Date of airing: April 22, 2000 (CBS)
Nielsen ratings information: 7.69 million viewers, 5.0/10 in Households, 2.2/8 with Adults 18-49
written by: Jeff Pinkner
directed by: Jim Quinn
Is there anything else that could immobilize Gary and make it difficult for him to run around Chicago and save lives? Was there no other way for the writers to depict the actions of a blind person trying to save lives? Yes, the series has done that before with Marissa during the season three premiere "Blackout," but it seems rather weird and ableist to not give Marissa the lead in this episode, considering the writers had the idea to let a blind person walk into a burning building and save a kid from dying. It makes me wonder what kind of conversations the writers had in the room, or what Shanesia Davis was thinking when she read the script for this episode. She has barely been of proper use in this season, and then she is given a script about a blind character who is going out there to save lives. And that blind character was not her character, who was legally blind. Honestly, this is a bit disappointing, but I guess all the writers wanted to do for this hour was to push the pedal to the metal in the regard of giving Gary a temporary disability to make it harder on him, otherwise, the writers were never getting to their weirdest ideas of how to disrupt Gary's life by hindering him physically.
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| There are two blind people being portrayed by two seeing actors in this screenshot. |
Still, the episode was pretty solid. In the beginning, when it was clear that Gary would go through this hour as a blind man, I was hoping for him to connect with Marissa on a different level, and to have her be the second main character of the episode, and I was quite happy that their little conversation went in that direction after Gary was released from the hospital, with her leading him, with her telling him how to live a life as a blind person (follow the dripping of the faucet to get into the kitchen), and him being scared about what is going to happen tomorrow when he receives the paper and cannot read it. But for some reason, the writers did not have faith in the legally blind character, so they created an entirely new character just for this episode to assist Gary in his deeds.
Yes, Gary needed someone to read the paper to him, and Vadim, a character we have never met before and who will never return to the show again after this episode, was conveniently there to do so, and because he could not ask any questions about the paper, Vadim was written as this slow-and-not-that-intelligent-type character who would do anything that is being told to him by Gary. Kind of like Patrick in the third season, who just accepted whatever Gary was telling him to do, and never asked questions (by the way, where is Patrick these days and why was he not used in Vadim's stead?). That was super convenient for the story, but also highly inconsistent, making me roll my eyes out the back of my head. Especially when Vadim assisted Gary throughout the day and still could not find any questions to ask Gary, especially when Gary told Vadim to grab one of the kids when the three were about to run away after Gary realized they were the ones from the tunnel in the opening scene. Vadim was listening to Gary about finding the kid that went missing, according to tomorrow's paper, and yet was at the hospital flower shop just a few minutes ago. At least that moment could have been used for a worried and puzzled face on Vadim, but it became noticeable that the writers did not want to tell that story, so it was not even touched.
But maybe the writers made something of a little joke out of it too, when you compare Vadim’s appearance with Nate’s. Vadim did not ask a single question while reading the paper, which means he did not notice it was tomorrow’s paper, yet Nate immediately realized that something weird was going on with that paper and he only needed to read the headline to do so. A kid figured it out much faster than an adult did, probably because kids are smarter than adults, or maybe because it was due to Vadim’s English language skills that seemed lacking. Maybe the writers were aware of the BS nature of Vadim’s appearance in this episode, and put Nate’s question during the warehouse fire front and center because of it, but it could also simply be a coincidence and convenience. I mean, Nate did not ask additional questions after he realized what the paper was, and there was no scene of Gary telling the kid to keep quiet about the paper and not tell anybody.
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| Cool people do not look at explosions. They jump away from them. |
In the meantime, consider the paper of this episode being mostly unhelpful to Gary. It did not come in braille after it must have known Gary turned blind for a day (their most trusted and useful subscriber, and they do not do a single thing to make his life at least a little easier), and it also changed the headline from “Chicago Youth Missing” to the warehouse fire, even though the fire happened without Gary’s input. That means the warehouse fire should have been the headline all along, yet the writers needed the plot convenience yet again and could not just lead Gary to the warehouse in which Nate was trapped. Gary needed to be a blind detective first.
At the end of the day, all of that is just nitpicking though, but it is slightly interesting how much nitpicking the writers accepted from their viewers, just to get an episode finished and out in the open. It is like collateral storytelling damage, and the more you have, the worse an episode or film is. Someone needs to get into that in a more mathematical fashion. And someone definitely needs to stick with that, in case artificial intelligence starts writing scripts for studios too lazy to pay writers more, because I can see those kinds of plot conveniences filling up entire screenplays in a few years.
