This week’s episode of The Unit features a royal mess of storytelling that managed to be fairly compelling. Kim’s babysitting storyline comes to a thrilling close as The Unit is sent on a wild goose chase by guest star Michael McKean.
Kim’s involvement with the terrorist-accountant, Isaac Reed, (which began as a babysitting job and snowballed into a first-base love affair) came to a climax in “Mislead and Misguided.” Col. Ryan asks her to go back into his house one last time, despite the fact that Isaac killed his last babysitter. Well, of course things get hairy due to a seemingly random visit by another terrorist–who gets killed by Isaac after he threatens Kim. Like so often this season, this entire plotline, which has been going on for quite a few episodes, culminated in a rather slapdash and nonchalant ending. Isaac may return in future episodes, but it seemed as if all the work Bob did in the last episode (“Shadow Riders”) was another red herring.
Speaking of Bob, he joins the other three Unit members on a rather strange mission to Uzbekistan. They’re sent there by some new guy named Dr. Donald Metz (played by Michael McKean), who claims to have intelligence showing the Uzbeks with anthrax labs. His inexperience in the field, however, as well as his over-reliance on satellite photography, leads the team on a wild goose chase filled with surprises. The entire mission felt like an allegory to our country’s current intelligence gathering failures. Too bad McKean’s character is so blatantly single-minded and stupid that any believability goes right out the window; plus, they never really say why he has rank over The Unit and Col. Ryan.
In a break from the show’s normal routine, director Steven DePaul used cut-away sequences to show The Unit’s ever-evolving mission plan. So the guys would talk about storming into the antrax lab, and then the episode would cut to them doing just that and failing. It happened a number of times, supposedly taking the place of long winded exposition. The effect was confusing at first (since they don’t really set up the fact that it’s essentially a dream sequence), but was a nice change of pace from all the dry erase board mumbo-jumbo.
The episode felt like a mish-mash of ideas and styles. Kim’s plot was more interesting than The Unit’s mission, but it enjoyed only about a third of the screen time. McKean’s character had next-to-no set up, but seems to be involved in something bigger than this episode. The “To Be Continued” tag at the end of the episode just added to the confusion.
B.A. Moment of the Week: Jonas assembles a bomb using a bag of heroin, acid, and a flashbang.
15. March 2009 at 6:50 pm
The mission dry runs weren’t dream sequences, they were just that, dry runs. Delta(who The Unit is loosely based on) always does these same sort of practice runs utilizing everything that was used in this episode. Intel about guard routes, the way door hinges open, the type of window frames, etc.