"Wave Goodbye" has the series' first great femme fatale nemesis, but not a whole lot else.
Peril Score: 3/10
Punched / Kicked: 3
Grabbed / Bearhugged / Thrown: 1 (blown through doors by Hurricane's storm)
Unmasked: 0
Knocked Out: 0
Success/Defeat Ratio: 1: 1
Tropes: Darcy Gets Clobbered (sort of)
And can you blame Darcy's boss? "Wave Goodbye" is not a great episode, but Darcy does look great in a swimsuit.
Darcy and Rafferty go the beach to see about some "broad" who assaulted a lifeguard. After the requisite beach silliness, the two encounter a pair of men in suits crawling from the ocean. The cops draw their guns, and the weird men spray them with goo. It's gross.
I'm not going to call this surprise attack a defeat... Even though the guys get away. (It is a slight example of the "Darcy Gets Clobbered" trope.) They end up meeting with their boss, Dr. Gail Waters, who decides to terrorize the city as the supervillain Hurricane. She goes to the bank and creates a real storm (even, in a totally gratuitous moment, blowing some woman's top off). Darcy hears about the situation of her home radio and arrives at the scene as Black Scorpion.
She walks into the storm-soaked bank. "From where I stand, you're dead in the water," she cockily declares. Hurricane is unfazed. "I'm going to take this town by storm," she says, and blows a stream of green air at our heroine.
Black Scorpion bears down and tries to fight back the wind...
But the storm blows her off her feet!
And through the front doors!
She lands on the pavement with a nice "UNGH!" Hurricane laughs and goes out to gloat at her downed foe.
Black Scorpion isn't done yet, though! She clambers to her feet and calls out Hurricane's name as she walks away. Hurricane responds by raining down lightning bolts in our heroine's direction. She dances around and tries to avoid getting shocked!
So nervous is Black Scorpion that she ends up retreating to the Scorpionmobile. But Hurricane summons up more weather and ends up trapping BS is her own vehicle! "Computer release locks!" she cries out. But the malfunctioning Scorpionmobile can't respond. It even starts transforming back to Darcy's car! "No!" she screams. "No!" But it doesn't go all the way.
This is, simply put, a huge DEFEAT for Black Scorpion, and a dominating performance from Hurricane. BS doesn't lay a finger on her foe or her goons. She is made completely inadequate by Hurricane's weather patterns, to the point where even her retreat goes haywire.
This might be one of the great defeats of the series if the shots were better. But as you can probably guess by the somewhat lackluster screencaps, the cameraman really didn't do this scene right. Black Scorpion's rain-dappled chest and Hurricane, looking sexy in a kinky purple costume, are just about the only eye candy we get.
Darcy visits her mechanic friend Argyle afterward to check up on the state of the Scorpionmobile. Hurricane, meanwhile, takes to the airwaves, and demands 10 million dollars from Mayor Worth to clean up the city's beaches. Which doesn't seem like the worst expenditure, actually. The catch is that if the city doesn't pay up, Hurricane will unleash the storm of the century.
(I was complaining about eye candy earlier, and the producers heard, so they included in the episode two pans up Darcy's upper body. Nice.)
The episode goes on in boring fashion. So...
Okay. Darcy's chest plays a prominent role in this episode. And then Argyle comes by and hooks BS up with the new and improved Scorpionmobile. With a huge storm raging outside, our heroine prepares for round two against Hurricane.
Her confidence restored, Black Scorpion drives the Scorpionmobile into Hurricane's lair and quickly dispatches her two goons. The two girls proceed to have the first of the series many catfights. This one is fairly one-sided, and it favors Black Scorpion. Hurricane does get a good punch in that spins Darcy around, and follows up with a hard kick that, for a second, brings her opponent to her knee. Hurricane gets one more kick in, and then it's all Darcy's show.
BS knocks out Hurricane, but Rafferty shows up before she can defuse the storm. There's the obligatory moment of tension before the two decide to work together.
Rafferty and Darcy blow up the machine, and the explosion's impact makes Darcy go "Unggh." But the situation otherwise goes exactly as planned. This is a definite SUCCESS for Black Scorpion.
And then the episode is over. "Wave Goodbye" is full of filler. Some of that filler-- like the random scenes of Darcy's cleavage-- is acceptable. But all the jokes and drama and such means very little peril. The initial battle with Hurricane means the episode's not a total loss. But "Wave Goodbye" is finally more ebb than flow.
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