Ronnie: “Still of the Night”, yet another episode named after a song, is instructive for what Night Man is to be. So far the level of preposterousness in the series reached to earthquake machines and a jazz musician being the most compatible and healthy heart donor; with this episode the possibilities become endless as Nighty must fight an extradimensional being, or someone in a bad ape costume, depending on how you perceive things. The bad ape costume stops an attempted rape in a park and Night Man stops that costume from hurting the would-be victim. I like how Johnny’s just bopping out to tunes while driving his Prowler until Raleigh calls him up. Raleigh, by the way, I think invented the whole “man in the chair” shit and Batman Beyond, Arrow et al owe Night Man a debt of gratitude. The being’s blood is poisonous so both the girl and Johnny are infected, but because the latter is a hunk built like a brick shithouse he’s barely affected. The script periodically forgets he’s affected I think.
This whole escaped lab animal cockamamie cover story the authorities are fed reminds Frank (FRANK!) of a case from 8 years ago, when several people died of infections related to a beast. Night Man is prescient in predicting that the police would contract out to private companies because that’s what happens in this episode and causes Frank’s unemployed cop sense to tingle. It’s kind of amusing to see the show go through this little detective story, pretending it’s a real TV show. Eventually they track down the original scientist, a physicist of indeterminate accent who reveals 8 years ago they brought a female beast to our world, and this time the beast is male. I’d like to see an Extradimensional Beast POV episode where he plots his revenge for 8 long years.
“Jazzman dipshit, reporting for duty!”
Cut to the chase: they get to the Fargate that conjured up the creature and the evil guy (there’s always an evil guy who wants to weaponize something for someone) gets thrown through. Night Man knows the only way to develop a vaccine (ew) against the blood disease killing him and that girl is to draw blood from the creature, so there’s a particularly insane scene where Nighty tries to reason with a bad ape costume, explaining they need a syringe of blood from him. The thing is, it WORKS. The fucking monster draws some of his own blood and hands it off to Night Man! Look, if you can’t appreciate plot points like that I don’t know what you’re doing here.
Chris: I’ve been reliably informed by Ronnie that “Still of the Night” AKA “Night Man Goes X-Files” is significant not just because the show stretches its wings in terms of what other, better, 90s pop culture it can rip off, but because it’s our introduction to investigative-reporter-and-girl-in-wig Elaine Barnes (played by Robin Bliley who probably isn’t actually wearing a wig but man does it look like she is sometimes). Because what a show whose primary cast appears to be learning their lines phonetically really needs is a fast talking Howard Hawks style dizzy dame to spit out dialogue like slugs from a tommy gun. Unfortunately, they apparently couldn’t find an actress capable of delivering that kind of focused, rat-a-tat performance at their price range (which I’m assuming was “lift back and forth from the studio and two popsicles a day from the catered mini freezer”) and defaulted to plan B, find someone who made the principles look competent by comparison.
This would be scintillating if the actors had chemistry with each other or, well, anyone.
Look, I’m sure that Ms. Bliley is a delightful person who, under the right circumstances, could deliver a perfectly respectable performance on a television show. Hell, she was one of the leads on 1993’s Ultraman: The Ultimate Hero, and that’s not nothing. But I doubt Lauren Bacall would have been able to pull off what Night Man asks of her because, A. you need actual dialogue to make that shit work, and B. you need competent scene partners to bounce off of. Screwball antics without those two elements is like playing tennis against a guy in a wheelchair using a dry sponge for a ball. You can see her trying to inject some energy into her scenes with Man, but the highest volume of acting he’s capable of is “smug complacency”, so she comes off as a wild eyed maniac who may or may not be wearing a wig, raving and gesturing wildly at a guy who’s thinking about what he’s going to have for dinner or something.
And again, it’s easy to make fun of these actors because they’re terrible at their jobs and should have gone into a career in hydroponics or gotten involved in some kind of pyramid scheme instead. But it’s also important to remember that this show is insane, and no one could look good in it. Take the opening scene with the couple. It goes on for a while. I get it, it’s Halloween time (“Still of the Night” aired in mid-October) and they’re going for that classic scary story opening of the boy and the girl in the car at night. But they really get into it. Like he tries something and she’s like no, gentle but firm; and he tries again, and she’s like c’mon, I said no, a little stronger but still willing to give him some kind of benefit of the doubt; and he tries again and she says something like you’re ruining this, which, Jesus, buddy, this girl is cutting you a lot of slack and you seem determined to blow it, and he tries again at which point she’s finally had enough and leaves. Why did that have to go on for so long? Were the creatives at Night Man trying to make some kind of statement? Because maybe some dude somewhere was watching that and getting a message about the importance of boundaries, but any tension or seriousness the show created dissipates the moment the handsy boy gets bodied by the guy in the ape costume.
It was a great day for the production when someone nabbed a costume out of the dumpster behind the Power Rangers set.
Ronnie: I think the creatives (lol) at Night Man just wanted to do the classic “bigger situation interceding on a situation”, as an extradimensional being interrupting a guy trying very hard to rape a woman. It is funny to think Glen Larson’s son, being given the ability to write a script, wanted to include a brief message on consent. It’d be forward thinking for sure; the 90s were still pretty retrograde in a lot of ways. Yet any attempt is muddled by the fact that it’s a stupid moment and a bad script written by morons.
More evidence the show is written by morons is that Night Man is a poor excuse for a superhero. By superhero standards, even live action television superhero standards, he does not pass muster. Instead of patrolling the streets in search of danger like a regular hero, Night Man tools around in his Prowler until his black heterosexual lifemate calls him up and tells him of a disturbance. I think this episode features the first time Night Man’s actually saved someone; other times he’s just beaten up bad guys, not proactively removed someone from danger. He doesn’t fare well in fights, getting his ass kicked by the extradimensional entity to the point that the laser eye is hanging out of his mask. The dad does the majority of the investigative work. Like it or not, though, this is our superhero, and Bay City is at his whims. If he doesn’t decide to take action, they’ll be besieged by earthquake criminals, heart thieves or bad ape costumes.
Chris: Hey, what happened to the one guy who spends most of the episode sitting in a chair and gleefully waving an air-baton around while listening to classical music like he was conducting the Policemen’s Benevolent Association Orchestra or something? Did the monster thing eat him or what? I’m not going to go to the trouble of looking at the episode to check, because fuck Night Man, but we spent an awful lot of time with that jerk and if he doesn’t show up again I think I might feel ripped-off. Or maybe I won’t. Honestly, who cares? This isn’t a show designed to be concentrated on or remembered. It’s a money laundering scheme that was made to be sold directly to hospitals so they’d have something to broadcast with the sound off in the Emergency Room at 3 AM. Hey did you notice that the girl who got attacked in the cold open was Chuck’s older sister Ellie from the NBC Show Chuck? That’s gotta mean something to someone, right?
Battle Damaged Night Man toy: coming to shelves never.
Look, the thing about Lois & Clark is it had the benefit of being based on characters with over fifty years of stories and continuity to dip into and reform as it saw fit. They didn’t have to invent Clark Kent or Lois Lane or Lex Luthor, they just had to interpret them. The vast majority of people tuning in to that show have a strong working knowledge of who the main characters are and what their deals are, and that makes it incomparably easier than making shit up out of whole cloth because that means the writers, directors, actors and viewers are all meeting these people at the same time. And if you’re trying to get viewers invested in a world with science fiction or supernatural elements it’s even harder because you keep slowing shit down and reminding everyone how shit works. So there’s a part of me that wants to cut Night Man a little slack, because what they’re trying to pull off is really hard. But then I remember that no one forced anyone to make this shit, and no one forced the producers to cast “talent” that Corky St. Clair wouldn’t have put in Red White and Blaine. So fuck this show. And fuck me for watching it. Thanks for reading, though.
Odds & Ends
-Armadrillion: what Night Man’s costume is made of, apparently
-The episode is written by D.G. Larson. I’m surprised it took us 5 episodes for nepotism to rear its entitled head.
-Cutting from the villain air conducting a classical music piece that was clearly created by one man with a synthesizer to Johnny driving around and rocking out to generic electric guitar rock n roll is the most succinct encapsulation of this show so far.
-Frank needs a hobby.
1X06 “FACE TO FACE”
Ronnie: Let’s get it out of the way instead of dancing around it: yes, Donald Trump is in this episode. American President Donald Trump. The president you elected. When The Donald fascination was at an all time high I had the hope/fear that the Night Man guest appearance would be dredged up like his efforts in Ghosts Can’t Do It or, more famously, in Home Alone 2: Secret of the Ooze. Alas, people ignored it like they have the series as a whole. I suppose I’m happy about that; we don’t need fucking tourists ruining the Night Man scene. Anyway, “Face to Face” is about a guy who gains shapeshifting powers and one of his initial actions is to impersonate Donald Trump and withdraw money from his account. I imagine Trump agreed to this because it establishes he has a lot of cash in his checking account and isn’t horribly in debt to everyone everywhere all the time. The cameo itself is baffling: it’s difficult to tell if Trump knew what was going on and the bank is pretty obviously a greenscreen. It becomes noticeable that Trump never appears in the same shot as anybody else, and that the actorly task of standing, walking, sitting down and spouting maybe 3 lines of dialogue is beyond his means. Trump’s appearance reminds me of video game NPC, which fits because I don’t think the guy has an inner life in real life either. It’s just blank tape. As a guest shot, it’s confusing and also disappointing, because I wanted to see Night Man use his evil sense to see all the rapes and financial crimes Trump is responsible for and decide to laser his weiner off. We can’t always get what we want, however, and Night Man remains a bizarre footnote in the career of our dumbest president (so far).
“Desperado” plays
“Face to Face” is notable within the show because it’s the first time Night Man has been up against an actual supervillain. Last episode introduced aliens and this one introduces a supervillain. Cyril O’Reilly–the actor, not the Oz inmate–plays E. Haskell Bridges, who gains chameleon abilities after facial reconstructive surgery. One of the first things he does is frame Johnny’s piano playing buddy and city councilman Lee Prescott for the attempted murder of the mayor. (The same mayor from “Whole Lotta Shakin’…”, which is a nice touch of continuity.) He then tries to burn down the House of Soul, which I don’t think would require face changing powers but whatever. Johnny stops the fire and saves Jessica. (Remember her? Owner of the club? In the main credits?) This is all part of his revenge scheme against Johnny’s dad and Lt. Dann, the men responsible for sending him up. He committed financial crimes so shouldn’t he be hassling the SEC? For Dann, Bridges impersonates him at a fancy party and asks a Scotland Yard guest of honor “When are you limeys going to get out of Northern Ireland?”, throws a drink in the guy’s face and punches the police chief in the face. Spectacular performance by Michael Woods, and you should know we don’t throw the words “spectacular performance” around willy nilly with this show.
I gotta say, this gets more and more surreal every time I see it.
Facey (that’s my nickname for E. Haskell Bridges)’s plan, outlined:
1. Withdraw $10,000 as Donald Trump.
2. Send Lee Prescott to prison for attempted murder of the mayor.
3. Ruin Lt. Dann’s career by pretending to be him drunk at a party.
4. As Dann, shoot Frank on the Golden Gate Bridge.
He didn’t account for Night Man headbutting him and throwing him into the water. Another adversary killed by OUR HERO, folks! …Or was he?
Chris: Hey, what exactly is “the frequency of evil”? Because to me it implies malicious intent and deliberate amorality. Like, say I have a really bad day at work and decide (for a moment) to break the windows of my boss’ car or take a shit on her desk (you thought the hypothetical boss was a man, didn’t you? Well wake up! Women can be abusive bosses too! Like Jen Aniston in that one movie and maybe the sequel that I never watched!). That, to me, would qualify as an evil thought, because my desire would be to derive satisfaction from causing another person pain or distress. Even if I never actually went through with it, I could never honestly deny that the potential didn’t exist within me. But say I’m a little old lady(or your typical 2nd Amendment White Guy) and when the doorbell chimes I look through the peephole and see a face that I can’t be sure is 100% white, so I grab the Sig Sauer P320 9mm handgun that I keep locked and loaded on a little table against the wall right where I’m standing for the inevitable moment trouble came a knockin, and empty the clip into the door. And imagine when, after I shakily reload and fire off a few more shots, just to be sure, I open what’s left of the door to check for any more gang members that might be skulking about, and see that the person who’d rang my bell hadn’t been a tatted out, seven foot tall, three hundred pound, muscle bound thug in a doo-rag toting an Uzi, but had instead been a young woman, somewhere around five foot two and probably weighed something like a hundred, hundred and ten pounds (she does appear to be Latina, or possibly Italian, so, you know, could have been worse).
This is the House of Soul’s equivalent of Riker growing a beard.
The point is, while I may have done something technically bad, my intentions were entirely pure. I was in fear for my life from an imminent threat on my own property and I exercised my second amendment right to stand my ground and defend my home. Sure, the suspect on my porch hadn’t been a gang banger looking to terrorize honest, upstanding citizens such as myself and in fact had been a young mother from a few blocks over who it turns out I’d actually met at church on more than one occasion and who’s three year old just needed to use the bathroom, but things happen in the fog of war and next time it really could be a pimped out Blood or Shark with gold teeth and shiny rims looking for houses to rob or kids to traffic, and if (let’s be real, when) that does happen you can’t hesitate for even a second, or you and your loved ones would end up dead, face down in puddles of their own blood. And wouldn’t that be the real tragedy? Hypothetically? It would have been the desire to ward off that horrific slaughter that would have led to my accidentally (but legally) shooting an innocent girl 35 times and inadvertently killing her. Sure, that would be regrettable, but my intentions were far from what you’d call evil. If anything, they were honorable and even heroic.
So I think we can agree that the idea of “evil” in terms of intent is vague at best, but if you were to try to define it in terms of cause and effect it’s actually even harder to pin down because the entire idea of effect presumes a definitive conclusion from which moral value can be determined. Like, say I rob a bank. Say I do it like Clooney in Out of Sight (except for the getting caught part). I walk into a bank, say to a teller that a random dude with an open briefcase is my partner and he has a gun that he’ll start using if she doesn’t give me all the money in her till, which she does, handing over a couple thousand dollars. Nobody gets hurt, there was never any actual chance anyone could be hurt, and the bank is out a pittance that is covered by insurance. But that poor teller is pretty shook up. She has nightmares for months that lead her to seek counseling and she ends up quitting her job. That all sounds bad, right? But what if she never really liked that job and was staying more for security than anything; what if the jarring experience of the robbery inspires her to finally pursue her dream because life is short and nowhere is really that secure and if not now, when? And what if she regularly stopped at one of those funky little coffee places for hipster trash on her way to therapy and struck up a friendship with a cute barista with anxiety issues and they bonded over their shared trauma and the friendship deepened into love and they got married? That only happens if I rob the bank. And, fuck it, let’s take it one step further, what if I hadn’t robbed the bank and the teller had never started therapy and didn’t meet the barista and he (yeah, baristas can be men, it’s 2025 getcherheadouttayerass!) has a series of escalating anxiety attacks that end with him taking his own life? Does that make robbing a bank somehow morally virtuous? Not really, but it’s also inarguable that the teller spending the rest of her (single) life at a mediocre job and the barista committing suicide is a much sadder outcome than a bank temporarily having less cash on hand.
These are the kind of weighty moral and philosophical issues that Night Man asks us to wrestle with.
Ronnie: I think this marks a turning point of sorts with the show because it’s really the first episode you can classify as a superhero adventure. Sure, he’d thwarted bad guys before, Night Man had, but he hadn’t fought with a supervillain, i.e., a criminal with some sort of special ability. This could be a Spider-Man comic with the Chameleon in the place of E. Haskell Bridges is what I’m saying. Now, does Night Man do a good job of putting forth a superhero story? Not really. The end “fight” is shitty even by this show’s standards and E. Haskell Bridges is more smarmy than scary. The result is a confusing hour of television mired in preposterous production decisions. AKA an episode of Night Man. But I do hope to see more supervillains in the show s we continue. Of course, the biggest supervillain in “Face to Face” happens to be a fucking guy with TINY HANDS, am I right?
That famous San Francisco fog
Chris: I basically agree that this is the first episode to feel like a terrible superhero show instead of some other kind of terrible show. There’s a guy with a specific grudge who gains a special ability through quack science that he uses to try and ruin the people he had a grudge against. In that sense, it resembles a professional hour-long television drama. But my god, the lack of basic filmmaking skills is breathtaking. It’s not just that there were shots out of focus, there was a two shot (you can tell I’m a savvy cinephile by the way I casually use industry slang like “two shot”) where Night Man is talking to someone and he’s out of focus and the person he’s talking to is in focus, and then that other person starts talking and the fucking camera focuses on Night Man. Do you understand what I’m saying? The shot started out of focus and then, as the scene progressed and the action moved to the area of the shot that was in focus, the dp changed the focus. Who does that? That was the best take they had? This wasn’t some fancy mobile True Detective oner (man, I’m throwing all sorts of jargon around!) that follows Night Man as he navigates some complicated geography, and it’s not some lengthy static shot where the actors are moving all around in the frame. It’s a ten second or whatever medium, two. One of the easiest shots in the world. And they fucked it up twice in that ten or whatever seconds! It’s madness!
Odds & Ends
-I strongly believe if Bill Clinton never played saxophone on Arsenio this show would’ve never existed.
-”In the future, someone might be able to alter his features enough to look like a totally different person” – the doctor’s entire explanation for why Haskell can change his face, hair and height
-the House of Soul becomes the House of SWING with the first appearance of Big Time Operator, a band you’ll learn to know and love
-Haskell practices his Charlie Dann impression by saying “hey Frank, you’re under arrest”, putting the episode’s Frank count into the stratosphere
-The funniest thing about the Trump cameo is that it’s completely disjointed from the rest of the episode. The characters never refer to Trump by name, for instance, and the actual cameo footage is even more awkwardly staged and shot than usual. He’s clearly never on “set” with another person.
-“Ironically, the guest of honor became the victim of a crime.” Is that actually ironic? Is it?
Night Man Nights: “Still Of The Night”/”Face To Face”
1X05 “STILL OF THE NIGHT”
Ronnie: “Still of the Night”, yet another episode named after a song, is instructive for what Night Man is to be. So far the level of preposterousness in the series reached to earthquake machines and a jazz musician being the most compatible and healthy heart donor; with this episode the possibilities become endless as Nighty must fight an extradimensional being, or someone in a bad ape costume, depending on how you perceive things. The bad ape costume stops an attempted rape in a park and Night Man stops that costume from hurting the would-be victim. I like how Johnny’s just bopping out to tunes while driving his Prowler until Raleigh calls him up. Raleigh, by the way, I think invented the whole “man in the chair” shit and Batman Beyond, Arrow et al owe Night Man a debt of gratitude. The being’s blood is poisonous so both the girl and Johnny are infected, but because the latter is a hunk built like a brick shithouse he’s barely affected. The script periodically forgets he’s affected I think.
This whole escaped lab animal cockamamie cover story the authorities are fed reminds Frank (FRANK!) of a case from 8 years ago, when several people died of infections related to a beast. Night Man is prescient in predicting that the police would contract out to private companies because that’s what happens in this episode and causes Frank’s unemployed cop sense to tingle. It’s kind of amusing to see the show go through this little detective story, pretending it’s a real TV show. Eventually they track down the original scientist, a physicist of indeterminate accent who reveals 8 years ago they brought a female beast to our world, and this time the beast is male. I’d like to see an Extradimensional Beast POV episode where he plots his revenge for 8 long years.
“Jazzman dipshit, reporting for duty!”
Cut to the chase: they get to the Fargate that conjured up the creature and the evil guy (there’s always an evil guy who wants to weaponize something for someone) gets thrown through. Night Man knows the only way to develop a vaccine (ew) against the blood disease killing him and that girl is to draw blood from the creature, so there’s a particularly insane scene where Nighty tries to reason with a bad ape costume, explaining they need a syringe of blood from him. The thing is, it WORKS. The fucking monster draws some of his own blood and hands it off to Night Man! Look, if you can’t appreciate plot points like that I don’t know what you’re doing here.
Chris: I’ve been reliably informed by Ronnie that “Still of the Night” AKA “Night Man Goes X-Files” is significant not just because the show stretches its wings in terms of what other, better, 90s pop culture it can rip off, but because it’s our introduction to investigative-reporter-and-girl-in-wig Elaine Barnes (played by Robin Bliley who probably isn’t actually wearing a wig but man does it look like she is sometimes). Because what a show whose primary cast appears to be learning their lines phonetically really needs is a fast talking Howard Hawks style dizzy dame to spit out dialogue like slugs from a tommy gun. Unfortunately, they apparently couldn’t find an actress capable of delivering that kind of focused, rat-a-tat performance at their price range (which I’m assuming was “lift back and forth from the studio and two popsicles a day from the catered mini freezer”) and defaulted to plan B, find someone who made the principles look competent by comparison.
This would be scintillating if the actors had chemistry with each other or, well, anyone.
Look, I’m sure that Ms. Bliley is a delightful person who, under the right circumstances, could deliver a perfectly respectable performance on a television show. Hell, she was one of the leads on 1993’s Ultraman: The Ultimate Hero, and that’s not nothing. But I doubt Lauren Bacall would have been able to pull off what Night Man asks of her because, A. you need actual dialogue to make that shit work, and B. you need competent scene partners to bounce off of. Screwball antics without those two elements is like playing tennis against a guy in a wheelchair using a dry sponge for a ball. You can see her trying to inject some energy into her scenes with Man, but the highest volume of acting he’s capable of is “smug complacency”, so she comes off as a wild eyed maniac who may or may not be wearing a wig, raving and gesturing wildly at a guy who’s thinking about what he’s going to have for dinner or something.
And again, it’s easy to make fun of these actors because they’re terrible at their jobs and should have gone into a career in hydroponics or gotten involved in some kind of pyramid scheme instead. But it’s also important to remember that this show is insane, and no one could look good in it. Take the opening scene with the couple. It goes on for a while. I get it, it’s Halloween time (“Still of the Night” aired in mid-October) and they’re going for that classic scary story opening of the boy and the girl in the car at night. But they really get into it. Like he tries something and she’s like no, gentle but firm; and he tries again, and she’s like c’mon, I said no, a little stronger but still willing to give him some kind of benefit of the doubt; and he tries again and she says something like you’re ruining this, which, Jesus, buddy, this girl is cutting you a lot of slack and you seem determined to blow it, and he tries again at which point she’s finally had enough and leaves. Why did that have to go on for so long? Were the creatives at Night Man trying to make some kind of statement? Because maybe some dude somewhere was watching that and getting a message about the importance of boundaries, but any tension or seriousness the show created dissipates the moment the handsy boy gets bodied by the guy in the ape costume.
It was a great day for the production when someone nabbed a costume out of the dumpster behind the Power Rangers set.
Ronnie: I think the creatives (lol) at Night Man just wanted to do the classic “bigger situation interceding on a situation”, as an extradimensional being interrupting a guy trying very hard to rape a woman. It is funny to think Glen Larson’s son, being given the ability to write a script, wanted to include a brief message on consent. It’d be forward thinking for sure; the 90s were still pretty retrograde in a lot of ways. Yet any attempt is muddled by the fact that it’s a stupid moment and a bad script written by morons.
More evidence the show is written by morons is that Night Man is a poor excuse for a superhero. By superhero standards, even live action television superhero standards, he does not pass muster. Instead of patrolling the streets in search of danger like a regular hero, Night Man tools around in his Prowler until his black heterosexual lifemate calls him up and tells him of a disturbance. I think this episode features the first time Night Man’s actually saved someone; other times he’s just beaten up bad guys, not proactively removed someone from danger. He doesn’t fare well in fights, getting his ass kicked by the extradimensional entity to the point that the laser eye is hanging out of his mask. The dad does the majority of the investigative work. Like it or not, though, this is our superhero, and Bay City is at his whims. If he doesn’t decide to take action, they’ll be besieged by earthquake criminals, heart thieves or bad ape costumes.
Chris: Hey, what happened to the one guy who spends most of the episode sitting in a chair and gleefully waving an air-baton around while listening to classical music like he was conducting the Policemen’s Benevolent Association Orchestra or something? Did the monster thing eat him or what? I’m not going to go to the trouble of looking at the episode to check, because fuck Night Man, but we spent an awful lot of time with that jerk and if he doesn’t show up again I think I might feel ripped-off. Or maybe I won’t. Honestly, who cares? This isn’t a show designed to be concentrated on or remembered. It’s a money laundering scheme that was made to be sold directly to hospitals so they’d have something to broadcast with the sound off in the Emergency Room at 3 AM. Hey did you notice that the girl who got attacked in the cold open was Chuck’s older sister Ellie from the NBC Show Chuck? That’s gotta mean something to someone, right?
Battle Damaged Night Man toy: coming to shelves never.
Look, the thing about Lois & Clark is it had the benefit of being based on characters with over fifty years of stories and continuity to dip into and reform as it saw fit. They didn’t have to invent Clark Kent or Lois Lane or Lex Luthor, they just had to interpret them. The vast majority of people tuning in to that show have a strong working knowledge of who the main characters are and what their deals are, and that makes it incomparably easier than making shit up out of whole cloth because that means the writers, directors, actors and viewers are all meeting these people at the same time. And if you’re trying to get viewers invested in a world with science fiction or supernatural elements it’s even harder because you keep slowing shit down and reminding everyone how shit works. So there’s a part of me that wants to cut Night Man a little slack, because what they’re trying to pull off is really hard. But then I remember that no one forced anyone to make this shit, and no one forced the producers to cast “talent” that Corky St. Clair wouldn’t have put in Red White and Blaine. So fuck this show. And fuck me for watching it. Thanks for reading, though.
Odds & Ends
-Armadrillion: what Night Man’s costume is made of, apparently
-The episode is written by D.G. Larson. I’m surprised it took us 5 episodes for nepotism to rear its entitled head.
-Cutting from the villain air conducting a classical music piece that was clearly created by one man with a synthesizer to Johnny driving around and rocking out to generic electric guitar rock n roll is the most succinct encapsulation of this show so far.
-Frank needs a hobby.
1X06 “FACE TO FACE”
Ronnie: Let’s get it out of the way instead of dancing around it: yes, Donald Trump is in this episode. American President Donald Trump. The president you elected. When The Donald fascination was at an all time high I had the hope/fear that the Night Man guest appearance would be dredged up like his efforts in Ghosts Can’t Do It or, more famously, in Home Alone 2: Secret of the Ooze. Alas, people ignored it like they have the series as a whole. I suppose I’m happy about that; we don’t need fucking tourists ruining the Night Man scene. Anyway, “Face to Face” is about a guy who gains shapeshifting powers and one of his initial actions is to impersonate Donald Trump and withdraw money from his account. I imagine Trump agreed to this because it establishes he has a lot of cash in his checking account and isn’t horribly in debt to everyone everywhere all the time. The cameo itself is baffling: it’s difficult to tell if Trump knew what was going on and the bank is pretty obviously a greenscreen. It becomes noticeable that Trump never appears in the same shot as anybody else, and that the actorly task of standing, walking, sitting down and spouting maybe 3 lines of dialogue is beyond his means. Trump’s appearance reminds me of video game NPC, which fits because I don’t think the guy has an inner life in real life either. It’s just blank tape. As a guest shot, it’s confusing and also disappointing, because I wanted to see Night Man use his evil sense to see all the rapes and financial crimes Trump is responsible for and decide to laser his weiner off. We can’t always get what we want, however, and Night Man remains a bizarre footnote in the career of our dumbest president (so far).
“Desperado” plays
“Face to Face” is notable within the show because it’s the first time Night Man has been up against an actual supervillain. Last episode introduced aliens and this one introduces a supervillain. Cyril O’Reilly–the actor, not the Oz inmate–plays E. Haskell Bridges, who gains chameleon abilities after facial reconstructive surgery. One of the first things he does is frame Johnny’s piano playing buddy and city councilman Lee Prescott for the attempted murder of the mayor. (The same mayor from “Whole Lotta Shakin’…”, which is a nice touch of continuity.) He then tries to burn down the House of Soul, which I don’t think would require face changing powers but whatever. Johnny stops the fire and saves Jessica. (Remember her? Owner of the club? In the main credits?) This is all part of his revenge scheme against Johnny’s dad and Lt. Dann, the men responsible for sending him up. He committed financial crimes so shouldn’t he be hassling the SEC? For Dann, Bridges impersonates him at a fancy party and asks a Scotland Yard guest of honor “When are you limeys going to get out of Northern Ireland?”, throws a drink in the guy’s face and punches the police chief in the face. Spectacular performance by Michael Woods, and you should know we don’t throw the words “spectacular performance” around willy nilly with this show.
I gotta say, this gets more and more surreal every time I see it.
Facey (that’s my nickname for E. Haskell Bridges)’s plan, outlined:
1. Withdraw $10,000 as Donald Trump.
2. Send Lee Prescott to prison for attempted murder of the mayor.
3. Ruin Lt. Dann’s career by pretending to be him drunk at a party.
4. As Dann, shoot Frank on the Golden Gate Bridge.
He didn’t account for Night Man headbutting him and throwing him into the water. Another adversary killed by OUR HERO, folks! …Or was he?
Chris: Hey, what exactly is “the frequency of evil”? Because to me it implies malicious intent and deliberate amorality. Like, say I have a really bad day at work and decide (for a moment) to break the windows of my boss’ car or take a shit on her desk (you thought the hypothetical boss was a man, didn’t you? Well wake up! Women can be abusive bosses too! Like Jen Aniston in that one movie and maybe the sequel that I never watched!). That, to me, would qualify as an evil thought, because my desire would be to derive satisfaction from causing another person pain or distress. Even if I never actually went through with it, I could never honestly deny that the potential didn’t exist within me. But say I’m a little old lady(or your typical 2nd Amendment White Guy) and when the doorbell chimes I look through the peephole and see a face that I can’t be sure is 100% white, so I grab the Sig Sauer P320 9mm handgun that I keep locked and loaded on a little table against the wall right where I’m standing for the inevitable moment trouble came a knockin, and empty the clip into the door. And imagine when, after I shakily reload and fire off a few more shots, just to be sure, I open what’s left of the door to check for any more gang members that might be skulking about, and see that the person who’d rang my bell hadn’t been a tatted out, seven foot tall, three hundred pound, muscle bound thug in a doo-rag toting an Uzi, but had instead been a young woman, somewhere around five foot two and probably weighed something like a hundred, hundred and ten pounds (she does appear to be Latina, or possibly Italian, so, you know, could have been worse).
This is the House of Soul’s equivalent of Riker growing a beard.
The point is, while I may have done something technically bad, my intentions were entirely pure. I was in fear for my life from an imminent threat on my own property and I exercised my second amendment right to stand my ground and defend my home. Sure, the suspect on my porch hadn’t been a gang banger looking to terrorize honest, upstanding citizens such as myself and in fact had been a young mother from a few blocks over who it turns out I’d actually met at church on more than one occasion and who’s three year old just needed to use the bathroom, but things happen in the fog of war and next time it really could be a pimped out Blood or Shark with gold teeth and shiny rims looking for houses to rob or kids to traffic, and if (let’s be real, when) that does happen you can’t hesitate for even a second, or you and your loved ones would end up dead, face down in puddles of their own blood. And wouldn’t that be the real tragedy? Hypothetically? It would have been the desire to ward off that horrific slaughter that would have led to my accidentally (but legally) shooting an innocent girl 35 times and inadvertently killing her. Sure, that would be regrettable, but my intentions were far from what you’d call evil. If anything, they were honorable and even heroic.
So I think we can agree that the idea of “evil” in terms of intent is vague at best, but if you were to try to define it in terms of cause and effect it’s actually even harder to pin down because the entire idea of effect presumes a definitive conclusion from which moral value can be determined. Like, say I rob a bank. Say I do it like Clooney in Out of Sight (except for the getting caught part). I walk into a bank, say to a teller that a random dude with an open briefcase is my partner and he has a gun that he’ll start using if she doesn’t give me all the money in her till, which she does, handing over a couple thousand dollars. Nobody gets hurt, there was never any actual chance anyone could be hurt, and the bank is out a pittance that is covered by insurance. But that poor teller is pretty shook up. She has nightmares for months that lead her to seek counseling and she ends up quitting her job. That all sounds bad, right? But what if she never really liked that job and was staying more for security than anything; what if the jarring experience of the robbery inspires her to finally pursue her dream because life is short and nowhere is really that secure and if not now, when? And what if she regularly stopped at one of those funky little coffee places for hipster trash on her way to therapy and struck up a friendship with a cute barista with anxiety issues and they bonded over their shared trauma and the friendship deepened into love and they got married? That only happens if I rob the bank. And, fuck it, let’s take it one step further, what if I hadn’t robbed the bank and the teller had never started therapy and didn’t meet the barista and he (yeah, baristas can be men, it’s 2025 getcherheadouttayerass!) has a series of escalating anxiety attacks that end with him taking his own life? Does that make robbing a bank somehow morally virtuous? Not really, but it’s also inarguable that the teller spending the rest of her (single) life at a mediocre job and the barista committing suicide is a much sadder outcome than a bank temporarily having less cash on hand.
These are the kind of weighty moral and philosophical issues that Night Man asks us to wrestle with.
Ronnie: I think this marks a turning point of sorts with the show because it’s really the first episode you can classify as a superhero adventure. Sure, he’d thwarted bad guys before, Night Man had, but he hadn’t fought with a supervillain, i.e., a criminal with some sort of special ability. This could be a Spider-Man comic with the Chameleon in the place of E. Haskell Bridges is what I’m saying. Now, does Night Man do a good job of putting forth a superhero story? Not really. The end “fight” is shitty even by this show’s standards and E. Haskell Bridges is more smarmy than scary. The result is a confusing hour of television mired in preposterous production decisions. AKA an episode of Night Man. But I do hope to see more supervillains in the show s we continue. Of course, the biggest supervillain in “Face to Face” happens to be a fucking guy with TINY HANDS, am I right?
That famous San Francisco fog
Chris: I basically agree that this is the first episode to feel like a terrible superhero show instead of some other kind of terrible show. There’s a guy with a specific grudge who gains a special ability through quack science that he uses to try and ruin the people he had a grudge against. In that sense, it resembles a professional hour-long television drama. But my god, the lack of basic filmmaking skills is breathtaking. It’s not just that there were shots out of focus, there was a two shot (you can tell I’m a savvy cinephile by the way I casually use industry slang like “two shot”) where Night Man is talking to someone and he’s out of focus and the person he’s talking to is in focus, and then that other person starts talking and the fucking camera focuses on Night Man. Do you understand what I’m saying? The shot started out of focus and then, as the scene progressed and the action moved to the area of the shot that was in focus, the dp changed the focus. Who does that? That was the best take they had? This wasn’t some fancy mobile True Detective oner (man, I’m throwing all sorts of jargon around!) that follows Night Man as he navigates some complicated geography, and it’s not some lengthy static shot where the actors are moving all around in the frame. It’s a ten second or whatever medium, two. One of the easiest shots in the world. And they fucked it up twice in that ten or whatever seconds! It’s madness!
Odds & Ends
-I strongly believe if Bill Clinton never played saxophone on Arsenio this show would’ve never existed.
-”In the future, someone might be able to alter his features enough to look like a totally different person” – the doctor’s entire explanation for why Haskell can change his face, hair and height
-the House of Soul becomes the House of SWING with the first appearance of Big Time Operator, a band you’ll learn to know and love
-Haskell practices his Charlie Dann impression by saying “hey Frank, you’re under arrest”, putting the episode’s Frank count into the stratosphere
-The funniest thing about the Trump cameo is that it’s completely disjointed from the rest of the episode. The characters never refer to Trump by name, for instance, and the actual cameo footage is even more awkwardly staged and shot than usual. He’s clearly never on “set” with another person.
-“Ironically, the guest of honor became the victim of a crime.” Is that actually ironic? Is it?
Ronnie Gardocki