TNBA reviews: Torch Song

An oft-disparaged episode, Torch Song emulates S:TAS’s Target with less success, abandoning its camp overtones and spending more time rallying our hatred for a warped sexual predator. TNBA again proves that it is, more often than not, lamentably inadequate at constructing for its villains anything other than bloated, breast-beating despair or psychotic shrillness. In his casting sickly, beady-eyed stares and stalking his prey with burly, hunched shoulders, Garfield Lynns is postured as an obsessive geek to be feared and derided from the outset. Unlike the similarly twisted Lloyd Ventris of See No Evil, who had soft, redemptive qualities and sieved into the rhythms of his tale, Lynns is a blunt object that deflects all closer inspection, jarringly jutting out of an already dissonant cluster of events.

Because character arcs are nearly impossible to develop across twenty-two minutes, Lynns begins as a real-world lunatic with a Madonna-whore hang-up on pop sensation Cassidy and swiftly turns into a more cartoonish lunatic, less human and more spectacular in his efforts to claim her as his own. As a character, he operates as a pendulum, swinging between the drive for total control over his idol and the destructive impulse to eradicate her. And like Baby-Doll and Mr. Freeze before him, Firefly is under the impression that igniting a citywide apocalypse equates to some form of therapeutic or spiritual cleansing, a leap that has only remotely made sense when applied to Freeze’s nihilistic misery. That several episodes seem to arrive at fusion bombs and other doomsday devices indicates a laziness on the part of the writers, who ride every villainous motive to this hash-brained outcome without possessing the verve to try something with more personalized stakes.

One might expect from Torch Song some type of thematic intermingling of subject matter and key motif, in this case fire, ever signifying passion or destruction. It partly fulfills these expectations, but unlike Heart of Ice, where ice and snow functioned as touchstones of pristine beauty that lyrically extended the sadness of the protagonist to the episode’s décor, Torch Song doesn’t seem to do much aesthetically with fire, indulging it for little more than bad puns or brusque figurative standbys for jealousy and contempt. I can give the episode credit for traipsing from an image of fire as a cheap entertainment draw-in to something more elemental and psychologically imprinted, but this is more than likely accidental and isn’t enough to significantly alter my evaluation.

The most significant aspect of Torch Song, then, is its swerving away from the period vacuum of the series that precedes it, which was an amalgamation of styles from various decades integrated for widespread purposes, to appeal more to the nineties. Cassidy is a nightclub superstar whose performances rely more on pyrotechnics than on her vocals to sell them and who embodies all the offbeat, sex-symbol mania of the eighties and nineties music scene. Unfortunately, Torch Song does little in the way of saying anything incisively amount music or the industry, nor does it even feel obliged to partake in any fun, referential pastiche in the vein of a director like Godard or Tarantino. Instead it stumbles through a misshapen pattern of daily investigations and nightly skirmishes, until culminating in a weak-willed jab at the music industry and a bit of faux-poetic psychological trauma.