My Own Worst Enemy Series Premiere Review

My Own Worst Enemy premiered on October 13, 2008. The pilot episode is titled Breakdown. Christian Slater stars as Edward Albright, a government operative and Henry Spivey, and efficiency expert with a wife and two kids. Edward and Henry inhabit the same body which results in some compromising situations when Henry starts realizing he has a split personality. Warning: my episode review contains plot spoilers.

The series premiere of My Own Worst Enemy was a fast paced action filled episode that had me hooked from the beginning. Christian Slater is excellent as the super sexy secret agent Edward and as the boring family man Henry. Christian Slater does an impressive job distinguishing between the split personalities.

It is revealed in this episode that Henry is Edward's split personality. Edward is a war hero who signed up for this secret experiment nineteen years ago. Alfre Woodard plays Mavis Heller, Edward's boss and main supporter of the split personality experiment. When Henry comes to her upset, she reveals that the experiment "manifested a divergent identity dormant in a sealed off portion of the medial temporal lobe creating a split personality." Hmmm, how many takes did it take for Alfre to get that line right?

The split personality concept is very intriguing. Even though Edward is the main personality, he knowingly allows Henry to become active after each mission. So Edward has always known about Henry but due to some glitch in the experiment, Henry is now becoming aware of Edward. Unfortunately, Henry awakens in the middle of an assassination attempt which results in the bad Russian guys finding out about Edward's secret identity. Mavis and her team rescue Henry and try to remove his knowledge of Edward but it doesn't work. It seems that Henry is now becoming the dominant personality.

The bad Russian guys tracks Henry down and threatens him and his family unless he returns a briefcase with some sort of weapon that Edward/Henry stole in the beginning of the episode. In a cool twist, the audience thinks Henry is back to normal with no knowledge of Edward but fortunately Edward has found a way to communicate with Henry and saves the day.

Edward and Henry now communicate with each other through video messages. Henry is willing to try to live like this because otherwise he knows the organization will erase him completely. He now knows he is being monitored by his psychologist Dr. Noah Skinner, played by Saffron Burrows, and starts to lie to her with Mavis's encouragement. Mavis is not ready to consider the Edward/Henry problem a security risk quite yet because she wants to protect the program.

I was very impressed with My Own Worst Enemy. Christian Slater is excellent. The plot is intriguing with great action scenes. I give the episode 5 out of 5 stars.