Painkiller Jane may get canceled after one season. That doesn't mean it should.
The pilot episode, which aired Friday, April 13, paced itself well. The great secret of the show and the main character's name - Painkiller Jane - came only toward the end of the episode. If first impressions are correct, Jane Vasco (aka Painkiller Jane) has superhero characteristics, though why has not been revealed yet. The pilot episode crossed four days in the life of DEA agent Jane Vasco as she transfers to an elite unit tracking "genetically altered humans with neurological powers."
It appears it's very much set in the moment, in 2007. Yet the first clue viewers get that there's some otherworldliness is when she traps two suspected drug dealers and a federal agent in a nightclub. The three of them all take on the same appearance. By watching their shadows she's able to tell which ones are fake and she shoots them both dead. They go all "dream hazy" and turn into the actual ugly faces they are. With bullet holes in 'em. Vasco's partner Maureen Bowers handles herself well in another part of the club.
Andre McBride is the federal agent and he's impressed with her ability to figure the situation out quickly and not kill him. After it's all over, McBride and another agent talk about "neurons" and that arouses her curiosity. What raises it more is that her minor league investigation is terminated and her bosses tell her that her entire service record has been red-flagged by the Pentagon. Let's just say her interest is piqued.
McBride and Vasco have a heart-to-heart about why she would be a good member of his team. "You think outside the box and if you hadn't, I wouldn't be alive" he tells her. Jane Vasco was suspended 23 times in school, "Yeah, my bad." Throughout the episode there's a brief allusion to a troubled past and graveyard scenes where, it seems, her parents died.
Vasco turns him down because he won't tell her the nature of the new assignment. She does deny his request, but follows him after planting a bug on his shirt. Once she finds their HQ, McBride says there's no turning back. The next day he threatens to get her fired from her Drug Enforcement Agency job by filing drug possession charges filed against her, unless she joins team Neuro. The entrance to HQ is the P. Copus used bookstore as a front and it leads to an abandoned subway station at Deckard Street.
With that arm-behind-the-back approach and the barest of information, Vasco is sent out on her first mission, to the pharmaceutical company Vonotek, with people she's just met. Like The X-Files and Doom, and others, the way to kill the bad guys here, the Neuros (plural), is by sticking a long spike in the back of their necks.
Those with the neurological aberration have a "unique ability to influence others" and to push past natural instinct survival skills and the natural ability to detect right from wrong. Proximity has to be close, within a couple hundred feet. No one knows why they are like that, but if the Neuro hunters can insert a chip, it neutralizes the aberrant neurology, without killing them.
Article comments
1 - Temple Stark
Hmm, Painkiller Jane is being repeated tonight on the USA Network at 9 p.m. (Pacific time). IOW, in 25 minutes ...