A superhero like no one other... because he's like them all.

Vince Faraday (David Lyons) is a family man and the only honest cop in Palm City, which is besieged by bad guy Chess. Vince is set up by his partner (Bad Cop) and the Evil ARK Corporation (led by Thomas Cromwell) to take the fall for Chess. In the process he fakes his own death in a televised police chase and wakes up in a circus with a bunch of lovable misfits and one of the Coyote Ugly girls. In an inspired leap from formula (not really) he gets to have a training montage with the carnies, where he learns fighting, hypnotism, and… caping? He sets out to get revenge, and get his life back with the help of the circus people and a mysterious computer hacker named Orwell.

The new police chief is sworn in, and just after making a ‘tough on crime’ speech he’s locked in his SUV by Chess, a guy in a mask with snake-eye contacts (who is almost as menacing as Michael Jackson in cat-eye contacts in the Thriller video). A tear-gas-type canister goes off, melting the car before exploding as Faraday tries vainly to save him. An independent contractor, the ARK corporation, is going to privatize the police force in Palm City and Vince’s partner convinces him to leave the regular force to become the face of ARK. Not even like a day later, Vince gets an email from Orwell (a subversive hacker type), who tells him that ARK are bad guys (in case you didn’t deduce that from the oily evil corporation vibe, or the menacing music, or having every read a comic or even viewed one from several yards away).

When Vince goes to investigate, he calls his partner in with his findings (Betsy Wetsy dolls in their train cars? Surely, their evil knows no bounds!) and he’s injected in the neck, and wakes up in a train car tied to a chair with his partner. His partner and best friend is a bad guy? No! And Chess comes out of the shadows and takes off his mask (why even bother wearing one? Was Westley right, are they very comfortable?) and it’s the oily rich corporate guy! What? They’re not the bad guys, really, they’re mostly misunderstood. So they staple gun a mask onto Vince’s head and send him out into the train yard to try to elude the police and helicopter chase, already in progress. He finds a trapdoor under a train car of gasoline and falls into a shockingly clean and dry sewer just as the gas tank explodes above him, so he can be safely assumed dead. But guess what? He’s totally not.

So as his wife and son watch the live footage of Vince being branded a super-villain and dying horribly in a gas explosion, Vince is actually being kidnapped by a bunch of circus freaks and carnies. He wakes up in a gothic nightmare and uses his ARK security card to buy his life from the carnival people, who are ready to kill him when he convinces them that he’s not Chess. We get to watch the carnies do a bunch of robberies on ARK security cameras, one conducted by a raccoon carrying a bag. Chess asks Bad Cop, “Do you think the raccoon acted alone?” That was kind of funny. But what was funnier was why he didn’t ask whose card had been used to access the bank vaults in all of these robberies.

Vince decides to get his good name back and undergoes a training montage with his loveable band of misfits. He learns hand-to-hand combat from a midget, and hypnosis from Inigo Montoya. I wonder who will teach him to grow a beard? He finds a cape and the head of the Carnival With The Amazing Setup That Never Performs A Show Yet Nobody Questions Why It’s There decides to train Vince to be The Cape. And here is the only explanation that we get on why Vince’s cape is so cool: it has weighted seams, and it’s made out of some kind of material called Spider Silk: stronger than Kevlar, thinner than filament, and apparently unknown by the police or armed forces of any country, amazingly. It seems like you could just sell Spider Silk to the military and not have to rob all those banks and stuff.

So the show just goes back and forth between Vince finding his footing as a crime fighter, getting his butt kicked a few times, and his family trying to deal with his loss. As a crime fighter, he screws up enough that he has to be rescued by his carnie sidekicks and by Orwell (who turns out to be Summer Glau). He saves his friends, and gets saved by his friends; he fights small-time bad guys along the way. He happens to be in a store where a robbery takes place and the bad guy says, “Don’t be a hero, dog.” And all I could think was, “mmmmmm, hero dog". Like a hot dog, only braver. On the family side, he makes the incredibly bad decision to appear to his son dressed as The Cape, who also happens to be his son’s favorite superhero. He doesn’t reveal that he’s Vince but certainly gives him enough for several years of therapy. As if the poor kid wasn’t already starting behind the ball when they named him Trip.

Just a couple of questions: how did the midget know that Malini was being held at the docks? How did Orwell know that Vince was going to break into Fleming’s house? Why didn’t anybody look around at the funeral? Because Vince was seriously pulling a Tom Sawyer by being ten feet away from the guests at his own funeral.

So the bad guys (Fleming / Chess, Bad Cop, Scales, and Cain) are firmly aligned on the side of eeeeeeevil. And the good guys (Vince, Max Malini and various circus people, and Orwell) are firmly aligned on the side of good. Although Orwell’s lack of a back story leads me to believe that a back story will be revealed that makes us question her loyalties, and then some dramatic scene will convince us that she’s a force of good.

The characters in The Cape are not three-dimensional. The premise is absurd. The story doesn’t deviate from formula in any aspect. The plot holes are big enough to pitch an entire huge, elaborate, Moroccan dream of a circus in. But it was kind of entertaining, in parts; and I just wish that the show was either original, subversive, or capable of using post-modern irony to turn the superhero genre around. Instead we get pure formula, with no surprises, and the running joke that the name sucks doesn’t mean that the name doesn’t actually suck.

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