Over the past four episodes, FUBAR has been content to stick to the same formula that’s seen Schwarzenegger trade in on his previous cinematic personas of both action and comedy. It’s hardly been an inspired enterprise, but despite some impressively lazy plotting, goofy comedy that isn’t anywhere near as funny as it thinks it is and plot arcs that could be spotted a mile off by a blindfolded mole, the show’s been chugging along almost solely by the buoyancy of its slickness.
However, with it’s fourth effort, I finally started warming to the show – but if you were to ask me why, I couldn’t for the life of me give you a legitimate reason how this has come to be. Had this second-hand reworking of True Lies finally found its groove, or had the show ensnared me in some sort of Netflix powered Stockholm syndrome? If the fifth episode is any indication, it’s unbelievably the former.
When last we saw the players of this colourful little action/farce, the team had broken nice guy arms broker, the Great Dane, out of a Turkish prison and substituted a terrified Barry in his place to throw off the head count. While Tina keeps him company over comms, the rest of the team race to get the amiable Great Dane ready for a meeting with uber-baddie, Boro, with a nuclear device dangled out as bait but their plan hit a massive snag when the Dane, understandably not looking forward to being sent back to the inhumane conditions of his previous residence, promptly does a runner, leaving the team holding the bag with no way to lure the suspicious Boro into their clutches.
Still, if nothing else, Luke, Emma and the rest of the gang aren’t nothing if not inventive, so while Aldon and Roo try to track down the Dane before Barry is found out, daddy/daughter demolition team secure both the nuclear device and a patsy to try and pass off the meeting with the terrorist long enough to spring their trap.
Impressively, the gambit works and once the smoke clears, the Dane is back in prison, Barry is safe and Boro is in custody, so everything’s golden, right? Well, not quite – you see the mood is rather drastically brought down by the news that Roma, Luke’s granddaughter and Emma’s niece, desperately needs a bone marrow transplant and no one proves to be a suitable donor other than the child’s biological father who proves to be a douchebag of remarkable proportions
Elsewhere, Emma’s dedication to the mission is tested when creepy torturer-for-hire, Norm, is brought in to forcibly get info from Boro, but she soon realises that torture, inflicted for any reason, isn’t an action that shouldn’t be taken lightly.
So after an almost unbroken run of slick but fairly empty episodes, Here Today, Gone To-Marrow betrays its wince enducing pun by suddenly injecting some rather heavy material among the blizzard of wise cracks and unlikely scenarios that involves a dying child that frankly comes out of nowhere. You’d think that the sudden appearance of a small poppet, desperately in need of a bone marrow transplant, would be anathema to the breezy attitude that FUBAR has been flaunting since its first episode, but it actually ends up being the fire lit under its butt that the show needed to get itself a little traction. The improvement isn’t massive and the result of some heavy plotlines plays merry hell with the tone, but the whole torture/bone marrow angle makes FUBAR become something its needed to be since day one: unpredictable.
The moral conundrum of extracting information from a murdering terrorist proves to add yet more tonnage to Emma’s already burdened conscience as the true weight of being a CIA agent finally reveals itself. While this does create something of a plot hole (Emma seriously hasn’t encountered torture before?), it spills into the B-plot as it becomes obvious that the only way anyone is going to convince Kyle – Romi’s scumbag biological father – to part with some bone marrow is to take it by force.
The result is something of a mess – but it’s an intriguing one nonetheless. Kidnapping a civilian – even one as pathetic as Kyle – and brutally extracting bone marrow with the aid of gaffer tape, household tools and no anesthetic is something you’d expect 24’s Jack Bauer to get stuck into, not a bunch of comedy spies aided by Tom Arnold’s cameoing torturer, Norm making the True Lies love-in all but complete. It’s somewhat unsure if FUBAR is advocating the use of torture, but despite Luke’s reservations, apparently it’s absolutely fine to kidnap and bore into the leg bone of a guy if he’s a toxic piece of shit – but while it does wonders for Emma’s character arc as she sinks further into the darkness, it does raise the question whether the writers behind FUBAR really thought this through.
Anyway, even though I may be questioning the postive use of torture, it’s still the most interesting thing in the episode by far. The previous episode’s cliffhanger is solved almost embarrassingly easy (the Dane simply just comes back willingly), the side plot concerning Tally and the rivals to Luke’s fake fitness business crawls along that little bit further and on top of the brutalizing of Kyle, Emma’s relationship with fiance is starting to crumple under the pressure with her actually stealing a kiss from work colleague Aldon. While its nice that so many of FUBAR’s moving parts are actually starting to move, it’s strange that a seemingly throwaway plot twist based highlighted the themes behind the entire show better than the actual main storyline. Maybe the whole show should have be about family of spies using their talents, skills and contacts to combat their day to day problems all along, rather than the plot we’re currently muscling through, but as the Boro plot still feels a little under baked, Here Today, Gone To-Marrow still is arguably the best episode to date of a show that’s every-so-slowly becoming more interesting with every installment.
Whether that means that FUBAR will actually squeak it’s way into must-watch territory before the season is over is unlikely, but its definately noticably less laboured than it once was.
Decent episode or am I in desperate need of deprogramming? I guess the next three episodes will decide…
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