It came as a great shock to me that this episode wasn't simply named "Trust," considering the number of times we heard that word coming out of various characters' mouths. I suppose I get it: There were a number of "face-offs" tonight, including one that doesn't exactly bode well for inter-office relations between Jaime and Antonio, and I guess you could argue that by discovering the big secret about her limited lifespan, Jaime "tore the face off" all of that bluster about her being nigh-indestructible. Actually, as we found out, she's really pretty fragile. Seriously–they keep reminding us that Jaime is a $50 million killing machine, but thanks to those very same anthrocites she can be felled by a single bullet? The net worth of my own body (if we're talking black market organs) is probably somewhere in the neighborhood of $5000 (and that's not counting the $5 latte I just drank) and even I'm pretty sure I could survive being shot in the shoulder by a disgruntled Bionic Woman fan, at least for a few hours.
But I'm not here to rip on the show's internal logic anymore–not even the scene where they manage to disable the alarm on the first try by going with the "highest probability" of the numbers being reversed, or the scene where Jaime bends the industrial fan back into place and it magically starts up again, good as new. As someone pointed out in the comments last week, this is, after all, a science-fiction series that requires a suspension of both disbelief and grumpy intellectualism–in other words, groaning "That wouldn't happen!" is strictly verboten. Thankfully, besides the Magic Bullet, the unexplained poker game/sting operation that Sarah somehow wandered into, and the laser that repaired Jaime's broken $27,000 toe, there weren't too many other leaps of faith required in this episode. And in fact, the night's biggest revelation–that Jaime only has five years to live–actually raised the stakes for Jaime (and the show) in a relatively plausible way. Now finding the upgrades that Will designed before he was killed isn't just about saving Sarah's life, it's also about saving her own, which should hopefully give the show some much-needed dramatic heft.
But I will continue to complain about this show's tin-eared dialogue week after week–and really, how can I not when the writers insist on rehashing the plot every five minutes? This is the fourth episode, for God's sake. Can the viewer not be trusted by now to remember that Jaime is a "$50 million weapon leading a double life" without someone being forced to awkwardly wedge it into the conversation? Even people just now stumbling in should be able to infer all of that from the show's title sequence. And could we please put a moratorium on sardonic, "hardboiled" exchanges like this one between Ruth and Sarah?:
Sarah: "I'm messed up, honey!"
Ruth: "See? Now we're getting somewhere."
Sarah: "Does that make you all warm and cuddly inside?"
Ruth: "You should know I don't do warm and cuddly."