The Endgame – “Pilot” (2022)

The first episode of ‘The Endgame’ aired February 21, 2022, at 10:00pm Eastern on the NBC network.  It was developed by Jake Coburn and Nicholas Wootton, who also wrote the pilot, and was directed by Justin Lin.  It starred Morena Baccarin as Elena Fedorova and Ryan Michelle Bathe as Val Fitzgerald.  Its overnight ratings were around 3.3 million viewers with a .46 share in the 18-49 demographic.  It ranked fourth overall for broadcast television for the night.  It was a production of Universal Television LLC, a direct subsidiary of NBCUniversal, as well as My So-Called Company productions, know for ‘The Vampire Diaries’ and ‘Roswell,’ and Perfect Storm Entertainment, which is associated with Justin Lin.

Not gonna criticize a temp title for the pilot.

              The involvement of Julie Piec and Justin Lin as executive producers is interesting, but this entire show is the brainchild of Coburn and Wootton.  They both have pretty extensive television backgrounds.  Coburn seems to have gotten his start as a writer on the Lonelygirl15 quasi-hoax back in 2007 which he managed to convert into gigs on various CW shows such as ‘Gossip Girl’ and ‘Arrow,’ mostly as a writer/producer.  Wootton goes all the way back to the mid-90’s, starting on ‘Brooklyn South’ before creating the one-season ‘City of Angels’ in 2000 and also working as a writer/producer on the later seasons of ‘NYPD Blue’ and ‘Law & Order,’ as well as more recently ‘Scorpion’ and ‘Stumptown.’ 

              Morena Baccarin has been kicking around television and movies for some time now.  Her big break came as Inara Serra on ‘Firefly’ and after that she popped up as the lead villain in the ‘V’ remake, appeared in several seasons of ‘Gotham,’ and I personally liked her recurring role in ‘The Mentalist.’  Ryan Michelle Bathe’s first big role was a recurring one in ‘Boston Legal’ and also appeared in ‘Army Wives,’ ‘This is Us,’ and ‘The First Wives Club.’ 

              Justin Lin directing this seems surprising at first, considering he’s mostly known for helping to turn “The Fast and the Furious” movies into the franchise it is today, helming movies three through six and returning for the ninth to start to wrap up the series, but he’s also directed pilots for shows such as ‘S.W.A.T.’ and ‘Scorpion’ as well as episodes of ‘True Detective’ and the ‘Magnum P.I.’ remake.

              All of which is a long way of saying that given the people involved this pilot should have been much, much better than it was.  To paraphrase myself, a tv pilot has roughly three things to accomplish during its run time: establish the premise, demonstrate how it’s going to function on an episode-to-episode basis, and make you care about the characters.  When I first started looking at pilots, I thought the first two were the most important goals, but the more episodes I saw the more emphasis I placed on the third.  Good characters can make up for a lot.  In this case it really doesn’t matter as this is an example of a nearly complete triple-failure.

Let’s lay it out in order and start with the premise: an international fugitive who runs a worldwide criminal empire including running a mercenary army and money laundering is captured by the US government, but it turns out it’s all part of her nefarious plan when her people take over seven banks in New York City in order to collect blackmail material on the Attorney General and the head of Homeland Security and makes it clear her schemes are just beginning.  And by the end that’s really it: there’s this criminal in ostensible US custody who has a mysterious ongoing plan involving holding banks hostage.  This is the setup for a Michael Mann movie, not the start of a supposed multi-season television show.

97% of her characterization right here.

              This leads directly into the second problem, because I have no idea how this show is going to function from week to week.  By the end of the episode, it becomes clear that the status quo for the season is going to be that Elena is in custody, the banks are still taken over by her mercenaries, and that nothing is going to be resolved any time soon.  It very much feels like the first half of a two-part pilot episode where in the second half we get the actual setup for the show but no, this seems to be it.  The synopsis of the yet-to-air second episode reads “A kidnapping orchestrated by Elena puts Val to the test as her past resurfaces and becomes a part of the bigger play.  The FBI Task Force contends with an unexpected turn of events in one of the banks.”  To the best of my knowledge this is going to be a series of episodes detailing the ongoing hostage situation as these seven banks are simply held hostage and Elena sits smugly in custody.  I’m sure other elements are going to be introduced but we have no hints in the pilot what they will be.  Nothing indicates this is a limited series, and I’ve looked.  I’ve written before about Season 3 problems, the notion that a premise will burn out before a show hits its third season, and I’m not entirely sure how this could make it to even thirteen episodes.  The show can really only go one of two ways: it either manages to be whip-smart and serve us bite-sized versions of the movie “Heat” for forty-two minutes every week with enough variations that it doesn’t get stale, or it focuses on other crimes outside of the banks and hopes we don’t notice that those hostages must be getting pretty hungry by now.

Which brings us to the third goal of a pilot and the biggest problem with this show, which is that the characters aren’t so much people as they’re small bags filled with crumpled scraps of papers with tropes written on them.  There are only two actual characters in this series surrounded by plot devices and exposition dumping machines, which is acceptable for a pilot, generally the supporting cast gets fleshed out as the series progresses, the problem is that both of the main characters suck.  Elena herself is yet another stupid person’s idea of a smart person.  She’s this criminal mastermind genius that’s managed to rise to the top of the world of crime and in the language of this show being smart involves magical predictive powers.  It’s one thing to be prepared and have some plans in place, quite another to be capable of what this show portrays.  To break down the first example the show gives of her abilities: sometime before the start of the episode she has one of her people deep enough inside the FBI that he’s personal security to the Attorney General of the United States.  He plants an envelope on said AG which says, “I’m the Queen.”  After she’s been delivered to her holding area she’s given a pen and a piece of paper to write down some information.  At the same time her people take the first bank hostage, then one of them holds up a message to a camera reading “Director Real: Bow to the Queen.”  As the director of the FBI is getting a phone call about this Elena hands the piece of paper to the AG, on which she’s written “check your coat pocket.”   He finds the envelope but doesn’t open it until the FBI director comes over and asks her if she sent the message and who the queen is, at which point the AG opens the envelope and reads it.

I don’t really feel the need to point out all of the ways that this is stupid.  It’s impressive if you don’t think about it for more than a few seconds, which the show is really hoping you don’t.  Enough things beyond Elena’s direct control had to happen in exactly the right order with exactly the right timing for that moment to land and while the moment itself is decent enough as dramatic beat before a commercial break in the end it doesn’t have any real effect on the plot.  In fact, it ends up as a net-negative for Elena as her deeply embedded agent in the FBI is quickly identified and taken into custody.  The fact that the agent had Eastern-European style gang tattoos all over his arms yet somehow was personal security to the US AG is in its own category of stupid.

Becuase of all the planning, y'see,

Her characterization just continues on like that.  Characters will make several sets of decisions and actions and end up at a place and time where magically Elena predicted they would be presumably weeks before.  Things keep happening that she apparently planned for with such magical timing and foresight that it’s never impressive, it’s just implausible and annoying and robs every scene of tension, and eventually it occurs to the audience that while she’s a main character Elena never actually does anything over the course of the episode.  She stays in one room saying various mysterious things hinting at bigger plans and smiling smugly.  Everything she’s done that’s supposedly amazing happened offscreen before the episode even started.  Because of her magical planning powers she’s never in danger, never threatened, never thrown off.  She has just one note to play.  The meandering accent that Morena Baccarin strains her mediocre lines through doesn’t do her any favors.

The character Elena is facing off against doesn’t fare any better.  Her antagonist is a mid-ranking FBI agent with whom she has a sketched-in history, involving some vague happenings in Gambia as well as both their husbands in what’s hinted at being the real ongoing mystery that’s going to be running in the background of all the bank shenanigans.  Val Fitzgerald is, as a supporting character helpfully states, the “first Black supervisor in the criminal branch of the New York office” of the FBI.  She’s so honest she got her husband thrown in prison for taking drug money, although she still loves him.  This causes her problems within the FBI as they suspect she’s dirty too, which establishes one of her two entire traits (one more than Elena, to be fair), which is to be angry all the time.  She drives angry, she talks angry, she invades personal spaces and doesn’t take guff from anyone.  She’s in a room with the Attorney General of the United States, the Director of the FBI, and the Director of Homeland Security and she’s the one telling them they’re wrong and what they need to do while verbally banging her fist on the table. 

The other note she gets to play is basically magical realization powers.  She figures out Elena is involved in taking the banks hostages through leaps of logic that are only impressive because the writers decided she’s right.  I counted six distinct moments in the forty-two minutes of the pilot where Val pauses in mid-sentence, the camera pushes in on her face, and she Figures Something Out.  If we’re lucky we’ll get a thrown-away line of dialogue to kind of explain how she came to her realization but mostly she just spits out the next plot point and we’re off.  From what I can work out this is essentially to balance out Elena’s magical planning powers.  This also allows her to angrily insist she was right to her previous doubters and be angry again when they insist on not taking her advice the next time.

She was right.

What this turns into in the finished product is Elena being smug about something, Val figuring out what she’s smug about, but just slightly too late so Elena’s plan still works, then Elena hints she’s smug about something again, and repeat until the episode is over.  They ping pong back and forth and nothing Val does interferes with Elena’s plans, and in fact her presence is factored into those plans in such a way that if she stopped to think about it she’d figure out that in a way she’s actually helping her.  They’re basically operating in a closed system that was apparently all mapped out before the season started so there’s a distinct feeling that nothing they’re doing matters. 

So using my usual rubric those are the ways this fails as a pilot, but it also fails pretty badly as a basic piece of filmed entertainment.  Before we get into specifics and the inevitable comparisons to ‘The Blacklist’ we need to examine its use of linear time as a storytelling device.  This isn’t anything special to ‘The Endgame,’ nor is it something I think the makers intentionally exploited, but it’s something I noticed from the manner in which I watched this episode.  The first time through I watched it while I took notes, which involved frequently pausing it while I typed out my thoughts, noting all the inconsistencies and leaps of logic.  The second time through I just let it play and while all the same problems were there without the ability to sit and consider and work out the implications of events the whole thing flowed a bit better because there wasn’t enough time to think.

To give a single example: there’s a throwaway line from Val relatively early on that they need to order protection to all of New York City’s banks.  Her boss, already established as an asshole antagonist, mocks her by stating that putting a “91 prevent defense” around all 765 banks in the city would be madness.  Several scenes later, after a bomb has gone off in response to a SWAT team trying to infiltrate a bank currently held hostage, he decides to call for exactly that, despite the fact that several other banks had previously also been taken over and the detonation of some bombs doesn’t actually change the situation or in any way make it more likely that other banks are also in danger.  But in a nifty narrative example of The Kuleshov Effect because the idea was planted earlier and something dramatic has just happened, we buy into the idea that this is an appropriate response.  It also reinforces our respect for the protagonist since it was her idea and (clumsily) sets up a plot point for later.  If we were given time to think about this, like I was when taking notes, this would instantly ring false but because we’re on to the next scene and dealing with new information it’s just enough to fade into background events.  This is the pattern throughout, and presumably why Justin Lin was brought in.  A key skill in enjoying ‘The Fast and the Furious’ movies is to not care in the least how dumb they are.

Boo!

              That’s why whole sections of my notes railing against the nonsense plot and implausibility of events weren’t exactly wasted but don’t matter that much in the end.  This show moves fast enough and throws enough at you that on a moment-to-moment basis that it hangs together just enough so that it doesn’t fall completely apart.  Nonsense plots aren’t enough in and of themselves to make something bad as long as the action is fun and the characters are engaging.  When those things also fail logic gaps are just another thing to add to the list of disappointments.

What’s presented in the opening of the show as a framing device nicely demonstrates the fundamental problem the episode has which is, in essence, that absolutely nothing gets resolved by the time it’s over.  Text appears on the screen establishing that we’re in Belarus, ‘six months after the collapse of the Soviet Union.’  What’s interesting here is that it doesn’t give a date.  I’ve done the math and the ages do work out but there’s no reason given in the episode itself that it can’t just say something like ‘May 1992.’  If you’re feeling generous the writers are planting seeds about the geo-political fallout of the collapse of the USSR which will matter to the plot later on but if so that doesn’t pay off in this episode and as is demonstrated throughout the writers have a fairly low opinion of the intelligence of their audience, so I think this is just an effort to not confuse people with specifics.

              Over the text we have Elena saying in a voiceover (later this is revealed to be a story being told to Val) that she has a little story to tell us, a fairytale.  It’s about a daughter who loved her dad, who brought her up in a harsh world and taught her how to fight to survive.  We’re shown a father and a daughter overlooking a road.  An SUV comes along, and the daughter is given a rocket launcher she shoots at the car, causing it to crash.  Interspersed throughout the rest of the episode we see scenes of the father and daughter approaching the car then following the trail of a survivor to a little wounded girl in the woods, who the daughter stabs.  The stabbed girl is then revealed to be a young Elena, and the voiceover starts again except this time it follows Elena in the car which gets shot by the rocket and then shows her being attacked in the woods.  She fights back and kills the father and daughter.  The episode ends with Elena saying she has another story to tell Val.

              The problems start with how the story is presented.  All of the stuff with the original father and daughter, their lines of dialogue, them approaching the car and following the trail, all of that was made up, Elena didn’t see any of it, so it doesn’t matter.  It’s presented to the audience as a clever twist: you think the voiceover is talking about this little girl but actually it’s this other little girl, fooled you.  But remember this is a story being told to another character, and when we cut back to Elena and Val when the little girl is stabbed Val is reacting as if the story she was told is the one we were shown, which doesn’t make any sense.  Having the visuals diverge from the voiceover works just fine, it’s a very common storytelling technique in film, but it doesn’t work when it’s one person telling another person a story.  It basically means that Elena told most of a story, stopped, then said “Oh, I was lying, let me start over.”  Making it be an actual story told in the actual episode just underlines how artificial the entire conceit is.  The story is: the car I was riding in got blown up, I ran into the woods, got stabbed but fought back and I lived.  That’s a pretty traumatic event for a little girl and it’s fine as a backstory, but it’s not enough to be the dramatic reveal for an entire episode of television.  She also finishes the story while Val isn’t in the scene, which the show is just hoping you don’t notice.  In fitting with the rest of the episode it’s left completely unresolved by the time we hit the credits.

              It’s also described to us as a fairytale, which it is not.  Considering that Elena’s criminal codename is Snow White and that the FBI director drops the line, “Snow White and the seven banks,” along with episode two of the show being titled ‘Fairytale Wedding,’ it’s hard not to come the conclusion that the writers have a burning desire to seem very clever without the ability to actually be clever.  I have a very firm suspicion that if this show miraculously makes it to the end of the season it’s going to end on a cliffhanger with no answers supplied to the audience because I don’t believe the writers actually have any.

About as satisfying an ending as the show has.

              So let’s address ‘The Blacklist’ in the room.  That show is currently in its ninth season and has just been renewed for a tenth so however you feel about its quality (general consensus is that its best days are well behind it) the engine it’s built on is still working just fine.  In addition to watching this pilot twice I also watched the pilot to ‘The Blacklist’ and this entire thing could have just been a list of ways that show did it better. 

              Let’s run down my pilot requirements again.  The premise starts off the same: an international fugitive is in US custody but has a master plan.  In this instance, however, we’re given specifics: he has a list of international fugitives he intends to bring down and is willing to help the government do it.  He very openly has his own agenda but the government is willing to put up with it if it helps them catch these criminals.

              This leads directly to how the shows will functions from week to week, which is basically as a procedural with a twist.  This is demonstrated in the pilot: the FBI is given the name and background of a bad guy and with the mastermind’s assistance they kill him and foil his plan.  The authorities spar with the criminal, there’s tension over his methods, but at the end of the episode the bad guy is dealt with, and the overarching plot moves forward.  Repeat as needed and you’ve got yourself a show.

Again we have basically only two characters, the criminal mastermind and the FBI agent counterpart.  However this mastermind turned himself in, volunteers information on another criminal, actively takes part in both tracking down the criminal and foiling his plan, then announces he’s willing to work with the authorities to capture other criminals.  So rather than just being in one room saying vague things he’s shown taking actions, figuring things out, is in more than one location, and at one point has a pen stabbed in his neck so he’s shown to be fallible.  The show also frankly cheats by having him played by James Spader, as with all due respect to Ms. Baccarin she’s no James Spader.

The FBI counterpart is the exact opposite of Val Fitzgerald.  Instead of already being a fairly senior FBI agent who has a history with the mastermind she’s a new recruit who has no idea who he is.  This allows her to be an audience stand in for exposition dumps and we identify with her when she feels overwhelmed and feel good for her when she triumphs.  She’s also allowed to have more than one emotion: she’s alternately excited, scared, sad, angry, relieved, annoyed, she gets to react to what happens to her with human emotions.  The episode also ends with a mystery involving her husband, so I can’t stress enough how much ‘The Endgame’ just rips off ‘The Blacklist’ wholesale.

A titanic struggle of wills.

‘The Endgame’ did not get good reviews.  It’s currently sitting at a 44 on Metacritic.  Its ratings were all right but it followed a reality show premiere and I will be shocked if they keep even two-thirds of their premiere audience for the second episode.  As if everything listed above wasn’t enough there’s a whole boatload of things I didn’t manage to work into the above paragraphs: the AG of the US, the Director of the FBI, and the Director of Homeland Security not only all being in the same undisclosed location at the same time but also being portrayed as tough guy veteran agents when in reality they’re political appointees, the fact that after accomplishing literally nothing our hero bursts into the holding area to confront Elena and says “The worst day of my life and I still almost got you.  What do you think I’ll do tomorrow?” when Elena has no idea what Val supposedly just did, the dramatic reveal at the end that Elena’s supposedly dead husband is actually still alive in an American prison as if we’re supposed to care, I could keep going for a very long time.  This failed as a pilot and as a simple episode of television.  When I’ve previously reviewed pilots I’ve had the foresight to know how they ended up doing and while I suppose there’s always the chance that history will prove me wrong as the network television landscape isn’t what it was even ten years ago I will be absolutely shocked if this show manages to make it all the way to thirteen episodes.  I had this vague idea that the Golden Age of Television had this whole tv thing figured out but this just goes to show you what gets on the air is just as random as ever.

Blind Date (1984)

               ‘Blind Date’ was written and directed by Nico Mastorakis, an independent Greek filmmaker who’s had a fascinating life story.  He started as a journalist in the late 50’s, his career culminating with sneaking aboard Aristotle Onassis’ yacht in 1968 disguised as a bouzouki player and subsequently breaking the news of the impending marriage of Onassis and Jackie Kennedy.  He was also heavily involved in the development of Greek television and radio, directing and hosting a number of shows throughout the 60’s and into the 70’s.  He had minor clashes with the military junta which ruled Greece from 1967 to 1974 but never suffered more than some incidental arrests and being taken off the air a couple of times, always ultimately returning.  He was sufficiently cozy with the military that after it was finally overthrown he was seen as unhireable by Greek television and radio.

The title never does make sense.

              He therefore turned to films, directing and producing the 1976 films ‘Death Has Blue Eyes’ and ‘Island of Death,’ the latter of which was one of the most infamous exploitation films of the 70’s.  He said in interviews that after seeing ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ he decided that if such a sleazy, violent film could make that much money an even sleazier, more violent film would make even more.  It didn’t.  He then headed to Hollywood where he wrote the screenplay for 1978’s ‘The Great Tycoon’ starring Anthony Quinn, based on the relationship between Onassis and Kennedy, then spent two years under contract with Paramount.  This didn’t end up producing any films but did have him cross paths with filmmakers like Ridley Scott and John Carpenter, both of them influential on his later films.  After writing the screenplay to 1982’s ‘Bloodtide’ he returned to directing with 1984’s ‘Blind Date.’  Between 1984 and 1992 he would write or direct a total of 12 movies and was active as recently as 2020, all through his own production company Omega Pictures.  All of which is interesting in itself and also goes a long way towards explaining how this movie turned out how it did. 

A shapeless, overlong, unfocused mess of a movie, ‘Blind Date’ is what happens when you assemble a bunch of influences together in the shape of a movie without ever deciding what it’s actually about.  This is not the work of a passionate filmmaker or an auteur, however you feel like defining that term, it’s the work of a media professional who’s been around a number of industries, sifted through some cultural trends, and decided to stitch a bunch of them together and call it a film.  There’s no central idea to the movie, no controlling idea, no singular point being made, and when it’s over you’re not really sure what the point was of anything you just watched.

              As a brief disclaimer the version of the movie I have access to is the 103-minute English dub.  There’s a version with three extra minutes that more than likely contains all of the violence that’s implied in this movie but never shown.  I’d like to complain about how little gore or violence there is in this, a supposed crime thriller, but it hardly seems fair to do so when for all I know it’s being kept from my delicate eyes by the censors, and that’s hardly the fault of the movie.

              The descriptive term thrown around the most about this movie is ‘Greek giallo,’ and that’s probably the most correct.  A full history of giallo is unnecessary for this discussion but in brief the term is generally used to refer to a subset of Italian thrillers revolving around some key plot and stylistic elements.  It’s usually a crime story with slasher elements and striking visuals, more interested in suspense, atmosphere, and often horror rather than any kind of coherent narrative or a satisfying resolution to a mystery.  Its heyday started with 1964’s ‘Blood and Black Lace / 6 Donne per L’assassino,’ directed by Mario Bava, and arguably reached its peak with 1975’s ‘Deep Red / Profondo Rosso’ directed by Dario Argento.  By the time this movie was filmed it had fallen somewhat out of fashion.  ‘Blind Date’ has a number of the elements of the giallo style but also brings in a number of other influences, and the entire thing ends up less than the sum of its parts.

Honestly confused if this is intended to be cool or creepy.

              There are three distinct plots in the movie and if woven together correctly they may have worked, but instead they stay almost completely separated for the entire runtime until clumsily colliding together at the end.  First there’s the traditional giallo part, consisting of a mysterious serial killer who drives a taxi and kills women with a scalpel while wearing latex gloves and listening to headphones.  Next there’s the psychological study of the main character as he obsesses over a woman he suspects might be a past girlfriend under another name.  Thirdly there’s the sci-fi conceit of a character who’s gone blind and has his sight replaced by sonar-generated computer images.  It’s not impossible for all three of these plots to build on and reinforce each other but it’s something the movie doesn’t even really attempt to do, much less succeed at.

              Surprisingly enough the most disconnected part of the movie is the serial killer running around killing women slasher-style.  You’d think this would be the central pillar of the movie but other than occasional news reports in the background the main character isn’t even aware the deaths are happening until a full 62 minutes into the movie.  At random parts during this hour we’ll cut from whatever is happening in the rest of the movie to get a short few scenes of the killer meeting and subsequently killing a random woman, or in one case a couple.  The sections involving the killer are generally the most interesting and well-shot of the movie, mostly from the killer’s POV and really evoking the spirit of classic giallo cinema with deliberate camera work and strong use of framing.  The entire opening, moving from a nighttime carnival through a cab ride to the meticulous subduing and killing of a victim using surgical accessories, is the most effective section and one that the rest of the movie never quite matches.

The important elements established by these sections is that the killer is a man, he listens to a Walkman through headphones, he drives a taxi, and he uses surgical instruments in his kills such as scalpels, forceps, and latex gloves.  It often lingers on these elements in a way that primes the viewer to treat them as significant and look for them during the rest of the movie, and except for a minor plot point involving the taxi exactly none of them factor into the killer’s motives or identity in any way.  His eventual identification and defeat are such throwaway parts of the film they retroactively make these sections of the movie utterly frustrating.

The unexpected throughline for the movie is the psychological study of our main character and his obsession over a model.  He’s named Jonathon Ratcliff, an American living in Athens and working in a largely undefined role for an ad agency.  His introduction is immediately after the opening kill and he enters from the bottom of the frame wearing headphones and a blazer with a white t-shirt underneath emblazoned with the slogan “I (heart) My Dentist.”  Leaving the t-shirt aside, because I frankly have no idea what to make of it, introducing him with headphones instantly links him in the audience’s mind with the killer in a way that I’m undecided on whether the movie intended.  He strides through the busy Athens streets while there’s a voiceover giving his backstory by way of a job interview for the position he apparently now has.  He arrives at a photo shoot at a hotel and becomes fixated on one of the models, Rachel.  At this point his internal monologue states, “No, it can’t be.  Not Marianne.  Not my Marianne,” while a sexy sax-based number takes over the soundtrack.  This is almost all we’ll get to explain his actions for the first thirty minutes of the movie.

I support dental hygiene as well, but ....

Despite the affections of his secretary / love interest Claire Simpson, played by a post ‘Star Trek II’ pre ‘Cheers’ Kirstie Alley, he begins to stalk the woman in a way that the movie treats in an oddly neutral way.  Immediately after a surprise birthday party sprung on him while he’s actively having sex with Claire, which she’s in on and somehow everyone treats as hilarious and not deeply inappropriate, he drives to across from the model’s apartment building and begins spying on her with binoculars.  During this he also takes note of a taxi driving up to the complex which the audience recognizes as the killer’s, which primes us to expect something to happen but which doesn’t pay off for another full hour.  In a later scene he follows the model and her boyfriend to a restaurant and then to a local make-out spot where he spies on them so openly that the boyfriend instantly spots him and chases his off through the forest, where he hits his head on a tree branch and is knocked unconscious.

As I said the movie treats all this as basically normal behavior.  Generally speaking when a main character is shown doing something immoral or ethically questionable movies will at least acknowledge the ambiguity of the situation with lighting, angles, music, some indication that the actions being shown are objectionable on some level.  Instead, here the stylish lighting, odd angles, and foreboding soundtrack are strictly kept to scenes of the killer while this, Jonathon stalking a woman he’s never met, is presented directly and shot much in the same manner as him just visiting his office.  He acts matter-of-factly, casually dropping jokes to himself as he spies on the model while that same sexy sax-filled number plays on the soundtrack.  The movie is doing everything it can to portray itself as basically on his side, including voyeuristic shots of the model doing everyday things while Jonathon isn’t even there to watch, the camera watching in his place.

At one point the movie cuts to a moody shot of him in bed watching video of the photo shoot, playing footage of the model over and over, while a voiceover of a recalled conversation fills in some more backstory about this Marianne.  Apparently, many years ago she was sexually assaulted while she and Jonathon were on a date and afterwards he was prevented from ever seeing her again.   The camera holds on his face with soft lighting while he remembers this and looks sad while obsessively watching the tape.  Eventually the movie goes so far as to play the sexy-sax theme after he’s broken into her apartment and sits next to her bad and watches her sleep, portraying the entire thing as somehow romantic.  At the end of the movie he suffers no repercussions for his actions and in fact his obsession saves her life.

He's really not very good at stalking.

I’m not sure how much credit to give to the filmmakers for this ambiguity, linking Jonathon and the killer through the Walkman imagery and having the main character openly be a stalker, but what leans me towards thinking it’s deliberate if clumsy is the movie trailer.  It takes imagery and moments from the movie and essentially creates an entire alternate plot.  This isn’t that uncommon and I’m not going to consider it a part of the text of the actual film but what makes it fascinating is that by using just the shots contained in the film the plot implied by the trailer, where Jonathon is the killer of these women, actually makes more sense than the movie itself.  Playing off the title the trailer portrays him as someone being set up for a date with the audience and using ironic phrases such as ‘he makes time for the ladies’ and such over flashes of the death scenes and various reaction shots of Jonathon, and the whole thing hangs together very well.  Since the murders are all from the killer’s POV they don’t have any shots of him and so all of the women reacting to being threatened are intercut with shots of Jonathon being a stalker, lit from behind dramatically, or inexplicably thrashing around while connected to electronics, something we’ll get to.  This was a small enough production that I doubt it was sent to a professional movie trailer production company and was probably done in house.  Even if they didn’t mean anything too profound by the trailer portraying Jonathon as the killer the fact that the shots to so easily do so were present in the movie means that on some level they were making that parallel.

It also contains the entire climax of the movie where Jonathon kills the slasher, so for anyone who wants to complain about modern trailers giving the plot away they’ve been doing that forever.

Before we move on to the third plot, the sci-fi aspect of the movie, I need to spend some time talking about the Sony Walkman Model WM-2 and their accompanying MDR-4 headphones because they are in fact crucial elements to the plot.  Introduced in 1981, this model Walkman was a pretty big leap forward from the original model TPS-L2 from two years before.  For those unaware the Walkman was a battery-powered cassette player and the first truly portable personal audio player that the general public could afford.  The WM-2 model was markedly smaller than the first-generation players and sported a sleek, silver body barely bigger than the cassette it played.  The controls were small, recessed buttons on the front and along with the orange-cushioned headphones became instantly iconic, likely why the imagery was used so frequently in this movie.

Honestly, I want one.

It’s hard to overstate the impact the cassette Walkman had on music consumption and society at large during the 1980’s.  It was the first time you could be out in public while listening to anything you chose and tuning out the rest of the world.  They would eventually sell over 200 million units of various models and another 200 million more that played CDs.  It was certainly considered huge at the time, with news stories and academic papers furiously studying the impact that walking around with your own personal soundtracks would have on people.  Would they become schizophrenic, sociopathic, detached from reality, unable to relate to other and the broader world?  Every worry people have broached about technology for the past hundred years, from the impact of the internet, VR, social media, everything since radio and television on, were also had about the Walkman.

And it’s not hard to see why.  There’s actually a very compelling premise to be had in the idea that wearing headphones in some way separates you from the rest of the world.  It’s very much a precursor to the modern worry about people always staring at their phones.  The movie even gets into this somewhat.  When the killer puts on his headphones the music takes over the soundtrack and all of the other sounds cut out.  Traffic, people talking, it’s all overridden by the music chosen by the killer.  It’s both diegetic and the soundtrack, which is a neat touch.  The only three characters ever shown as using a Walkman are the killer, the main character, and the model he’s obsessed with, but it’s never established that listening to music is important to any of the characters other than as something pleasant or indicative of their characters, it’s just a stylistic flourish and plays no part in the final climax of the movie.  No one but the victims ever even know the killer listens to headphones.  It’s an intriguing premise that’s ultimately discarded.

So let’s talk about how twenty-five minutes into the movie Jonathon runs forehead first into a tree branch and is somehow struck blind, the upshot of which is him getting magic computer vision.  Other than the movie establishing that cassette players and video game systems and therefore technology all exist this is exactly as out of left field as it seems.  It’s explicitly stated by several characters that he didn’t injure his eyes, nor does he have any detectable brain injury, the doctors are mystified and simply say there’s nothing they can do.  He’s even told that his sight might return some day.  This causes him to confess his stalking and backstory to his current girlfriend and therefore the audience and explain he thinks the model might be his former love under a different name.  This is never resolved, by the way, he eventually just seems to decide it’s not her.

'Tron' was 1982.  Just saying.

After moping about his loss of sight and wandering out at night seemingly out of petulance, only to be beaten up by some thugs in a subway terminal, he’s at a random party on a yacht when he suddenly resumes an apparent previous conversation with a person we’ve never met before about the Hydra Society and a Dr. Steiger who is apparently a two-time Nobel winner and an amazing brain surgeon.  A lot of things happen very fast at this point to get to the new status quo.  In about nine minutes we’re introduced both to Dr. Steiger and to the nonsense science that you can just hook up wires to people’s nervous systems to transmit both sight and sound, have our main character agree to irreversible brain surgery where a plate is inserted into the top of his head onto which a pair of headphones can be attached with an audible click, and are introduced to a film-filter through which Jonathon can now see everything as a crude outline.  This is explained as the result of a sonar device and ‘visual synthesizer’ hidden inside the shell of a Walkman identical to the one he’s been sporting since the beginning of the movie, which is quite convenient.  He’s also told he can record images and sounds and play them back later, which is used exactly once.  He’s warned not to use the device more than fifteen minutes at a time or for more than two total hours in a day, which he promptly ignores, and it never comes up again.  After a triumphant return to his office and a brief date with his girlfriend he goes home and plugs himself into his Atari console for reasons which are entirely unclear.  After seizing from what seems to be a very intense game of ‘Super Breakout’ he has a brief pixely vision of a small child that he later mentions was a scene from his childhood.  There are scraps of dialogue to try to justify all of this but they’re just things that need to happen for the plot to move on.

The next thing he does is break into the model’s apartment and watch her sleep, so going blind and wandering into a science fiction movie was really only a detour in the overall stalking plot.  Remember that he’s only seeing outlines of things and he’s supposedly trying to figure out if she’s his former girlfriend under an assumed name, so supposedly he’s doing this by basically looking at a series of lines in the dark, although I doubt the movie cares about any of this so maybe we’re past that point.  After that he goes back to the subway terminal and beats up those thugs from earlier with a weighted cane.  I want to accuse the filmmakers of ripping of the Daredevil comics, at the time wrapping up Frank Miller’s iconic run, but I doubt it was that much of an influence.  On his way home from the fight is when the three plots finally connect as with his enhanced sonar senses he hears a victim of the serial killer scream in fear and goes to investigate.

The following section is the only part of the movie that really works aside from the opening kill, and it’s good enough that it really should have formed the center of the movie instead of just the climax of the second act.  Jonathon rushes into the apartment building and confronts the killer as he leaves the victim’s apartment, scalpel still held high so Jonathon can tell from the outline that he’s a sinister figure.  Jonathon then runs up the apartment building stairs in a panic, stumbling and detaching his headphones from his magic Walkman.  With the killer following up behind him he eventually ends up on the roof and we have a scene of a blind man groping around the edges of a roof in front a large neon Coca-Cola sign.  This is some pretty striking imagery and some decent tension, let down more than a little by the killer leaving when cop cars pull up below and Jonathon simply reattaching his Walkman upon remembering that’s a thing he can do and escaping via a neighboring roof.

It's not without its strking imagery.

The idea this establishes is very simple: what if you and a killer saw each other’s faces but because you only saw computerized outlines you couldn’t identify him but he could identify you?  The idea is goofy but if the entire movie was set maybe ten years in the future and we hadn’t spent the entire first hour getting to this point through stalkery nonsense there could have been something here.  There are some great little touches in the premise that could have worked wonders.  The doctor pointed out that Jonathon can’t read anything because his device works off of sonar and he can’t see through glass for the same reason.  This immediately raises some obvious possibilities for intense sequences where Jonathon gets lost because he can’t read street signs, maybe the killer spots him at a location with a lot of interior windows and is able to stalk him while he’s none the wiser, or the killer somehow finds out about the sonar and starts making really loud noises to confuse him, and these are just off the top of my head.  Instead, the killer is never made aware that Jonathon is blind at all and although there’s a brief scene near the end where it’s supposed to be in a darkened swimming pool the confrontation immediately moves to a bright hallway and the movie is over about four minutes later.

There’s somehow a full thirty minutes left after the rooftop scene and it spends most of it attempting to tie the plots together.  Here’s where he replays a recording of the events around confronting the killer and remembers the engine sound of a passing taxi.  He deduces that this means the taxi is owned by the killer.  He recognizes its specific sound but he’s not sure from where.  He decides the logical thing to do is to hook himself back up the Atari console since he did it once before and remembered something random from his childhood, so doing it again will help him remember this one specific thing.  Of course, it does, and he realizes that the taxi is the same one he saw when stalking the model.  He decides this means the killer’s going to target the model he’s been stalking as his next victim.  The fact that this ends up being true doesn’t make it any less stupid. 

"pitch black"

In a separate set of scenes the killer follows him to his apartment, waits for him to leave, breaks in, identifies who he is, and even looks through his folder containing a photo of the model and draws a line across her throat with a red pencil, which is dumb in and of itself but makes even less sense when the killer’s identity is eventually revealed.  It’s important to note that at no point does the killer try to silence or even threaten Jonathon, who remains completely unaware of this break in.

Eventually our two psychopaths converge on the apartment of the model and very slowly confront each other.  The serial killer is revealed to be the model’s boyfriend, a man we’ve seen several times before and was the one who chased Jonathon into the woods causing his head injury.  There are a couple lines of dialogue establishing that he’s been telling her he’s a doctor and that’s all the motive we’re getting for why he’s a doctor-themed slasher.  Jonathon confronts him while he and the model are swimming, turns off the lights, taunts him from the darkness, then the killer stalks him through the back halls of the apartment complex with just a scalpel and wearing some speedos before Jonathon slams a door into his face, causing him to plunge the scalpel into his own neck.  Jonathon tells a very confused model she’s safe now before reuniting with his girlfriend and walking into the credits.  It’s exactly as unsatisfying a conclusion as it sounds. 

Inexplicably there’s a title card after the credits reading, “Jonathon Ratcliff will return in Run, Stumble and Fall.”  This never came to pass. 

The ending impression of the movie is of an unfocused set of ideas that happen around each other without any central theme or plot to tie them together.  The serial killer stuff is well-shot but completely shallow, the psychological stalker story is the first twenty minutes of a De Palma movie with no follow-through, and the science fiction elements are a film-processing technique in search of a plot justification.  Any two of these could have been combined into a compelling movie but this didn’t manage it with three.  The only reason the kill scenes exist is to show the breasts of the victims and possibly some gore if that’s in the longer version I didn’t watch.  The pacing is atrocious with far too much time spent showing Jonathon as a stalker with almost no time examining why he’s acting that way and leaving it completely unresolved at the end.  The computer-generated sight is utterly superfluous, the plot point of him not recognizing the killer could have worked just as well if he’d been wearing a surgical mask, and aside from one decent scene on the rooftop his blindness never factors into anything.  Things simply happen in this movie until it’s over with no thought given to overall themes or purpose.  In the end this is the product of a man who’s decided for business reasons that these things make money and knows more or less how they’re put together, so he assembled one from ideas he had laying around.  It’s not completely incompetent, it’s not utterly terrible, it’s just a movie where the people who made it didn’t care all that much about it.

Can't fault the ambition.