Main cast: David Soul (Cooper Halliday), Jean-Pierre Stewart (Georges Sorrel), and Page Fletcher (The Hitchhiker)
Director: Bruno Gantillon
Sigh, so I’m back to admiring Page Fletcher’s rear end as the highlight of the episode again. Doing so makes it very apparent as well as Mr Fletcher in the current season has aged.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with that, as we all age and there is no fighting gravity and sadly. All those fillers and laser works we do on our faces and bodies, sadly, only make us look like plastic cat people instead of young and people, so no, the technology isn’t there yet.
In this case, however, Mr Fletcher looks very different at the current season from the time when the opening butt cheek-rubbing scene was filmed, and this is the biggest tragedy of all: his butt now looks flat. I was waiting for that day when he would bare it all, from the back at least, on screen big or small, but now I find myself not as enthused. This show doesn’t have a high budget, and it certainly looks like the budget took a nosedive for this season, but surely they could afford padding for his rear, at least. At least keep the illusion alive and let me enjoy the view, damn it!
Still, if that hypothetical Mr Fletcher’s bared ass show were real, it’d probably be a more exciting watch that the current season to date.
Oh, The Hitchhiker, what happened? I am not sure of the story behind the scenes, but this show has become… weird, for the want of a better word, ever since it becomes a weekly ugly Americans in Paris nonsense.
This time, David Soul himself is the American. He plays Cooper Halliday, an unscrupulous real estate developer that bribes his way into getting what he wants. So, the average real estate developer, then. Cooper’s big dream is this big project that gives the episode its title, but so far there are stubborn officials putting up some resistance in getting things approved for him to proceed.
He soon has bigger problems to worry about: he hires the charms of a prostitute, only for the scene to fade to black, and when the lights are back on, Mr Soul is in a pair of black grandpa panties and the hooker is hanging from a rope, dead. Oops.
Mr Soul does his best to chew scenery and make Cooper as big a cartoon villain as possible, but this episode is one fatal flaw: it’s ghastly boring. I find my attention drifting often while trying to watch this thing because I can’t find anything interesting about it. It’s pretty obvious what is happening, as the small cast means that it’s easy to figure out things way ahead of Cooper.
In fact, towards the end, the bad guy has to point out that only an idiot like Cooper would fall for the whole thing, which feels like a not-so-subtle way of the people behind this episode to tell me what a pointless affair the whole thing is. Perhaps they are even laughing at me for watching it.
At any rate, David Soul does elevate Renaissance a little, but on the whole, there isn’t any of the glorious revival promised in the title here. This episode is just boring—very, very boring.
