Episode
Title: Past Tense
Season 08,
Episode 04
Episode
164 of 344
Written
by Sandra Smith Allyn
Directed
by Nick Havinga
Original
Airdate: Thursday, October 2nd, 1986
The Plot
(Courtesy of TV.Com): Flashback
Scene: Mack tells Phil that the firm he is
working for is involved with the mob, but Phil says he has a wife to support.
Later Phil is indicted, and asks Mack to lie on the stand, but Mack says
he can't.
The polls
begin to shift in Gary's favor. Peter decides to use married Gary's affair with
Jill against him, although they've decided to hold off until after the
election. Mack has a phony story released that they found the kidnapper's
fingerprints and know who he is. This makes Phil very nervous, and Greg figures
out that he is the kidnapper. Greg confronts him and gives him one day to undo
the situation. Phil pours gasoline all over the house and lights a match. As
the house starts to go up in flames, Karen discovers a trap door to the attic.
Welcome
to Past Tense, which picks up
directly where we left off in the closing moments of Reunion, with Greg getting all excited to hear that he was getting
a visit from his old law school buddy, Phil Harbert, and then the shocking
reveal that Phil Harbert is, OH MY SWEET JESUS, Karen’s kidnapper! Actually, this glides us nicely into another
thing that I can bitch about regarding this current juncture in the series,
although I confess I think it’s really only a flaw that relates to my bootleg
DVD copies of the series and not the original broadcast. See, the copies that I
have on DVD don’t merely show us a thirty second preview for the next ep, but when you jump into the next one and immediately have to sit through an unbelievably
long “Last on KL” recap, all set to
the tune of that absolutely dreadful season eight theme song. Okay, so that sucks, because when you watch
five eps in a row, you really don’t need a recap at the start of every single
ep, and it also sucks that you have to hear the theme again, and then after the
recap is done, we, you know, hear the awful theme song yet again, and it’s just
too much. Like I said, I’m pretty
positive that this is a result of my copies using the syndication package
edits, cuz when I rewatched these five eps one more time via the dark corners
of the internet that I am privy to, they used the original broadcast edits and
the eps just start with the credits, no thirty second preview, no seventeen
minute recap, none of that, and it’s much better. Of course, you might wonder why, if I hate
these so much, why do I force myself and My Beloved Grammy to sit through all of
them every single fucking episode. The answer
is that I am insane and dangerously unstable.
Also, since I know you guys like to hear about me peeing as much as
possible, now would be a good time to mention that I pee a lot and so the fact that it takes a year or two for the eps to
get started just means that I can go take a nice leisurely pee and guarantee
that I won’t be missing anything of import.
We open
Past Tense on Karen still kidnapped
in that house in the middle of nowhere.
Right now, she’s working on a fairly corny letter to Mack about how much
she loves him and Bob Loblaw. I am oddly
unmoved by this little speech, and it’s strange because I came close to tears
with Sid’s little message to Karen on the tape recorder way back in season
three’s Critical Condition. I suppose the difference there was that, you
know, Sid died. I have that retroactive
knowledge that Karen is going to be fine because she’s going to continue to be
in every episode all the way until the very final one. Therefore, I don’t put the same stock into her
little letter to Mack that I did in Sid’s last message to Karen way back
when. The good news about this scene is
that Karen finally decides to kick into action after three eps of basically
just sitting around. She’s kinda reading
over her letter to Mack and then she crumbles it up and says to herself, “I’m smarter
than he is,” and starts looking around the room for a means of escape. I’ve already thrown out my opinion on what
Karen should do (take a page out of the Looney Tunes handbook and smack Phil in the face with a frying pan), but she
doesn’t take my advice and instead chooses to start Shawshanking her way out of the room by chipping away at the wall
with, like, a knife or something.
At the
same time Karen is having her lightbulb moment and getting to work on breaking
the wall down (“Mrs. MacKenzie, tear down this wall!”), Phil and Greg are
hanging out in his skyscraper office and catching up on what’s been going down
since law school. This scene is
important because Greg brings up how Mack’s wife is missing and Phil has to
feign surprise about it, and then later we get some badly written exposition to
help emphasize how Phil, Mack, and Greg were all buddies together cuz Greg and
Phil have a drink together and Phil declares a toast, “To Phil Harbert, Greg
Sumner, and Mack MacKenzie, the three musketeers!” and I almost expect him to look
at the camera like Dark Helmet in Spaceballs
and ask, “Everybody got that?”
Actually,
while we’re on the topic of these three characters and their past histories,
let’s talk about this ep’s Sepia Toned Flashback, which takes place in a bar
(random: I like the period accurate music that’s always being played in the
background when we flash back to the ‘60s, and I fear that it would wind up
being chopped out if/when KL ever
officially makes it to home media or a streaming service) and involves
something about Phil being in trouble with the law. I guess Phil got involved with some bad mafia
dudes, as tends to happen to everybody at least once in their life (paging Gary Ewing, season two), and so now
he’s asking Young Mack to commit perjury in order to get him out of this
jam. Young Mack has the same staunch
ethics that 43 year old Mack has, because he says no, that committing perjury
is wrong, Bob Loblaw. Well, there you
go, the dots are now officially connected to why 1986 Phil is so pissed off at
1986 Mack and has kidnapped his wife.
Since Mack refused to lie on the witness stand, Phil went to prison and
when he got out, his wife was dead, or gone, or moved away, or wouldn’t answer
his phone calls, or something like that.
Back in
the present day, we can add not one but two
cigars to The Sumner Cigar Counter.
The first one occurs in his amazing rec room that comes complete with
pool table (more on this portion of the ep later) and the second cigar is lit
when we return from a Sepia Toned Flashback to find Greg relaxing outside on his
ranch with Phil and Laura. For those
keeping track at home, this makes Cigar #17 and Cigar #18, respectively. Greg has really picked up the habit strong
since we first met him in season five, no?
I like cigars as much as the next guy, but they are a vice best enjoyed
in moderation; if Greg keeps this up too long, he’s gonna have to go under the
knife for some sort of icky gum cancer and his teeth are gonna turn all
brown. Anyway, the cigars really aren’t
the important thing; what’s important in the latter scene is that Phil
accidentally reveals that he kidnapped Karen (whoops!) by randomly dropping her
name and saying something like, “I sure hope Karen is okay.” Greg pulls him
aside and says how he never mentioned his name to Phil, so he now thinks Phil
is the kidnapper. He gives a good
forceful speech in which he says, “I never heard about this because we never
had this conversation,” and then he urges Phil to fix whatever damage he may
have already done.
I might
be hopping around here and going out of the order of events as they take place
within the ep, but who cares? Phil
begins to panic later because Mack uses his powers with the police to have a
phony news story released saying they found the kidnapper’s fingerprints. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that last ep,
but they discovered Karen’s little rental car abandoned at, like, an airport or
something. In the phony news story, they
claim that the fingerprints were all over the car and they’re about to make an
arrest. This frightens Phil, and then
fright compounds with anger a little later when he discovers Karen’s ruse (her
cunning attempt to trick him) of trying to bash through the wall. He gets pissed and takes a frying pan (a frying pan; why aren’t you paying
attention to this, Karen?) and bashes the wall really hard, revealing that,
beneath the paint, there is nothing more than a brick wall. Oh crap!
How’s Karen gonna escape now? After
both of these events occur, Phil is suddenly possessed by the spirit of The
Trashcan Man as he begins to obsessively light matches and flick them towards a
big jug of gasoline. In case your
parents never told you, this is a bad idea and you shouldn’t play with matches,
because you might get burned. Phil’s
goal is not to burn himself, however, but rather Karen, because our exciting
cliffhanger for the end of the ep is him leaving a lovely trail of gasoline
throughout the house and then setting it ablaze like Norman Bates at the end of
Psycho IV. Oh crap!
I sure hope Karen is okay, although I have a strong suspicion that
she’ll be fine.
Okay,
so that about does it for Phil and Karen and all that; let’s move over to my
favorite storyline, Gary and the senate.
This ep had my second favorite scene from the entire first five eps of
the season contained within it, with my very favorite scene being, of course, Gary
laughing while trying to film that commercial in Distant Echoes. This second
scene is a real doozy and also gives me lots of thoughts about our current
political climate and the idea of honesty. Okay, to set the scene, early in the
ep Greg meets up with Peter and The Ned Beatty Lookalike (Sid Farkus) and they
discuss how best to torpedo Gary. Greg
says how they won’t even have to try, that nobody would ever elect an alcoholic
with an arrest record for murder. This
is a sound reasoning, but then we cut to this big auditorium where they are having
the first big senatorial debates or whatever, and Gary unleashes a terrific wet
fart into Greg’s face when he stands in front of the audience and says, “My
name is Gary Ewing and I’m an alcoholic.”
God, this scene made me so happy, so much so that, after watching it, I
keep thinking about it throughout my day and whenever I think about it, I’ll
smile. There’s something about the cut
from Gary’s declaration to Greg’s deflated face that just makes me feel insanely
giddy. Gary doesn’t just stop there, by the way, because he also explains how
he got arrested in season four for the murder of Ciji (although he doesn’t
mention her by name; I think neither Ciji nor Cathy shall ever get a verbal
shoutout again on the series and that makes me sad), and he proceeds to explain
how he was exonerated and didn’t do it.
I have
so many thoughts about this scene and I’ve been thinking about this scene for
days. As a person who believes in strict
honesty and believes that you’ll never really get in trouble for anything so
long as you tell the truth, this really spoke to me. I admire Gary for this courageous act and I
believe he is doing the right, noble, and ethical thing. If I ever run for politics (and I know I can
count on your vote), I would institute a similar policy of complete honesty and
my enemies would never be able to dig up dirt on me. One
last small detail that I appreciate: Late in the ep, Gary calls Olivia up on
the phone and they talk about having an early dinner and Olivia says that she’s
going to be going to her drug therapy session later that day. I appreciate this, because we haven’t seen
Olivia blaze up as of late (and I think she
is actually clean and sober at this exact juncture, but there’s a heavy chance
that this will change later down the line) and I like knowing that Olivia’s
doing her drug therapy thing. It would
be very easy to just sorta forget about her stoner period during season seven,
but the writers don’t do that; they throw in this little line to tell us where
she’s at in her life right now.
That’s
about all I got for this ep. Even though
I wrote less about this ep than the last three, I think I actually liked it the
best. While I still hate the opening
theme music, hate the music throughout the eps, hate the visual style of the
series at this point, and even hate the small things like the super cheap
computer-looking font that they use for the ep credits, I still think the
season is improving before my very eyes.
I think perhaps this particular season starts out at its weakest and
then improves overtime, although I suppose we’ll see. This ep barely had any Hackney in it,
which I appreciated, and I found lots of good qualities to talk about. I enjoyed the Sepia Toned Flashback, I enjoyed
Greg smoking his cigars, and I loved the scene with Gary at the debates, so
yeah, not too bad as long as you can get past some of the inherent problems
taking over at this point.
Let’s
see if Karen can finally escape from the clutches of Phil Harbert. For our next ep, series creator and
undisputed genius of everything David Jacobs returns to the director’s chair
for Slow Burn.
Even the fire that was set wasn't interesting, or believable. Oh well.
ReplyDeleteI don't remember feeling any fear that Karen was in any real danger back when I watched it the first time. It just wasn't urgent enough as you have said many times.
ReplyDeleteWhy in the heck does Phil look Greg up? I guess to pump him for info re: Mack. But dang, he slipped himself up wayyy too easily.
ReplyDeleteI'm digging the Gary Senate race story as well, though honestly do not remember it at all. 😕