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Surface You know, this show keeps...

Nov 22, 2005 03:00 AM ET
by TV Guide News

Medium

Surface
You know, this show keeps striving to emulate Spielberg, but this week, I couldn't get the darker side of Walt Disney out of my head. For starters, the entire plotline, which finds Dr. Laura and Crazy-Eyed Rich stranded at the bottom of the ocean, had me constantly making up highly inappropriate lyrics for "Under the Sea" — you remember that calypso confection from The Little Mermaid that effectively ruined the bulk of 1990. (A brief example of my handiwork: "The oxygen's always greener in somebody else's tank; if Lake Bell dies in this episode, maybe they can get Hilary Swank." And this is Reason No. 837 why I'm not quitting my day job.) But where I really get worked up is, as usual, with the whole Nimrod story. Our intrepid scientist and man-on-a-mission gasp and wheeze their way through a perilous brush with carbon monoxide poisoning, but it's that first shot of Nim dumped out of a fishing net that earns my first actual sympathetic "ohh" of the hour. Stupid CGI artists, all making me emote and stuff. And by the end of the episode, after Miles gets the flash-boil treatment from a school of mini-non-Nims and hobbles home only to find the real deal waiting in his closet — it's Old Yeller all over again. What's the matter with you, boy? You ain't got the hydrophobie, have ye? I best go get my shotgun. Years of therapy wiped clean with one angry little sea-monster bark. My childhood angst aside, this episode gets extra props for working in an extended and completely irony-free Siegfried & Roy analogy. I didn't think it could be done.