BibleMan: Jesus Our Savior (Part 2)

Today, I’m continuing my week-long marathon of the Bibleman franchise as part of Secular Students Week. If you make a donation to the Secular Student Alliance this week, and I’ll cover a movie of your choice.

“Jesus Our Savior” was the first and only two-part Bibleman story, with the first part originally airing in October of 2002, and the second appearing in February of 2003. It comprises the eighth and ninth entries into “The Bibleman Adventure,” respectively. Both parts of “Jesus Our Savior” were written, produced, and directed by Bibleman himself, Willie Aames.

After a whopping 8 minute recap of the previous episode, the story of “Jesus Our Savior” finally continues with Bibleman on the brink of defeat at the hands of the new villain, Primordius Drool. However, instead of finishing him off, Drool captures Bibleman and brings him back to his lair, where Biblegirl and Cypher ultimately track him. Of course, they are able to temporarily defeat Drool by attacking his shiny tooth, and rescue Bibleman from his lair.

After the team is reunited, they manage to piece together Drool’s plan: to use the public’s dependence on Bibleman to draw them away from depending on God. So, they decided to pray, and clarify that they should never take credit for what they see as God’s work. Speaking of which, check out the BibleMan branded bible in stores near you!

The episode’s plot ends quickly, with Drool ultimately being dispatched pretty easily through teamwork between Cypher and Bibleman, with the green clown-man exploding into lightning and pixels. However, the last seven minutes is essentially dedicated to a sermon from Bibleman about the importance of Jesus, who concludes by all but explicitly stating his retirement, and Cypher’s takeover of the Bibleman role.

However, another sequence appears after the apparent conclusion of the episode that creates yet another cliffhanger: Bibleman’s former sidekick, Coates, appears unexpectedly and attempts to assassinate the hero. This leads into the real last episode for Willie Aames: “A Light In The Darkness.”

There isn’t a whole lot of content to this episode, and I can’t help but feel like they should have consolidated the two parts of “Jesus Our Savior” into one, slightly longer story. Not only does it start with an 8 minute recap, but there is also more than one point where characters just watch clips of the previous episode on a computer monitor. All in all, probably a solid third of the episode in total is made of recycled footage from the previous entry.

If the two parts of “Jesus Our Savior” had been condensed into one, it might have made a pretty good sendoff for Willie Aames from the series. However, the team clearly wasn’t prepared to deal with a two part story, and the second half is a boring wreck. The fact that it ends with another cliffhanger cheapens the entire emotional conclusion as well, and nullifies the feeling that this episode marked the end of an era. I’m a little curious if the last segment was filmed later, after an agreement was made for Aames to stick around for one more episode. Honestly, if you cut that and “A Light in the Darkness” out of the series, the overall story doesn’t skip a beat. It is also pretty disappointing to see the allusion to Cypher taking over, given how the transition is actually handled in “A Fight For Faith.” Overall, this is a really boring episode, and doesn’t live up at all to the setup of the first part. For being roughly 45 minutes long, nothing much actually happens in this episode.