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Mania Grade: B-
Episode: The Outsiders
Stars: Dennis Haysbert, Robert Patrick, Regina Taylor, Demore Barnes, Abby Brammell
Created By: David Mamet

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"The Unit: The Outsiders"

I’ve been watching this series from the beginning, not sure why I haven’t reviewed it up to now.  Maybe I haven’t covered it because it hasn’t affected me in a strong enough way negative or positive.  I don’t hate the show, but I don’t look forward to it the way I do others during the week.  It’s just that show I watch on Tuesday nights when nothing else that interests me comes on.  Once I watch it, I’m usually entertained but often I don’t remember much about it the next day and I definitely don’t rush to the water cooler to discuss it.  What I like about the series is the mix of the home drama and the military action circa 1985, but that may be what keeps the series from being stronger than it is.  The focus each week is split to some degree between these two stories, the mission of the week, and the drama with the wives of the week.  Maybe if one of these two parts were gone the other could get more attention and tell a deeper story, but then the series would either be just another nighttime drama about husbands and wives or a rehash of 80’s machismo, which could be fun.   

The series is only vaguely serialized and surprisingly the serialized parts of the story are at home with the wives not within the missions the Unit conducts each week.  There’s wives cheating on husbands and husbands cheating on wives both out in the field and at home, and these stories end up rippling across a few episodes.  That’s where we are with this episode featuring genre fan fav Summer Glau.   Summer plays Crystal, the fiancée of a military man that was convinced to work freelance by one of the wives and ends up getting badly hurt. Well, in a fit of loneliness she and another of the married Unit members, Mack, hook up.  Mack realizes it’s wrong but she doesn’t and she goes all fatal attraction on him for a couple of episodes.  She doesn’t kill any animals but she does try to force herself on him and she threatens to tell his wife.  This episode is the culmination of that story as she seeks revenge by going to a journalist and revealing everything she knows about the secret military group.  So, Jonas, the Unit leader covertly deals with the situation by scaring the life out of the journalist and having Crystal declared insane.  Crystal admits that all she wants to do is go home and leave her fiancé to fend for himself so Mack throws her some cash and she’s gone. 

Meanwhile, a couple of members of the Unit have to retrieve a black box from New Guinea tribal holy land so they must go through a ceremony to be allowed to have what they came for.  Not much action in this mission.  If we have to have both the drama and these missions why not on occasion have a mission that means something from one episode to the next.  I don’t mean just a two parter or something I mean missions that have a real long lasting affect on the series.  There never even seems to be any real danger because you know all of these main characters will survive.  There are some Mission Impossible style missions occasionally that are fun to watch just to see how cleverly the team accomplishes their goal.  I also enjoy the missions that put the team in an ethical dilemma and the fact that whether they completely agree with the mission or not they complete it because that is their duty as soldiers.  This mission was all about faith and belief. 

What saves this series is a fantastic cast of actors and a good bit of well written dialogue.  David Mamet is one of the producers of the series and his influence can be felt in the military side of the series with its tight snappy dialogue.  Also, the wives are all interesting and unique characters with only Kim Brown bordering on cookie cutter.  Even Summer was excellent in her episodes on The Unit and she will be missed now that her story is done.  So, there’s a lot to like about this series I just feel like it needs that extra something, that extra spark to really make it great.  This episode is a perfect example of what I’m complaining about, the mission just seemed ho hum and unimportant to the series as a whole.  When I was a kid, I read all the typical horror and science fiction books you might expect such as those of Isaac Asimov and Stephen King but I also used to read some junk from a company called Gold Eagle Books.  They published these hyper macho quick read action books that I just ate up as a kid and there’s something about the military parts of this series that makes me feel nostalgic for those books.  Even the character names like “Jonas” and “Mack” sound like they came right from those books, as a matter of fact one of the series of books from that era was called Mack Bolan.  I don’t think those books would hold my interest nowadays but it’s funny to get that old feeling, even just a little bit, from this television series, and I think that’s truly why I tune in every week.