I know that, in the past, I have insinuated that Eleventh Hour has some vague grudge against women. After this week, I must admit I have been wrong.
Eleventh Hour has a very specific grudge against women.
This week’s episode is about a perfume that contains a neuromumblemumble aphrodisiac pheromone that drives men to murder—usually to murder the tart who had the gall to put on perfume in the first place. (That’ll teach those upstart girlies to leave the house.) We see four women get attacked in a single episode. Eleventh Hour, having finally made up its mind that it hates the ladies, is not wasting any time.
The plot is so paper-thin that we only meet the bad guy when Dr. Rufus and Co. pay a house call to the perfume company and we see a demonic lab tech doing his best Gollum impression from behind some beakers. Less than ten minutes later he’s forcibly spritzing a front-row attendee at a Dior show that looks like it’s being filmed on the set of a daytime talk show, and three minutes after that, everything is resolved. Basically, this is forty minutes of women in peril, just like CBS likes them. Let’s count them up!
1. Hayley Von, who is lazily attacked and awkwardly pawed by a photographer. Apparently in the world of Eleventh Hour, this is news, and her agent jumps in to intervene. It’s a heart-stopping fight—for the photographer, since he gets a pen to the neck.
2. Supermodel. In this clip, a bouncer attacks a model who’s walking in a Lulu’s Lingerie Outlet show at the Mall of America (of course it’s a lingerie show). He paws at her for about sixty seconds as extras look on, glassy-eyed, without making a move to help. Then her spine snaps like a broom handle.
3. Call girl, whom the perfume magnate invites to a hotel room. Her job: to put on some Fervor, and then sit around and see if he feels like attacking her. Shockingly, he does! However, she is the coolest woman to ever appear on this show, and shoots that dude dead with the snub-nose in her purse. Later, Counselor Rufus tells her that what happened wasn’t her fault, as if she’s not actually traumatized by the assault on her life, she’s just weeping because she feels guilty for shooting the guy. She wraps up the case for him: “He was going to kill me.” Oh SNAP, Rufus.
4. The beleaguered and indie-frump assistant who takes home her boss’s advance sample of Fervor to wear on a big date, and ends up getting accosted by the cab driver (nice one, CBS). In the ensuing awkward scramble, where he magically gets her into the back seat between cuts, she kicks him in the face with her heel and makes a barefoot run for it. Later, the dude doesn’t have a mark on him. Not that she’s worried about her safety; she just hopes her gentleman friend doesn’t think she stood him up with a story about being assaulted by a cab driver. FBI Agent Young, observing Sleepover Protocol, leaves a message on the guy’s phone that his date was assisting the FBI with an important case. Your tax dollars at work!
5. Though no woman is singled out in this melee of sleepy extras pretending to be enfervored, it’s still a crime, since it implies that the “Dior show” would take place on the same runway as the Lulu’s Lingerie Outlet show from the opener; Dior does not do fog jets, CBS. Shame on you.
(There’s an antidote to the pheromone perfume! I bet they market it as “Halitosis.” SCIENCE.)
