Charlie's Angels

The Angels are hired to discover if the death of an actress in a women's spa is a murder or not. Of course it is but the Angels get inside a complex that looks more to a jail than to a spa.



They go undercover, Sabrina as a diestist (it's really funny to see her eating once and again when preparing food or giving carrots to the womens), Kris as an exercise instructor and Kelly as a guest. The women who work or are guest in the spa are very strange in the way that some of them have the word "suspect" written on their face. But who was the killer? What I like about this episode is that the story is interesting from the beginning to the end and although the suspects are very clear there are some surprises. For once, nobody wants to kill Sabrina but Kris... twice.

Although "Charlie's Angels" represented an important moment in TV history for action roles for women, where they got to dish out physical punishment rather than just standing on the sidelines while the men fight, rarely did the heroine trio lose a physical battle, which certainly betrays any sense of treating the premise sincerely (even if going one level beyond that in taking such a fun show seriously is more than one would want). In this episode, there is finally a scene where Kris (Cheryl Ladd) is cornered by a strong woman and demonstrates overconfidence in taking her on, only for the woman to throw Kris through a table knocking her out, dragging her away, and positioning her on a massage table for a novel way of bumping her off, by disallowing her skin to breathe through its pores, reminiscent of the same urban legend as used in the film "Goldfinger" when a beautiful blonde was killed by being covered head-to-toe in gold paint. The other Angels of course come to Kris' rescue just in time, but not before her humiliating defeat by knockout, which didn't happen often enough to the heroines in this show. This may seem an offensive viewpoint in a post-feminist era, but what should be offensive is the idea of it being politically incorrect for fictional women to demonstrate defeat, which is just another case of restriction of a female stereotype, and whenever a woman is seen on the losing end, it actually may give the female audience a feeling of empowerment, just as any demonstration of female victory was empowering before the feminist era.