TV: Wiseguy, Mel Proffit Part 1.

Episode 11: Independent Operator


Having spent six weeks on leave following the demise of Sonny Steelgrave, Vinnie is charged with a new task. He will fly to Stockton, CA (13th largest city in the state, 3rd largest landlocked) to befriend one Roger Lococco, a hitman who has been very, very busy.



Roger's been prowling a business hotel's bar, picking up "stray married women" every night. A local frisbee, Kenny Sususha (bit player for any asian role you have, Clyde Kusatsu ) will be on hand to help sell Vinnie's cover.

The two meet at the Stockton airport, introducing another stupid, though not as conspicuous, OCB Ident code. Kenny stands in the terminal and looks balefully down at his watch, loudly complaining "My watch.. It's broken! It says 7:25." Vinnie, who has received as little briefing on the start of this case as he did the previous, has to cop to ignorance of the code.  Kenny is then forced to lecture Vince on the proper response code: add the day of the month to the original time and say that's what time it really is.

Black suits by the pool: legit businessmen!

Within 20 minutes they're in the hotel bar, in time to see Roger depart with his latest conquest. Vinnie outlines his plan to meet Roger, notable in that this time he won't be spilling soup. The following morning, Kenny and Vince stage a disastrous gun buy three pool chairs away from Roger. Roger finds their ineptitude amusing, however, and falls for the act like a kid in short pants.

Over rounds of bloody marys, the two spend establish their bonafides with quippy job descriptions, a contest Roger easily wins with "I sell peace and tranquility at reasonable rates to...deserving clientele." I suspect real mobsters and/or FBI agents don't carry around newspaper clippings of their legal run-ins. Regardless, Roger invites Vinnie to some "action" at midnight.

Come midnight, Roger drives Vinnie out to the airport. They meet three blondes from Finland whom Roger's employer has sent him for between-job downtime. They speak no english, but apparently they are very friendly. By morning, though, Roger's bored again. He drives Vinnie out to a hangar where a german mechanic named Goethe has just finished his car; a '74 t-bird that has twin .50s near the headlights and a 20mm AP gatling gun in the trunk.

Vincent's impressed, and wants to sign on. Roger says he'll run his name up the flagpole and see what happens; at eight they'll go to a party/interview. Vinnie uses the time to report in (he no longer uses the date portion of the day code, just the words). Just as he's returning to his room, Roger surprises him with news the party schedule changed. With no preamble, it's back to the airport where the Finns are waiting.

In the next act they arrive by chopper on the Hotei, Mel Profitt's yacht. What follows is one of the better drug-fueled wicked excess parties of 80s television.

Lust!

Gluttony!

The stellar debauchery music of the broadcast version has not been retained -- even though I've never heard the original music anywhere else in my life.*  Vinnie, unable to help himself, acts like a complete rube. He asks everyone he approaches suicidally invasive questions like "Who are these people?" and "Who's Mel?"

Sloth!

Envy!

Such questions land him alone in a guarded cabin before he can further damage the party. He's seen to by a hot-for-tv brunette, future never-was Joan Severance. She is the famous Susan Profitt, younger sister to Melvin. They speak of Roger, of Sonny Steelgrave, and Vinnie's forced to spout more of his impress-the-new-boss BS about not believing in luck. " I take it, and I make it, but I don't sit around and wait for it." It's better than his draw last breath/spend last buck "life ambition" he sold to Sonny, and it works so well that he knows that Susan already wants him. Since Kevin Spacey's contract doesn't start until next episode, Susan is in charge today, displaying an capacity for independent command absent from the rest of the arc. She's assigning Vinnie to do a job with Roger as possible entree to their organization. This is the only time in the arc she takes point on any work whatsoever.

       In highly vague Lococo style, Roger drags Vinnie to Victoria, where they use the "Rambo car" to extract one of Mel's drug middle-men from a safehouse captivity. During the escape, Roger is shot. Improbably, Frank is on the scene the very instant Roger passes out and drives into a ditch. Weird. Last we saw Frank, he was in Stockton, California. Now he's not only in Canada, but he's right on Vinnie's tail. Amazing detective work like that is something Wiseguy never contains.

Here in Canada, they speak openly before witnesses, not all of whom in law enforcement, that Vinnie is an FBI agent.

They find a doctor for Roger, and some three days later he comes around, heavily bandaged. Vinnie explains that without knowing what his next move was with Roger out, he took their package out in the weeds and clipped him. But.. we were supposed to debrief him! Well... you didn't tell me! Roger wants to see the corpse. Somehow they acquire a laborer to do the digging. Canada is so lawless!

The cadaver they've planted while Roger was out does the trick. Back on the Hotai, Mel has invited Vinnie to dinner (by way of Susan). Once again, Vinnie is under.

--

Pros: Amusing banter from the hitman pissing contest, also Frank's classic exchange with his California colleagues.

Cons: Awkwardly plotted around Kevin Spacey, music changed, and a few lame contrivances.

Then: A-
Now: B

* if you know what it is, please tell me; Google has failed. Lyrics include "Moving to the beat," "I am on the road to you" and a chorus which includes "Daddy's coming home tonight."  Thanks to Wiseguy fan and commenter franzeska, this has been revealed.   You can watch the similarly of-the-era music video here.  Those interested in locating the next item of minor Wiseguy media can point me to the demo versions of Deborah Harry's Brite Side used so prominently in the Dead Dog arc and seen nowhere else...

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Episode 12: Fascination for the Flame

"It is a bitter taste, dammit!"

Enter Mel Proffit. My first exposure to Kevin Spacey.  Kevin was an emergency fill-in for a suddenly-in-rehab original choice rumored to be Gary Cole. If the casting was extremely last-minute, it explains Susan's one-off competency last week; her dialogue was likely written for both Profits and then delivered around Spacey's absence.  In any case, few actors could have done justice to a manic-depressive, drug-abusing, incestuous international cartel head. No one else could have taken that skeleton and run with it like Spacey. His first two episodes are tours de force of character acting.

His first scene, alas, not so much. It's all nuts and bolts work, establishing Mel's acute paranoia, his queasily intimate relationship with Susan, and his drug abuse. The Profitt sibs refer to the injections as "elixir," though late in the arc it will be identified as heroin/amphetamine speedballs. Susan shoots him up between the toes (leading to Mel's catchphrase) to avoid telltale visible tracks, and whenever the IV drug use comes up (frequently)in the Profitt arc you hear a humorously magical whooshing for the injection followed by a faint twinkling sound, like when the old woman snorted her coke in Airplane!.

Oh, the scene also introduces the A plot of this episode. Paco Bazos, middleman for the 5 families of Argentina, is getting married. He invited the Proffits to the wedding, but Mel has some suspicions about the bride-to-be. It could be that she's a fed. Or maybe she poses for pornographic magazines. Susan seems to think she just models swimsuits. Either way, the future Mrs. Bazos is a key plot point!

In Monterey, California, there's a middleman of the Argentina underworld trying to get married. Outside, there's a street preacher hanging on a wall for later use. Mel's two hours late and Paco is becoming impatient. Out of respect, he's held the wedding two hours. Just as he's about to go on without Mel, Roger walks into frame and explains the Profitts will arrive momentarily. Mel talks briefly with the bride's mother, asking pointedly if the family once resided in Virginia.

While he momentarily relents, once the ceremony reaches the "or forever hold their peace" portion, Mel interrupts. He's certain the bride is an infiltrator. He offers Paco a cool mil to postpone and run a background check. Bazos, his fiery latin pride wounded, refuses flatly. Mel and his entourage depart. Paco orders an underling to send up some muscle from Sao Paulo. He wants them All Dead!

While part of this plot is to demonstrate Mel's paranoia and his need to control and manipulate his underlings, the actual specifics as used here are nothing but artificial urgency. It assumes first that nobody ran a background check on Lisa Martin during what can only be a whirlwind courtship of a major underworld figure.

Secondly, it assumes that marriage will completely change the situation whether she is a plant or not. Isn't she already close enough to know details of this part of Mel's organization? Has Bazos held back all of this, waiting for his wedding night?

Third, (spoiler) since she is a CIA plant, are her family members at the wedding also plants? Are agents required to put their loved ones into harm's way for such things? Would there be an annulment when her assignment was over? And if discovered as such, does it really matter when her assignment decides to kill her?

Equally ill-defined is the motivation for Mel and company to stay in town. Why not return to Vancouver until cooler heads prevail?

Instead, they're staying, and are planning to be around for a few more days. Roger's negotiating a minor War Car mod with a local auto-shop worker. He and Vinnie pretend to be movie producers and want a bullet-proof car for their imminent shoot. Vinnie, brazenly, is making a (presumably day-code free) disguised call to someone in the OCB to set up a meeting with Frank. Roger often displays near Mel-class paranoia, but here he's not even paying attention.

At his meet, Frank infodumps on Paco and charges Vinnie with acquiring fingerprints from the Profitts, as neither is on file under their present names. Vinnie fills in gaps of what occurred at the wedding, noting Mel's fixation on Virginia. "Now, the only connection I can make is that the FBI is headquartered in Quantico, and the CIA in Langley," he reasons. Good guess since the writers already ran this play when Sonny also emphasized this flimsy connection. Demonstrating further Terranova insight (or maybe just confirming why he's investigating the man) he tells Frank that he has a "really bad feeling about Mel Proffit."

Back at his day job, Susan conducts another one-on-one interview with Vinnie. They discuss security at the hotel (though not why they're staying in town at all..), Roger being bored, drink some champagne, and make out on the beach. Vinnie deftly switches glasses with her while they kiss. Using his junior detective ground-up-pencil-graphite and scotch tape method, he extracts prints! Mission accomplished!

At 3am, he receives a phoned invitation from Mel to come up for a beer. Presented with a Lowenbrau, Mel cross-examines him about the security issues Vinnie discussed with Susan. Thus starts one of the top-five Mel bits. Producing a pistol, he claims there's one bullet and asks if Vinnie likes roulette.

The idle rich are hard to entertain.

In short, all of this is a warning that Susan has found Vinnie interesting, and the last many people Susan has found interesting aren't seen much anymore. The only question for the first time viewer is if it's her or Mel's jealousy that has done them in.

Following the game of roulette, Vinnie switches beer bottles with Mel, and just like that! Two sets of prints.

An indeterminate time later, he receives his briefing from the CIA. Mel and Susan were orphans. Both have genius or near-genius IQs. In their teens they killed their foster brother when he caught them kissing. They were sentenced to a juvenile detention camp, and cut loose at 18. At which point the government stopped caring about them.

Not all of this is strictly true in the course of the series, but for now, the important thing is their relation to each other: his psychoses keep them moving, and hers keep him stable.

Finally, the reason for everyone staying in town is advanced. Bazos, allegedly at the urging of his masters down south, wants to make a peace. He and Mel meet in a restaurant, where Paco gives a title-origin monologue about Mel's role as the bright flame in the darkness. He remarks that there are beetles that come with the moths: hard, shiny bugs, difficult to kill.

During this, Susan is abducted by one of Mel's security goons, Helios Romanos. As Paco further soliloquizes, he also has a man named Romanos, indicating the bodyguard in the restaurant. His guy and Mel's guy are cousins.

Mel receives a phone call. Susan tells him what's happened. She's taken. Bazos gives a deadline for ransom and leaves, smug.

Tying in with the CIA briefing on Mel and Susan, Mel's raging despair is barely controlled. He's screaming, yelling, breaking things. Only a self-administered dose of elixir calms him down enough to give a redundant order: go find her.

Clearly, money is a powerful motivator for these guys. Mel has a dozen goons around, plus Roger and Vince, and all of them take orders from a boss who is disintegrating psychologically. Vinnie and Roger have their own agendas, but for everyone else, the only fear card Mel has to play is that one of the other muscle might dissuade a betrayer.

Vinnie outlines a roundabout scheme to find the dozen or so members of the Argentinian death squad, and within the space of an ad break, they've found the place. One cursory drive by on the house reveals heavily armed thugs all around the yard.

The near-frontal assault works flawlessly, recovering Susan, killing Paco, and wiping out his small army. The wife is also killed, accidentally, by Paco. Frank and his three-bureaucrat team move in the moment Vince and Roger have left. They can't know that every one of Paco's muscle is dead or gone, but they walk right in anyhow. They find and ID the late Mr. and Mrs. Paco Bazos.

As revealed later by newspaper and the CIA, Paco's wife actually was a plant, under deep cover for the CIA. Which makes the general federal ignorance of Mel a little harder to swallow. CIA weasel Shagrass notes that her death will be a problem for Frank to report, as if it's entirely unprecedented that an undercover agent could be slain by the subject of their investigation, as a minimally skilled forensics examination would make clear.

In the end, Mel's back on the Hotei, giggling in triumph while another of his high-power parties thumps in the lower decks. Of all the things to close this adventure on, Vinnie enforces some Reagan-era doctrine and asks Susan why she gives Mel the drugs that "send him into orbit." This is presumably to balance his personally witnessing of Mel's greatly improved state of mind following an earlier dose. Susan suggests that the drugs free him from the pain his mind inflicts on his body.

Ten years later, Mel would be a prozac zombie.

---

Pros: One of several great Mel scenes.

Cons: Two episodes and you're already wondering how Mel maintains any control of his far-flung empire.

Then: A
Now: A-

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Episode 13: Smoky Mountain Requiem

SMR opens with a black and white flashback sequence in the mountains of Valdusda Ridge, Tennessee. The year is 1984, and a high school boy named Russell Haynes narrates a letter to his parents from prison: because his parents' farm loan being called in (what, no tobacco? Nice reference to one of Sonny's government-as-mob points, anyhow), he took money from Mel to run a truckload of moonshine (packed, of course, in corked 1-gallon cider jugs) across a state line. Naturally he was busted, and the second the judge's gavel comes down, he's being introduced to prison rape (another pet subject of the Wiseguy writer's room), and from there it's catatonia that leads to pull-ups in his cell. He has six years on his sentence...

In the present, the Profitts have returned to Vancouver, which is as close as it gets to home for them. Another little continuity reference: the show has always been principally shot in and around Vancouver. Though in-show is a bit delusional that Vancouver is in Quebec.  Vinnie checks himself into a hotel, walks out on the balcony, and uses a wireless -- one of those monstrous 16-pound bricks from 1988 -- to call in and request a meeting. Lifeguard agrees that it's time he and Vinnie met in person.

At the meeting, with no preamble, Vinnie says he's off the case. Frank backs him, but Shagrass asks that he at least give a good reason for leaving rather than stir up Mel's paranoia. Vinnie accepts, going to Roger to tell him he'd rather run an operation in New York than be muscle for Mel. This is our first real look at Roger's home, a spartan loft in Vancouver decorated with abstract welded sculptures (Roger's working on one when Vince arrives), weapons, and a punchbowl of large-gauge ball bearings.* He also has an asian houselady, who gives Vinnie a hot towel while he waits.

The Don Profit

Roger is sympathetic to Vinnie's feelings of isolation, and we get a little of Roger's philosophy, one that in a more mundane fashion is that of Elijah Snow: it's a strange world. That said, Roger will not tender a resignation for him: Mel will just assume Vinnie is with the FBI (ha, ha!) and tell Roger to kill him. And Roger will. So Vinnie needs to go and get Mel's buyoff on his resignation.

Malthus figured it out.

Good thing, because not only does this keep the episode going, it brings in the #1 all-time Mel moment. Excited by Vince's desire to be more than a hired goon, Spacey launches into first his stellar Brando and then a high-level overview of his international contraband market, couched in the theories of Thomas Malthus. It's all brilliant, and a crime this scene isn't on Youtube somewhere.

While most of his money is now tied up in munition deals, the business that started it all is the (now-largest) cocaine distribution site in the USA, operated on a farm of... what's that boy in prison's name? Oh yeah, him.

Middlemen have cut in and are not kicking their share up the chain. Vinnie and Roger are to go and collect or destroy as appropriate. Arriving, they're met at the municipal airport by Ernest Haynes, Russell's dad and current owner of the green wood-accented station wagon that was once abandoned in a field following rasta assault and later the place where a young boxer's body was discovered. Ernest is played by Rance Howard, Ron's father and a durable bit-character presence over decades of TV. After some brief smalltalk, he pulls a gun that Roger quickly relieves him of.

They eventually reach the Haynes residence, where Ernest and his wife, Lottie, put them up in Russell's old room. Lottie's also packing heat, but doesn't try to use it.

Awakened the next morning (jetlag sucks, fellas) by loud music, Roger and Vinnie wander out the back door and are quickly subdued by thugs. Willie Jesus, current middleman, complains that he has not been compensated for running the operation and has taken his own raise out of Mel's cut. Roger counters directly: pay up what you owe, or die. Since he's unarmed and has several guns pointed at him, Jesus laughs him off and gives them a day to get out of town.

Even though everyone involved knows what's going on here on the Haynes farm, Vinnie asks his usual obvious-stupid questions to get Ernest to take him on a tour for our benefit. Shipping pallets full of coke. Hundreds upon hundreds of pounds. Ernest freaks out, faints.

"Happens all the time," says Lottie, applying wet compress to her husband's forehead. With Ernest indisposed, Vinnie starts asking her the stupid questions, and she tells him the parents' POV of the letter-from-prison. This outrages Vinnie, who again gets on a pay phone and talks openly with the Lifeguard about releasing the kid, some of which within earshot of Roger.

While waiting for Mel to offer more guidance, Ernest shows the boys his still and cache of 20-year-old 'shine then sets them to work milking cows and brushing horses. This keeps them occupied while a large truck of cocaine leaves the farm. Willie Jesus tells them to leave, again, but is not in a hurry to cross Roger. Yet.

When Vince next tries to call Mel from the back-alley pay phone, he finds the man himself nearby. Mel deduces that the business can't be saved and orders everyone on the farm killed. Vinnie is opposed, and even Roger has qualms about slaying the Haynes, whom remind him of his grandparents.

As is often the case in Wiseguy, difficult moral problems like this are taken out of the characters' hands. Roger and Vinnie go to sleep troubled. Roger dreams of the encroaching third world ("You don't have to go, it'll come to you," one of his many prescient insights) and Vinnie fantasizes about Susan. Out back in the trailer, Jesus has decided their time has come, and sends a man with a shotgun, who is summarily neutralized by Russell, arrived home from prison unannounced and raring for a fight.

Downtown, Frank and Shagrass have arrived. Vinnie's late in contact, but not overdue yet. Shagrass thinks they should go to the farm, but Frank wants to give Vince his full complement of time. Shag points out that Vince does have a history of alcohol and mental problems, and Frank finds that to be a cheap shot.**

At the farm, Russell leads his captives to see Willie Jesus. He's evicting them from the farm, but Willie tells him to leave; improbably asserting that if Russ kills him, his men will kill Russ. It's a very brief mexican standoff (ha, ha) that ends when Russell reaches out and snaps Jesus's neck while Roger pulls a swizzle stick from a nearby g&t and stabs two of Willie's men in the throat. Improbably, all three of the good guys flee the trailer through the single narrow door before the remaining goons can heft their machine guns.

One reaches the door just after they rush out, but is felled by a rifle-toting Ma Haynes from the back porch. Still, the boys are quickly pinned down behind a woefully thin backyard table. If Jesus's remaining men weren't spraying blindly through the trailer wall, they would have been easy pickings.

Ernest steps up and molotovs the trailer. It falls off its struts and onto its side. There are at least 2 of Jesus's guys still alive, though when one pops his head out a window, Roger cold-cocks him with a shotgun butt. Roger doesn't kill any more goons, but when he makes a possible move toward the Hayneses, but Vinnie talks him out of executing them.

And that's the last we see of the Haynes family. When Frank and Shagrass arrive, anyone living at the farm are gone. Not so much another several hundred pounds of coke, which tickles Shagrass.***

Mel is unhappy with the number of survivors, but Vince defends the act as simply having left them in poverty, a threat to no one. Roger distracts Mel's further discussion of the situation by suggesting that they own everything, from the seed to the street, and cut out bothersome middlemen. This is Roger's hidden agenda making its first appearance.

Back in Vancouver, Vinnie realizes that, whether he has legal authority or not, Mel's too big to quit. Also, he wants a further look at Roger's background. Oh, and he wants to meet the Lifeguard. Guy acts like he just busted the biggest coke operation in the USA...


* Roger says "A man can kill with anything." He will prove this true again and again.

** The only thing this can possibly reference is the arc-bridging standalone episode "Last Rites for Lucci" wherein Vinnie was put in therapy group for post-betrayal stress. At some point I will write capsule reviews of the standalones. Maybe. Shagrass's annoyance for being attacked because he read Vinnie's file foreshadows, probably unintentionally, another one-off, "White Noise" where Vinnie ends up in a mental hospital (where again Sonny haunts him).

*** The large amount of coke, Frank deduces, is the cause of Shagrass's removal from the case, effective next episode.


---

Pros: Malthus, also Roger's realpolitik.
Cons: Hokey premise and sloppy ending.

Then: A+
Now: A

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Episode 14: Player to be Named Now

In the chill of Vancouver, Vinnie and Roger are sweeping the Hotei for explosives. Roger waxes fond for Mel's depressions, because it means less work for the help until he recovers.

"How many bombs have you found?" Vinnie asks. "None," admits Roger.

Wait for it...

"Until now." There's a small cardboard box that the two spend a very tense scene cutting open. Inside is a handwritten note: "Here's to adrenaline, the nectar of the gods. Mel."

Later, Mel is hardly contrite. He felt security had been slacking off, and that Vinnie shouldn't be mad, for the best reason of all: Mel doesn't want him to be. He's also wearing a baseball jersey, and invites Vince out, at 4 in the morning, to hit some balls.

Mel's rented the local municipal stadium for an hour or two ($10k; not a bad price for the largest dome stadium in the world at the time) and is fairly bouncing with joy: He's going to buy the Sacramento expansion team in the American League and move them to Vancouver. Because he's always wanted a team of his own. Once on the field, Vinnie finds himself bonding with Mel over childhood love of the game. Clearly this was a scene written to show Mel as more than a gonzo caricature, and fortunately Spacey sells it, injecting him with pathos -- and not between the toes.

Susan retires to the limo early, and then Vinnie joins her while Mel pays for the rental. He catches them between kisses, and it's enough to throw him into a jealous rage when they're alone at the hotel. Once becalmed, he advises Susan to sleep with Vinnie if she has to, but, God, don't fall in love with him. Susan has the look of someone about to do both.

Vinnie meets Frank and Kenny, Shagrass is absent for reasons later explained. Frank's angry as hell because he's 3 time zones away from his boss and is incapable of playing phone-tag. Also, he paid $150 for his suit that's just lost a button. He's ranting about the collapse of national pride when Vinnie arrives. Kenny just happens to know enough about Eddie Van Platt, one of Mel's old associates who owns the baseball team Mel's about to buy. Kenny, ever the quick study, floats the idea of flipping Van Platt, though nobody knows if that will work. Frank chides Vinnie's lack of detective skills, so Vinnie decides to do what he always does: go to Roger and ask leading questions that would almost surely get him killed in a "real" situation involving hairtrigger assassins and megalomaniacal arms dealers.

Cut to Roger's loft, and Jacqueline DuVries has just arrived; she's a woman with the assured but haunted look of a mafia wife. Roger doesn't recognize her, but she says they met in Montreal two summers ago. This doesn't exactly jibe with Roger's assertion of having been with the Profitts a year, and given the choice of selecting Roger's start date and the nonspecific present day, it can be made to work -- but it's sloppy. But back to her: she's one of Mel's old groupies who's discovered she can't make it on her own and has returned for a handout. or to sell the little she has left.

Roger tells her she had her time, and it's over. Jackie insists, and stands up against a wall, invitingly. Roger picks up a handful of ball bearings from the dish and hurls them around her, embedding each in the wall. He delivers not one of his better monologues, about her belatedly discovering her role as a plaything to Mel.

Vinnie arrives, and stops Roger mid-throw. "Not an old toy to you, eh, Buckwheat?" Roger asks, and hops on his Harley to ride victory laps around the loft. Vincent, as Jacqueline prefers, takes further pity on her, divining her homelessness ("let me get you a hotel room" -- come-on?) and notes, wrongly, that she never flinched while Roger was throwing the BBs. She counters that he's either losing his eye or his nerve, and that he used to "part people's hair" with them.

On the boat, Mel sketches team uniforms and broods over Eddie van Platt, who cut Mel out of the drug market in the south. Mel plans to ruin the man financially and lowball him for the team. Two of the Mexican families, who cut into Mel's business by way of Eddie, are "Vizini" and "Calderone" -- veiled Godfather reference?

Vinnie returns to his room to find Roger waiting (Roger's just finished solving a Rubik's cube in a "pathetic" 8m 40s). They're going to burn a construction site tonight prior to Mel's large party on the Hotei, which is where he will take his revenge on Eddie. Vinnie dutifully calls it in, but when the time comes, they torch a different location entirely, which will cost Van Platt a few million dollars.

And so it's time for another of Mel's fall of Rome parties, with coke and champagne for all. Eddie saunters up to Mel and immediately the two start a pissing contest. It's so engrossing that Mel scarcely notices Jacqueline's return.

Eddie, though, he'd take a flyer. Soon, Mel's making offers for the team but Ed gently rebuffs him. Noting his interest in Jacqueline, Mel has Sue coke her up and when they return he offers Jacqueline as the titular player to be named now as a pot-sweetener. To her credit, Jacqueline balks at the idea, but when Mel gives her the choice of Van Platt or the outside world, she scampers off to the playroom, full of Wesson-ality.

Five minutes later, and with much of the party over, Mel moves on Eddie. This is where the writing nosedives. After Eddie gives the leaden cue of "I don't need your money," Mel launches in. The fire. Vegas and Reno (Reno? This is a man who owns an island in the Yucatan, and he plays heavy in Reno?!) are calling in his markers. Oh, and his stock portfolio, ridiculously underdiversified with primarily Unidac (a Cannell-universe staple) industries shares as collateral (to be fair, it's the 80s; buying on margin was the thing to do, even more than now), is in jeopardy because friends of Mel orchestrated the DoD canceling key contracts.

Eddie is actually stunned. Or the writing gets very bad, take your pick. Rising from his chair, he sputters "You knew you were gonna do this! You had this all planned!" Duh!

Mel counters with his reasons: 1. He enjoyed doing it. 2. Eddie had no chance of beating him. 3. He loved it. Yes, two of the three reasons are the same. He decides he won't pay more than $6 million for the team now, and has Roger lock Eddie up until he caves in.

And now it's Jacquie's turn for bad dialogue. "I did what you wanted..." she says. And then adds: "I made love to him like you wanted me to." Just in case we're uncertain of what was going on in the playroom with the vegetable oil.

Mel opines she must not have been any good, and orders Vinnie to throw her off the boat. Mel pulls a gun, unmindful that Vinnie promised to kill him the next time this happened. Some posturing occurs, but then Mel becomes tired and leaves. I guess the main character of the series does have script immunity.

At the docks, Jacquie is going back to her life of a has-been model, and thanks Vinnie for showing her choices for her life. Also, obliquely, for saving that life.

In the wrap-up segment with Frank, we find that MLB has rejected Mel's buy offer. This puts Mel into Roger's favorite mode: bed-ridden with depression.

---

Pros: Spacey at the bat, more coolness from Roger.
Cons: Atrocious writing in the fourth act.

Then: A-
Now: B-

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Episode 15: Merchant of Death


In some fictitious banana republic, insurgent general Battista is infodumping his arms supplier, some ex-agency yahoo who now middlemans for Mel.

Battista laments the old days, when the US Government was freer with the weapons to latin american insurgents. But then that dirty congress pulled the plug. The private sector is just so unreliable! His army, once near victory, now faces bloody defeat. He wants 500 Exocet missiles to hold his territory, and he wants delivery yesterday or he might just take out his frustration on EAY.

Exocets? Did anyone in the writer's room research what Exocets do, or did they just like the name? Exocets are designed specifically for targeting large ships. How many large navies are there in latin america? I'll let you consult your Janes to check.

Back on the Hotei, Mel is buying 3 million in emerald bling from a shady bling merchant. Spacey looks ridiculous with an enormous $1m emerald on his finger, but, again, he's crazy. Elsewhere, Susan has recruited Vinnie to be her escort for a party at the French embassy, and strongly hints on the ride over that she is paying for the boyfriend experience.

It's a ploy by Mel, though we're kept in the dark as to specifics. When Susan prods Vince to wait for her in an empty room upstairs, he goes right away. And is almost immediately busted (for loitering, mind) by none other than the scourge of Fox Mulder, the Cigarette-Smoking Man! In the breast pocket of his Susan-supplied tux they find a cable detailing a French arms sale to Angola. Vinnie is such a good cop that he didn't even notice the paper until now! Naturally, he denies knowledge.

X-Files crossover!

And when they drag Susan upstairs, she denies knowledge of Vinnie. Which lands him in the Vancouver jail. He spends a few hours before Roger comes to collect him. Mel offers him a drink; Vinnie takes it and demands some explanations. One of the frogs, he reasoned, was dirty. And since one in particular was interested in the cable, Mel thinks it was him. And the CSM retreats to the shadows, his work done. Mel approaches the frog and gets him to turn over on his boss. Once again the show reverts to illegal business conducted in public, in front of witnesses, in open (and operatically-flaired) language.

Vince makes a call-in, and, rare for this arc, we see a full date: 12/10/1987.

Roger takes the opportunity to advance his vertical-integration agenda. It's been a slow march, but Mel's finally up to the point of considering the idea.

Susan, naturally, sexes her way out of Vinnie's doghouse.
Unfortunately, she chooses to do so at a time to keep them both away from Mel's meeting with senior frog. Fortunately, Vinnie arrives from the other end of the dark alley meeting-place just in time to hear the dying words of junior frog: the location of his blackmail stash he's been saving for just such an occasion! Peeved at Susan's using him, Vinnie lies about any last words from junior frog.

Back home, Mel's furious. He pays up to ten times minimum wage to Vinnie, and where was he? Well, he was sleeping with me, Susan tells her brother with a look. Mel plays Vinnie and Roger off each other, hoping to rid himself of one of them, ordering Roger to find the documents and Vinnie to stay out of his way.

Vinnie recovers the paper cache with Frank, who will try to kill any resulting arms deals via official channels.

He had no idea it'd be so much.

To Roger's chagrin, Vinnie delivers the papers. Mel's too happy to be paranoid of the sudden windfall; Roger, however, remembers to be suspicious. Animosity waits for the moment. First, Mel enlists senior frog. While Vince has been protesting his presumed level of education throughout the arc, the writing here as he talks to senior frog makes him sound like a drop-out, all clumsy references to crepes and Louis XVI. In the end, sr. frog takes the cool mil and a new apartment in Mel's pocket.

NOW it's time for animosity. Mel drops a "Battlefield: Earth" reference and then chastises Susan for sleeping with Vinnie. Mel sounds like a stalker, describing how every pore of his existence feels her absence, and other such gems. As a demonstration of her ability to cut and run on Vinnie, he has her throw his laughable emerald bling out the window. He doesn't even watch her do it.

Roger now airs his problems with Vinnie, and here he admits he's been in Vancouver for more than 2 years. With Mel? Was he placed here to get to Mel? He warns that any more extraordinary competence could be hazardous to Vinnie's health.

And then Mel comes down on him as an encore. There's cuban cigars, promises of cash, a bigger role in the org. Mel's careful to do all this within earshot of Roger. There's only one thing: Susan gets everything, and yes, for the dim viewers, he means everything, from him. Dismissed.

Head spinning, Vinnie staggers to his room and finds Susan in his bed, wanton and dropping l-bombs. There's a cut, but next we know Vinnie is calling up the Lifeguard for moral guidance.

When Frank returns to Vancouver, he informs Vinnie that despite his trip to Washington, the missile deal went through. Battista has his 500 anti-ship missiles of dubious worth.

This, strangely, emboldens Vinnie. For the first time in the series he decides to become proactive in breaking up the operations of the man he's investigating.

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Pros: Well underplayed Profitt manipulation games. CSM!
Cons: Contrived plot advancements at every turn.

Then: B
Now: C+

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