A therapist programs Jake into Bascom’s assassin.
Episode Summary
Jake and Sam work on taking down an arms dealer named Lambert (who has a history with Bascom) but lose track of him in a carnival-looking place.
Therapy
Lately, Jake has been feeling ill and blames it on residual effects of being locked in the freezer. He was in the freezer a long time ago (the first movie!) but okay.
He sees a therapist (Janet Blake) who uses a machine to relax him and let him sort through images and stuff going in his mind. It looks rather silly, with Jake just jogging in place during these sequences.
The Investigator
Bascom is suspicious that someone in Cosmos is leaking plans to Lambert. He hires an investigator named Spader to look into it, but Spader doesn’t get along with Jake. They have an altercation in a diner and Spader is murdered shortly thereafter – did Jake do it?
Whodunnit?
Sort of. It was Janet Blake working with Lambert, using her “relaxation” machine, to control Jake and make him an unwitting assassin. She programs Jake with a new mission: kill Bascom.
Jake tries to do it but can’t; Bascom talks him out of it to override the machine’s programming, and Lambert and Janet Blake are arrested.
Thoughts
This one ended on a whimper; homages to The Manchurian Candidate are so overdone. It does have the novelty of having the involvement of three Shatners, though! Lisabeth Shatner wrote the episode, Melanie Shatner played Janet Blake, and of course William Shatner played Walter Bascom, but he also directed the episode (his third time directing Tek).
I like the last scene in the series, or at least the sentiment behind it, with Bascom telling Jake he considers him a son. It was a nice moment and gave the series a sense of finality and closure (as best as they could). Of course, it would have had more of an impact if Bascom had a larger presence in the show.
Rating
Series Overview
TekWar is fantastic and fun, but in an awful way; if you’re looking for serious, thought-provoking drama, this isn’t it. But if you enjoy cheestastic action and writing (with decent sci-fi ideas buried underneath) and view this through a B-movie lens, you’ll have a good time. I certainly did, as my ratings will attest.
I’m not even sure I’d recommend this to fans of the TekWar novels (they exist?) either because the low tv budget necessitated changes to Sir Shatner’s sacred text. Yes, the budget: TekWar‘s number one enemy and what ultimately led to its demise.
The show felt stronger in the earlier episodes when you had the dream team with Beth and Sid (not to knock Sam) – this felt like the Tek we were meant to see. But unfortunately it was not to be.
This was my second watch through of the series, and this time I noticed that later episodes started recycling plot elements from earlier episodes. This is not cool, especially for a series that only lasted one season. Maybe its quick demise was for the best.
If you’re going to give the show a try, I recommend you start at episode 1 instead of the first movie; the films are the weakest part of the series.
Series Graph
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