Steven Seagal: Lawman – Season 1 Episode 2 – "The Deadly Hand"

The silence is shattered by a hoarse jagged scream coming from the corner. An unseen assailant wears nothing but a frozen heroin grin. The damp night darkness dominates everything, casting a net of evil over every trace of light. Iniquity hides in blots of blackened sidewalk, out of sight, out of understanding, a derelict space of inhumanity. In each shadow runs a thousand scenes of law-breaking, every cutlet of skin a night’s toil for a brazen knife – grim nocturnal tyranny foisted on the unsuspecting and the innocent.

Such is the dank Louisiana cityscape prior to the arrival of Steven Seagal. His very presence erases the bad, the sordid, the lustful nightmare dynamic of pent-up, foil-lipped libidinal excess that’s spewing out over curb-stones and old grannies nightly. Seagal quells the mad rush of Tiamatian lunacy and unbounded eroticism. “The jecks” knew no limits before Seagal arrived to introduce a generous dose of civilisation. The panoptic eye gazes out from a gap in Seagal’s lower thigh.

Episode two of Steven Seagal: Lawman documents Seagal’s infinite hunger for justice, his undying determination to rid the streets of negative energy and mediocre “Zen practitioners”. The mission will demand all of Seagal’s powers. He will be forced to summon countless tidbits of wisdom, applying knowledge to situations of dire import.

Certainty is rarely possessed by the hero. Its fleeting presence eludes the grasp of so many. Yet Seagal clenches certainty in all its plenitude, trapping its divinity in a single fist.

This certainty provides Seagal with an endless amount of confidence. Years spent studying the martial arts have made him impervious to panic, immune to the onslaught of fear. Invincibility wears a mask stitched by Seagal. No attack exists for which he cannot harness an instant defence. But his fellow officers are not so blessed. They, the fools, have not spent forty years studying the intricacies of aikido. A mix of pity and concern leads Seagal to put on a training session for these helpless souls.

A sweat-stinking gym is the stage for Seagal’s transmission of wisdom. Craven eyes surround him as he delineates the philosophy of his fighting style. Use the opponent’s momentum, capture the forward thrust, enfeeble the attacker, drive him down, expel no effort, be a winner, make it look easy. Fortune will meet the focused consumer of high Seagalian teaching. He guarantees that frequent practise will turn even the puniest, the most shite, into hardcore warriors, wholesome symbols of meritorious equity, the colossal-hearted figures of a modern day gigantomachia. Seagal is forging an army of epic proportions. His pupils know it: each visage grows more and more admiring with every demonstration, more and more the colouration of love with every choice word of encouragement.

The episode ends with another training session. Here a team of trainee cops are the recipients. A mass of youthful faces stares star-struck at Seagal as he describes the combat arts. The natural philosopher surprises with his erudition, throwing expectations into a fire of juvenile wrongs. He advises them to forget all the nonsense about Steven Seagal the movie star, discount the unimportant in favour of the crucial message, the one maxim we must all cherish: “Steven Seagal can save my life”.

Yes he can.