Girl Power

DVD, BUGS S4 (Girl Power)

A dubious accolade goes to this episode, that of worst episode of the series. It's all relative, of course, and as with all of 'BUGS' this is still watchable for the characters, and some more enjoyable connections to its own history, as has been the theme of the first couple of episodes in its final year. This is almost a sequel to those, or a continuation, in theme at least, as Ros' youthful past with her activist associates and reminders of her slightly misspent youth, were explored, and now she comes up against a girl gifted in gadgetry and electronics as she was, and must take her in hand. From that perspective it has the bones of a great story as Ros is just the kind of well-adjusted role model a girl of fourteen would need (other than her meltdown at Beckett for Terry's death at the end of 'Sacrifice To Science'). Child actors sometimes work, sometimes don't, but in this case Carly is too good - she really does come across as a frustrated and obnoxious young teen, which doesn't make the experience of being around her much fun. At heart she's a good girl, as evidenced in the way she really wants to impress Ros, despite claiming her new temporary guardian 'hates' her, expressing herself in typical extremes, and she comes good in the end, rescuing Ros in the nick of time. But just as Ros wants to kill her at first, that's the 'charm' of the episode that bleeds into the audience.

It's just not a very good setup, having this child tech genius break into The Hive because you're set up to expect something terrible - terrorists, hardened criminals, who knows? And I understand that sometimes subverting expectations can be a good thing (it was clever how Ros wasn't actually kidnapped at the end of 'Renegades,' for example), but it has to turn into a more compelling direction than what you were expecting, not less. This smacks of trying to appeal to the young audience which I was part of back when it was first shown, but I don't imagine I particularly cared for the story at the time. Not that I felt it was the worst episode, but as with much of Season 4 it wasn't a standout and in subsequent viewings I've come to understand what was wrong. As well as making room for a teenage girl to be involved in many scenes, the stakes are incredibly low until much later when Ros is in danger of being crushed by a falling lift, a scene that was very well done, and one of the highlights as we see Carly use her device to overload the system keeping the door shut, Ed pulls Ros out just as the heavy weight comes crashing to the floor in a pile of metal parts and dust - it really sold the split second escape, but it needed to because there wasn't anything of the usual tension and hairsbreadth avoidance of hazards in the episode, with not a single explosion, countdown or death to its name.

To what do we owe the drama? A burial mask made of gold and precious stones, which is quite an impersonal thing, even going by some of the occasional impersonal stakes we've seen before. And somehow, the threat of other countries refusing to lend Britain its treasures for exhibitions isn't a very galvanising issue to get behind! Minister Quayle, almost apoplectic with fury at Jan and her team hints that the whole lot of them will be booted out unless they recover this prize, claiming the country will become a cultural leper colony, forgetting perhaps about his own cultural heritage, but then that's always the way, isn't it: we 'never' have enough artefacts of our own to show off, all of which demonstrates that the only real thing at stake is the saving of Bureau 2's face, something that isn't even played up as much as it might have been when you consider that not only do they bring back Beckett's old organisation, The Hive, but his old boss, too, Mr. Dent! The extent of Dent's sardonic comments on this is asking if Beckett's made a go of this Bureau 2, when you'd think he'd be the type to be very competitive between organisations. It's great to see the old boy again, naturally, one of the brilliant things about this season (and it wouldn't be the last we'd see of him, either), and I'd love to know what prompted them to go right back to the very first episode, 'Out of The Hive' for their inspiration - it's Colin Brake and Stuart Doughty again, writing the third episode in a row, which I don't think had ever been done before.

To recap we have an annoying teenaged girl, the stakes are low, The Hive's not used in quite the spirit we might have expected, but there's another big mark against the episode: its insistence on adding domestic ordinary locations, so far removed from the traditional high-tech companies and buildings we'd see before, or even the lavish historic structures. We see a bit of both with The Hive being the very epitome of a 'BUGS' building, and Mr. Dent's residence and the museum are certainly high class, but do we really need to see the dreary reality of housing estates and shopping centres - granted, it's great fun to see Tandys used as the place where Carly secretes the mask (I thought it was Dixons at first, Carly calling it the Discount Electrical Store, but no, it was even older than that!), but this level of mundanity is far from what I expect in the series and was a trend that would continue in other episodes to come. It's a touch uncomfortable with the characters, too, as obviously Ros and Beckett are a little awkward, though I was surprised how quickly they got back to some form of normality. It's not like Beckett has the chance for a quiet chat, and Ros isn't sobbing and blubbing any more or acting the goat, and they talk quite civilly on the radio when he's trying to reach Ed, which was a good way of breaking the ice, and Ros has her hands full with Carly which was a distraction for her, but it's nice to see her attend his little housewarming at the old Bureau of Weapons safe house Alex found for Beckett to live in, so we even get a traditional comedy ending where they're laughing together over an old report on the young Ros, but we also can't say things are hunky-dory, and it would be strange if they were considering the melodramatics that had occurred.

No, the real weirdness is in Alex' shameless flirting with new Hive recruit Adam Mosby, the man we love to hate (though he wouldn't be the only recurring character this year to come under that category - there's still Christa to come!), which seems to come out of nowhere. It's as if they really wanted something for Alex to do, and since they'd broken up Ros and Beckett, why not cause a little trouble between Ed and Alex. Soapy, or what! Adam comes across as a bit bland, but then in Alex' defence, so does the new Ed, despite leading the Bureau now. Actually, when it comes down to it, Beckett just has more presence and so he never feels like he's really working under Ed, they're just working together in the episode's other good sequence - the triple bluff of the mask coming into the country. Ed gets to do his best Tom Cruise impression as he recreates the 'Mission: Impossible' trick of descending from the ceiling in a harness to test Ros' security precautions, and he's also the one that gets to have the fight with one of the villains, but otherwise he's quite muted. He seems to forget his martial arts ability, something he's done before, when fighting this Dan, who is clearly the muscle of the trio of villainy, as you can't see Filsinger or Nightingale getting involved in anything physical - even the moment Jan 'steps' in and trips the woman in the car park looked a bit weak. Action is difficult in heels!

The villains were another weak part, we really never learn anything about them. Filsinger, another Hive employee must simply be greedy - you start to wonder how many bad apples this organisation hires: there were two in their first episode and now the organisation returns and once again it's an inside job! They also sacked Beckett and Ballantyne was murdered, SACROS was lost, and yet Dent's still in charge! He must have had a very good record prior or friends in very high places! Let's hope he long ago fired his Human Resources Manager… As for Filsinger's woman, Lisa, the same must be true and she was motivated purely by greed, though neither seems to have any violence in them. It's not that villains in the series tend to have complex or sympathetic backstories, but the last couple have (Roland Blatty and General Russell), so in comparison these three come across as most simplistic and dull, there's never really any sense of a great threat, and they're even stupid enough to discuss their plans right above the lift shaft where they've just incarcerated Ros and Carly. They're reminiscent of the kind of male/female duos the team have encountered many a time, but we don't really know who they are or why Dan is working with them and they never do anything spectacular.

We do apparently get a little extra detail on certain things, such as extrapolating that The Hive must have begun fifteen years before the episode since they say it's only been broken into once in fifteen years, unless they meant they'd been using the building as HQ for only that time. That was fun, since we know exactly who broke in: Ed, back in the very first episode, though they sadly never allude to it directly and Ed never goes near the place this time. It's odd, because Ros claims she couldn't break into the place when she's trying to compliment Carly for her ingenuity, but she did, she was there helping Ed do it, in any case, but I suppose she was just trying to get on her good side. I got the impression Dent may have been a family man with children as he asks Ros if she had children and when she replies in the negative tells her she's got all this to come, then, in a way that sounds a bit regretful or world-weary, although he never came across like that before, but it's hard to know how much to read into a character we know so little about. I'm just glad they brought back the very same actor almost four years later, and filmed at the very same Hive building (though they'd used its interiors and other parts of it for other episodes since then), with those highly recognisable twin towers at the front. Adam's office could even have been Beckett's, who knows!

There is time for something meaningful, when Ros tells Carly that life isn't a game and you can't just put another coin in the slot, something so relevant to today where we're bombarded with fantasy so much we can almost forget the harsh reality of the world and life. She tells a story of how when she was a teenager she caused a fake road accident that all the emergency services got called out to and because of this a fire near her house didn't get attended to as quickly as it would have. The impact of the story is lost a little by being watered down, as she says it put three people in hospital for a week due to her actions, but no one died. It's almost as if they toned it down thinking of the young audience watching, but if someone had died that would have had a bigger impact, and it's not like we don't see people being killed all the time on the series! But that's only 'fantasy violence,' whereas this is close to home domestic tragedy, and coupled with the identifying of ordinary life through showing town houses and shopping centres, maybe it was too close to home, they thought? Again, it's a good story and close to making an impact, as it clearly did on the young Ros, realising that actions have consequences and life is precious, but too often the episode is a touch tame. Beckett says standards at The Hive aren't what they were, but he could have been talking about the series itself.

As if in continuation of where the previous episode left our characters, Beckett wears the same dark blue shirt, this time with a purple and red tie, while Ros is in her blue suit jacket which may be the same one she wore in 'Blackout,' with black trousers. It's a very light grey sort of blue, so I wouldn't have thought they chose it to say something about the pair of them as they may have done with the green last time, but who knows, they aren't avoiding each other, so that's good. Ed continues to be especially nondescript, matching Houghton's portrayal, with mostly black, but also a tan jacket which is a bit like the one McLachlan wore as part of his 'change of image' to impress Alex. To be honest I prefer the basic wardrobe he's worn so far more than the semi-colourful jogging outfits of Season 3! But there wasn't a lot of colour unless you count the yellow or green lighting at The Hive, and the red when the alarms go off. I wasn't enamoured with the hopping rabbit animation Carly uses to foul up the systems, nor her amazing catch-all gadget that can do anything, though in its defence it wasn't used much. It's fun to hear the excitement about recordable DVD and the amount of Gigabytes, though of course that (and the monitors), really dates it like nothing else. Most fun is seeing Dan playing on an original Game Boy (though I think Game Boy Color had been released by then), even if it makes sounds no Game Boy would! Then again, in this world a laser can be spinning wildly and come to a stop exactly on a wire to burn through it and send the lift crashing down - a lift that was jerking down dramatically all the while, too!

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