'Las Vegas': Who's your daddy?

So Danny is now in all about the miracle of life. He's learning about his forthcoming child, he wants to take parenting classes, and he's talking about nipples in public. If Danny and Delinda were a real couple this would all be for the good, it would be nice to see him take part in the experience, but this is a TV show and I don't care for the storyline at all (as I know I've stated before). It really doesn't make me like the story anymore to see Danny and Delinda go through the minutiae of parenting classes and to watch them get nervous when confronted with super-parents.

More happily, Piper got caught allowing a girl who she knew was under 21 to play a slot machine. An undercover gaming officer snapped a shot of the girl at the machine and gave Danny a choice -- a million dollar fine or fire Piper. Danny opted for door number 2 and canned Piper before the opening credits. The problem is that firing her before the opening credits meant that the story wasn't going to end there and it was more than likely that before the end of the episode Piper would be hired back.

Right after the credits, Delinda tore into Danny for firing Piper. Delinda argued that a million dollars was really nothing to the Montecito and Danny should have just paid the fine. The woman never ceases to amaze me, yeah, a twenty-something year-old concierge is totally worth a million dollars (if you believe that I have this bridge for sale, it's in Brooklyn, but it's awesome). As if Delinda wasn't enough, Cooper ordered Danny to hire Piper back and Cooper paid the million dollar fine himself.

Naturally everyone figured that Cooper and Piper had a thing (I think I could interest all the characters on this show in purchasing my bridge if you're not interested). Cooper however was doing it for reasons clear only to himself. I like seeing Tom Selleck on TV every week, but why does his character always have to be so damn mysterious and quiet? It was interesting at first, but it's becoming annoying.

Eventually, and far too slowly for my liking, Cooper picked up on what everyone was thinking and explained to Danny the importance of second chances and how everyone that had potential deserved them, even Piper. I never really saw Piper with potential, or, perhaps I never saw her with potential that I thought she would ever realize. In any case, there is no way that Cooper was telling the truth to Danny. This should have been a huge tip-off that there was something else going on here. There's no way that Piper is the best concierge ever, so something else had to be going on.

At some point (and the show didn't make it clear when it happened), Mike went from thinking that Piper and Cooper had a romantic relationship to believing that Cooper was Piper's father. Okay, so that's a pretty big leap and I for one am curious as to when it happened, but I guess I'll never know. Mike worked out some really weird map with intersecting lines and dates that pinpointed where Cooper and Piper's lives nearly overlapped prior to their working together at the Montecito. The intersections weren't terribly close (they mainly amounted to the two being in the same state at the same time on three occasions prior to Vegas), but Mike was sure that he was on to something. He was so sure in fact that he explained his hypothesis to Piper. And, more shockingly Piper believed him.

After being confronted, Cooper insisted that Piper was wrong, but she wasn't buying it. As it turned out Cooper was telling the truth, he wasn't Piper's father. Cooper however was friends with Piper's father before Piper's father was killed. He had in fact been subtly watching over her for years and Mike's intersecting map was sort of accurate.

I'm sorry, did we ever know that Piper was either adopted or didn't know her father? I don't recall the show ever making a point of that and just dropping it into the last third of an episode like they did is really weak storytelling (reminiscent of last week's out of the blue assassins thing, which after rewatching still makes no sense). Don't you have to set this sort of story up? Don't there have to be hints and clues dropped along the way?

The episode played out like a movie with bad surprise ending -- there the teens are in the haunted mansion, hiding in the shower, the bad guy is about to get them. Our villain stealthily creeps into the bathroom, he brandishes a knife, he raises it, he begins his downward blow, and Aquaman, who had been vacationing nearby, shows up, reveals the killer to be Aquaman's long-lost third cousin, Asriel (who just went off his medication for a little while), and they all have a wonderful barbecue and a good laugh. Later that night, Melissa, the young, confused co-ed and Asriel... well, you get the picture.

As for Sam, dear Sam, this week I was far happier with her story, it was true Sam, true Las Vegas, and just good fun. She received a ticket for making an illegal u-turn (and quite possibly endangering the lives of children), got Polly to lie in court to try to get out of the ticket, and ended up getting both of them tossed into traffic school. Sam couldn't be bothered to take the class seriously though and spent the entire episode trying to get out of being there. Good times. Why the show bothered with the rest of "plot" I can't imagine, they should've jettisoned the whole thing and done a Sam and Polly episode.

You know, I remember trying, unsuccessfully, to get Melissa over to The TV and Film Guy's Reviews, but just because she didn't visit doesn't mean you don't have to.

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