CLEOPATRA 2525 Season 2 Episode Guide and Reviews on the SCI FI FREAK SITE

CLEOPATRA 2525
Season 2

The Watch
Baby Boom
Brain Drain
Mauser's Day Out
Reality Check
The Pod Whisperer
Out of Body
Juggernaut Down
Truth Be Told
In Your Boots
The Soldier Who Fell From Grace
No Thanks For the Memories
Noir or Never
The Voice

Cleopatra -
Jennifer Sky

Hel -
Gina Torres

Sarge -
Victoria Pratt

OTHER CLEOPATRA 2525 SEASONS
Season 1

OTHER GIRL POWER SHOWS
Birds of Prey
Dark Angel
Ghost Whisperer
Medium

The Watch

The team are assigned to keep a peace conference secure from attack, but when Sarge's sister is injected with deadly nanites set to destroy her in two hours, Sarge becomes the threat to the conference's organiser herself.

CLEOPATRA 2525 returns for a second series with the a perfect example of what the show is all about. It's popcorn puff nonsense with women dressed in not very much running around and beating the living daylights out of the goth-ed up men for flimsy reasons that are best not thought about too hard.

This opening episode even has the gall to steal the whole 'antidote rolling around the floor during a bar fight' sequence from INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM. When Steven Spielberg did it, it was fresh and fast and funny. When this show does it, it is cheap and really rather depressing.

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Baby Boom

After a fight in a tanning salon, the team is left in possession of a baby that has been programmed to explode, killing them all. Can they defuse it without killing it in time?

Where to start? Apart from the opening in the salon, which allows for a lot of barely covered flesh to be displayed, there is the whole questionable taste of having a bomb in a baby and the sequence where they are all throwing it around between each other as they plunge hundreds of feet down the underground shafts.

On top of that, there are the deformed mutants who are only present to give the team someone to shoot at. Their morphing from hardened warriors to caring could-be mothers, is hardly convincing, but then what on this show is?

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Brain Drain

The team is sent to pick up an engineer who has gone a bit crazy. He turns out to be infested with an alien device that sucks information out of the brain, killing the host and Hel just got herself infected.

There's no real change of pace here even though the plot steals from ALIEN's 'searching from facehuggers' scene and THE THING's 'testing the blood for aliens' sequence. The betrayers attack at just the wrong moment, meaning that there's lots of the heroines jumping around shooting a lot and things blowing up.

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Mauser’s Day Out

Sarge has lusted after cyborg Mauser since the start of the show and she has come up with a chip that will bypass some of his inhibitors so that he can show her some 'affection'. Unfortunately, the inhibitions against killing are the ones that get bypassed and Mauser sets off to locate and kill Voice.

The conflict between the more adult elements of CLEOPATRA 2525 and the more juvenile show up here is stark contrast. Sarge's intentions at the start are not compatible with the comic book nonsense that follows it, although there is some unexpected depth in the revealed relationship with a wife that nobody knew Mauser had (not a lot you understand, but unexpected for this show). The idea is clearly that the show offers something for both kids and adults, but the two elements just work against each other, rather than with.

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Reality Check

Whilst checking out the lastest virtual reality training equipment, Cleo is caught up in a Betrayer attack that turns out to be a dream. In fact her whole life in 2525 has beeen a dream. Then Sarge and Hel appear and the truth turns out to be even stranger.

Welcome to the 'it was all a dream' episode that crops up in so many genre shows. This time around it's because of a virtual reality simulation, but the pattern is familiar from so many other shows. There is amusement to be had from Hel and Sarge spectacularly failing to fit into today's society, but the strip club scene with Jennifer Sky gyrating around on stage is out of step with the general juvenality of the rest of the show.

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The Pod Whisperer

The team venture out onto the surface in an attempt to open peace negotiations with the Baileys that now rule there, but things go horribly wrong, leaving Hel a fugitive from a whole team of betrayers and a couple of Baileys. Mauser unveils a special runabout vehicle with which to mount a rescue, but it doesn't seem to like Sarge's driving so much.

CLEOPATRA 2525 has never been a show to use plot as a replacement for a lot of pyrotechnics, but this episode has even less plot than usual. After minimal setup, Hel runs around a lot and the other two women fly around in a very cartoonlike flying car spouting TOP GUN quotes in the hope of being amusing. They aren't.

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Out of Body

An old enemy from the past shows up and blows Cleo onto another plane of existence, leading Hel and Sarge to believe that she is dead. She still proves to be a useful distraction to the bad girl though.

Reena, the mind-controlling woman from Season 1's Mind Games and Trial and Error is back and looking to regain her powers. Though it's hard to believe, she is even more of a pantomime villain than before, all sneers and overacting for her life.

The plot is so thin that it makes the average wafer look obese in comparison and Jennifer Sky as Cleo proves to be even more irritating than usual as he hasn't really got anything else to do.

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Juggernaut Down

Mauser comes up with some technology that might allow a Bailey machine to be captured for the very first time. It almost works as well, but fails at the last moment and the Bailey surprises the whole team when it enters the shaft after them, something that Baileys don't do. The reason is clear when an automated defence system opens up and smashes the Bailey, sending it crashing to the base of the shaft. The team follow it down, but are then trapped when a betrayer team show up to destroy it.

Logic has never been a strong point of CLEOPATRA 2525, but it reaches new depths of idiocy here. The idea that a defence system of this magnitude, something that is effectively keeping the whole of humanity alive, has been simply forgotten beggars belief. Something that could be used as a weapon in the fight to retake the surface and nobody ever bothered to keep developing it? It's a stupid story that allows for all the usual blowing up of stuff.

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Truth Be Told

Hel is certain that she has proof that her father is alive, but Voice insists that this is not so. No longer trusting Voice, Hel removes the surgical implant that allows Voice to speak to her and goes after her dad, even though it means releasing one of the the team's most deadly ememies from cryoprison.

There's not been a lot of angst in CLEOPATRA 2525 to this point. It's been bright, cheery, shallow nonsense, but events take a darker turn here as Hel goes against her boss. Her team, of course, don't take this personally and go to her aid, even when Voice orders Sarge to kill Hel. It's all going to end in things blowing up (because it always does), but there are going to be tears before bedtime as well.

Arch enemy Creegan was one of the more startling villains of Season 1 with his evil clown facepaint, but here he is just a dull villain in silly makeup, not given anything to do other than to be the device that takes Hel to her father.

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In Your Boots

The villainous Creegan is scheduled to be executed for his crimes, but he switches bodies with Hel and sets about wreaking his own special brand of havoc. Hel, meanwhile, has to stage a prison break in an attempt to get her own body back.

Apart from Creegan being briefly back to his evil manners this is just more of the same running and shooting. The old chestnut of bodies being swapped and friends slowly coming to realise is given no new twists and proves to be less than interesting. There aren't even the usual amount of explosions to distract from the story's deficiencies. The longer running time also manages to just prolong the boredom.

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The Soldier Who Fell From Grace

The team gets a new leader and a new member, neither of whom get along very well with the existing members. Hel takes a decision to leave whilst everyone else prepares for a mission to find out information about the shaft defence mechanism revealed in Juggernaut Down. Looking for relatives on the lower levels, she learns of a betrayer plot to prevent that information being found at the cost of her entire team's lives.

Just when you thought things couldn't get any worse the show goes an introduces a truly dire robot dog. This thing makes all other robots that ever appeared look like works of genius and is too painful to watch. A show that was just poor has been turned into downright torture. Crappy special effect aside, the plot is obvious from the start and plays out with no surprises along the way apart from the easy way that Hel allows Voice to take over her life again after all the crap she has put her through.

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No Thanks For The Memories

The team are called to the site of a killing only to find that there is surveillance video showing that Sarge did it. On the run, the team has to find out why she did it and why she can't remember most of what happened.

A vaguely interesting premise is reduced to a lot of running and athletic jumping and shooting and things blowing up in the usual manner. The main reveal is also fluffed by the fact that the clone responsible remembers things that happened even after it was created from the real Sarge. It's a major plot fluff up, but then the writers seem to care about as little as we do.

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Noir or Never

An old friend and ex-voice team leader goes missing. The trail leads Cleo to a karaoke bar where she becomes entangled with an agent of the Bureau of Health. Sworn to ensuring another plague doesn't devastate humanity, the Bureau hunts down and kills potential infectees and Cleo is just one such potential.

Shadowy organisations doing shadowy things and being corrupted from their initial missions is nothing new in any genre of storytelling and there is very little here that could possibly be termed new. Except, perhaps, Jennifer Sky as a redhead singing 'I get no kick from champagne', quite a sequence and one that the makers liked so much that they replayed it all over again at the end. Apart from that, it's the usual running and shouting and blowing stuff up.

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The Voice

The team is ordered to kill another Voice team, one that has gone rogue, but they appear to still be in contact with Voice and think that it's Hel and her team that are the rogues. Old enemy Creegan turns out to be behind it all and sets up a confrontation with the elusive Voice that will reveal the origin of the Baileys and start a war for the very survival of humanity.

We have, at times, been very disparaging about CLEOPATRA 2525 and never without reason, but we'll be the first to say that the show comes up with a cliffhanger ending that almost makes us wish there were going to be more (we said 'almost'). The opening half of the episode is the usual explosive nonsense, although the body count is racked up beyond anything we've seen yet, but it's in the latter stages that the information starts to flow. It is a shame that Creegan's tale is told in flashback from bits that we've already seen in previous episodes in an attempt to fill in the time to the last minute revelations as this is a cheap and boring gimmick.

What isn't boring is the revelation of the Bailey's origins, which we'd partly suspected anyway, and most especially their creator. The other big moments are the glimpses of the all out war on the surface between the Bailey army and the new weapons that the humans have crafted from the guns in the shafts. The effects budget for the whole season must be packed into the last two minutes of the show, which are very spectacular.

However, the classic fantasy film IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE is somewhat sacred here at the SCI FI FREAK SITE and so the taking of the name George Bailey in vain is the last insult that sees us bidding CLEOPATRA 2525 goodbye without any regrest in our heart.

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