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Post by darmok on Feb 22, 2004 23:09:31 GMT -5
Well, I'll have to watch it again to figure everything out. Eames had some good one-liners as usual. ("He must have been worried about leaving in one piece.")
The title can be interpreted in at least 2 ways, as often is the case. Certainly the drugs were mislabeled, with horrible consequences. Then, Eric/Brian was mislabeled.
I'll have to watch again to see if Eames had a larger role as she has the last 2 episodes. I didn't notice, so my first inclination is that she didn't.
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Post by trisha on Feb 22, 2004 23:19:51 GMT -5
I will have to watch this one again, too. Lately I haven't felt the need to watch any ep twice, but I had a hard time paying attetion to this one. Could just be because I'm tired from being on the road. Could also be that there was just nothing special about this episode to really stick out in my mind an hour later :/
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Post by janetcatbird on Feb 22, 2004 23:28:05 GMT -5
I'm with Trisha, nothing horrible or fantastic stood out either way. Eames seemed a little more subdued, but then so did Goren. Of course, this guy didn't need to be rhumba-ed around the office so he didn't need to take that approach; the quiet snickers would be much more disturbing.
I did feel a little sorry for--Buchanan?--the company CEO who wasn't involved. I'm sure it's possible for ambitious offcials to have their own private agendas, and they certainly covered their tracks. But he should have been aware. It was kind of him to quietly tell Eric/Brian what to do at dinner, but it would have been better to casually begin, actually showing him without saying anything that might have been overheard.
That's all I can think of, I leave it to those of you with tapes to point out stuff to comment on. I'm still confused on those tainted shipments. 1) Who authorized the redistribution and 2) How could they hush it up?
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Post by trisha on Feb 22, 2004 23:54:19 GMT -5
I thought that Buchanon told Eric/Brian that it was bone marrow for our benefit. At first I thought that he knew what it was, but was disgusted at the reminder of what he had done. Now I see that it was also meant to demonstrate that the real Eric wouldn't have needed to be told what it was.
I was also curious about the lack of follow through with the incinerator receipt. If the person in charge of the disposal had followed through, they would have realized the drugs were gone before any of this could happen. I do believe that Buchanon was innocent, though. It was a scam perpetrated by those soulless pieces of human garbage we saw meeting with the victim before and after he tried to blackmail Eric/Brian.
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Lilee
Silver Shield Investigator
Posts: 190
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Post by Lilee on Feb 23, 2004 0:20:00 GMT -5
trisha, welcome back! I thought this ep didn't leave a huge impression just cuz I'm tired from all the thinking I've been doing lately, but seeing that some of you feel the same lack of punch, maybe that's it.
I'll have to re-watch after folks have posted some more. Good call on the marrow at dinner, trisha. I thought, too, that he was just disgusted because of the work connection.
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Post by trisha on Feb 23, 2004 9:24:53 GMT -5
Hum, it seems this episode was a flop for CI. Too bad, because it had potential. It even had a good build up of emotion from the audience with the Dr.'s concerned look in the opening and the revelation that the little boy contracted HIV from the drugs. That is where Goren's focus should have stayed, and it should have made him mad. He didn't even seem puffed up that innocent people were being used as a dumping ground for the tainted drugs. In other episodes, such a blatantly evil act would have sent him into a flying rage. In this ep, meh.
Perhaps there was just too much to this story for the 45 minute time slot. In that case, a lot of the Eric/Brian story should have been left out, and more focus should have been on the rest of the evil men who sold the drugs. Even cutting a man in half didn't make Eric/Brian half as bad and those guys. Like Eames said, that guy got of easy. He deserved a very publicized trial where everyone could see what an absolute horror of human being he really was. That and prison is worse than death, but instead he gets to be known as a victim and E/B is the bad guy.
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Post by NikkiGreen on Feb 23, 2004 15:41:46 GMT -5
I thought I was too tired to really appreciate this episode. I'll have to try and watch it a second time. But then I enjoyed the repeat of Undaunted Mettle and really, really enjoyed SG1 after that...so
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Post by Major Hathaway on Feb 23, 2004 20:50:44 GMT -5
Nikki - I think I knocked your last post off when I updated the episode description for last week. Please post it again. Timing issue - sorry.
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Post by Metella on Feb 23, 2004 21:16:58 GMT -5
The guys Brian was setting up at the end were the guys who had to have known about the drugs. I got that the drugs had been processed in a substandard way - something was wrong with the heat in the machine - didn't get hot enough, whatever. So, the production director set the entire amount that MAY have been substandard to be destroyed. Just as life should be.
But .... when is life as it SHOULD be? So, a higher up saw that over 15 million in product was about to be scraped; it would be very easy for a person in his position to just have a written memo given to the shipping department - saying the destination was Asia and off it went. Now Goren seems to think they KNEW it was infected with HIV, so they pick an area that had a high rate of HIV infection so an increase in new infections would not be out of the ordinary. That goes with his quip about picking Asia or Africa. I'm not so sure they knew it was infected with HIV, but they certainly knew it was not up to human use standards.
Anyway - the lesser of two evils ....... I'm not so sure on that statement; in this episode - yeah, they were all bad, real bad. Really - murder someone to hold on to a fake life when you are not running from the law? Sign a sure death warrent for thousands to make 15 million? Nasty. Maybe they were equally bad, nasty, pathetic - but I say only the ones who sold drugs they knew may have been infected with HIV could hold the title of EVIL.
Perhaps our Hero for Justice is relying on that concept and word a little too much. How can he forgive chicks that do EVIL and not men? I think he has some serious fluffy/pansy ass/ let women get away with too much/ issues if he really is going to keep holding to this position.
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Post by trisha on Feb 24, 2004 9:22:15 GMT -5
Ugh, you know I agree with that. Toughen up, Goren. Those women would do NOTHING for you.
I would also call the execs the greater of the two evils in this story, but when I put all the killers in perspective I can see where Goren was going with his statement.
It's not that the execs got off on killing innocent people, it's that they just didn't care. That make them all sociopaths in my book. Brian is also a sociopath, and felt nothing for or about cutting a man in half. That is almost worse when you think about it. The execs never saw any of the people they killed. Brian meticulously scrubbed the gore out of the tub and packaged up his kill like a side of beef. So, I can see why Goren would put them all in the same category. What makes one sociopath better or worse than another? The amount of kills they had the opportunity to make? Or perhaps the way they did it and cleaned up the mess? Maybe neither. Maybe a bad apple is a bad apple no matter how many others you lump into the same barrel. I would say this is true, it just wasn't explored well enough in the episode. It seemed tossed in at the end.
There was also one last element missing from this episode. In the first five we see that the Dr. is on to the drugs being the source of the HIV, hence the prescription change, but then we never hear from him again. If he really knew, wouldn't he blow the whistle?
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Post by popularlibrary on Feb 24, 2004 14:15:19 GMT -5
The contrasts and contradictions in Mis-labeled interested me. The episode covers international scenes, and large multi-national implications; many of its central characters crave the sea, and sail for sport and pleasure; Eric Dunlow has been brought up on boats and has ocean photographs in his office. But aside from the scene outside the hotel, the episode is kept, with claustrophobic intensity, indoors. The characters are seen stuck in offices, hotel rooms, waiting rooms and confining apartments. There is often light coming through the windows, but no one ever seems to get outside, even the detectives. Even the scene outside the hotel takes place at night and is confined to one small area. It re-inforces the sense of lives turned in on themselves, of minds oppressed and chained by blind self-interest.
Horrific crimes of tabloid proportions, the kind that evoke all our worst cable-news gabble and pontificating, are bound tight into a stifled emotional atmosphere that mutes verbal expression. The shallow corporate criminals have minds so commonplace they can manage only cliches, even when Johanssen, who indifferently assigns hundreds to death from AIDS, displays real shock at a messy, physically brutal crime. Eric/Brian's complex sociopathology, devoid as it is of empathy, is also devoid of language to express his fury and greed. In the end he can only sputter. It makes him seem even more crippled and pathologically unaware. The total effect is at once ghastly and deflating.
Th effect is strengthened by the powerfully contained shock and anger of Goren and Gordon Buchanan, whose intense and passionate reactions reject any trivializing rhetoric for their expression. Their respect for the horror of the crimes combines with an absolute refusal to inflate the criminals by wasting recriminations on them. There is only Goren's taunting question - Africa or Asia? - which Johanssen does not answer. Goren uses his rage to 'kill three birds' and Buchanan helps him without an instant of reflexive corporate self-protectiveness. Eames is also profoundly shocked and angry, and contains it with the same tense dignity.
It was an episode that turned on misreadings, miscalculation and misunderstandings. Johanssen and Mailer think their crime will never be discovered because, as Goren points out, there is so grave an AIDS crisis in Thailand, who will notice a few more cases. But of course, a doctor treating an American diplomat's son notices with a vengeance and sets off the waves of disaster. Clay Sherwood's wife sees her husband only as a womanizing screw-up. She has no grasp of his greed and desperation, or his hatred of being dependent on her family's money. Unlike Eric, he knows the price of 'being taken care of'. Sherwood's misreading of Eric leads to his death, and Gordon's careless generosity allows his executives to commit crimes and his assistant to trick and betray him. And Eric has little conception of what maintaining his deceptions will cost, or of his boss's character, especially the part his homosexuality plays in his life.
The broader crime is bound up with and contrasted to the more personal one and all of it is linked to class and money. In one way, Eric/Brian's story reminded me of the fifth century barbarians who fell on a corrupt Roman Empire and destroyed it - not because they wanted to destroy it, but because they wanted their cut of the spoils. They wanted to be part of it, and instead, they cracked it to pieces. Eric's bloody hands spread the stain over the entire set of crimes, forcing the executives who murder at a distance to deal with violence up close. And Buchanan's decency may be personal but it is also a function of being wealthy enough to have the choice of working or not, and of having a social position so secure his homosexuality doesn't really make him an outsider - he has, after all, done his duty and produced a family, so now he is free to do as he wishes with his life. If he is the most decent person in this story, he is also one of the most ambiguous. His wealth and position give him choices the others don't have, and put him above them in ways that both make him blind and allow him to achieve his moral superiority. He is a very attractive person, and Goren clearly likes him, but the episode never gives him a free pass.
Like several episodes this season, Mis-labeled tried to push into new dramatic territory, and for me, it largely succeeded. Its complexities were less of plot than of atmosphere and the social/economic interconnections that allowed the crimes to feed off each other, and for Goren to conclude, to Carver's speculation about the media's choosing a lesser of two evils, 'there ain't no such animal.'
Elena
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Post by janetcatbird on Feb 24, 2004 15:33:51 GMT -5
Well, I did think of how in the Bible (I'm awful at chapter and verse) there's a bit somewhere about how no one sin is worse than any other, they're all equally hated by God. Maybe Goren was reflecting back on his days as an altar boy. They were all sociopaths, it's just that the corporate executives seemed worse to us as humans because of the mass scale and the very pettiness of their greed. Eric may have been despicable, but he wanted a better life and had some sort of self-loathing.
I can't remember the exact wording, but C.S. Lewis, when he wrote "The Screwtape Letters" (wonderful book!) talked about how he didn't feature Hell as a fire and brimstone place because nowadays that whole thing is superstitious and outdated. Besides, it's too melodramatic to be truly effective: "The worst evils are committed in offices with flourescent lighting by soft-spoken men in business suits".
I really think the problem with this episode was they bit off more than they could chew. If they had dealt with just the executives or just Eric in the hour slot, it would have been fine. However, I was relieved to see that Buchanan's sexuality was not made the main issue. OK, it's there, but it's not as important as the crime, move on. That was a disappointing moment from Goren when he said he guessed by the depth of his reaction, you'd think our guy would be a bit deeper than that. Buchanan was right, ANY half-way decent human being would have been horrified, orientation has nothing to do with it.
Evil is a buzzword, it's one of those that conures up terror and purely nasty stuff that goes way deeper than "bad guys". And I'm glad I'm not seeing things, Metella, you're right abotu Goren having a blind spot for women. THe only reason he's as intense for Nicole was because she made it personal. "But Not Forgotten"-- What was up with that? Chivalry may be all well and good--although from my Grail Lit and French Lit class I've realized just how much that connotation has changed over time--but denial isn't doing anybody any good.
Again, no tape so I cna't say for sure. Just going with impressions and what I remember. Later all.
Catbird
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Post by trisha on Feb 24, 2004 17:25:23 GMT -5
Great analysis, Elena Just a few comments... Wow. I didn't even notice. Good call. Really? I didn't see it. The way he flipped through the photos actually surprised me. Would you do that? Want to see them all, I mean. Wouldn't one look at one photo have been enough? Not for Johanssen, apparently. He got a good look at every one before handing them back. Strange, don't you think? It may have been ghastly and deflating for Brian, but I didn't feel anything here. It was like the episode never climaxed. Sherwood in full panic mode was the most interesting and ghastly to me. That man was a sociopath in every sense of the term whereas Brian really only fits the lack of remorse and inability to accept blame associated with sociopaths. He did have dreams for a parasitic lifestyle, but he never achieved them. He worked for his living, and even seemed to have realistic long term goals- something most sociopaths cannot manage. Sherwood, on the other hand, was a parasite, but of coarse had delusions of grandeur and an inflated self worth so he felt he deserved everything he got. He was also greedy, impulsive, sexually promiscuous, manipulative, completely devoid of love for his family and remorse for the people he infected with HIV. He also had a superficial charm and was an easy if not pathological liar. What's left? So, Goren can say one sociopath isn't any better or worse than another, but when I compare these two, it's hard for me to completely agree. Sure, a bad apple is a bad apple- a rose by any other name-... get them off the street, but don't tell me there is no such animal. I'll have to watch again before I comment on the emotions from Goren and Eames. I really didn't see any rage, but I was tired and distracted.
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Post by Metella on Feb 24, 2004 18:14:03 GMT -5
Elana, you know that I like you. We have an occasional off-board relationship that I enjoy as far as it goes. You also know I think most analysis done in this depth are just personal wish-reflection. I sometimes struggle to read through all your long posts .... my mind starts to drift after the third paragraph & I have to go for caffine. I know here you are waiting for my pointing out of all the wish reflections done ..... Can't do it. It must be this opinion of the episode happened to match my personal soap-box issues very well. All I could even squeeze out of my contrary nature in form of rebuttal to your post was ..... Hey, it was really cold in NYC when they were filming this, so they wanted indoor scenes and anyway, there is never an overabundant amount of outdoor scenes, I know as they are my personal favorites and I enjoy them so I note them. Pretty weak argument, eh? The global company/ethics/health/environmental/labor quagmire is so distressing to me I have no idea where & how to vent my frustration. I think this would have been very well done to have followed the contaminated drugs and explore it further & then have the transition to Brian and devilishly throwing in red herrings .... all to make this a 2 part episode; throw in some Carver slamming it home in the court room, Deakins working hard to smooze some international fellow coppers to get info for Goren and Eames to use ..... Well, missed chance - but that goes to show that I did really enjoy this episode - just wish it had been presented a bit differently.
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Lilee
Silver Shield Investigator
Posts: 190
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Post by Lilee on Feb 24, 2004 20:35:30 GMT -5
Wow. This is why I don't re-watch the episode right away. The only thing I can add without seeing it again is that Eames seems to be the one most affected by this. She is holding frozen tears as the little boy walks out of the Dr.'s office. That got to me. Of course some emotion is from her recent mommyhood. But I have seen that look in her eyes before: compassion and pain. What was the episode where the young girl was raped by her kidnapper?
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