such as love, attraction, those sorts of things are not within his skill set. Anyway, I don’t think strictly this episode should be considered plagiarism but it’s a little close for comfort. Like, at least change the title. “Bonnie & Johnny” would be a good one.
The greatest sin the show commits this hour is a waste of Jon Polito. Polito is a wonderful actor as seen in everything from Homicide: Life on the Street to Miller’s Crossing (and a number of other Coen Bros movies) and when I saw he was playing Al Capone I had expectations that of course Night Man could never begin to meet. Polito isn’t terrible but he’s not noteworthy either. Usually Night Man casts actors that meet the level of quality of the show (Donald Trump, for instance) so when they luck into an actual good one it’s annoying that they’re squandered. Ah well. Forget it, Jake, it’s Glen A. Larson-town.
“You’ll have to speak up, I’m wearing a towel.”
Chris: Yeah, I’m almost more likely to chalk the whole thing up to weird coincidence than lazy plagiarism simply because so many of the details of the story are different between the two episodes. Maybe one of the writers saw the L&C episode and then forgot it but the super broad strokes and title stuck in his mind such that it seemed more like an original idea than rip-off or homage or whatever else you might call it when it sprung to mind again. Because, think about it, why would you change so much about the first version of “That Ol’ Gang of Mine” and then keep such an obvious marker as the title? The whole thing makes more sense if you think of it more as being like when Elaine inadvertently ripped Ziggy off due to a toxic combination of deadline panic and subconscious, bedsheet related inspiration than any kind willful Nina-Copies-The-Letter-From-Chapter-Two style deception.
And while we’re on the subject of plagiarism vs homage vs shit-the-writer-forgot-he-saw, let’s all welcome, I guess, the Men in Black to the Night Man Television Universe? I’ve spoken at length in previous L&C&C&R entries of my deep and abiding affection for plotlines where you can tell what movie or TV show the writer was watching in an effort to avoid work right before their deadline. The Tempus L&C episodes were usually fertile ground for that kind of bullshit. And the in “That Ol’ Gang” we’re introduced to two, nameless, suited and sunglassed government agents who are responsible for guarding and then recapturing the frozen gangsters who are clearly intended to parody Agents J and K from what was at the time, the highest grossing film of that year (Titanic wouldn’t drop for another month). But the thing about the Men in Black is, they’re already parodies? Like, that’s the whole idea? They’re a comedic riff on the idea of the anonymous, super competent, all knowing government agent/bureaucrat that was so big at the time? The 90s were rife with weirdo conspiracies involving government agencies covering up presidential assassinations and coups in faroff lands and either fighting off or aiding and abetting alien invasions. Men In Black was an ultra dry comedic riff on that trope, and in “That Ol’ Gang”, Night Man is trying to riff on the riff. Do you know how good you have to be to successfully parody a parody?
The bridge is a place for couples to make out, not for people to commit suicide as you assumed.
No really, I’m asking, because however good that is, Night Man not only doesn’t hurtle the bar, it trips over its own shoelaces in the run up, falls on its face and farts in front of God, the viewing audience and everyone.
I will say that I did genuinely smile at Bonnie using the phrase “High Hat” in conversation with Capone. A nice, subtle, reference in a sea of loud, blunt ones.
Odds & Ends
-The credited writer, Doug Heyes Jr., is a real piece of work, by which I mean he’s a lunatic. The “about the author” section of a book he wrote describes his life as such: “Following a life-changing personal healing,Doug Heyes discovered “The Touch” – the gift for healing he describes as “the natural birthright of all human beings. ” He left a successful career in show business to plunge headlong into the waters of holistic health and healing“. The question of whether ten Silk Stalkings scripts makes for a “successful career in show business” aside, building an entire framework from that song from Transformers: The Movie is no way to go through life.
-“Alcohol neutralizes the effect of the serum” – Hoover Jr. to Bonnie. I want to see an alternate version where Night Man wins the day by getting the gangsters hammered.
-Not a Bonnie Parker aficionado but I’m reasonably certain she’d never call anyone a “big palooka”. Yet again Night Man is confusing people with Fantastic Four’s The Thing.
-Dillinger calls Night Man “a flying flashlight”, which is great.
Ronnie Gardocki