“He’s out there waiting. For you.”
“Animal metaphors. Just remember one thing. I can be a real bitch.”
“So any sign of monkey boy?”
“We’re being hunted.”We get our last “previously on Tarzan.”
I wish I could understand Jane after she’s run and out of breath. Something about 14th street and a former drug bust (John doesn’t know what a drug bust is and doesn’t know what professional sports are).
Jane seems to reference something about him getting into pro sports and figuring out what a drug bust is. This could be a nod to the many sports professionals in the 1990s and 2000s that were caught for drugs.
Sam explains what happened to the captain (Scott). Sam presents evidence against John’s uncle. Scott says, “Yeah and maybe he killed Kennedy, too.”
John and Jane running for an abandoned building as spotted by a policeman with a search light hanging out of the police car. John climbs a building and reaches down for Jane but she claims she cannot make it and urges him to get away for her. He watches as she’s caught and arrested.
John goes to see his uncle who says, “You really have an issue with the front door, don’t you?”
John tells his uncle he knows what he wants and that is for him to stay with his uncle. He will if his uncle helps Jane.
The next morning after the opening credits, Richard has a cooperative but agitated John in a room. Richard serves him breakfast and explains Jane is still in jail and has a lot to answer for; the judge let John stay with Richard but John will have to go to court and the trial will take weeks.
John knocks Richard down and rages and has to be held back by three (only three?) men and sedated by a fourth. As John is restrained in a bed, Richard watches from a hidden mirror that allows him to watch John secretly. Two women are with him. One explains that an insanity plea is highly possible.
A policeman (they all look young in this episode) brings Sam to Jane’s cell where he rubs it in that she did not listen to him, jokingly. When she admits her first mistake is not listening to him, he says, “Damn! Rehabilitation does work!” He is enjoying himself and then tells her she is free to go.
Kathy posted Jane’s bail so Jane goes to see her. “We’re partners in crime. You aided. I abetted.”
Kathy thinks Richard has been ten steps/moves ahead of everyone else. While she is fending off her charges, he will say John is insane so he can get control of John’s shares. She has to go above the DA’s head. She has friends in the court system (on the bench). She can stop custody proceedings. Richard watches as John seems to put himself into a sedation though the woman he was talking to earlier tells Richard it is their sedation. Richard thinks it is something else.
Jane wants to try again with the witness who is at city hall. Sam is driving with her and they talk.
Donald is put into a hotel until the trial. He worries about everything. He mentions Legionnaires’ (disease). He thinks a way to catch it is the lack of hotels changing their AC filters. In the hotel elevator, Sam drops a cell phone into Donald’s jacket pocket. Jane calls him and works on him to figure out how they can get his testimony thrown out.
This leads Sam and Jane to Dr. Benjamin Toll, who treats Donald. He invokes patient client privilege. This does not apply when considering the reliability of a patient as a witness to a crime. When they question an uncooperative Toll, who tells them he never prescribed Donald anything that could impair his judgment, a woman going through the files overhears them and hesitates.
Sam wonders if Clayton got to Toll and paid him off.
Jane gives the young woman, a nurse it seems, her phone number. The woman knows Donald and thinks he is sweet.
Sam gets a call from a friend at dispatch who was watching for anything strange coming out of Greystoke.
John’s heart just stopped.
Jane rides with John in the ambulance. Sam blocks Richard from protesting and when Patrick Nash comes up to Sam, Sam says, “Mister, I’d step your ass back if I was you.”
With no pulse and no heartbeat and with John not breathing for a long time, the young EMT gives up in the ambulance. John holds John’s hands and tells him she’s sorry, there’s so much she didn’t say. His monitor beeps and he is back, awake.
Jane yells for the ambulance to stop and she and John jump out after it does.
Jane grabs a coat off a man selling coats as he pushes a rack with another man. She pays him 20 bucks but he rants about that ---he wanted more. John puts the coat on. He was freezing. He also has on socks it would seem.
Richard attacks the EMT and sends Patrick after John and Jane.
Jane asks how John slowed his heart down to nothing. He asks her, “You can’t do it?” She tells him people can’t just play dead. He had to have known this for his plan doing it to work. She starts to plan again and he yells at her that her rules won’t fix this. It will never end, he feels. John leaves her, both of them upset, and John climbs a building.
John’s missing two days…
This episode sees Kathy with a new hair cut?
NOTE: the street scenes, while good, even exciting at times, do NOT look like NYC.
Sam reports to Kathy and Jane: there’s been two stray dog attacks in the last two days. These attacks are dogs on a bodega and a butcher shop: John leading the dogs. This means he’s been eating. These two attacks are a couple of blocks from the Greystoke building.
Sam thinks John is going after Richard and this time if he kills him he will be guilty. Jane leaves to go find John and tells Kathy that she should warn her brother (Richard).
Song as Jane drives up streets.
Jane hears an ad on the radio for Nicodyne Gum. This makes her calls Sam to check into meds that he quit taking.
Kathy goes to Richard who is leaving for a fund raiser at Senator Hopkins this evening. She tells him he shouldn’t go. She has questions about herself warning him because she’d like to see John ring his scrawny little neck but she doesn’t want to see John in that much trouble.
NOTE: this two consummate professionals make this scene, indeed all their scenes and this series, really and truly work. Far from being boring, their chats with each other and apart from each other, all really work. They are both infinitely watchable.
Lawless is particularly stunning in this episode in acting ability and look.
She tells him that it’s gotten out of hand and that he is obsessed. And that John is never going to stop fighting him.
Richard says, “I’m impressed with him. I mean the cunning that it takes to escape like that.” He will counter move whatever move he makes. She won’t let him hurt John. Ironically, he asks her, XENA WARRIOR PRINCESS that she used to be, “Are you sure you’re up for it, little sis, it might get bloody.”
As she closes up, Sam asks the nurse if he can ask her questions about Donald who they both like, he says, but that Donald is in serious trouble.
Kathy scoffs at Richard’s parting animal metaphors as she walks out. “Just remember one thing.”
“What’s that?”
Kathy answers, “I can be a real bitch.”
Sam calls Jane: Donald stopped taking his anti anxiety pills before the accident and he had a reaction. He showed up at the doctor’s office complaining of blind spots, headaches and hallucinations. In the middle of Jane complimenting Sam, she stops as she sees Richard leaving in his limo.
The street scenes in these last few scenes look more like NYC and might even be?
As she tries to track Richard, Jane finds a tire iron or something in her tire, preventing her from following. She blames John. She calls Sam, who asks, “So, any sign of monkey boy?”
She hails taxi 5Z22. She tells Sam that Richard’s plates are ACX7015. A car like that might have a vehicle recovery system. She wants Sam to report it stolen so that it can give Jane a location.
In a WTF moment, Nash and Richard find when they open the divider that…the front of the car window is smashed (John through glass again?) and the chauffeur gone (did John kill him?). Huh?
Richard says, “We’re being hunted.”
Nash orders Richard in the car and to lock it. Richard thinks he can protect himself. Is he kidding? He really can’t, not against Tar…John. Nash tells him he pays him to do a job---protect him--- so let him do it.
In a brief impressive sequence and series of short shots, Nash looks for John but John climbs over a railing and stares at him, John’s hair blowing, Travis acting up a storm to be honest. A few seconds later, Richard hears Nash cry out. This seems to be in Central Park?
Richard gets out and calls for Nash. John throws him off a not so high up bridge.
Sam tells Jane that the car in the Marshall in the 90s? Huh?
He also tells her the car is stopped.
We see mostly Richard as he continues, hurt, to justify his actions, invoking John’s father wanting John to have been a Clayton and not wanting John to run around the streets like a madman. John, in response, tosses a burning metal barrel at him. He tells John they are family but after John throws a wounded Nash at Richard, Richard takes Nash’s gun. The soundtrack sometimes supports and sounds like that Richard is being stalked by a wild animal.
Jane arrives by taxi just as John has a pipe in hand over Richard. John says, “You’re gonna die.”
When John tells her they tried her way and now they will try his, Jane pulls a gun on him, trying to convince him not to kill Richard. She tells him that if he does this, he will never see her again. She convinces John to trust her, even if not the world and its rules. SONG as they walk away.
John goes the police station…presumably. (what happened to Richard’s driver?).
We cut from the night to the trial. He has shoes on.
Donald tells his story but with the medication being off and him having called the doctor about it, the nurse testifying, the charges are dropped. Kathy kisses John.
John thanks Jane. Jane says, “Thank you,” and then utters the only time the name is mentioned in the entire eight episodes—at least unless I missed something---- “TARZAN.”
The judge might be named Oakley.
Where did Jane get the name Tarzan from?
John complains his shoes hurt and Jane says, “So does these,” meaning her shoes. She takes her shoes off and he takes his shoes off. Together they leave the courtroom.
End of series.
This was an okay episode to go out on. Jane’s sister was sort of a non starter role. The stand out character is Sam, and though he stole the series with the best lines ever, this episode has Lucy Lawless as almost stealing the entire show.
I wish her Kathy and Sam had shared more scenes together. Here they have a few but not many and when the verdict is read they share a look. It would have been great if they started dating on the show. At first, I thought she was too old for that but as it turns out, if the information is correct on the net, she is YOUNGER than he is. He was born in 1958 and she in 1968. If season two came about, they should have had a romance. It would have been great.
Which brings me to this show. Okay, if the show were named MAN FROM THE JUNGLE or THE URBAN SAVAGE or anything other than TARZAN, it might have lasted longer. It’s not bad at all ….it’s just NOT TARZAN.
If they did get more episodes or if they did get a second season, what could happen? I have no idea. I would guess more cases, more rescuing other people? Maybe a visit back to the jungle where John was raised?
As it stands, this is the first time I’ve seen it ALL, all the way through rather than bits and pieces and it’s not a bad show and none of the scripts seemed terrible. It’s definitely worth watching at least once or twice and the acting isn’t bad at all.
Just don’t expect ANY Tarzan clichés or tropes but as in this episode with the whole stopping his heart and pulse and breathing for a VERY long time, Tar…John…has some superhuman powers that Tarzan probably wouldn’t have. I mean I don’t think Tarzan in the novels and the movies and other shows could do some of the superhero things he did in this series on a regular basis (jumping threw glass, pulling a man from a car window?). So, they sort of blew it on the TARZAN thing and on the regular man who was raised by apes thing, too and/or making it realistic. It’s kind of not.
And yet, there’s something about it that seems…well, almost gritty and charming at the same time. Maybe it’s just that they thought they could get away with this. They almost made it work and in some ways, it sort of resembles shows that are on services now.
I can’t believe the show was fully filmed in NYC which further makes it sort of an insult. When shows like THE EQUALIZER and LAW AND ORDER and others were filmed in NYC, this should have been.
Apparently they were supposed to do 12 MORE after the pilot but didn’t, I guess. Not sure there’s any more info than that.
The Songs:
"Burn" by Sense Field
"Show Me The River" by Eastmountainsouth
