Date of airing: December 5, 1998 (CBS)
Nielsen ratings information: 9.68 million viewers, 6.5/12 in Households
written by: Alex Taub and Sean Clark
directed by: Gary Nelson
This episode was so outside the realm of what EARY EDITION has been doing for two and a half seasons that it made for a completely different series. Yet this episode was fun as heck and gave me joy, especially during the last 15-or-so minutes, when the great mission was to bust a conman with a con. A Mission: Impossible, if you will. This hour had a villain, it had a band of heroes, it had a bunch of victims that needed help and/or revenge, and it had a plot that could have been the TV version of OCEAN’S ELEVEN, only without the action and thrill of robbing a bank and such.
I do like those long con premises, especially when the characters that got conned decide to hit back with their own con, proving that karma always hits you back when you expect it the least. But it is noticeable how the writers came up with a simple and random story, so they can fill another hour of television without particularly thinking about how much sense that story makes within the scope of the show’s premise, as well as the characters' lives. Not to mention that Gary and Erica’s con was way too complex to have happened without a single hitch. First of all, I am stunned that Gary, the man who needs clues written in black on white paper to understand what he is supposed to do, could even come up with such a complicated plan, which involved creating a fake persona for himself and Erica, play out a fake shooting in a bar, and even synchronize different timelines to perfection, so that a random police detective walks straight into Stanley Hollenbeck on the street, so an arrest can be made.How convenient that everything went on as planned, so that a conman can be brought to justice without getting gunned down by a random sweet old lady on the streets of Chicago.
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| Gary can't crawl away from his mother any faster. |
Still, it was an entertaining episode. One that does not define the show for what it is, and one that might not even be the best episode of the series, but I was amused nonetheless, and I had fun watching Gary and Erica play their fake personas, seemingly having fun doing so (at least Erica did), while trying to get to know each other a little more and hopefully starting to go on romantic evenings together soon. I especially liked Erica slipping into her Southern accent, making me wonder where she got that from and why this might have been Swanson's finest performance in her career – she could have played the blond bombshell or starlet in a story set during the 1920s to 1940s, turning all the men crazy by robbing them blind. The typical villainess who would not stop pumping you full of metal. What a shame that Swanson became a bit of a starlet for real, ruining a marriage (she and her SKATING WITH CELEBRITIES dance partner started dating on said show that aired on FOX in early 2006, which ended his marriage to a woman eight months pregnant) and becoming quasi-blacklisted by being the supporter of a political Nazi.
Anyway, I would have loved for Gary and Erica’s con to have been a little longer than just a third of the episode that it was, because I would have loved to see some Gary/Erica action here, with the two slowly figuring out that they like each other, and like spending time with one another. And let's not forget that Erica just accepted being Gary's partner in crime here, so one might think that the two have a bit of an understanding and there is more to that than meets the eye. If Gary's mother can see it, then so should either Gary or Erica. They partnered up to put n evil guy to the ground – if that is not the best way to fall in love, then I don’t know what is.
In a way, this episode may have had the first true villain of the show – one who might be able to break out of jail at one point, go back to Chicago and exact revenge on Gary and Erica, kind of like Sideshow Bob always does on THE SIMPSONS. But I guess Stanley Hollenbeck was too nice a villain to be a bad guy like that, although maybe he really is the baddest and most evilest of them all, considering he did not at all freak out after the shooting in the bar started happening and he essentially witnessed a cold-blooded murder. A few seconds later he started to realize what may have happened (probably when he realized he did not have the money with him), and was about to step into the bar again. Normally, when a shooting happens right in front of you, you either crap your pants and run away quickly, or you just freak out and have a nervous breakdown in the corner. But Stanley was calm while Erica played the murderous girlfriend, pulling out her fake revolver to shoot her fake husband like she was part of a detective noir thriller story set during the 1940s in Chicago, in which people die at any given moment. Maybe that is why the last part of the episode felt so funny – Erica was so deep in her role, she seemed to have wanted to just draw her gun and do the shooting, because she knew this would be straight-up fun to do.
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| The ultimate revenge comes with a loaded revolver. |
Meanwhile, I kind of loved that Gary and his mother Lois teamed up as well, even if it meant the writers did not have time for a proper mother/son storyline here, due to the notion that Lois was one of the victims of Stanley's con. Lois could have been replaced by a random character who happened to be one of Stanley’s victims and who knows Gary from before (maybe another character who has appeared before – how about retired Detective Crumb?), but I guess having that victim be Gary’s mother was a way to add a particular layer to the episode, to make it personal for Gary.
