TV Review: Hostages Season 1 Episode 12 "The Cost of Living"

Welcome to Hostages: where we tease potential stories with tension, then reverse things back to normal like nothing ever happened.

That's pretty much what this show is. "The Cost of Living" picks up right where the previous episode left off. Duncan is kidnapped by Logan and the NSA guy, seemingly pissed that he sabotaged their plan.

Oh now, what will they do to him? Nothing apparently, since Duncan tells him they can still work together. So the show has the NSA guy walk over with a knife (cue dramatic music), bend down (turn music up louder), then cut him loose.

Whew, that was close. Almost had some actual tension there!

Did you think Hostages was going to explain the asinine kiss between Duncan and Ellen with the most ridiculous explanations possible? You would be correct. This week we get Ellen saying "everything's been so confusing and heightened. I know what I'm supposed to feel: I'm supposed to hate you. I don't." Great. I think the beginning ("everything's been so confusing..") was a little bit of art imitating life. All the character motivations on this show are confusing.

I could write 10,000 words on how bad of a choice this kiss was, but I respect you more than Hostages does. So I'll just say this: if Ellen doesn't care about her family, neither do I. To erase any doubt that Hostages truly has no idea what they're doing, Ellen makes another move at Duncan.

Duncan is then all like "whoa Ellen, calm down. We have a job to do." You sure do, Duncan.

To make matters worse, the father in law uses this kissing evidence to imply Ellen would be charged with Duncan. This hilariously convinces Brian YET AGAIN to not say anything to the authorities despite ranting and raving about it for the past few episodes.

Brian finally gets a phone and calls Duncan's dying wife and explains everything. Whatever. Duncan will probably have her convinced she had too much morphine and hallucinated the whole conversation next episode.

Duncan tries to frame the new Secret Service guy in charge with a prostitute but the cop Duncan got to arrest him ends up getting shot.

Cut to a scene later with Duncan and the NSA guy, and apparently the secret service guy is still getting charged with hiring a prostitute? But not murder? Okay...

Hostages also has a whole surgery story this week involving Ellen saving a controversial patient because...? It involved a cop killer who Ellen saves then later gets validation with his son thanking her. If anything, it was a lame attempt to root Ellen's character back to what she was introduced as.

First of all, you failed at that Hostages. Secondly, not a great time to shoehorn in a conversation about surgeon ethics.

The one story this week they didn't completely mess up on was the Sandrine one. Pissed off at her, the secret service guy Logan in true Hostages form invites Sandrine on a new mission. This time he wants her to plant mini bombs on Duncan, Kramer's and Archer's cars to kill them after the President is killed.

Sandrine agrees. What worked was the chain of events that built up the tension - Archer watching this exchange, Archer identifying Logan to Duncan, Duncan warning Kramer etc.

That makes it all the more disappointing knowing it's going to unravel quickly when Sandrine declares her love for Kramer and tells him about the whole plan so he can save her. Probably, right?

Photo Credit: Seriable