My Own Worst Enemy: The Hummingbird

It's got to be a hard pill to swallow when you find out that you're whole life is made up. And an even harder pill when you're the so-called "normal" half of a split personality. Yes, on My Own Worst Enemy, it's the Jekyll personality "Henry" that has to deal with the fact that he's really a gun-toting torturing Hyde named "Edward." And to make things worse, the personality switcheroo chip in his brain is malfunctioning so he's becoming both Henry and Edward at ill-opportune moments. Like turning into Henry when on top-secret missions in Berlin, or becoming Edward when Henry's about to watch hours and hours of old home movies.

In "The Hummingbird," Henry has become a bit more frantic. He might just be capable enough to not get killed in foreign lands, but he's still overly-anxious about the whole "we made up your whole life" thing. In fact, his memories are so real to him, that he just can't buy that they're fake. He sifts through his old childhood keepsakes, watches old home movies from when he was a child, and even tries calling anyone he might have ever known going back more than nineteen years - all in a desperate effort to discover the truth.

After all this, I buy that he might really have a reason to be paying regular visits to his shrink, Dr. Skinner . In the first episode "Breakdown," the visits were just because of his intense dream-age, but now he's got a lot to get off his chest. Not only is everything that Henry's ever known about growing up become a work of total fiction, but "Edward" seems to be getting more quality "sheet time" with his wife, Angie. And to make things even more horrible, Edward is a sexual dynamo who's taking Angie to new levels of ecstasy - with help of course from a depraved, yet titillating move known only to us as "The Hummingbird."

Slater is actually pretty great at being both Edward and Henry. Edward's disdain for anything mundane is quite palpable, but not overly-cooked and Henry's queasy quest for a small piece of mind is just as believable. Back at the secret underground spy lair, Mavis is doing her best to keep Edward's vulnerable condition a secret from her boss Trumbell. If it gets out that they are unable to control Edward's switch, he'll get put down like a sick dog. In fact, Edward's co-worker, in the spy world and the fake work world, Raymond, thinks he's too much of a risk and should just get executed. It's a nice little power play by all, with each character having their own reasons for either wanting Edward dead or alive.

And talk about a scene that plays on many levels - Henry has to interrogate a German prisoner to gain the whereabouts of a terrorist cell in London. But he has to act like he's Edward, since Trumboll is looking in on the brutal proceedings. Meanwhile Mavis is trying to tell Henry what to say through a hidden earpiece. It was quite good. And it would have been interesting, but also way too easy, to have Henry somehow use his "normal guy" smarts to get the info without using torture. He's just not that clever. He just needs to buy time until Edward re-emerges. And what gets the job done in the end? Well, torture.

Henry tries to hide from "the Agency" as he goes off to see his old college buddy, who's now a doctor, and get a cat-scan on his brain. It's an earnest attempt, but he learns a hard lesson after he gets gassed on a bus and taken back to headquarters, and the doctor himself winds up murdered, despite Henry's attempts to protect him. I'm not exactly sure what Mavis' motivations are for wanting to keep Edward alive, seeing as how she's pretty cold and condones torture and all that. But for some reason she's got a smidge of compassion for him. Either that or she just doesn't want her higher-ups to know she's totally screwed up.