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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mel O&#039;Drama" data-source="post: 259385" data-attributes="member: 23">Fly Jaime /  The Jailing Of Jaime (continued)In common with The Jailing, Fly Jaime had a tangible undercurrent of not being sure who to trust. There was a nice reveal of a co-conspirator as the sweet little old missionary turned out to be not so sweet. Jaded twenty-first century viewers might be a little less surprised at this turn of events, but I greatly appreciated this attempt to play against the obvious. The sense of the characters’ isolation and vulnerability came across strongly. Fly Jaime’s “in on the secret” character was Marlowe, the alcoholic doctor who came through and helped save Rudy’s life with the help of Jaime’s bionic soldering finger. The connection between the characters felt appropriate as it seems to foreshadow Christopher Stone’s later appearances in the series in a different role. The Jailing Of Jaime meanwhile got across that sense of the walls closing in as Jaime is falsely accused. It helps that we’ve accompanied Jaime on her routine assignment to meet a General friend of Oscar’s and witnessed everything she has. So we’re in on the sense of confusion that comes when accusations start to fly the next day. It sets wheels turning about who can and who cannot be trusted. It even crossed my mind - even though there’s no indication that Jaime is thinking it - that we don’t really even know Oscar too well.It’s an interesting experience to see Jaime becoming a pawn of a larger game, not knowing why or who is behind it, much less able to prove her innocence. There’s a scene in which she’s brought before an official, and the dynamics of power through withheld information are tangible. As Jaime is questioned, with Oscar alongside her, a uniformed officer comes in and whispers to another. It could be innocuous, but in this situation everything is fraught with meaning. More than Fly Jaime, The Jailing is filled with twist after twist as more people are revealed to be in on the conspiracy. One red flag for me was the General Jaime met, since I mistook actor Philip Abbott for Sandy Ward, who I associate with sinister roles (Dallas’s Jeb Ames not least). Even as Jaime broke out of her cell, I knew objectively it could go very badly for her case. But what’s a bionic woman to do? There was a nice edge to her character here, as she spoke back to the guard who initially refused her request for food. This was carried over into the final act as she locked herself and the person she’d found to be behind it all in a safe rigged with explosives, threatening him with certain death unless he gave her the evidence she needed. It’s an extreme, but it felt right here. For all its faults - which are common to most episodes and are down to production aspects such as clearly recycled footage of bionic hearing not matching up, or Jaime’s visible stunt double - The Jailing Of Jaime is a well-structured intelligently written piece that engages the audience. There are no liberties taken in resolving the situation. The “t”s are crossed and the “i”s dotted. Not only does the situation feel genuinely challenging for Jaime, once she escapes and becomes a fugitive we see how resourceful she genuinely is. She takes it upon herself to tackle head-on a situation which looks impossible. The outcome may be inevitable with episodic Seventies sci-fi, but it feels as though Jaime has genuinely earned her happy denouement and that slightly cheeky phone call with Henry Kissinger. </blockquote>

Verification: Who played JR Ewing?