Apologies on the slight tardiness of this week’s TVQuesting. Before I wrote anything about Alcatraz I wanted to catch the third episode: three episodes of a show is quite often a good barometer of how a show is going to go. A great example is Terra Nova: the first episode was phenomenal, but the second and third episode took a serious dip in quality and ingenuity. You could guess that show would become rote then and there.
Alcatraz, in my opinion, started out rather weak. It introduced the premise of convicts being time travelled out of Alcatraz in the 60s and winding up in the present day, and from there it jumps through the usual hoops. Almost a full episode of cops racing against the clock to catch a bad guy, with the final minutes dedicated to slowly pushing forward the hook of the show. That hook being that once the bad guys have been caught the secretive G-man takes them to some out of the way recreation of Alcatraz, as opposed to just, y’know, killing them.
I’m no expert on time travel, but I do think about it a lot. The whole premise of returning the prisoners to a version of Alcatraz is going to need to have an incredible reason behind it, because otherwise it doesn’t really make sense. Do you know what you call a group of individuals who were once alive in the 60s and then suddenly weren’t there anymore? Most people would call them ‘dead’. When you’re dealing with time travel the issues arrive when you deal with travel to the past. Travelling to the past opens up the possibility of paradoxes, whereas a (seemingly) one way ticket to the future is basically just a TV version of linear time. They’d still be headed in the same direction if they had never vanished in the first place.
So why not just off them and dump them somewhere? They’re out there killing people, and if a criminal is armed and dangerous chances are they’re going to get popped. I almost feel like there’s going to be a future episode that deals with one of these people getting iced in a way that the body can’t be recovered and it causing some weird time travel problems down the road because he isn’t back in their deep woods Alcatraz re-creation.
Jorge Garcia is another nit I have to pick. As far as the rest of the casting goes it seems fairly fine. The criminals being cast seem to fit the type. The lead actress makes a fine enough cop. The creepy old dude makes a good creepy old dude. Jorge Garcia doesn’t really fit the super genius archetype. He delivers the lines well enough; he just doesn’t look the part. The rest of the character’s background seems forced in to give viewers something to relate with. Oh, hey, here’s one of the few people from that other J.J. Abrams show that is immediately recognizable anywhere, exhibiting a lot of the same mannerisms he had there, and boy does he love comic books, except now he’s a genius and an authority on Alcatraz.
It could be that I don’t think he works because I wasn’t a fan of Lost. With Lost my suspension of disbelief was shattered somewhere during the second season. Between a whole second half of survivors from the plane crash and the idea that Hurley seemed incapable of losing weight on a deserted island I just quit watching. Not completely egregious offensives from a sci-fi television show, I know, but they were the proverbial straw.
So here he is again in a more upfront capacity, as hefty as ever, and they want me to believe that he’s the perfect partner for an ex-cop whose sole responsibility is often literally chasing down criminals? In the second episode at one point they have the creepy old dude, the ex-cop, and Hurley show up at two very, very tall buildings. The criminal is at the top of one of the buildings, so the old guy gets to the top of the first building while the ex-cop heads for the other.
The old dude manages to get all the way to the top of his building, walk out to the roof, realize he’s at the wrong building, go all the way back down to street level, cross the distance to the other building and make it all the way to the roof in time to help apprehend the convict, and that is more believable to me than had, in all that time, Garcia’s character somehow arrived on the roof.
Yes, I realize the character is supposed to be a researcher. He’s an expert on the criminals of Alcatraz. So, why exactly is he accompanying the cop on the field at all? It would be just as effective to the viewer to cut to him in front of a big, complicated computer talking and have the cop wear an ear-piece.
Those quibbles aside, I haven’t wrote the show completely off yet. The problems I have with it aren’t as egregious as they need to be for me to give it up, and honestly I need to see the payoff of the top secret prison the end of every episode shows. That’s the clincher on whether or not this is a good show or simply another crime drama with a twist.
What about you guys? We’re three episodes in, so you guys must have an opinion on how it’s treating you. Hit up the comments and let’s chat. What are your feelings on the show, your predictions, whether or not it exists in the same universe as Person of Interest, or whatever else? I am decidedly interested to see what anybody else is thinking.
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