Cinemax’s Femme Fatales: 206 – Bad Science

The fifth episode of Femme Fatales‘ second season takes us on a bit of a departure from our normal story. While they’ve already dealt with the supernatural (Haunted and Visions), this is their first real venture into Sci-Fi…

I had an issue with this episode. It’s an issue that showed up a couple of times in the first season, but this was definitely the most egregious offender. And that issue is – too much sex. Now every episode has gratuitous sex in it, but normally it seems more organic to the story, fits in better. In this case however, a lot of it seemed a detriment to the story. It simply happened so frequently, and in such an odd setting that it that it took you out of the story and ate up time that could have been spent expanding on what was actually a pretty sweet story…

In said story Matilda is the lead of a small group of scientists, who don’t look much like you’d expect scientists to look being that they are all young and attractive and whatnot. And the four of them are working for Mr. Hawks (Coach Cutlip from the Wonder Years Robert Picardo) on roughly the same idea from the The Fly – teleportation.

But, it would appear that our young group of scientists were working with a little better technology, and as fate would have it, the device did work, just not exactly as they planned. As we would soon learn, the teleporter worked, it just wasn’t a straight A-to-B trip. You see, Mr. Hawks is happy with the results and doesn’t feel further work is needed. He’s not interested in transferring people, just packages – as he apparently has it out for the Post Office – so Hawks decides to shut down the program. Rather short-sighted you could say, why not replace the airport rather than the Postal Service? Anyhow, upon the threat of having her funding and research cut, Matilda does what any good fictional scientist would do – opts for human testing…on herself.  And we all know how well that worked out in The Fly…

So Matilda teleports, but before ending up on the 2nd platform as planned, she takes a little detour to A PARALLEL UNIVERSE!!! And she does so Terminator style.

It is here that we are introduced to another world, once similar to our own, but so very different now. A scorched sky, a society at war, and technology that seems more advanced than our own…you know, aside from the teleporter anyhow. Unfortunately, we don’t get too much more info than that. We know that on that world the war has been raging for decades. Oh, and that the parallel Matilda is a military leader.

The meeting in the alternate world is short-lived however and not just Science Matilda, but also Military Matilda are transported back to our world together. From here out we are given just an exploratory glance at the details about the other world, instead we are given glimpses of King Kong-esqe future for our Matilda’s before it’s discovered that having them both occupy the same space is breaking some natural laws and killing them both.

It is decided that Military Matilda will be sent back to her own world for the safety of them both, but through multiple screw-ups among our scientists, and massive amounts of lab sex, the wrong Matilda is sent back and Military Matilda is left in our world. A world that is woefully unprepared for her. A science team that was unprepared as well. The episode ends with her killing the whole team and setting out to conquer our planet.

Now, all that is fine, and this should’ve been my favorite episode – but, too many scenes were spent playing grabass when more of its limited runtime could’ve been used expanding on an awesome idea. For that I’ll gonna say 2/5, and I’m gonna do so in complete and utter disbelief that I’m condemning boobs…