This show has always been near the top of my personal 'brilliant, but cancelled' list. It wasn't perfect, but when it worked it was like a quick little action movie that you got to see once a week, which is why I still hold on to my old recordings and watch the entire run every couple of years or so. This episode is one of my favorites, not just for the fun, exciting, Indiana Jones-esque feel of a treasure hunt in South America, but for a handful of brilliant scenes that have always struck me as particularly clever.
One such scene occurs at the very beginning of the episode. Spoiler warning I suppose, although given that the show is a decade old and somewhat obscure given that it only ran two abbreviated seasons and never entered syndication that I'm aware of, I'm guessing most people who bother to read this probably won't need the warning.
The episode starts with Chance breaking out the hapless good-guy guest star who is being held by some corrupt military types that are gearing up to interrogate him about some treasure he found. Chance, dressed in military fatigues and hoping to make a quiet exit with the guy under cover of darkness, is spotted and questioned by one of the military guards. Instead of immediately cutting loose with some punches to knock the guard out, Chance thinks quick and approaches the guard as a friend, suggesting that the same irritable attitude he just greeted Chance with is the reason why his coworkers have cut him out of the loop.
I LOVE this scene. First, because it shows that Chance, whose backstory is that he is trying to atone for his violent past, makes a real effort to avoid violence whenever possible, even if it is the most expedient route. And second, because it taps into an under recognized aspect of human nature, which is that most of us harbor some secret fears that our coworkers don't like us or are quietly talking about us behind our backs. But, paradoxically, most of us also don't talk to each other about those fears out of an unconscious fear of seeming weak. Those two aspects of human nature, which I suspect are far more universal than we would guess, are exactly the kind of loophole someone like Chance would exploit to fast talk their way out of situations.
It reminds me of an interview I saw with an old Daily Show correspondent who went to Stephen Colbert for advice when he started on the show. Colbert's advice was to "not be afraid of the silence," meaning that when you are interviewing someone, being comfortable with long pauses after you ask someone a question they don't want to answer will yield results more often than you would expect, because people unconsciously hate long, awkward pauses in conversation and try to fill them with chatter that often reveals more than they would have wanted to. The mere fact that it's an open secret in the industry doesn't reduce its effectiveness one bit, because the tactic exploits a weakness in how the primitive lizard part of our brain works.
Anyway, the episode isn't perfect, some aspects of the plot might not have aged too well with respect to male/female dynamics, but I still enjoy it anyway. Great episode.
