Date of airing: October 11, 1997 (CBS)
Nielsen ratings information: 13.29 million viewers, 8.8/16 in Households
It looks like this show is becoming less adventurous and more centered towards dealing with the big crime coming from the underworld of Chicago. Also, it looks like this show is becoming a little weird and absurd when it comes to the writing. A lot of things that happened during this hour gave me a headache, and I almost had to call an ambulance to drive me to the hospital because my eyes almost broke out of the back of my skull due to all the rolling. All this time, Gary was telling the US Marshal that something was fishy here, that the wedding was about to be attacked, and none of the guys in suits listened to him or investigated if there might have been something behind what Gary told them. The FBI got involved in this mess (after Gary was right about the Father being a gun-wielding mystery guy), and the US Marshals still didn’t listen to Gary and thought that he was just a disruptive man out to ruin a wedding (as if the FBI’s involvement wasn’t already doing that for the US Marshals).
Then this episode turned into something of a love affair when Genie became interested in her high school sweetheart Gary, hoping that he would give her an answer as to whether or not she should go forward with the wedding. Seriously, Genie, if you have second thoughts about your marriage with Stan after hugging your high school boyfriend whom you haven’t seen for decades, then maybe he wasn’t the reason why you got cold feet right before the wedding. Chuck said at the end that he was giving Genie and Stan six months. Judging by how troublesome their relationship was in this episode, I might give them less than that.
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| Two former lovers talk about the good old days. |
Plus, Gary truly is dealing with the Chicago underworld now. In the
previous episode, Chuck had to deal with some henchmen who wanted to
burn down a fisherman and his shack, and in this episode, Gary was
straight-up preventing an assassination plot from happening. Something
happened between 1996 and 1997 that raised the stakes ever so slightly
in this series. I don’t mind at all, but it does take away from the
family-friendly values the first season delivered, from the TOUCHED BY AN
ANGEL-type show this series wanted to be on Saturday nights on CBS. Now
the show is about arson, assassinations, people with guns, explosions,
and various federal agencies doing their job and getting interrupted by
Gary’s antics. One might hope it’s going back to where the show was
during the first few episodes, but then again, didn’t I bitch a little
bit about that modus operandi as well?
The episode was still solid though. The writers decided to bring a little more backstory into the episode and give Gary an ex-girlfriend, and in a way, he even became a special agent in this episode, showcasing what the paper can do to him when things get a little weird and dangerous and Gary decides to do everything in his power to stop a life from ending prematurely. Both elements might not have fit together well in this episode, but maybe I’m still a closeted sucker for big crime stories, waiting for a hero to come across to stop the assassin from killing the good guest characters for the sake of dark drama (I have been hoping for a decade I would like those kinds of shows, but I still don’t – BOARDWALK EMPIRE and THE SOPRANOS will forever elude me). But the reason both elements didn’t fare well here is that both premises (the wedding, and the assassination attempt) weren’t serious enough for either of the characters. If this episode had been about the wedding only, the writers could have focused on the emotional whirlwind a wedding brings, especially with how Gary and Genie were dealing with their shared past, and how they were dealing with a third man in the midst who happens to be the groom, possibly becoming an unintended victim of soap opera drama. Unfortunately, the assassination plot was almost entirely separated from either Genie or Stan (or Gary, for that matter), making the main characters of the episode collateral damage only, almost randomizing the rest of the premise and turning it into a B story. You could have cut out the assassination storyline, and it may have been a better episode, because it would have been a more emotional episode that focused on the backstory of the characters.
Granted, if Stan had been involved in the assassination, this would have been an entirely different kind of hour, one probably unsuited for the show and what CBS wanted on that timeslot, but at least it would have connected the assassination attempt to the wedding, making the episode not look like two different writers’ rooms were involved with it and then their stories were thrown together during production. In addition to all of that, Stan and Genie’s story was more interesting anyway, making me wonder why the writers couldn’t realize that beforehand, and why the episode had to be pepped up with an assassins’ thriller featuring incapable federal cops, including a tiny Whodunit mystery and an action setpiece blowing up the C story that served as comic relief (the truck man and the constant accidents he gets into). The first season of the show was mostly character-focused, with Gary being pressured to be more than he thought he was by the paper, or the guest character of the week with their troubled life that needs fixing, but now the show has clearly gotten off the rails, just a tad bit.
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| The US Marshal has finally listened to Gary. |
Did I say this episode was solid? Well, I did. It was definitely not a shady episode, but still, there was something about this hour that came close to a betrayal of what the show was before, especially in its previous episode, when Gary had to deal with a suicide attempt. Why even include the Genie/Gary backstory when all you wanted was an assassins’ thriller with guns and explosions? Why even include an assassination plot when the reason for it was to put some thrill in an otherwise character-centric episode? This episode was a mess. But it was a solid mess. Consider me confused.
