s1e20: TKO

Watch your back

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I suspect there’ll be some disagreement here, but I thought ‘TKO’ was OK. Nothing special, but a perfectly serviceable standalone episode. There have been worse episodes so far (‘The Gathering’, ‘Infection’, ‘The War Prayer’), and while this one is served with an enormous wodge of cheese it just about manages to hang together.

That the episode works at all is largely down to the chemistry between Jerry Doyle and Greg McKinney. The odd friendship between Garibaldi and Walker Smith feels real, like one of those unlikely connections that burns fast and never quite makes sense to anyone observing. The sort of friend that comes to stay for a day, and you have enormous fun with a crazy night out, and then the next day you can’t wait for them to get the hell out.

McKinney has the cheesiest of all character stories, yet entirely commits. He has the right amount of swagger, and fully goes for the Rocky-lite cliches. He’s fun to watch in every scene (while writing this, I discovered that he died in 1998 at age 41. Sheesh.😞). Don Stroud as Caliban is weirdly enigmatic, despite being little more than a plot device. Soon Tek-Oh is striking at the Muta-Do, and his alien make-up looks incredible on the blu-ray with the neon-lit arena. In fact, the general lack of VFX in this episode results in it looking visually pretty great throughout, from a blu-ray quality point of view (though we do get another GORGEOUS view of the restaurant in the central garden area).

Oh, there’s also a plot with a rabbi. And, in fact, it kinda works. Having ‘TKO’ come later in the season, as we’re following the master list order, means that as viewers we’ve almost forgotten about Ivanova’s father dying — as such, it’s a bit of a surprise when Rabbi Koslo shows up to check on Ivanova. His scenes with Sinclair work well, especially the way O’Hare plays his realisation that he’s let down his colleague and friend by not even realising. The follow-up scene in which Sinclair orders Ivanova to stay and listen worked for me.

Also, notice that in the scenes with Sinclair shows that he’s been playing with a collection of large protractors, like you get in a kid’s stationary kit. There’s even a big transparent orange one. Says a lot about Sinclair’s mental state at this point in the season.

The weirdest thing about the episode is that it’s so low-key. There is hardly any actual science fiction in it.

Update: I fully intended to touch upon the awkward cultural appropriation going on in this episode, but originally left it out. It is very strange that the central sport in the episode is presented as being an alien thing, with humans not permitted, despite it having the same name as an actual, real sport. I don’t know anything about Thai boxing, but it’s very odd, especially on a show that otherwise goes out of its way to show a fairly diverse range of cultures in a respectful way (especially for the mid-90s). It feels a bit like they grabbed at a name thinking that nobody would know it, simply because it wasn’t an American sport. Peculiar indeed.

Next up we have ‘Legacies’, which marks the penultimate episode of season 1. That seems to have gone by pretty fast?

‼️ SPOILER STUFF ‼️

“Watch your back!” is about all there is in this episode, I think? But phew, that’s a retrospectively impactful line — and, again, moving ‘TKO’ to later in the season makes it all the more important.

Oh, also the ship that brings the guest characters to the station is, I think, called ‘White Star’. An interesting reference both historically and to a ship that will show up in season 3.