Tarzan: Emotional Rescue (2003) – Review

In the previous episode Rules of Engagement we were treated to some really good drama between Tarzan and Jane – with Jane’s rational side warring with her heart – and we also had a pretty damn good “Crime of the Week” with a mad vigilante sniper, but this week’s Emotional Rescue does its best to undo all that good will it earned.

Episode 5 “Emotional Rescue”

Things get even more complicated for Jane (Sarah Wayne Callies) in this episode when she learns that Richard Greystoke (Mitch Pileggi) has found the rooftop witness to Detective Foster’s untimely demise. He calls Jane in for a meeting, explaining to her that he has John/Tarzan’s (Travis Fimmel) best interests at heart and that he isn’t planning on using the witness as a blackmail tool, he only wants to help John be the man his father would have wanted him to be. He then gives Jane the necklace that Tarzan was found wearing in the jungle, the necklace that once belonged to his mother. Jane takes it and gives it to Tarzan because she is the dumbest person on the planet.

“Your uncle gave me this to give to you; now completely trust this for no reason.”

Richard has been trying to recapture Tarzan ever since he escaped his evil clutches – as whoever controls this jungle boy also controls the majority shares of Greystoke Industries – so of course, the necklace contains a tracking device. I think any person with half a brain would have deduced this, and Jane is supposed to be a New York police detective. In Rules of Engagement she used her detective’s skills to track down the mad sniper, but in this one she comes off as a person who would have flunked out of the police academy by her first week. In the opening scene we see Jane fighting some random perp – being cop this seems like a thing to do – but then we see actually looking to the rooftops as if hoping to see Tarzan there, to possibly come and rescue her?  This makes no sense and is not the kind of Jane I want in any interpretation of the Tarzan story, we don’t need a damsel in distress in our 21st Century Tarzan update, and certainly not one who is supposed to be a cop.

“O where O where could my saviour be?”

Tarzan doesn’t show up to save her – Jane has been sending him very mixed signals about his stalking – and so Jane actually has to do her job, and she takes out the perp on her own. Now I have no problem with Tarzan showing up and using his superior jungle fighting skills to track or take down a bad guy, but it shouldn’t be to the detriment of Jane’s character. This show could have had them as a great team in the vein of Buffy and Angel, but instead, it’s more like Catherine and Vincent in Beauty and the Beast. Though in the case of Catherine and Vincent you had this great tragic love story backing it up, not so much with Jane and Tarzan. It’s hard to get too worked up over this relationship when much of the screen time is of Jane bemoaning her attraction to this superhot guy.

“We are totally star-crossed lovers.”

The police procedural element of this episode is as generic as it is boring; Nikki (Leighton Meester), Jane’s kid sister, is concerned when her best friend Darcy (Stephanie Mills), who has dropped off the face of the Earth, and she asks big sister Jane to look into it. Turns out Darcy is shacking up with a Canadian serial-killer (yes, we do have them) and he has brainwashed her into submission. As Darcy went with this jerk of her own volition there is nothing Jane can do – as an officer of the law this makes sense – so Nikki turns to Tarzan for help. When this asshole starts beating on Darcy, because her caught talking to Nikki, Tarzan smashes through the door and goes all ape shit on the dude.

Law of the Jungle has strict codes for this sort of shit.

Jane and her partner Sam Sullivan (Miguel A. Núñez Jr) arrive just before Tarzan can beat the jerk to death, and when Jane finds out that Tarzan is here on her sister’s behalf she freaks out. She tells at Tarzan, “I don’t want you anywhere near my little sister, she’s not a cop she can’t protect herself the way I can.” Yeah Jane, you are so great at protecting yourself. *snicker* When Tarzan states that he would never hurt her, true love and all that, Jane goes off on this rant about how he can’t always control himself, as evidenced by the fight with her fiancé on the roof. Wait…what? You mean the time when your asshole fiancé tried to shoot him, fell off the roof trying to throw Tarzan over the edge, then slipped to his death, all while Tarzan tried to pull him back up? You mean that time?

Jane has the worst memory for a cop.

The scene ends with Tarzan taking off and Darcy and her “boyfriend” Pratt (Kevin Rushton) being taken to the police station, but they have to let Pratt go because Darcy refuses to press charges. What this show fails to address is the fact that Pratt should be pressing charges against Nikki and Tarzan for breaking into his place, and with assault and battery. Yet the big barefooted dude, who beat the suspect up, is never addressed as if Jane could somehow control what Pratt would say concerning Tarzan to her fellow police officers. Jane then follows Pratt out of the precinct and berates him for being a guy with a small penis who has to beat up women to make himself feel big, and that she will be all over him 24/7. Apparently, Jane is unaware that without probable cause her actions are quite outside the law, and that Pratt could file a harassment suit for this kind of behaviour.

Jane has the worst understanding of the law for a cop.

This harassment is all in the hopes that this guy will fly off the handle and hit her. She actually goads him on saying, “You’re not scared of me, are you? Come on, look you have sixty pounds on me. Lay me out.” This is beyond moronic, for one Pratt may have sixty pounds on her but Jane is currently wearing a badge, as well as carrying a gun, and secondly, they are twenty fucking feet from the police station. Pratt would have to a completely out-of-control psycho to take a swing at Jane here, and yet he almost does, but then Tarzan drops down to save her and foils her beautiful sting operation.

“John, we need a code signal for when I’m actually in trouble.”

And just when you think this episode can’t get any dumber Pratt races off to kidnap Nikki. It turns out that Darcy took a second look at her boyfriend – after finding out he was a suspect for murder in Toronto – and has decided to take a powder. This causes Pratt to snatch Nikki from her apartment, and he races off with her.

Note: Their apartment door has a spy hole yet Nikki fails to look out it and see the crazed gun-toting Pratt lurking in her hallway, making Nikki one of the dumbest New Yorkers out there.

Pratt’s plan is to force Nikki to convince Darcy to come back to him. Okay, this guy may just be as dumb as Jane thinks he is. Darcy is able to surreptitiously use her cellphone to call Jane, and soon her sister and partner are in hot pursuit. Also in pursuit is Tarzan, who appears in the superstructure of the bridge – somehow ahead of everybody – and as they are crossing he is able to drop down in front of them.  Then Tarzan leaps onto the hood of their car.

And somehow this does not end with everyone dead.

So apparently the laws of physics do not apply to jungle men as Pratt’s car is speeding along at about seventy miles an hour, and yet Tarzan is able to safely land on the hood, reach inside through the driver side window and grab the steering wheel. I may not have a complete grasp of the laws of inertia but I’m pretty sure if one were to leap onto the hood of said speeding vehicle you would most likely smash through the windshield, killing or injuring the occupants and yourself. Instead, Pratt just slams the breaks and Tarzan goes flying down the road, where he is stunned on impact with the concrete. Pratt then gets out and we get a stand-off with the psycho holding a gun to Nikki’s head, that is until Jane puts her gun down resulting in Pratt going to shoot Jane, but then we get Tarzan leaping out of nowhere to knock Jane aside, Sam shooting Pratt, and Pratt and Nikki falling backwards off the bridge and into the water.

Tarzan to the rescue!

Nikki is saved and Jane is super grateful, but I’m more stunned when we discover how Tarzan ended up there in the first plays because it turns out that Tarzan followed Pratt from the police station. Which begs the question that if Tarzan followed Pratt from the time he had that altercation with Jane how didn’t Tarzan see Nikki getting abducted from her apartment in the first place? This makes absolutely no sense, does he not know what a kidnapping looks like?  Nor does it explain how he was able to get ahead of the car chase, as even an ape man cannot travel through the city faster than speeding vehicles, but before we have time for all that stupidity to sink in we cut to evil Richard Clayton and his next diabolical next move.

“Let’s tie Jane to some train tracks.”

With the tracking device Jane so nicely gave to Tarzan – her being an idiot and all – Richard was able to find out that his nephew has been living with Kathleen (Lucy Lawless), his sister and John’s aunt, and that Kathleen has “poisoned” John against him. So Richard tortures the witness, a poor agoraphobic germaphobe named Donald Ingram (Tim Guinee), into changing his statement from Detective Foster’s death being an accident to a murder committed by this blonde barefooted dude. So that sounds at least a little interesting, as now Jane should lose her job for the aiding and abetting of a murderer, and most likely go to jail, and we may finally get that city-wide manhunt for Tarzan that Jane was so worried about.  But that is all for future episodes *sigh* as this one ends with Jane dropping by Kathleen’s place where she catches Tarzan in the shower, and they have a tender reunion.

Something for the ladies.

You can read all my reviews for this show here: Tarzan: The Complete Series.