By Stu Robinson
Human Target returned to FOX last week, launching its second season with a double dose of estrogen.
This comes as no great surprise. In Season 1, Human Target demonstrated potential but looked to be in need of some time and tweaking to find its stride.
For the uninitiated, the show features square-jawed Mark Valley – brilliant in FOX’s late, lamented Keen Eddie but horribly miscast in ABC’s Boston Legal – as an assassin reformed by his
own conscience. Using the name Christopher Chance, he partners with ex-cop Laverne Winston (Chi McBride) and quietly creepy freelancer Guerrero (Jackie Earle Haley) to protect clients by placing himself in the line of fire. He usually does this with abandon, perhaps freed by the belief that he deserves to die anyway for his past.
Appropriate for a character born in comic books, Chance is drawn in bold strokes – an action hero from central casting who springs into action on behalf of justice and all that is good. Winston is the imposed-upon sidekick who manages the office and provides backup in the field. Guerrero, meanwhile, is the guy they bring in for special tasks – intelligence, technology, torture. The quieter he gets, the scarier he becomes.
The creators of Human Target were so eager to move in a new direction that they resolved last season’s cliffhanger in one scene – a bank shootout – after which Chance disappears. Guerrero tells Winston that Chance had become too attached and blamed himself for Winston being taken captive in Season 1’s final episode.
Cut to an ashram in the Himalayas, where Chance is in deep meditation until billionaire philanthropist Ilsa Pucci (Indira Varma) arrives by helicopter and convinces him to return to work – and to his colleagues in San Francisco.
This isn’t the first time the writers have tried pumping some estrogen into the cast. They added a woman to the team midway through the first season, but sexy computer geek Layla, played by Autumn Reeser, disappeared after a couple of episodes. Perhaps Reeser was too busy playing agent Lizzie Grant on Entourage.
The result of the Season 2 premiere : After being saved by the Human Target team, Ilsa decides to bankroll Chance and Winston’s protection business. Of course, she tells them she’ll be a hands-off, mostly absentee owner. Yeah, right. We’ll see about that.
In the process of saving Ilsa, the guys capture and eventually employ a nubile young thief and conwoman named Ames, played by Janet Montgomery coming off her own eight-episode run on Entourage. (Hey, if you want to cast actresses, there are worse places to look than the Entourage set.) Winston had arrested Ames numerous times as a juvenile and basically thinks she’s incorrigible. But Chance and Guerrero see potential in her and let her tag along.
The next episode set up some of the interpersonal dynamics going forward. Ilsa will challenge Chance on the moral implications of their work while bedeviling Winston in matters around the office. Meanwhile, Guerrero and Ames will provide comic relief as he tries to mentor his precocious protege. (Think Yoda and Luke Skywalker, but with Yoda cranky and malevolent and Luke replaced by a hot chick.)
Expect that Chance’s past will continue to intrude upon his present. In Wednesday’s episode, he finds himself protecting the widow of a man he killed seven years earlier.
So buckle your seatbelts. Human Target may be a low-key action series, if there is such a thing, but the show seems to be embarking upon Season 2 with a fresh burst of energy.
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Stu Robinson, a college friend of the TV Tyrant, is a writer, editor, media-relations practitioner and social-media guy based in Phoenix.