We, the white-knuckled regular viewers (chose your white knuckle reason) open today's installment of the Painkiller Jane oeuvre to the Evan Biddell First Look fashion preview. We're behind the scenes with Jeffrey Graham, a whiny stage director (or whatever the overtly snide and pompous are called) who, for being a guy, is a real bitch.
The fashion show is filmed well but all we're seeing is pouts on chopstick legs walking back and forth endlessly. (Wait, you say that, in fact, is a fashion show? My bad.) Just when I was thinking, "So which one dies here?" on cue, Shannon, the Rebecca Romijn-Stamos look-alike keels over.
Rather than us staring into the pained eyes of beauty, interrupted, she instantly has the look of being in her late 50s or early 60s. Emphasis on "late." She's dead.
There's a model who glares who also seems to own the backstage area - or thinks she should. We're led to believe she's the neuro of this episode, one who controls others' minds and bodies with their own thoughts. With another show she'd be the feint, a well-played decoy to keep everyone guessing, could it be ... ? With this one ... well, let's just say she ends the episode more wrinkled than a T-shirt caught in a couch cushion.
Voiceover Painkiller Jane says she was given fairytale books as a child that provided the appropriate and safe gender roles. She managed to ignore the plot device where the hero always saves the damsel. But being the graceful and beautiful princess with equally stunning hair never quite left her system.
For an episode billed as one that would change Jane Vasco forever, I didn't quite see how. However, this tenth episode (actually filmed as the ninth) offers a decent wrinkle to the kill or wait-I-can't-be-killed dynamic of the self-healing Painkiller Jane. We find out that she can mentally and deliberately stop or speed up her own healing.
She has sat down with Strikeforce Vicodin team member Dr. Seth Carpenter. They're investigating a bruise that won't heal. Jane nicely points out that her not healing has become unusual, while everybody else who visits the doctor's office has no such expectation. Jane still has lots of dreams — about things that don't die, zombies, vampires, Elvii and the reality of overpublicized celebrity skanks. Dr. Seth speculates about her mental activity affecting her body but he hesitates later when Jane tells him about experiments she did to prove it, while she was handcuffed to a bed.
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