Eleventh Hour - Argo

I better watch what I eat. After downing a hearty breakfast, a San Jose family flops on the floor - stricken with paralysis. Just twitching and drooling all over the place. But not the daughter, Emily, who winds up being a suspect in the poisoning of her family.

Now it's up to Dr. Hood and his FBI cohort Agent Young to save the family from dying a freaky fungal infection death. When I first see Hood, he's in South Dakota looking into a mysterious airplane crash. Glaring at wreckage and looking at a marker board full of "D=R x T" equations, Hood is able to "see beyond" the obvious in the ways that most Procedural Crime show heroes can. With flash-editing and trippy sound effects, I get a glimpse into Hood's advanced mind.

Well no wonder he can solve all this science stuff, when he looks at things the camera tilts in all these extreme angles and such. I actually think it would work better if I was just able to believe, on my own, that Hood is a genius - without the amped-up Bruckheimer jazziness to tell me so. But what am I gonna do? It's a Bruckheimer production.

Hood is called away from this case in order to head over to California to look into the paralyzed families case. But not before he easily solves the crash case however. I actually liked seeing Hood work on another case right before heading into the main plot. It comforts me to know that, since the FBI has this guy on some sort of retainer, he's being used to the fullest. It did seem strange that the head of the Case Team in South Dakota, Agent Bennett, went from being very thankful to being skeptical to being hostile - back into being thankful in a matter of a few seconds. That's how fast Hood solved the case. You would think that these know-nothing FBI guys might have figured out how geniuses work? They just blurt out the name of junk food. They don't speak to people like they're human beings. Just random musings come out of their mouths.

Bennett: "What is it, Dr. Hood?" Pause. Hood: "Ice Cream. Do you have any?" Don't worry. Hood actually used the ice cream in a little science experiment. He didn't just want to eat some like Walter on Fringe. Look at me, I'm spending too much time on the first five minutes here.

I really wish that Young would go back to the more aggressive she-soldier that she portrayed back in the first episode, but I fear that that element of her persona might have gotten chucked aside - at least for the meantime. Right now, she's the character who says "oh?" after Hood comes up with a brilliant scientific lead. Oh, and she wears a suit and chases the villain in the end when they try and run away. Kind of like Olivia in Fringe.

Eleventh Hour isn't about to be entered into the annals of TV greatness any time soon. It's a perfectly enjoyable show, that can be entered into at any point and makes me forget about my looming gas bill that's due for an hour. Like most crime shows, the lead is very important, and I'm a fan Rufus Sewell's Hood. He's just a nice balance of compassion and creepiness. The way he talks to Emily as she's crying about saving her family is distant, yet earnest. It's the way he has to be in order not to get emotionally drained from his work.

A farmer used organic pesticides on his crops. Pesticides that his son stole from the waste dump where he worked. Pesticides that were dumped there by a giant Agricultural technologies firm, Aeonium, after it was discovered that the scorpion venom they used in it was toxic when combined with food coloring made from insects. Through all of this, I get to learn about the family farms' struggle against giant corporate farms, the greed of global agro-business firms and genetically modified foods. I also get a little peak into Hood's sadness as well, learning that his wife died from brain cancer. I feel educated.