TV Review: Painkiller Jane - "Toy Soldiers"

(See review of last week's pilot episode to better understand this one)

Wherein as the show starts, I suddenly connect, why the main character is known as Painkiller Jane. The more astute of y'all probably figured it out but not me. She heals but she still feels the pain of whatever happens to her. So she needs painkillers.

In "Toy Soldiers" we start out in a munitions depository warehouse with uniformed men shooting a lot and killing a guy driving a forklift. It's unclear at first whether the uniforms or the driver are meant to be there.

The forklift driver gets shot twice at least, and falls once, gets up, rolls under a closing door outside and lays there, dead. Or maybe not quite dead. There's a flashing red light and the guy gets up and runs away. The two shooters look around in confusion. A guy on a communication radio blurts that their subject is "MIA."

Jane Vasco - Painkiller Jane - wasn't in that scene. The show features a fair amount of narration by the main character:

I barely saw my father while my mother was alive. After she was gone he took me to the movies, the circus, ballgames. Distractions. ... As a kid you were always given something good to deal with something bad.

She and Dr. Seth Carpenter, fellow members of Strikeforce Vicodin** are talking about why she's built like she is, able to heal herself. Something she's just discovered. See first episode recap.

"Right now what I could really go for is major distractions ... Tequila shots and a weekend with Brad Pitt — and Angelina Jolie." This throwaway line anchors this show in the here and now, not ten years from now or five years ago. It wasn't clear before, and maybe wasn't meant to be, but it is now.

Doc does own up to the fact that her genetics "are a little weird." But she's otherwise healthy. Vasco thanks him for speaking some English in the middle of all the medicalese.

The answers for the question of "why" is still far away, like how the Incredible Hulk, in the TV series anyway, really didn't know why he turned green and got so angry.

Vasco walks to an area of the abandoned subway station for Strikeforce Vicodin HQ that's dripping with wetness and she steps up to balance on a once-electrified rail, live just five years ago. It's what a child would do. Joe Waterman, one of the team that's tasked with trailing and disabling "neurological aberrations" is working on something there, just keeping the rails working. He says it's just to keep busy, but am I too much of a naive dreamer to think something this small will turn up later in the show?

Article Author: Temple Stark

A graphic designing wordsmith, with a decade-plus career in community journalism behind me. Take a mean photo, have a new camera, and have been riding the wave of Twitter for more than a year.

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