29.9.08

Turns Out I Was Wrong

About Wire in the Blood. The episode I was watching actually was the season ender. The entire Michael thing is wrapped up in the last ten minutes of the episode, in yet another act of stupidity on the part of Tony and the cops.

As Kevin's driving Tony home from a funeral, suddenly the low fuel light comes on. Despite Kevin's protestations that he filled the tank up the day before, neither of them finds the whole thing suspicious, allowing Michael to abduct Tony at the gas station.

So, to recap, even though theoretically everyone knew that a cannibal serial killer was coming after Tony, he just had the single police escort, and Michael's plan to abduct him was centered around siphoning of gasoline during a funeral without anyone noticing, and then knowing that when they stopped the car, Tony would stay in the car while Kevin was paying, and have either a window rolled down or the door unlocked so he could easily be cloroformed and abducted.

For a super-genius, that's a pretty lousy plan.

Back at Michael's hideout, he admonishes Tony for failing to cure him. Tony responds that even if he's murdered, Michael can't murder the fact that Tony understands him. This is all the kind of psychological rambling that would have had a lot more weight if we, the audience, had ever experienced their sessions together at length - this isn't the case, though, the only time we saw them together was the escape episode, where there was no actual session, just Michael lying about having converted to Christiantiy as part of his escape plan.

So Michael attacks Tony with a length of rope, and Tony defends himself with his tie, and after a short struggle, Tony manages to strangle Michael to death, ending the whole storyline abruptly and anticlimacticly.

So not only was the whole Michael thing not building to anything big or dramatic, now there's every likelihood that the next season will feature Tony trying to deal with his psychological problems surrounding the fact that he killed someone (even if it was in the most justified instance of self-defence ever), possbily stripping him of the feature I like most about about the character, the fact that his passion for solving crime comes from a place of good-natured intellectual curiosity as opposed to monstrous depression and PTSD-based obsession.

Of course, there's a chance Tony could just bounce back next year, and be his old self right away. I can't believe I have to wait something like eleven months to find out.

Less if they do a special like last yer.

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