Jupiter’s Legacy “Cover Her Face”

I know I have mentioned in multiple places recently that I got a new HDTV, and for the most part, just about everything I watch has looked about a thousand times better.  There are some exceptions, and one of them was maybe not so surprising:  the old age make-up employed on this show.  Granted, that seems to mostly refer to Walter, especially since I don’t think they did much more than slap a wig on some of the cast, but it’s still true.

I mean, Grace looks pretty good for a woman who is theoretically in her 90s.

OK, that can perhaps mostly be due to her superpowers keeping her younger.  But she looks like she’s just a young woman wearing a white-haired wig or something.  She doesn’t look that old.  Certainly not elderly.  However, there’s something bigger going on with this episode that I think is worth noting and it’s this:  Grace has a pretty good outsider view of Sheldon.

And what that outsider view tells me here is this:  Sheldon may be a good man, but he’s always been somewhat extreme in his views.

That’s what comes out here in the two timelines.  Past-Sheldon is pushing his crew to get a very specific boat to sail them to a place no one has ever really returned from.  Sure, there’s one guy missing, but that’s a surgeon named Richard Conrad, and he turns up floating on some wreckage on the way.

Plus, Walter had to throw all of his own money in to take the voyage while Fitz proved valuable in the old boat’s engineering section.  But the more the ship gets closer to wherever they’re going, the more Sheldon seems to lose it, and the more everyone else seems to recognize how off-his-rocker he might be.  True, his delusions appear to be accurate as they do arrive at a mysterious island, but it was Grace that had to finally calm Sheldon down when he got to his worst.  The past storyline mostly played out with Grace just observing things and bonding a bit with Fitz, the one other member of the group who isn’t a ruined millionaire.

That’s the past.  What’s the present?  Well, Sheldon has to do something out in space and Grace has to take care of things on her own.  That means intervening when she sees one young hero about to kill a villain in a fit of rage.  Now, if this were Sheldon, he would have lectured the young man on right and wrong, the importance of the Code, yadda yadda yadda, but Sheldon isn’t here.  Grace, you know, actually listens to these kids.  Turns out the villain had killed one of the other young heroes.  And this one was one of Chloe’s best friends.

Naturally, it means when Grace catches up to the guy, she really cuts loose and hammers the hell out of him.  She leaves him alive, but it was a close thing, and it would be really hard to say she was entirely in the wrong.  Not everyone has Sheldon’s self-discipline, but that may be because Sheldon is incapable of moral compromise.  That’s a fine thing, but it does make him, in a small way, less human than the others.

Can someone like Sheldon see where he’s gone wrong in life?  Moot point given this show was canceled before it could even start to go that far…

However, there are still reminders that Sheldon is a little too focused on the Code and not on, say, being there for his kids.  Once again, he remembers a fallen hero by the character’s superhero name and not her real name.  Once again, he just goes about his business, not a bad man, but one with a very narrow worldview.  And, given how an episode like this goes, I think it’s clear his wife knows that and for her part is willing to keep a secret from him to somehow preserve some peace at home.