With FUBAR’s fifth episode, it seemed like the show had turned a minor corner to take its predictable, spy shenanigans and goofy family farce and turn it into something with a smidge more of an edge with an out-of-nowhere plot thread concerning the kidnapping and torture of a civilian in order to get bone marrow for a little girl.
While episode six doesn’t exactly pull out something as left-field as a dying child and Tom Arnold working on a man’s thigh bone with a corkscrew, it does have the benefit of having a lot of its building drama to finally come to a head.
Stuck in a literal hot box of a sealed, airless, malfunctioning safe room, the percolating issues between Emma, Aldon and Luke overflow much to the annoyance of Roo. However, while Roo may be pissed with all the dirty laundry being aired in a room with no windows, it still gives FUBAR the slight edge it needs to remain head and shoulders above mediocre.
Carter, convinced that his relationship with Emma is in dire straights, convinces Luke to train him to beef him up, however, while Luke is slowly warming to his nice-guy son-in-law in waiting, he still roundhouse him with the revelation that he witnessed his daughter and fellow spy Aldon kissing. It’s a bad habit the two are continuing to do at work, but Emma pulls back at the last minute when Aldon suggests they go to a hotel room to consummate their affair.
Luke’s attempts to broach the matter with Emma, but, as usual, the continuing matter of a terrorist trying to construct a WMD keeps getting in the way and the latest mission sees both Barry and Tina to pose as gamblers in a high stakes, underground poker game in order to clone the sequestered phone of Boro’s right hand man Cain. While Barry has barely calmed down after the last time he entered the field saw him chilling in a Turkish prison, the fact that he how has to struggle with both maiming a Nigerian cover while cheating to stay in the game as long as possible gives him further cause for alarm.
Elsewhere, Tally voices her suspicions about the inconsistencies in Luke’s fake business, but after feeding her yet more lies, the spy ends up falling into bed with his ex-wife.
Later, the mission undergoes its first stage as the team clear space at the gambling table by convincing the Biryukovs, an old elderly gambling couple, to be a no show, but when it comes to sedating the old costs just to make sure nothing goes wrong they resist, citing COPD issues. After the usual, farcical, bullcrap that usually unfolds during missions in this show, the entire team ends up trapped in the Biryukov’s panic room, leaving Tina and Barry to unwittingly go it alone and if they don’t figure a way out, they’ll appreciate due to a faulty air processor. Even worse, Cain turns out to be awful at cards and so to keep him at the table long enough, Barry and Tina now have to cheat to keep him in the game. However, when Boro himself turns up, the stakes get far higher than just chips and cash.
It seems that the act of FUBAR dropping its earlier gimmick of splitting the spy stuff between the end and the beginning of each episode has given the show a bit of a boost. Sure, at first, the cliffhanger endings made the show whizz by rather painlessly, but after a couple of episodes, the fact that a lot of the action and character threads would resolve at the start of the episodes meant that FUBAR never felt like it was resolving anything in order to move onto the next thing. This would have been especially damaging if the showrunners would have insisted it on occuring for Royally Flushed as this installment pushes through an almighty logjam of backed up resolutions and revelations.
Yes, it’s another Barry-on-a-mission episode and it takes time out from its busy schedule of riffing on True Lies to riff on Casino Royale instead, but this uneven tale of the tangled personal lives of a group of CIA agents continues it’s slow, upward climb in quality due to it paying off some building tensions.
It sure isn’t subtle as we open on Jay Baruchel’s Carter trying to literally make himself a “stronger man” by getting Luke to train him. However, while he has suspicions that Emma may be seeing the ridiculously buff Aldon, her father drops the bomb that he actually witnessed the two kissing which has the expected effect on the genuinely sweet guy. This is only the first of many rapid seismic revelations that rock our characters during the episode as the script gleefully stirs the pot before planning to not just spill the tea, but fling it in everyone’s faces at the worst possible time. This all comes to a head when Luke, Emma, Aldon and Roo are trapped in a defective safe room with precious little air and a steadily rising temperature and the tensions between them all give way like a dam made of plaster of paris. In the ensuing screaming match, Luke reveals he knows what’s going on between Emma and Aldon, that he’s told Carter and that he’s slept with his ex-wife; Emma counters that she’s the one who hooked her mother up with her current boyfriend, Donnie and both Aldon and Roo angrily react to all the fallout while both revealing something of their disadvantaged backgrounds. It’s all juicy, juicy stuff and it pretty much goes a long way to justifying all the mounting melodrama we’ve had to witness up to this point. However, while this outpouring of frustration mean that some of it gets resolved and a couple of our cast members get a better understanding of each other (Roo and Luke in particular), the gulf between Luke and Emma seemingly has never been greater.
Probably the best indication that FUBAR is getting its shit together episode by episode is that while all this is going on, the mission involving Barry and Tina isn’t eclipsed in the slightest. Perky, quirky and not marred by slightly stilted action set against a dodgy CGI backdrop, the ever changing nature of the mission is highlighted by Barry trying to squeak by with a Wakandan accent and a surprise appearance of Boro himself who arrives at the game unannounced and it moves with a lightness of foot that some of the other missions simply haven’t had.
While FUBAR still has a ways to go to truly bring back memories of Schwarzenegger’s heyday, it’s the emotional payoff that the show has needed to finally get it firmly off the starting blocks and start endearing itself after half a season of mid-level, spy mischief.
Now, if only the action scenes could step up too….
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