Fight the Ship

...can distract the viewer from plot and character development, production, story, acting, dialogue... all? "Fight the Ship" takes one for the team and decides to offer just forty minutes of mindless action that takes the story practically nowhere, but makes for a very entertaining episode.

It is basically as follows: there is a fight for the ship (the title I think says it all?) at the same that there is a fight on the streets of Baltimore. Cue... shoots, people dying, more shoots, cheesy dialogue, more shoots, blood... Did I say shoots?

If the 'enemy' was a better shooter, the episode would have lasted like 5 seconds, but the 'other' lacks the accuracy our heroes have, so we get lots of bodies that are just there to fall on the floor and die, while our heroes fight for their life, the ship, and overthrowing Granderson.

But frantic pace, and good acting (yes, action scenes also need good acting) help in making the "Fight the Ship" an episode that grabs the viewer attention and holds it with non-stop action.

This is a textbook example for students in film school on how to direct layered action scenes with a basic cable TV show budget. At one point, there were four simultaneous gun battles/fight scenes occurring at different locations, yet the viewer never loses a sense of what is taking place or where. It's loud, frantic and there's not a lot of dialog. Executive Producer Michael Bay must have been proud.

Credit goes to Jack Bender who directed some of the best episodes of Lost and who worked on Alias, The Sopranos and Game of Thrones. A+ episode.