Lawrence Dane Devlin (No. 26)

So Shamar ends up in the back of a van where the screwball Lawrence Dane Devlin explains how he is going to kill her. Using a flare, she attacks him and she takes off. Anyway, he is chased and shoves a stick up his gut. But back to the van. Eventually, a magical bear comes along, kills the guy, and pushes the van into a lake. Shamar is drowning. She is pulled out but now is in the hospital, having never regained consciousness. Oh, in a big change, the duffle bag full of bones is on its way to Costa Rica. And Liz is screwing things up again. Will this ever end? One other criticism, how has this special unit lasted when no one follows orders?

In this episode, we see what happens when writers make plot a priority over characters. Basically, characters in this episode do not behave the way they normally do because the writers wanted certain plotpoints to happen and the only way to make them happen was to quite suddenly change everything about certain characters without doing any groundwork. To speak a little less vaguely, this episode takes a character shown time and time again over several seasons to be a bad@$$ who is fully capable of taking care of herself and inexplicably turns her into a damsel in distress. It's not because she's finally met her match, though. She's only going up against some un-athletic backwoods criminal who is far lower on the totem pole than many of the foes she's faced off with in the past. The reason this situation is too much for her is because this highly trained field agent has seemingly forgotten all her prior training and experience. The real reason she's suddenly a damsel in distress in this episode, though, is because the writers wanted to give a hero moment to another character -- one who's been presented as barely more than the wimpy tech guy since the show began.

I wish I could say this episode is the one lowpoint of the series, but I'm writing this review retroactively from several seasons down the road. The reason I'm back on this episode so many years later is because this episode is when I first noticed that the quality of writing for the series had taken a turn for the worst. I can't say it's all bad from here on out, but most of it is.