Well they certainly pulled out all the stops on this one in their quest for a memorably bad episode.
First, the childish and childishly American vocabulary of the horror-comic including the ending. Sending up your own product is insulting to your customer (me).
Next, as usual, we have Da Yoof, doing nothing but mumbling, staring, looking and sounding identical, but still expecting (one presumes) to get the weekly envelope containing the wage that should have gone to an actor or at least to someone who knows that it is customary to open one's mouth when attempting to speak.
Then, passing over the massive implausibility that furnishes the clinching documentary evidence (which the lowliest of trainee scriptwriters should have been able to rework into something tolerably believable) we come to serious flaws of characterization.
Making the principals the story is not dramatic, it is the last resort of the creatively bankrupt producer and in Lewis it robs the programme of its mainstay of interest namely the fluid and often amusing double act of Lewis and Hathaway plus the gently thoughtful development between Lewis and Laura which punctuate the 90 minutes and give light relief from the weak plots and 13-year old characters.
And finally we have to have the diatribe painting anyone opposing the orthodoxy of the scientific establishment as a thicko low-life. Job done as Da Yoof would say.
Not quite down to the standard of Life Born of Fire but gives it a good run for its money.
First, the childish and childishly American vocabulary of the horror-comic including the ending. Sending up your own product is insulting to your customer (me).
Next, as usual, we have Da Yoof, doing nothing but mumbling, staring, looking and sounding identical, but still expecting (one presumes) to get the weekly envelope containing the wage that should have gone to an actor or at least to someone who knows that it is customary to open one's mouth when attempting to speak.
Then, passing over the massive implausibility that furnishes the clinching documentary evidence (which the lowliest of trainee scriptwriters should have been able to rework into something tolerably believable) we come to serious flaws of characterization.
Making the principals the story is not dramatic, it is the last resort of the creatively bankrupt producer and in Lewis it robs the programme of its mainstay of interest namely the fluid and often amusing double act of Lewis and Hathaway plus the gently thoughtful development between Lewis and Laura which punctuate the 90 minutes and give light relief from the weak plots and 13-year old characters.
And finally we have to have the diatribe painting anyone opposing the orthodoxy of the scientific establishment as a thicko low-life. Job done as Da Yoof would say.
Not quite down to the standard of Life Born of Fire but gives it a good run for its money.