Okay, so I generally like the show. I usually don’t mind the parts where they stretch reality just a tad. When Parker pulls of instantaneous disappearances, for instance, I can handle that.
This episode bugged me.
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First, at the beginning they are casing the food company and get caught be security, Parker escapes by doing a backflip off a bridge and disappears. Then they show her hanging under the bridge and the guy looking around clueless. That’s as far as I can tell the first time they’ve shown how she did one of her disappearances. Okay, acceptable.
Then the score, where they go into the company during the company All Hands (State of the Company) meeting.
First off, I wish my company All Hands meetings included catering and entertainment like a magic show. Usually we just get an hour and a half or so getting lectured on whatever the current contract performance and where the company is going, with a slide show. Come on, I want to see magic. Okay, lame complaint.
Then the speaker for the meeting is supposed to give some hour long presentation or discussion on the state of the company, how the business is going and what they are doing to for the future, etc. All standard fare. But he decides to just say, “Hey, our current record speaks for itself, so let’s get to the entertainment.” (paraphrased) But he’s a VP, not the CEO, who is in the audience. Surely he was told to actually deliver some content. That strains credulity that the boss man would let him get away with blowing off the whole point of the meeting. The catering and magic is all just peripherals, the heart of the meeting is the presentation he decided to skip. I realize the story wanted that to happen so they could put the team under unexpected pressure, but it isn’t logical in a real-world way. It kills verisimilitude. It breaks suspension of disbelief.
Okay, then Parker is in the elevator on her way to the top with Elliot and What’s-his-name, but is needed on the ground floor to assist with the magic act, so she climbs out the elevator trapdoor and jumps off to freefall down the shaft, while Elliot ties off her safety line. Except she free falls all the way to the bottom of the shaft without the rope providing any slowing near the end. Then she lands on her feet. I totally accept that she’s supposed to be a nut job with cool equipment, but in this example, her equipment didn’t do anything until after she landed, then the floor broke, and she fell an extra 10 feet or so while What’s-his-name got yanked up by his shorts. Sorry, reality just got shattered. Suspension of disbelief replaced with active disbelief.
Finally, the resolution. They were supposed to recover a memo from the VP that proved he decided to leave salmonella infected products on the shelf and pay out any lawsuits rather than pull the whole line to prevent sicknesses/death. But he was smarter than them, and took the same opportunity they were trying to use and went up to the server room where they were going to go and started deleting the email.
Now let’s assume that there is actually a way he could eliminate all copies of this memo he wrote to justify the decision, that somehow the CEO was unaware of. And let’s assume that there’s no other proof of the salmonella infection so that no one can, you know, tell the FDA or the CEO or the media. So here’s my question. They guy goes into the server room alone, with Elliot and What’s-his-name around the corner watching him, all worried because he just entered the server room and is deleting the files so now what will they do? Well, why didn’t Elliot walk in and bonk him on the head, save a copy, then go tell the CEO before he woke up? I mean, it’s not like that guy could do anything to Elliot. But no, instead they have to go with a back up plan to go to another room and try again.
Then they finally get to the other room, only all copies have been deleted and there’s no incriminating evidence left and What’s-his-name is locked in the backup room. Game over. So they go to plan D or Q or whatever level of emergency on the fly plan they are at, and instead download recipes onto the bad guy’s phone, then when the bad guy comes in, What’s-his-name is forced to take him and security to find the others, which is downstairs “in the gray van”. So they go downstairs and outside the building and Parker swipes the phone, and then they blackmail the badguy by using his phone to smuggle the recipes out of the company, they can set him up to look like a corporate thief. So what is the resolution? The CEO and the client show up and berate the guy. Wait a minute, if the CEO is aware the guy didn’t steal the files but was being used, then he must be agreeing because of the contamination, but if he is acting now because of the contamination, what convinced him to act, and why didn’t he just fire the VP and pull the line of food himself? He’s the friggin’ CEO, he doesn’t need proof to take action, does he? The whole point was that the CEO didn’t know what the guy did, and that was why he destroyed the memo. What? The internal story logic just fell apart.
This episode sucked big rocks.
(I did, however, enjoy the bit with the rabbit.)