Review: Mike Tyson Mysteries “The Death of Lyle Victor Linkus; San Juan Puerto Rico Blows but San Juan Capistrano”

Triangles are a little bit like pyramids

Overview (Spoilers Below)

Lyle Victor Linkus exhibits almost super-human strength when he survives his state-mandated execution, beats the executioner to death, and dives out a window. All this happened in the small town of Reidsville, Georgia, and bad publicity compels the prison warden to call the Mike Tyson Mystery Team to the scene. But first, the gang drops Deezy off in Atlanta to meet a woman he’s been chatting with online.

In Reidsville, the woebegone warden arms Mike with a pistol and sends them into the forest to “take care of” Linkus. Instead, they opt to go home, and it takes them more than a month to realize Deezy never returned from Atlanta. The team finally finds Deezy in Reidsville where he claims Linkus carjacked his online girlfriend after murdering a gas station attendant. Following a struggle, Deezy forced the killer to drive off a bridge. The gang tracks them to a cave where Mike accidentally shoots Linkus and Deezy’s lady friend with the warden’s pistol.

In the next episode, the team is tasked to investigate all the swallows disappearing from San Juan Capistrano, California. Unfortunately, Deezy booked them on a plane to San Juan, Puerto Rico by mistake. On the way to the real mystery, their private jet is pulled into the Bermuda Triangle.

When they wake up, a helpful guide informs them that they’re actually in the KRC Triangle which is a pillar of Scientology that stands for Knowledge, Responsibility, and Control. She brings them to meet the Commodore who is actually Scientology founder, L. Ron Hubbard. The whole time, Mike mishears KRC as KFC, so it’s no surprise to him when Hubbard takes them to the aviary where they find the missing San Juan Capistrano swallows.

After Pigeon riffs on Scientology and oral sex for a good minute, the swallows fly the team back to California. A Catholic nun, who seems very into swallows, praises Mike and unwittingly reveals that Scientology and the world’s other religions have many similarities—sans an alien dictator named Xenu or Xemu.

Our Take

Both these episodes, while not bad, were a bit hollow. While it’s not easy to write an eleven-minute episode with a complete, fulfilling arc, it’s been done and done well by other shows with the same format. It’s even been done well on Mysteries from time to time. However, on this show, in particular, it often feels like the creators write up until eleven minutes and then abruptly stop upon reaching their time limit. Sometimes that sudden cutoff can be funny, but oftentimes it doesn’t hold up.

Deezy is okay as a “sometimes” character, but jamming him down our throats by including him in every episode this season isn’t working for me. And it’s especially distracting to have him as the episode’s primary focus. Nobody cares about Deezy’s side plots, but when they’re a means to an end like when Mike had to learn CPR, they have the potential to strengthen a plot. But when his disjointed side story intertwines with the primary plot like it did in “The Death of Lyle Victor Linkus,” it brings the entire premise down. Sorry, Deezy, I know you’re trying.

In 1990, the actor Tom Cruise joined Scientology, and later that decade a lot of his fans discovered this tidbit. So, for a period starting in the late 90s and ending in the late 2000s, people learned of Scientology’s peculiarities. This was the peak period of Scientology humor that was more or less universal. 2019 is a little late to score Scientology burns, and hearing about it in this episode felt completely random. Hubbard’s been dead for more than thirty years, and the religion’s most animated backers—like Cruise—have been notably somber for close to a decade.

I won’t call it low-hanging fruit because many Scientologists still have a heightened sense of superiority due to their unusual ways. But I’ll liken it to odd-hanging fruit like durian or a horned melon. Seriously, what did Scientology ever do to you, Mike Tyson Mysteries? However, that dig at Christianity was spot on