Main cast: Terence Knox (Leon), Yumi Fujimori (Mai Jan), Cecile Paoli (Sylvie), and Page Fletcher (The Hitchhiker)
Director: Rene Manzor
It will be hilarious if Made in Paris had been an episode that doesn’t feature the French crew, but this is another one of those Paris-made episodes. Ooh, aren’t we all meta today.
Leon plays a factory owner that has his workers toiling under miserable conditions, and he doesn’t care whether they are suffering or dying so long as the production quota is met. Naturally, he’s in the clothing business, because while these Hollywood people love those clothes made in sweatshops, they want everyone to know they disapprove of the way those clothes were made. Not that it will stop them from buying those clothes, of course.
When one of his Chinese workers is badly injured, and he’s like eeuw, just get that loser away before he has to pay that fellow’s medical bills, he is soon subject to some unusual situations that lead him to believe that the workers may have cursed him with some Chinese woo-woo. Oh no, is he going to meet a bad end soon?
Well, meeting a bad end would be a relief as Leon is trapped in a slow, draggy episode that has nothing of note happening for so long. Terence Knox tries his best to mug and chew scenery to keep things even a little interesting, but the bulk of this episode sees him just walking around slowly here and there while sporting the expression of a bulldog trying its best to keep it in until it has found the right spot to do a number two.
There’s nothing of the woo-woo nature that happens here, either. This is perhaps the only accurate thing the show gets about its otherwise amusing blending of superficial Chinese and Japanese elements into an oh-so-Western take of “Chinese”. Chinese people don’t have a plethora of curses and hexes at our disposal, no matter how I’d like to wish this were true; that would be more of a Thai or Indonesian thing.
As a result, this is a boring episode of mostly walking around places, manic facial expressions, and nothing else that can be considered even remotely interesting. Sure, this one being boring is probably better than it being terrible, but still… yawn.
