This Friday on 'TR 2070' ep 19 'Eye Witness'

This episode opens up with Olivia and her old friend out having drinks. Robin invites Olivia back to her place. After walking around the apartment, Olivia hears a crazy scream. She investigates and notices a man with bloody hands and suddenly starts running away while the man begins to chase her. It ends up that it was Robin's husband who went crazy and killed a girl and chased Olivia.

Hume is called in to investigate and questions Robin. She has no idea that her husband was involved and somewhat refutes Olivia's statements. Also, Mr. Fowler's personal security team arrived before the CPB which adds to some of the confusion. Olivia is brought back to her old apartment for safety and there is some unease between herself and David. Meanwhile Farve and the lieutenant interrogate Trower which leads to the name of a mistress as his alibi. Hume then goes in to interrogate the mistress. There seems to be a discrepancy in time between the two stories although they surmise that the 1/2 hour discrepancy isn't enough time to commit the murder.

Olivia is back in the apartment and start hallucinating that she's seeing people come through the t.v. She doesn't really know if these hallucinations are caused from her implant or if they're just her paranoia.

In kind of a cool scene the lieutenant interrogates the head of security and threatens his life if he doesn't give some answers. He confesses that Robin is actually lying to protect her husband.

Back in the apartment Olivia starts having crazy flashbacks and accidentally overdoses on anti psychotic pills. Hume finds her and there's a pretty intense scene of him trying to resuscitate her.

After Olivia gains her strength agents of the CPB are called in for security but they double cross Hume and try to capture Olivia. She actually ambushes one of them and Hume gets the other.

The episode ends with Olivia correctly identifying Fowler.

*This was a very good episode with a lot of twists and turns and intensity.

*They never really explain how Fowler was able to commit the murder in only 1/2 hour. They also don't explain why he did it.

*I thought this was going to be a two part episode around the 30 minute mark.

*Do they ever explain why the CPB agents double crossed Hume??

It's a very good episode I give it a 9/10.

I don’t have much positive to say about this episode. I know a lot of you don’t like procedurals but I actually like them. This however was a mess.
Well I take that back there was one positive. I have been a fan of Nigel Bennett’s since Forever Knight.
Back to the mess. We are back to college student caliber. What was with all the awful camera work? Did they think they were being arty? Close up nose, close up mouth, close up eyes, back to the nose. I will say I found it fascinating to watch the nose shots. That was a new one for me.
This episode could be used for training of why a family member cannot investigate a case that involves a family member. There were so many examples of how this was not working I just am not even going to list them all. I am assuming the reason he did not call medical help for his wife is because he was concerned she would not be considered a creditable witness. Also, is it common in the future to have an ipecac type syrup in the home?
Random: I’m not sure if David is the best care giver. It seems like Oliva was making a lot of noise during her pill taking adventure. Maybe it was a sound proof sliding glass door. It did answer the question I had earlier “Who gets the couch?”
This was an episode that went nowhere for me.
I am giving it a 4 out of 10.

Shocker! Jonas Brack is still alive. I recognized him immediately posing as the barber who was taking bets. I didn’t even know they still had barbers using old fashioned scissors in 2070, let alone taking bets on the side. Oh, wait a minute. That was the iZOMBIE episode I watched last night. I wondered why Jonas looked about 15 years older. Never mind.

Okay, seriously, this week’s ep gets off to a fast start as Olivia has drinks with an old friend Robin who has a ba$tard for a husband, but a rich ba$tard! Olivia goes to visit her enormous house just in time to hear a woman’s screams and then see rich husband Frank come out of his room covered with blood. She barely escapes into the elevator and gets away. Two good shots here: Franks gets hold of the elevator doors as they are closing and holds them for a second as if he will pull them back open, but then his grip slips and they shut. Also, the last shot zooms in on Olivia’s eyes, and then shifts to the eye shot which opens the theme. They’ve only done that three times on the show, but it’s always cool to me when they do.

The murderer Frank Trower is of course a top executive. He sends a “special ops” team to try to clean up the mess before the CPB gets there; they wipe out most of the forensic evidence and (we are told) probably would have gotten rid of the body too if they’d had a few more minutes. He gets a woman to give him a phony alibi that they were having room service far away at the time of the murder. So Olivia’s eyewitness ID is key to getting him indicted.

Protecting Olivia means moving her back to David’s apartment and a chance for them to spend time together. Olivia had told Robin earlier that they were dating again, and having a chance to fall in love all over again. Yet, David seems aloof and distant for most of the episode, even cracking poor jokes like telling her at one point she watches too much TV. It isn’t until she accidentally takes the wrong pills and collapses that David shows real emotion, frantically trying to keep her awake until help arrives. He consoles her afterward, telling her sincerely that he wants her to make the ID only so she can get on with her life with her confidence intact; he figures Trower will pay for his crimes sooner or later either way.

Olivia started to have doubts about her ID of Trower, but they turned out to be unfounded. Trower had somehow caused a “bootleg channel” on her TV, making her think that she had seen both Trower and his wife talking to her directly through the TV, even having Robin’s face seem to bend the screen outward. When that GASLIGHT treatment doesn’t work, they have their female mole in the CPB stun David and then try to take out Olivia. But Olivia points David’s big gun at her, leading to my favorite line. The mole says, “There's no way you...” and then Liv takes her out before she can finish the thought. David then takes out the other guy with his stun gun – guess their stunner was a tad weak.

This is definitely Olivia’s show, and she does a bang-up job of playing a psychologically terrorized witness. I already told you about David. Farve doesn’t have much to do, just a couple of scenes – one where he tells Olivia he can choose to react to something with emotion or not after she asks him wouldn’t he have reacted the same emotional way that she did.

Random thoughts: Recognized Art Hindle as Fowler right away. He’d done a lot of TV shows in the 70’s and 80’s, including a movie pilot called – wait for it – CLONE MASTER. He played a man who made multiple clones of himself. That would have come in handy in this show – look, I’m there in the restaurant – see the surveillance footage? And if that doesn’t satisfy you, I was also there and there and there.

They kept making a big deal out of how they couldn’t believe that Robin hadn’t seen her husband like Olivia had. But Olivia heard the screams (which Robin tried to ignore) and ran to the room where Frank emerged from, after which he chased her back to the elevator. It was a huge house, and if he fled after failing to get her in the elevator, it’s entirely plausible that Robin never saw him. (Of course, she knew he was there based on the music she heard playing, which was their cue for “I’m busy boinking some other girl. Please don’t bother me”.)

That alibi witness Susan Page looked a lot like Olivia to me. If I had only seen one episode of the show, I could have easily confused the two. Maybe that’s why David was obviously staring at her – she’s his type.

When Olivia had her doubts about whether she had really seen Trower or just ID’d him from seeing him on TV, David pointed out to Olivia that she had ID’d him to Farve before she ever saw him on TV, which was true. Oddly enough, her identifying him in a lineup at the end of the show could easily be challenged because by then Trower had been on TV a whole lot practically being advertised as the prime suspect. In the end, it was the initial ID that she had already done that should prove to be the strongest evidence.

David and Ian didn’t really work together tonight, as indicated from last week’s show. But that’s the only part of last week’s show that had any bearing. The search for the creator was forgotten entirely once again.

Still a good suspense episode and a change of pace. Despite its flaws I’ll give it 8 Post-Modernist paintings that looked like they were done by Kindergarteners. Okay, that was a bit rough. Paintings done by Kindergarteners would actually probably look much better.

A timeline and the questions it raises:

OK, let me see if I got this right.

* Robin and Olivia have a meal together and reminisce about stuff. Husbands, most.

* Robin takes Olivia to her apartment in the city, which, like everything else in this show, is unjustifiably badly lit. I understand why the outside would be dark, but inside a rich couple's apartment the least you would expect is some decent lighting. But hey, there are individual lights for the horrible paintings.

* Olivia witnesses Frank leaving a woman's murder scene, while Robin seems to do her best to hide and NOT to be a witness instead of doing what would normally be expected, which is to introduce Olivia to her husband.

* Olivia identifies the husband as the man who was in the crime scene. At which point I start thinking that Robin had taken Olivia to the apartment on purpose because she wanted Olivia to be a witness. And since we didn't see the husband actually kill the woman, obviously he's being framed by the wife.

* Robin lies and says Olivia told her about her implant and subsequent mental problems. OK, so Robin is trying to discredit Olivia for her to lose her credibility as a witness. Then why did she take Olivia to the apartment precisely at the moment a murder was being committed? Coincidence? That's lame then.

* TV people start talking to Olivia (pretty much like they do to me) and basically call her crazy. OK, at this point I just think either Olivia IS crazy (unlikely for being too obvious) or the couple are in this together, so, again, why take Olivia to the apartment in the first place? And how are they causing Olivia's visions? Well, I'm sure that will be explained with some fancy technobabble in the end, right? (it turns out it wasn't after all.)

* The mistress gives Frank an alibi. There seems to be a time discrepancy, but at this point I'm not paying attention anymore, so I don't know what that means.

* Olivia tries to kill herself with an overdose. David has the chance to be the hero and saves her. (What are damsels in distress for if not to be saved?)

* When Olivia has all the reasons to believe she IS crazy, thugs passing as CPB agents (or real, but corrupt, agents) attack David and kindly inform Olivia that no, she's not crazy, this is all a plot to make her look crazy, and now that she actually thought she was crazy they decide to kill her for some reason. Also, for some reason, she's waiting for them with David's cannon gun. Trigger-happy Olivia takes over for the second time in the show.

* Olivia pulls herself together and, perhaps as some of David's manly self-confidence seeps into her, she also becomes confident enough to identify Frank in a police lineup.


Random details:

- If Frank and Robin have a house in the country, I mean, if a "country" even exists, why not live there all the time instead of enduring that chaotic and polluted city?

- Frank the husband looks more like a poor man's (or Canadian TV actor) Robert Redford.

- There's a parallel plot with the corporate security guy and his team that are called to the crime scene before the CPB, but in this convoluted plot full of unnecessary elements, that's something that, if you ignore, it won't make a big difference.

- But I loved the way Calley manhandled the guy in search of the truth, and getting a small confession out of him.

- I think Olivia has target practice lessons in the living room, which can be converted into a shooting range when she's there.

- By the way, didn't Olivia have a job? Whatever happened to it?

- Wouldn't TV in 2070 have the kind of interactivity (TV people talking to her and saying her name) Olivia thought she was seeing anyway? That might have sounded fantastic in 1990, but today it certainly isn't.

- Notice that when Olivia identifies Frank, there are only CPB people in the room. Where's Frank's lawyer? Any independent party? No, nobody. Basically the CPB could have just faked the lineup and claimed Olivia identified Frank if they wanted to frame him. The whole process seemed like a silly formality, since Olivia had already identified a picture of Frank to Farve.


All in all...

Nowadays there are many shows that make feminist propaganda and this is so exaggerated that it irritates me. A show becomes a piece of propaganda, and female characters become one-dimension cutouts of action heroes mimicking the dramatic role that used to be occupied by men. Case in point, this new Supergirl show.

Well, in that respect Total Recall 2070 annoys me because it goes to the other extreme: women are just useless props that need saving. Right from the beginning, the woman basically talk about their strong, powerful husbands. It's always the husband who is the important part of the couple, usually a corporate executive. Except that in the Humes' case, it's Olivia who has the corporate job, while David is just a lowly public servant, a cop. But Olivia, even before her implant crisis, acts more like a traditional housewife and her life gravitates around David's.

More than once David has treated Olivia like a child, yelling at her not to use the sublimator, making medical decisions for her, and now supporting her while through her mental instability process. In no point we see David in a fragile position and being supported by Olivia's strength, because she has very little.

But Olivia sort of redeems herself (but not the writers) in the end for shooting the bad guys and identifying the villain for the police. Still, the writers basically don't know how to write female characters. Or they know and don't give a cr@p about it.

One more thing, in the end we have no real explanation about Olivia's mental state. I assume it was the drug she was taking. But it would be cool if it had been some kind of technology that actually distorted the TV image somehow or something. But for the bad guys to have tampered with the drug, they would have needed to do that BEFORE all this case happened, when the drug was prescribed, because Olivia only became a person of interest to them because she, well "coincidentally" became a witness. I give up trying to understand.


Grade:

Initially I was going to give it a high grade, but when I was watching the episode, Farve looked right at me, called me by my name and said, "This episode deserves no more than 5 pills of Hallucinol."

I'm sort of ambivalent towards this episode, it's good but once again the interesting arc from the previous ep is not followed up ,not yet at least. This has happened a few times and is very irritating,as it probably was for the viewers at the time. I take back what I said last time about cancellation, it's obvious that cancellation was not known at this point and I fear that a number of interesting threads will be left unanswered after 22 episodes. The true nature of Calley was revealed here and that that's another development that will probably be left dangling.
Why can't networks if their going to cancel a show say "look, we'll give you a 90 minute special to tie things up" I can think of a couple of shows that that could have been useful, Land of the Giants and The Invaders .
This week's story did sort of end quickly without answering some important questions as others have commented on, most importantly why did the CPB agents turn on Hume and why did the murder happen at all ,unless it was rage caused by the killer's impotence ,he was unable to produce ..er fluids!
So not a totally satisfactory ending ,a bit rushed,
6 out of 10.

MadpBut not the show's fault. It really depends on what youtube capture you happen to catch.

n Shocker! Jonas Brack is still alive. I recognized him immediately posing as the barber who was taking bets.

The true nature of Calley was revealed here and that that's another development that will probably be left dangling.

My bet is "self-defense"! Probably the woman attacked the poor man.

Madp (By the way, do they still have mayors?)