This week’s INCORPORATED finally unfolds the story of what happened to Laura Larson (Alison Miller) in the Red Zone. As we her abducted and tortured, we see how Julian (Dennis Haysbert) rose in the ranks during the hostage crisis. And yes, Aaron (Sean Teale) is still covering his tracks to make sure Roger’s death doesn’t come back around to him.
After heading into the Red Zone to have a night out in one of the clubs, Laura, and her friends quickly split up in differences over the taste in men. She was grabbed by the man she was interested in. The Red Zone cops get a cut of the ransom, so they’re no help to Laura as she is hauled back by the man to his family’s apartment aided by his sister. Once in the apartment the siblings quickly tie Laura down and cut her ear demanding the ransom money. The siblings are aided by their mother who realizes who Laura is and tells her son to redo the video to ask for more money. Unfortunately, for the hostage takers, they left the scalpel out and with some effort Laura grabs it and frees herself. When the girl comes back into the pack after they received the ransom money, Laura does not hesitate to kill her. Meanwhile, Julian manages to track her down and has killed the whole family retrieving Laura and taking her back to Elizabeth (Julia Ormond).
So this had a pretty bad dialogue (worse than usual) with the likes of “If I spill these beers, we’re gonna have a problem” being the stand out among the host of really bad gems. Laura is the best character on the show, so I can’t put my finger on why I was so cold to this episode as I should’ve been fully invested. I’m really glad Laura wasn’t raped as it was hinted to in the first episode. But still, this was hard to watch the only character worth rooting for was tortured. A question I asked my brother while watching this is, why are the clubs in the Red Zones so exotic and nice? I mean why not make bars and clubs that match the aesthetic of the clubs and bars in the Red Zones because I mean eight out of ten times something bad goes down. What was cool is that we see Julian wanted out from Spiga as he has a family and something traumatic had happened. Elizabeth, we see forces Julian to where he is now which hopefully we’ll see how that tension is resolved as in the present Julian and Elizabeth as simpatico. Elizabeth and Laura’s contentious relationship is illuminated as we see Elizabeth refuse to pay the ransom for Spiga in order to protect their intellectual property. Ouch. Added to that Laura figures out that Elizabeth, her own mother, keep in mind, has a hand in her father’s death as well.
We then end the last fifteen minutes in the present as Aaron works with Theo (Theo Marquez) to con employees from a rival corporation into buying Roger’s (Douglas Nyback) watch. Which works, as it makes Roger look like a defector. And please stop having Theo remind Aaron that he needs to save Elena (Denyse Tontz) every time they share a scene. So you’re probably wondering why they did Laura’s backstory this episode, well that’s because, for the first time since the abduction, Laura heads back into the Red Zone to help the girl she promised to her now ex-maid that got delayed due to a riot breaking out.
So while “Sweating the Assets” was one of the better episodes of the season so far, the problems still exist here. It was good to have a Laura-centric episode, Incorporated still leaves much to be desired. I hope we get more episodes like this where we don’t have to follow Aaron for the A-plot. We now know why Laura is so traumatized between the kidnapping, mutilation, the guilt of killing, as well as finding out a particularly nasty truth about her mother and father. Yeah, that would scar almost anybody. Also, is it me or is Julian becoming the hero of this show? He’s smarter than he seems and I think he knows Aaron is behind everything that is happening so…go Julian!
Season 1, Episode 6 (S01E06)
Incorporated airs Wednesdays at 10PM on SyFy
Read all of our reviews of Incorporated here.
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A lifelong film enthusiast since he can remember, Brandon is a indie filmmaker/screenwriter and freelance critic who resides in Trenton, NJ. Feel free to hit him up on Twitter to talk movies, shows, and music (especially hip-hop).
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Brandon Norwood | Contributor
