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Intelligence Review: Cain & Gabriel (Renew This Show!)

We’re all friends, here, right? So I can explain to you why my reviews of this show are always a little late. First, the show is on too late for me to do anything else afterwards – I like that it’s on late in the evening, that’s just fine, but I have to get up early. And second, Intelligence doesn’t lend itself to really looking for the deeper meanings in TV. Don’t get me wrong – I really enjoy this show (so does hubby, which makes it nice, because we don’t always agree on TV these days), but it doesn’t require the soul-searching, how-would-you-live-with-this that other shows might. And I keep thinking that I ought to be offering that to you, so I spin my wheels looking for it. (And this week, I really do have an excuse. You don’t want to hear about it, but I was sick, and would like a few “poor babies”.)

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What this show DOES have are several really interesting characters, getting more intriguing by the week. It has strong women, and not just younger women like Riley. It has fun twists on several crisis scenarios that, face it, we’ve seen on other shows, but with the premise of this show, get a new life. It has Josh Holloway, often shirtless (do I need to say more?).

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And to increase the fun factor, it has producer Michael Seitzman and the crew of writers live tweeting all kinds of bonus tidbits. I realize not all of you are on Twitter, and many of you (getting to smaller subsets here) don’t watch live, so you wouldn’t see the live feeds, so this gives me some extra stuff to share with you in my reviews.

Alan Ruck

This week’s episode, Cain & Gabriel, guest-starred Alan Ruck (Spin City – and I just found out he was at University of Illinois at the same time I was!) as a man confined to a wheelchair because of a disease that is going unexplored by pharmaceutical companies. He’s a hacker, and has figured out a way to, he thinks, pressure the drug companies to continue a search for a cure. By tapping into the Witness Protection Program databases, he’s located several men that he can manipulate to complete pieces of his sinister scenario – what Lillian and Jameson call the Stick-and-Carrot Opp (put pressure and a reward on your unwilling participants – the stick and the carrot). Cain is the rider, the mastermind, looking for his mules.

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Gabriel has tracked a truckload of chemicals to San Francisco, and Dr. Cassidy has explained that, mixed together and released, they’ll cause a huge number of deaths. Complicating the search, however, is that Lillian’s estranged artist daughter Samantha (guest star Laura Slade) lives in San Francisco – and Lillian won’t allow herself to break and tell her daughter to leave the city while they look for their bad guy.

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This is another look into Lillian’s complicated life, following her very interesting relationship with her father (and word is that Leland – Peter Coyote – will be back!). Near the end, Riley reveals that when she was 16, she shot her mother’s abusive boyfriend to death, but her mother still didn’t talk to her for the next 14 years. Riley urges Lillian to talk to Samantha and let them get to know each other.

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Gabriel uses the chip to access building databases, and finds a permit to put an elevator into a house – and there’s Cain, working from his wheelchair in front of a bank of computers. His goal is have his mule detonate the chemical during the shareholder meeting of the only company that had been doing research into his disease – and not to kill, but to cause paralysis, creating a bigger incentive for the company to find a cure.

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Sadly, Intelligence was not one of the shows that CBS announced as “renewed” this week – it’s still sitting in limbo. I think it really deserves a full season to introduce itself properly to a wider audience, and get to its full potential. If you feel the same way, you can help – let your friends know about the show, and if you’re on Twitter, there will be a  Twitter storm to let CBS know we want it back! On Wednesday, March 19,  at noon eastern, tweet your love with with #CBSRenewIntelligence.

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