Original Airdate: October 27, 2001
In the process of searching for a New Mutant named Donna that decided against going underground and joining Mutant X, Shalimar meets Richard Saunders in Donna's apartment. Richard, another Feral mutant (like Shalimar), playfully battles Shalimar, and it's obvious that they feel a chemistry between them. She finds out later that he's a researcher at Genomex, and that Donna has been going to him for treatments, but likely doesn't know what the upper echelon, or the GSA's, goal actually is.
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| Shalimar scaring off a drunken admirer |
Karen Bell, a worker at Genomex, notices during an internal audit inconsistent equipment appropriations and unlogged mainframe time, leading her to believe that unauthorized experimentation and research is being done. She goes to Eckhart with this information, and he tells her to gather more information and come up with suspects. Upon discovering that Richard is the one doing unauthorized research, Karen tries to have them seized, but they get away and hide out at Donna's apartment (she's not yet come back).
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| Karen Bell |
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| Shalimar and Richard |
Meanwhile, Brennan and Jesse leave Emma out of their training, as they don't want to hurt her or get her too beat up. They see the error of their ways by the end of the episode as she consistently helps them out throughout their investigation to find where the New Mutant Donna disappeared too.
Richard informs Shalimar that he's been working on a serum to negate New Mutant powers, and that Donna has been taking it for almost two weeks. He too is taking the cure, as he has never felt right in his skin. Shalimar has a difficult time understanding this, as she is quite comfortable being a New Mutant, but given her recent, and very strong, emotions, she's considering taking the serum also.
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| Richard and Shalimar |
A Jane Doe is discovered by a medical examiner, and the DNA's recent alteration leads Eckhart and Bell to realize that the "cure" Saunders has been working on actually leads to a destabilization of the central nervous system. Before Shalimar or Richard realize this, Shalimar takes the first dose. She wakes up the next day, and finds Richard collapsed on the floor, sick. Bell, who was given permission to put together a GSA task force to take in Richard, fails as Emma, Brennan, and Jesse are able to handily defeat the agents and bring Richard to the Sanctuary.
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| Brennan, Emma, and Jesse |
Adam isn't able to come up with an antidote to the serum, but can save Shalimar by using Richard's bone marrow and neutralize the dose she's taken. However, in Richard's weakened state, this would accelerate the process of Richard's death. A teary-eyed Shalimar agrees to this, and holding hands, Richard tells her that she's the only woman he's ever loved.
After failing (again) to capture Saunders, Eckhart has Bell terminated, as Adam lets Shalimar know that if she needs them, Mutant X will be there for her.
This episode did very little for me in many ways.
Three separate plots occurred here: 1) Shalimar meets and falls in love with Richard, despite Adam's warning her against following emotion over reason, 2) Karen Bell, an ambitious Genomex employee, tries to please Eckhart and consistently fails, and 3) Emma feels ostracized by Brennan and Jesse because they view her as physically weak.
None of these three stories was particularly compelling, truth be told. Perhaps it's because Shalimar is a Feral mutant, or perhaps it's because Feral mutants such as Shalimar and Richard always feel an animal attraction when they meet, but it's never fully explained exactly why Shalimar fell so quickly for Richard, or vice-versa. It just happened, and is brushed off by Shalimar as "love at first sight." It felt hollow, and though the end was moderately emotional, Richard never struck me as that intriguing or compelling a character. Worse still, I'm 75% sure that we'll never hear of Richard again, and by the next episode, Shalimar will be back to normal with no mention of going through any grief due to the events of this episode. Should that lack of continuity occur, which I truthfully expect, I'll be quite disappointed.
Emma's story feels odd. Brennan and Jesse both refuse to train with her, but once they see her kick Karen Bell in the face during their altercation to extract Richard and Shalimar, boom, they immediately see her value. It just didn't feel right - though I cannot swear to it, I have to imagine somewhere within the first three episodes Emma proved her physical worth, and even if she didn't, choosing to not train with her as opposed to trying to toughen her up by training with her doesn't really ring true.
Karen Bell wasn't a bad character, but she was obnoxiously overachieving, and had no idea what she was getting herself into. We're led to believe that she was smart woman, but wouldn't a smart woman know what she could and couldn't do? Trying to prove herself to Eckhart by commanding a task force, something which she's never done, seems overly foolish. She likely just got caught up in the excitement of being in charge for once, but she really should have thought that out more.
And need I mention the overly choreographed fight scene between Shalimar and Richard the first time they met? It reminded me of everything I hated in the 2003 Daredevil film; that scene between Elektra and Matt still very much plagues me. Not to mention that grating early 2000's techno music. I feel that everything that could go wrong in a Mutant X episode happened here, and if not for the semi-potent ending, it might have even gotten an awful rating.
The last episode, "Russian Roulette", wasn't that great. It was passable, but nothing to write home about. This episode was pretty bad, and portions felt out of place. Like I said when I started reviewing this show, I know absolutely nothing about the shape of things to come. I didn't watch this when I was a kid, and I never laid eyes on a single episode growing up. Could this series pick up in quality? By all means. Hopefully it does, as based off these recent outings, I've not been all that impressed.
Rating: Below Average
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