Superhero shows need their monsters of the week, and this episode of Second Chance brings us a pretty good one. This one hits home not for Jimmy and Duval, who are brokering an uneasy truce as they try to figure out their new relationship parameters, but for the Wonder Twins, Mary and Otto. Because someone is killing child prodigies, and it could have been one of them as potential victims, once, just as easily.
The story is formulaic, and the show doesn’t bother making you guess who might be doing it. We see our killers early on, and though both are saved for surprise reveals later, it’s not really the mystery of who we’re figuring out. Rather, we need to know why they’re doing it. And while that has less resonance for the masterminds of Lookingglass, it still makes for a thrilling, tense episode.
A large part of that is due to the performances of Henri Rubatti and Kathleen Munroe as Emile and Liz Kenyon, respectively. He’s been in any number of things playing vaguely vampiric European men, and she was David Straithern’s rebellious daughter on Alphas. So they know what they’re doing and they make us wonder why they’re doing it as we start to realize they’re not saving child prodigies, but executing them with heroin overdoses.
We get less movement on Mary’s cancer and Otto’s paranoia this week, though spending a little time with Mary’s assistant Alexa, who tries to kill Jimmy until she realizes Mary might have the hots for him. Then her matchmaker instincts take over, and it’s all several layers of weird after that. Considering Jimmy may be more like Mary’s pet science project than an actual person in her and especially her brother’s eyes, there’s a bit of a boundary issue.
Still, we get some nice icy B-movie villains, a visit to a college campus, a dramatic rescue in a locked swimming pool, and a cracked therapist who has a memorable capture scene, and sometimes that’s all you need on a Friday night.