“Revelations”

Revelations unfortunately cannot maintain the sharp direction for the better. On the other hand it doesn’t slip completely back down to the depths of the first portion of the season. Unfortunately we’re left with a barely mediocre episode, that for once has less to do with the writing and more to do with the performances.

Never an acting tour de force, it goes above and beyond to stink up the joint this week. To high…er lowlight the debacles of this week?

Bottom of the absolute barrel: Aura. At her best performances, Anna van Hooft is mediocre and this is far from her best. Her scene quarreling with Barin over their intended bonding ceremony is the worst sort of soap opera that Steve Bacic as Barin ALMOST escapes unscathed. But van Hooft looks like she came out of a high school play and not a good one.

Karen Cliche’s Baylin is just that although she has little material to work with in this episode.

Jody Racicot, usually the highlight of the show, is even further over the top than he needs to be, but again this is more to do with the material which forces him to do as such. Racicot actually does a good job of what he was given…unfortunately.

Even Eric Johnson’s Flash, which is usually passable is NEVER stellar. His scene with guest star Sam Jones (yes…Flash Ahh Ahh savior of the universe himself) playing prisoner Krebbs in a wasted guest star role, was beyond over the top yet amazingly unemotional. When Krebbs tells him his father was executed, it’s like he physically knew what he wanted to do but emotionally it came across as a fifth grader who’s hamster died.

The only actor to come out unscathed is the increasingly interesting Rankol, who plays it close to hand and appropriately smarmy.

It wasn’t all bad. They stayed on Mongo practically the whole episode and the few portions on Earth between Dale and Flash’s mom were actually good for the storyline. Huh. Imagine that, I’ve been railing on them to stay on Mongo, they listen, and the best played sequences in the show are back on Earth.

The political intrigue is continued with Barin determined to marry Aura still in case the water machine Zarkov fixed fails again. Unfortunately the intrigue is making Ming look rather weak.

In an intriguing twist a prophecy is introduced by a set of voodoo monks who appear to be in the employ of Ming. They declare that Ming’s rule will end soon as a warrior is uniting the cantons against him. Ming is defiant but scared.

As the trio of Flash, Baylin, and Zarkov make their way into Nascent City again and eventually get captured (yawn — and seriously…the Patriots? This is an amateur high school film version of futuristic stormtroopers. It’s god awful.)

In a minorly intriguing twist Rankol has Krebbs tell Flash that his father was executed when he really wasn’t. We don’t know what he’s up to, but it works well.

Overall, it could have been much worse. The heart of this episode is mostly in the right place, they just have to concentrate more on making the characters believable and continue the arcs properly. To me this seemed less like a complete failure and more like a slipped step in the solid footing of the last episode. If this were another saga I might have been harsher, but as a Flash Gordon episode it still is nearly passably mediocre.

C-

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