CW’s THE TOMORROW PEOPLE ep 7: LIMBO

 

CW’s THE TOMORROW PEOPLE ep 7: LIMBO

Right away this episode starts on bad footing IMO. Reminiscent of SUPERNATURAL’s openings, a woman doesn’t wait for a guard to escort her to her car and goes it alone, only to be accosted by a man: a TP! He uses her own pepper spray to spray her and other powers to get her. Apparently he’s been raping women. Stephen, fetchingly shirtless, is in the hotel room with Cara where they’ve spent the night and yes, he is a year over legal age in NY so…but Cara feels weird. They’ve basically betrayed John. Stephen wakes up and wants to rent a movie but Cara knows someone’s coming. A couple checking in see Stephen in his boxers.

 

More bad footing for this episode: Trying to track the rapist, John tells Cara and Irene that their powers don’t make them good, they just make them powerful. Excuse me but the feeling of the original series was that BEING GOOD made the TP break out into TP which is why having so many evil Tp and TP working for the gov’t and Tp betraying other TP feels SO VERY WRONG. And it’s happening in every episode.

 

When Cara avoids contacting Stephen, John knows something is up and will contact Stephen himself even though Irene offers to. A tall blond stud named Perkins comes up against Stephen, telling him he is toxic and gets his partners killed. Stephen might have intel on this sick bastard, John says. And again the TP have no way to track another TP but the enemy gov’t installation does.

 

Jedikiah is more interested in catching the rapist because it might compromise their organization. Someone is cleaning out Darcy’s stuff. Victims of the rapist wake up in their bed with their hair wet. When Stephen wants some room to breathe (ironic given what’s to come, perhaps foreshadowing?), Jedikiah thinks him having some time away from Ultra will do him some good but that he’s wearing on morale and needs to get it together because he’s seen what happens to rogue agents, a less than veiled threat.

 

At a restaurant, John is just there in front of Stephen. John tells him that he can only fulfill his destiny or fail it.

 

Astrid sees Stephen in gym, not looking this glum since his volcano didn’t erupt in 6^th grade earth science. Stephen knows Jamie Right cheated on his bio quiz and thinks he might have crabs. Astrid tells him, “With great power comes great responsibility…to have yourself some fun.” The gym coach/teacher asks him to come down for the B team to pick sides. For his team, Stephen picks Rory, who forgot his inhaler. The guy that is picked for the other team, Dave, is played by a guy who plays on Riverdale as Sweet Pea (?)! Stephen evokes the BAD NEWS BEARS. When Jergens acts like a jerk, calling Stephen a dick head, Stephen uses his powers slightly to get a score for Rory and himself in the basketball game. Astrid gets carried away and slaps Stephen’s ass. Jimmy Brandt sprained his ankle and Rizzadole has the flu so the coach asks Stephen (calling him Jamieson) to fill in on the varsity.

 

Amid some snappy dialog, that’s funny at times, John, Russell and Cara look for the rapist in an open area but separate a bit. John tells Cara when he was away with Russell he thought about her a lot and knows he has to win her trust back. In his way he tells her he loves her.

 

Stephen teleports with Astrid. He just, as she puts it, atomized her to the top of the Empire State Building and back. Her whole body is tingling. When they go up to his room (attic room), they find Cara there. Astrid introduces herself and leaves. Cara tells Stephen they need him back inside Ultra. When he pushes the issue about “them” she tells him it was her mistake and that she and he should never have happened that way. He tells her to look him in the eyes and tell him she doesn’t feel it, too. He tells her he felt it when she was just a voice inside his mind. She apologizes and teleports away, “I’m sorry, Stephen.”

 

When Jergens, Dave and another player talk about the PEP party having to be canceled because Dave’s dad is having his book club at his house, Stephen offers up his house for the party since his mom is working the night shift. The party is out of control with dancing, kissing, and one guy sees Stephen levitate a falling vase so it won’t break. He seems to be doing cocaine and calls it trippy. Astrid thanks him for the invite that she didn’t get. It was just supposed to be a few guys but she claims, not according to Twitter.

 

Before the big games, the guys are drinking Tequila and tell Stephen is apple juice…giving it to him to drink. Luca reports someone is turning his bathtub into a gravity bong, which stuns Stephen because Luca knows what that is. The football guys are drunk but Jerkins or Jenkins introduces Dave with two dads (okay, that’s cool but why intro him that way) and Van, another African American like Jergens. Luca knows who they are. A girl named Jenny fakes that there’s a situation upstairs Stephen needs to take care of but when they go to his room, she closes the door and starts kissing him.

 

Russell fantasizes about super heroics when they catch the rapist. John asks him to go help Irene, who has tapped into the police scanners (why can’t TIM do that?). Russell, often, has the best lines. Cara confesses to John about she and Stephen and apologizes. He’s hurt and tells her she wins, they’re even now but she won because she came clean in two days.

 

Astrid goes to find Stephen about the cops about to bust his party and finds him on the bed with Jenny Reardon. On the steps down, after Jenny leaves, Astrid says, “You kinda suck as being a super hero.”  Stephen says, “Yeah, I know, that’s what I’m trying to tell everyone.”  During their resulting conversation, Stephen picks up Astrid’s thought, “I’m in love with you.” 

 

When another girl is attacked and knocked out, John appears and fights the rapist, who calls them one of the blessed ones. He teleports away when Cara (who traced him as he teleported) and Russell appear. They can’t get a read as to where he teleported to.

 

When a chesty Stephen is about to use his powers to clean up the house after the party, Jedikiah and Perkins arrive. Together they put a suppression cuff on his wrist, another invention of his father’s. It takes away his powers. Perkins punches him.

 

When Luca comes to Stephen’s bedroom and notices the wrist band thing, Stephen calls it one of those BALANCE things (which I think are out of business now?). Mom came home for breakfast and did that quiet angry thing when they wish she would just yell but doesn’t. Stephen kicks him out of his room.

 

 

Irene tells Stephen that the cuff is made of titanium but they don’t know the alloy and would need that in order to remove it. John apologizes they couldn’t help him get it off and Cara is extremely cold to Stephen. John escorts Stephen topside and tells him he has his back for the game, which Stephen is not doing very well with. I’m guessing he was using his powers to win or play better in every game, which seems to be another no. Stephen’s team is the Wildcats. His number is 15. Dave’s number is 17. John is using his powers to do things like make the ball hit Stephen in the face.

 

In a scene that I utterly despise, John taunts Stephen about his having had sex with Cara. This makes the episode dive fast. John warns Stephen, who is angry at him and says it just happened. John tells him it was nothing but sex. Cara appears out of thin air and uses her powers to separate them after a brutal physical fight. “If either of you says he started it, I will tear you both to shreds.”  She repeats that it was a mistake and tells them this ends now. She leaves. John winks at Stephen in a superior glee and leaves, too. As he gets up off the floor, Stephen sees a pipeline logo and recalls that logo is what the rapist wore and he recalls (for some reason) Cara was in the shower with her hair wet. He deducts that the man brings the victims to the sewers. The month on the pipe ticket (what is that?) seems to say June. The date is a bit harder to see if it is a date. It seems to be issued 11-9-14 possibly?

 

Against better judgement but totally alone now, and it makes sense that he’d do it, Stephen goes below into the sewers. He finds the rapist in the act and in an odd scene just tells the blond girl to run and the rapist lets her. She leaves. Stephen then, though he should know better, attacks the teleporter rapist who uses his powers to neutralize the pipe Stephen has and fling him into a grid where he ends up with his face in the water. Cara detects Stephen is in trouble. John wonders with the suppression cuff on him, how is Stephen communicating? Cara doesn’t know but he is.

 

Awake, Stephen is being kicked and beaten by the rapist, who tells him he knows he is not able to kill him. He knocks him out and drops him into the current. Uhm, WRITER faux pas: THIS IS KILLING HIM. Cara appears and uses her powers to knock the rapist down. She then beats the crap out of him, “I’m gonna make you beg!”  John takes off after Stephen. She tries to hit him over the head with a pipe but the prime barrier stops her. As the rapist starts to get up, Russell appears and kicks him down.

 

As Stephen lays in the water dying, he encounters his father in a limbo like corridor (and it just struck me how like one or two of the images in the opening credits of the original series this looks like). He sees his father there and his father tells him to find Thanatos. John pulls Stephen’s body out of the water and begins CPR and trying to remove the water. In an iconic moment for fandom everywhere, John gives Stephen mouth to mouth! Three times. I salute the series and the episode for not taking the coward way out and making Cara do it. Instead, she’s watching from the other side of the water. John saves Stephen’s life but then says, “Lucky guy.”

 

Stephen tells Jedikiah he figured out where the rapist was hiding. When Jedikiah asks him what made him change his mind about wanting to be an agent, Stephen repeats John’s words: he either fulfills his destiny or fails it. Jedikiah uses his lap top to remove Stephen’s suppression band. Before he goes, Jedikiah tells Stephen the man he brought in was ranting about a dark haired woman with piercing blue eyes that attacked him. When Stephen asks what happens to him now, Jedikiah tells him something that Stephen definitely doesn’t have the stomach for.

 

Cara asks if they’re good and John responds with, “Well, technically now, we’ve both made out with Stephen so I’m willing to call it even.” After the joke, he tells her, “He’s in love with you, you know that, right?” She does. She also tells John that there is something between she and Stephen but that she will lie to him if it takes that to keep harmony down here. He asks if she loves him and she says yes. He tells her that’s all he needs to know.

 

Stephen goes to a restaurant and meets Astrid there and tells her that pork buns are great peace making at treaties, as in Geneva. He apologizes to her. She says what I’ve been thinking, “Yeah, it was like the plot of an 80s movie. You went from geek to sheik and back to geek.”  And a few 90s movies, too. One thinks of YOU CAN’T BUY ME LOVE. “You got the popular girl and here you are, begging for your best friend back except you ruined the ending because you already know how she feels about you.” Stephen tells her Cara doesn’t love him back. Astrid tells him, “You don’t have to be a mind reader to know she’s lying.”

 

In the lair, Stephen tells Cara he won’t bring up their connection again and that they are inevitable. He tells Cara and an arriving John that he saw his father and they will figure out how to find his dad: his dad is alive.

 

REVIEW: Or rest of review:

Okay, despite the many flaws and deviations from the original series, there’s something compelling about this episode and indeed, the series, at least on this re-watch. Knowing what the CW has done since ARROW to BATWOMAN with those shows, ARROW only having started one year before THE TOMORROW PEOPLE, it’s easier to see how this show is superior to all of those shows, with some individual episodes being exceptions. First, the connections are stronger. Second, the ongoing story isn’t as dragged out as those are. Back when I first saw this, I really wanted the Jedikiah Ultra thing to end so they could get on with space aliens, time travel, world break outs, etc. Yet…now…time and perspective have changed some of that. I still think they made a mistake in how this series was set up but perhaps production costs necessitated the need to set the show in the same place every week: NY. That said, the characterization is strong and the drama, even if soap opera like (and that’s not a dirty phrase…practically EVERY series EVERYWHERE now is a soap, like it or not) with all the she loves me, she loves me, too and he loves her, triangle going on…actually with Astrid it’s more like a rectangle…persists. I find the entire thing from episode one to episode seven, thus far, compelling, hard to dismiss and difficult to put down.

 

Yes, the tropes of the old series are put down and even denied and sometimes the complete opposite stated. For one thing, I always felt the people who become TP really had to act a certain, goodly, even Godly way before the gene takes effect. Maybe that’s not scientific but more spiritual, which is why I loved the original series, which also downplayed that but made sure no one really evil broke out. This idea seems forgotten by almost ALL the returns: audio, CW and 1990s (though no one there is wholly evil) but nowhere is it more contradicted than in the CW series. The violence displayed by the TP and the utter temper flare ups by even the heroes (John is particularly nasty in his revenge on Stephen having betrayed him and slept with Cara) is disturbing and awkward. And again I can’t help but feel the show was competing with the ultra (no pun intended) violent ARROW and even more so with SUPERNATURAL. SUPERNATURAL which started in 2005 with a good first season and an even better second, is ending only this year, in the 2019-2020 season. While it lasted a long time, I felt it shouldn’t have. What was basically a great monster of the week series survived by stretching out its arcs and becoming a huge negative, violent mess of a downer, usually. Yes, there were still strong episodes as it bore on and some were even light and funny but on the whole repeated plotlines, casting God and angels as all but evil and villains, and killing off major, likable characters and turning the main heroes, all three or more of them, evil, was just wearing. Yet it survived. I believe THE TOMORROW PEOPLE kept things SUPERNATURAL like by having the evil villains built in: TOMORROW PEOPLE were the evils. Yet, where ARROW and SUPERNATURAL excelled was in giving their villains detailed and probably overlong backstories. Here, we don’t even get the rapist’s name.

 

Again, despite the flaws, the dialog is strong and the relationships even stronger, even if most of it is how deeply all the females love Stephen. Luca had potential but if he broke out, the show would probably make him a baddie, which would have made me sad. I also wondered if Astrid would break out. Instead, later, we got most of the adults being TP already!

 

The best part of this episode is, without doubt, John’s  mouth to mouth to Stephen, especially after their nasty fight and “break up”. Slash writers everywhere should be rejoicing…though few probably saw this episode or indeed, the series. In any case, this episode is not as bad as I first thought and I’m more entertained by these than the tedious BIG FINISH audios.