"Coffee, Tea Or Annie"
Spoilers. This episode asks the audience to suspend their disbelief for one of TV-land's biggest clichés. "Coffee, Tea Or Annie" revolves around Annie (Gretchen Mol) going undercover as stewardess because she's a dead ringer for a murdered flight attendant called Valerie Palmer. In reality, no lookalike is convincing enough to trick friends into believing such a ruse, but in TV Land characters don't notice Annie's got a different voice, unique mannerisms, and other obvious tells. To a degree, LOM:US gets away with it because everything we're seeing is perhaps a construct of Sam's (Jason O'Mara) imagination, but that's fortunately the only major complaint about this enjoyable installment…What worked here was simple: writers Bryan Oh and Adele Lim stole some elements from one of the better BBC episodes (the swingers party), focused on the one aspect of LOM:US that's clicked from day one (the Sam/Annie love-in), kept everything fun and frothy, remembered to stir in a few poignant moments, and actually developed Annie's character. The storyline itself was admittedly thin (not to mention reliant on us swallowing the silly idea of Annie fooling everyone into thinking she's someone else), but it was still easy to enjoy and not as tedious as recent episodes have been.
Writers: Bryan Oh & Adele Lim
Director: David Petrarca
Cast: Gretchen Mol (Annie), Jonathan Murphy (Chris), Michael Imperioli (Ray), Harvey Keitel (Gene), Jason O'Mara (Sam), Marla Sucharetza (Mrs. Collins), Caleb Wallace (Young Sammy), Hamilton Clancy (Derelict), Keri Lynn Pratt (Leslie), Kelli Giddish (Carol), Mark Deklin (Ronald Harris), Mark Linn-Baker (Lincoln James), Gina Gershon (Rita), Scott Robertson (Doorman) & Jim O'Keefe (Det. James Harrison)
"All The Young Dudes"
Sam grows a fierce beard to go undercover as Irish ne'er-do-well Sam Bono, part of a gang hijacking trucks containing expensive merchandise across the city. After getting arrested during a police sting, he's later bailed from jail by Irish gangster Jimmy McManus (Peter Greene), who takes a shine to him. Once again, Sam's childhood in 1974 clashes with "present-day" 1974 when he realizes Jimmy's Tarot-reading barmaid sister Colleen (Paige Turco) is someone he had a crush on as a boy living next door to her. Sure enough, Sam bumps into his mother Rose (Jennifer Ferrin) once again, which just complicates his cover and investigation."All The Young Dudes" was quite straight-forward and O'Mara (able to use his natural accent) held the show together well, with the main cast pushed into the background for the most part. Guest stars Greene (rapist Zed from Pulp Fiction) and Turco (recently murdered in Damages) added value to sketchy characters -- so, while the thin storyline wasn't especially compelling, Sam and Colleen's romance worked well enough given the meager time allotted to its development.
The episode raked over old ground with Sam and his mother, but interacting with your own parent remains an emotionally compelling facet of time-travel stories – although I wish the show would do something interesting, like have Sam prove to Annie he's not crazy by getting hold of Young Sam's fingerprints and showing her they're identical to his own. Sam could have proven his story countless times, if he put his mind to it. But, this is clearly TV-land where normal rules don't apply; indeed, one key difference between LOM:US and LOM:UK is where Sam find himself. In the BBC original, Sam was transported back to the '70s. In the ABC remake, Sam's been transported back to a '70s cop show. And there's a difference.
Overall, I actually rather liked "All The Young Dudes", but only for the peripheral moments – like a tense and amusing scene in McManus' bar where Sam's told to shoot police informant Colleen and handed the gun by her brother, or the shocking climax (with Ray and Chris being gunned and left for dead by Greene.) Other moments were less successful, like when Sam finally has a heart-to-heart with his child self about the fact his father has gone, because what should have been a touching scene was mired by dumb, pointless "morphing" of the child actor into various ages of Sam. It distracted from the moment entirely.
Writers: Tracy McMillan & Sonny Postiglione
Director: Darnell Martin
Guest Cast: Jennifer Ferrin (Rose), Peter Greene (Jimmy McManus), Paige Turco (Colleen McManus), Caleb Wallace (Young Sammy), Richard Kain (Officer Kain), Harry Raab Alderson (16-year-old Sammy), Patrick Salerjno (10-year-old Sammy), Bill Cwikowski (Timothy), Robert Creighton (Little Patrick) & Daniel Stewart Sherman (Big Patrick)
"Everyone Knows It's Windy"
Essentially the sequel to "All The Young Dudes", this penultimate episode of LOM:US opens with Ray and Chris being stretchered to hospital after being shot by Irish mobster Jimmy McManus, who himself is killed hours later by an unseen gunman. Ray recovers from his flesh-wound, but Chris is in a more precarious position – which makes his comrades at the 125 Precinct the prime suspects in McManus' murder. Enter FBI Agent Frank Morgan (Peter Gerety), who is convinced it's too much of a coincidence that Greene was found killed in an unrelated dispute so soon after shooting two cops.
Essentially the sequel to "All The Young Dudes", this penultimate episode of LOM:US opens with Ray and Chris being stretchered to hospital after being shot by Irish mobster Jimmy McManus, who himself is killed hours later by an unseen gunman. Ray recovers from his flesh-wound, but Chris is in a more precarious position – which makes his comrades at the 125 Precinct the prime suspects in McManus' murder. Enter FBI Agent Frank Morgan (Peter Gerety), who is convinced it's too much of a coincidence that Greene was found killed in an unrelated dispute so soon after shooting two cops.The eye of suspicion falls on Sam when an eye-witness identifies him as someone running from the crime scene, and the gun used to shoot Greene is then found in Sam's apartment after a police search. Fortunately, Sam has an alibi in hippie neighbour Windy (Tanya Fischer), whom he played checkers with until three o'clock in the morning, but unfortunately Windy has vanished. In fact, her entire apartment has been cleared out, meaning Sam's not even sure she ever existed.
Sam's quickly locked up under suspicion of murder, but Gene facilitates his escape with a cartoon-sized key hidden in a Chinese meal's fortune cookie, giving Sam the chance to find the real killer before Morgan recaptures him.
I have to say, I enjoyed this one a lot. It's another episode where Sam is more central to events, with everyone else just circling his orbit, which seems to suit LOM:US much better. Clearly the double-act of Gene and Sam just doesn't have the same verisimilitude in the American translation, and O'Mara actually works better as a sole lead. The episode worked very well as a version of The Fugitive, but there were also some noticeable steps towards conclusion for the series – when Morgan is revealed to have been the mysterious voice talking on the phone to Sam, who directed him to the ominous basement around mid-season. We even get a few apparently solid leads about what Sam's predicament is: the people Morgan works for (part of Project Aries?) injected tiny robots into Sam's brain. But, the story nicely makes all of this ambiguous, when we're reminded that Morgan has read Sam's psych-evaluation, so is probably just messing with Sam's head once he was identified as Greene's real killer.
Overall, despite a few maddeningly vague moments towards the end and some bad dialogue at times, "Everyone Knows It's Windy" was a good mix of compelling wronged-cop-on-the-run-to-clear-his-name drama with a healthy dose of LOM:US's mythology. Perhaps best of all, after Annie talks Sam down from a building rooftop (believing Morgan's words that death will reunite him with loved-ones on 2008), it appears that their relationship is finally going to blossom. And, yes, for all its faults, I like the Sam/Annie will-they/won't-they facet to this show, because the actors are appealing together and the scripts handle their romantic storyline with more aplomb than the sci-fi stuff.
Writers: Phil M. Rosenberg & Mike Flynn (story by Mike Flynn)
Director: Alex Zakrzewski
Guest Cast: Tanya Fischer (Windy), Steve Rizzo (Det. Rizzo), Liza Binkley (Intern), Baylen Thomas (Doctor), Robert Creighton (Little Patrick), Scott Adsit (Dr. Clifford Dorsett), Peter Gerety (Agent Frank Morgan), Peter Greene (Jimmy McManus), Joe Toronto (Officer Priore), Michael H. Bush (Paramedic) & Deidre Goodwin (Nurse)
