'Knight Rider': The rebirth of KARR

Tonight Knight Rider finally recreated one of the storylines from the original series that I had been most looking forward to finding out about. Though KARR didn't make it onto the screen this week, we now know that he exists in this incarnation of the franchise and can almost certainly look forward to seeing him at a later date.

The show began with a degraded live video message coming into KNIGHT from the CIA. Well, not from Langley directly so much as from a hooded figure standing out in what looked to be the woods somewhere. His message was garbled, confusing, and turned out to be Michael just playing a Halloween joke on the gang. Alex actually thought it was funny, I kind of thought it was illegal use of government (or government contractor anyway) equipment. Can you imagine how many of your tax dollars were spent on that little prank?

If everyone had been paying more attention to what was going on around them instead of playing jokes on one another they might have noticed that there had been an internal breach at KNIGHT, that a tech was dead, and that the mainframe had been hacked into. Doc Graiman and Zoe did come upon the body, but they figured it was a practical joke. By the time they decided it was real, the as-yet-unseen bad guy had fired three shots at Graiman and Zoe.

The complex went into emergency lockdown and Michael, Sarah, and KITT were still on a plane (in choppy weather) flying back from their latest mission. Michael and Sarah were not terribly pleased with being cut off from the base and tried to access the backdoor into the KNIGHT computer system. KITT, realizing that there was a back door into KNIGHT figured there might be one into him too and got a tad worried. Poor KITT, it's not like there was a self-destruct sequence initiated or anything... wait, there was, but he didn't know it yet.

Back at KNIGHT, Zoe was just fine, but Graiman had bumped his head on his way to the floor. Apparently, despite the killer having a nearly 100 percent chance of hitting one of them, he missed both. Despite not being a great shot, the bad guy was smart, he had looped the video feed so no one would see him enter the room (like Bruce Willis did in Hudson Hawk). Unfortunately for the killer, Billy figured out that he could recreate the audio portion of the conversation between the dead tech and killer. To be fair to the killer there were no mics in the room, Billy whipped out some sort of high tech equipment that could find leftover soundwaves in the computer room so that he could rebuild the conversation. So you can't really blame the killer for not fully covering his tracks because who knew that you could rebuild conversations from soundwaves that are just lying around in a vacant room.

By that point, Graiman was back on his feet but hugely worried because he had seen on the mainframe before going down that someone had activated KITT's self-destruct. Even worse, Graiman couldn't turn it off. KITT had 20 minutes before blowing up and Sarah, Michael, and the doomed Mustang were made aware of the situation when Sarah activated the backdoor to KNIGHT and had a little chit-chat with Alex and company. The only thing that could save KITT was -- for reasons too vague to explain -- the killer's handprint.

In yet another sad instance of the show putting human before human-like car, Doc Graiman opted to download all of KITT's files so they could have that data later even though they didn't have time to download KITT's personality. The car initially hesitated, but Sarah and Michael sweet-talked him into the plan (which was going to end with KITT's "shell" being jettisoned from the plane). KITT didn't balk at his being jettisoned, just at the notion that they cared more about the files than him.

Sarah decided that they could deactivate the bomb manually, but she neglected to consider the fact that there simply wasn't enough time to get it done. KITT tried to point out that a highly trained team couldn't get it done in time, but that didn't stop Michael going it alone anyway. Michael must not have been too concerned however with actually getting it done, because when KITT started to have some of his favorite memories downloaded, Michael stopped his work to watch.

Back at the base however, there was no rest for the weary. Billy identified the voice sample of the killer as belonging to Carrie, who vehemently denied that she was the one who hacked the mainframe and shot at Graiman and Zoe. Carrie always seemed like an unnecessary character to me, so I was willing to buy it, but Billy did some more checking and figured out that the voice sample had been faked (apparently the killer was aware of Billy's awesome ability to grab old soundwaves from rooms).

No sooner did Billy figure out that Carrie wasn't the killer than the fire alarm went off in Carrie's room. A quick check indicated that there was no fire and it was only then that Graiman tried to take Carrie's handprint to see if it would deactivate KITT's self-destruct. I kind of wondered why they didn't take her handprint immediately to see if she was the killer, but that was just me being silly, trying to apply logic to the show.

On the airplane, Michael and KITT were actually trying to apply logic to their situation. KITT realized that Graiman put in the self-destruct so that KITT wouldn't end up like KARR, and upon learning about the original prototype, Michael became intrigued. Michael was absolutely sure that he had, at some point, run across KARR. Michael also had the epiphany that the point of everything going on at KNIGHT was simply to have them download KITT's files so that they could be stolen. And, stolen they were, by Zoe.

Well, not quite Zoe, and not quite stolen. It looked like Zoe, but it wasn't Zoe, she had pulled the old switcheroo during the gunplay. Real Zoe was able to stop fake Zoe, who had taken Billy as a hostage, from escaping just in time for them to slap fake Zoe's palm on the pad to abort KITT's self-destruct (Michael and Sarah were ready to parachute out of the plane rather than forcing KITT into the cold dark night but it wasn't necessary).

Fake Zoe ended up biting some sort of pill and killing herself before anyone could figure out who she was working for, but Graiman was putting his money on KARR or someone affiliated with KARR. The assumption was that the goal had been to putt KITT's files into KARR and create the "ultimate weapon." And here I thought KARR was already a pretty great weapon.

Another thought and a question:

• Sadly, at the top of the episode, when Billy first appeared I instantly knew he was dressed as Captain Jack Harkness. I even thought it was a cool outfit.
• Question of the Knight -- How long will it be until we actually see KARR in the flesh (or steel or whatever it is that he's made out of)?

The TV and Film Guy's Reviews - not just the prototype, but the finished product as well.

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