Relic Hunter (TV Series) M.I.A. (2001) User Reviews

The long list of enemies

[unbrokenmetal · 6/10 · 1 May 2014]

Cate (the agent from 'Last of the Mochicas') finds that Sydney was abducted, but a very valuable relic she was carrying, a Fabergé egg, was left behind, so it was not an ordinary robbery, but probably something personal. Cate goes to see Nigel and Claudia. Most likely, an old enemy of Sydney has captured her, but the list of suspects is very long, from rival relic hunters to gangsters to evil priests (Cate: „How serious was the grudge he had against Sydney?" - Nigel: „He did vow to cut out our hearts"). As they check their current whereabouts, they remember Sydney's most dangerous adventures.

This new episode is stretched to 43 minutes with plenty of flashbacks, excerpts from previous episodes. This is not really exciting, you know it all if you didn't miss any of them.

An excellent episode

[fabian5 · 10/10 · 29 May 2010]

In this episode, Interpol agent Cate Hemphill arranges a night sting operation with Sydney as bait but Sydney gets snatched off the streets before the sting can even begin. When Cate hears Sydney's last taped words--"what are you doing here"--and Cate's trap, a Czarist fabergé egg, is left behind on the sidewalk, she quickly realizes that Sydney's kidnapper cannot be one of the illegal antiquity smugglers that she has been targeting but rather one of Sydney's many...many enemies from the past.

Basically, Nigel and Claudia have to run through their recollections of Sydney's Relic Hunter 'entanglements' and cases with Relic Hunter's truly nasty villains with Cate in order to catch the culprit--who plans to kill Sydney just as the morning sun rises the next day. Its really a whodunit with Sydney's life on the line now. Much of their work ends in frustration as they find many of Sydney's rival relic hunters are either dead, firmly locked away in prison or are living far away from North America and in no position to threaten Sydney in New York. In the end, Nigel,Claudia and Cate reach the end of their list and guess the kidnapper's identity and save Sydney just before she is about to be killed by....a truly scary psychopath. Let's just say the killer appears in one of the earlier episodes of season 2 of Relic Hunter...and he despises Sydney enough to drug and kill her for foiling his past plans by making her suffer and pay before she dies. He's certainly not your garden variety villain. All in all, this was one of the best Relic Hunter episodes out there and I rate it at a generous ten out of ten.

The Dreadful Hours

[ttapola · 2/10 · 10 August 2011]

It was an ordinary night of channel surfing. I came across the channel airing this episode. Since nothing else was on, and I had missed only the first five minutes of the episode, I decided to watch it - after all, one reviewer had given it the full 10/10 - the best of the best there could *ever* be. This had to be the TV equivalent of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

It was not. A lazily written, unoriginal plot is so thin the episode has to fill its running time with clips from past episodes clumsily shoehorned in. They are poor. In fact, *everything* is poor and not even unintentionally funny. You cannot believe how long the opening title sequence (I have seen some episodes in the past) and the end credits run - and that happens on *every* episode! A pitiful solution to pass as much running time as possible every week without spending any money on script, filming and other things the show-runners obviously considered an inconvenience in their hunt for as much profit out of as little expenses as possible. They even play the title music over a fight scene, in order to avoid having to pay someone to actually compose original music specifically for the scene.

This is dreadful. 2/10 - there are few things worse out there. But now, seeing how few people have rated these episodes, I have found a calling - to watch the remaining 32 episodes and rate them. Once in a while, one has to watch really bad TV to appreciate the really good TV even more.