Category Archives: Dramas

Birds of Prey

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With excitement building for the Wonder Woman reboot this fall, I thought it would be a good time to take a look at some other DC Comics heroines, the ladies of 2002’s Birds of Prey.

In a nutshell, a blonde, a brunette and a redhead live together looking hot and fighting crime. The pilot is the story of how they got together. The show, or at least the pilot can be appreciated at face value, if the viewer has no previous knowledge of the characters. It could even be accused of ripping off Charmed, with its story of three powerful women joining forces and a suspicious cop on their trail. But there is ton of back story—at least 40 years worth of comic book lore.

Alfred, of Batman fame, narrates the opening. The story is set in New Gotham, and Batman has disappeared from its crime-ridden streets. The voiceover lends a storybook feeling, a bit like the tone of Pushing Daisies.

Barbara Gordon (Dina Meyer), formerly Batgirl, is confined to a wheelchair since The Joker shot her. She now lives in a clock tower—a set that looks like the same one Smallville used—surrounded by computers. By day she works as a school teacher. Living with her is Helena (Ashley Scott), the daughter of Batman and Catwoman. She was raised by her mother, killed by a henchman of The Joker while her daughter stood by, helpless. She has grown up to be The Huntress, a hero who runs across building tops by night, fighting crime while The Oracle oversees from her tower. In the comic world, The Huntress had completely different
origins, but did turn to heroism following the murder of her parents. (This according to The DC Comics Encyclopedia.)

As these two women experienced their personal tragedies, a third girl dreamt their pain. She is now teenage Dinah (Rachel Skarsten), and she has travelled to New Gotham to seek out the women from her dreams. On her way to find them, she witnesses a man being hit by a bus. She runs to his side and, when she touches him, she sees a vision of him being attacked by rats. Her power, it seems, is the ability to share people’s thoughts or fears. The comic book Dinah became The Black Canary, though that name isn’t mentioned in the pilot.

The man’s death sparks the women’s investigation into a series of related murders disguised as suicides, which leads them to some dockyards and the lair of the killer. Among the three of them they get to combine supernatural, or metahuman powers of an X-man with the high tech gadgetry of Batman.

As the women investigate these deaths, the police are also on the case. Detective Jesse Reese (Shemar Moore) is one officer who believes that something bigger is happening beneat the surface. He’s the “the truth is out there” character of the show. Sums up what may be the message-of-show with the awkwardly worded adage, “Myths are just the truth a few generations later.”

Another significant introduction in this pilot is that of Helena’s psychiatrist, one Harleen Quinzel (Mia Sara – remember her, Sloane Peterson from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off?), whose name reveals that she’s an enemy-in-waiting.

With its roots in death and destruction, this pilot promises a fairly dark show. There are small doses of humor, with lines like, “This place is supposed to be a secret. That’s the whole point of a secret lair.” Barbara and Helena argue about lighter things, too, like being out of groceries. There’s also a quick Superman/Smallville reference: “There’s been some really weird stuff with meteor showers.”

This pilot does a nice job of tying together the episode plot with a longer-term plot, when Harleen interacts with the episode villain at the end. There’s both resolution and reason to keep watching.

UPDATE 2/17/2012: In case you’re a big fan of the Black Canary character, you may like to know that Katie Cassidy has been cast to play her in the forthcoming Green Arrow series on The CW. And, in case you haven’t been paying attention, that Wonder Woman reboot never happened, but I’ve since blogged about the pilot of the 1970s series.

The X-Files

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XFilesPilotLooking back at The X-Files, which premiered in 1993, it’s almost impossible not to compare it to a hundred other shows to air since. As a huge Bones fan, I’m most inclined to look for parallels to that show, and many have been drawn. Yes there’s the female-skeptic/male-believer duo, which apparently, was unusual in 1993. But upon re-watching, the X-Files pilot strikes a tone that is all its own.

The pilot opens, as many crime shows do, with a murder. But this is not two drunk kids having a frolic in the woods when they stumble onto a body. Instead, we witness a scene that, if you happened to just turn it on at that point, you might mistake for the climax of the episode. The victim displays absolute terror as a bright light appears over a ridge and a figure emerges from it. Cut to the police investigating the scene. We are briefly introduced to a detective who recognizes the victim as a classmate of his son, class of ‘89. Only after the crime of the week is established do we meet our protagonists.

Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) is an FBI agent who is brought into the office of one of her superiors, where she is properly introduced to the viewer. She was recruited out of medical school to the FBI, where she has worked for two years. She is clearly a trusted member of the team, as they are asking her to check up on another agent with an established high-profile career who takes an interest in classified files. As she is briefed on her new assignment, a tall, silent man–who will later be known in X-Files lore as Cigarette Smoking Man–stands by…smoking a cigarette.

Scully heads to a cramped basement office to meet this volatile agent, Fox Mulder (David Duchovny). Mulder is painted as eccentric, but he’s not Walter Bishop eccentric. In fact, with his boyish charm he could be described as a cross between Walter and Peter Bishop. Later, his celebratory reaction at realizing that he and Scully just jumped through nine minutes is reminiscent of Dr. Emmet Brown. He’s a likeable character, as is Scully, but the immediate tension between them feels forced. It’s understandable that he is defensive toward her; he believes she is there to spy on him. Her defensiveness isn’t so easy to understand. We can assume the writers are going to work up some sexual tension between the two.

Legend has it that Scully had a boyfriend in the original script, possibly increasing the stakes. here is a hint of sexual tension when Dana strips down to her underwear to show Mulder some bumps on her back, after which they sit around and talk by candlelight. The scene reveals some of each character’s vulnerabilities. But there is no witty, flirtatious back-and-forth; just two people getting to know each other.

As one might expect, this work has personal meaning for Mulder. His sister was abducted, he believes by aliens, as a child, and the record of the case was covered up. It’s predictable, but you have to have your personal connection. (Bones’ mom was murdered, Olivia Benson was raped, Kate Beckett’s mom was murdered, Veronica Mars was raped… I could go on.)

There is something unique about this pilot, however. The episode overall has the feel of a true crime television special, putting into a realm of freakiness above normal network drama. Opening with the subtitle, “The following story is inspired by actual documented events,” and then using typewriter text to denote times and places add to this effect.

The plot, which involves mysterious deaths of several former Oregoneon high school classmates, gets relatively complex. Personally, I find the casting of all these middle aged white guys with receding hairlines confusing; I couldn’t keep straight the detective, the medical examiner, and the coroner. That being said, the show really is story-driven. There are no shots of gorgeous bodies and scenery like in the CSIs or any slapstick, such as sometimes works into Bones or Castle.

The detectives more or less solve the case, only to learn that all the paperwork they file on it immediately disappears. The show ends with the Cigarette Smoking Man taking the one piece of surviving evidence and filing it away deep in the Pentagon archives. This scene sets up the show for a long time to come.

Perhaps the lines that best encapsulate where we’re headed are when Scully asks, “Do you have a theory?” to which Mulder answers, “I have plenty of theories.”

Roswell

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Although it spent its 3 seasons with less than stellar ratings, Roswell not only helped put the WB network (now the CW) on the map as a destination for teen girls, but paved the way for another show about an attractive high school student from outer space.

Roswell was based on a series of books called Roswell High, and the title itself serves as back story. The name of the New Mexico town is synonymous with UFO cover-ups. We all know what happened there in 1947. Don’t we? Seriously, do you know what happened? Because other than a vague idea of something about a crater, I didn’t. There may or may not have been an alien crash landing and the U.S. government may or may not have conducted autopsies on the victims. Read more about it here.

Even supposing the viewer knows nothing about Roswell, the show spells it out visually right away. We open with teen narrator Liz (Shiri Appleby) writing in her diary, introducing herself via voiceover. “Five days ago I died,” she says. “After that things got really weird.” Intriguing, if a bit cheesy. Then we find her at work in the Crashdown Café, a 50s-style, UFO-themed diner.

 Liz and Maria (Majandra Delfino) are waitresses in schlocky theme uniforms complete with antennae. They clearly enjoy messing with truth-seeking tourists. It’s a special occasion in Roswell, the day of the Crash Festival. Presumably that’s a day when the residents cash in on their fame. (However, this is set in September and the Roswell “incident” happened on July 8.) Isabel points out that the dopey looking Max Evans (Jason Behr) keeps staring at Liz. Indeed, he is the first to spring to action when she is hit by a stray bullet fired during an argument between customers.

Max runs to Liz, where she has fallen to the floor bleeding from the abdomen. He places a hand across the wound, healing it. He breaks a bottle of ketchup and instructs Liz to say she broke it. He and his friend speed off in a Jeep before the authorities arrive. A pair of nosy tourists start poking holes in Liz’s story with the sheriff. Sheriff Valenti (William Sadler), we see, has his suspicions. He takes note of two empty Tabasco sauce bottles on a table where the boys were sitting.

We next meet Liz at school. She’s kind of a plain Jane, a good student, and for some reason dating a douchebag who is—big surprise—Sheriff Valenti’s son. She confronts Max and he admits with almost no reservation that he is an alien. He swears her to secrecy, but in no time she has dished to Maria. Playing a friend of Liz’s is Colin Hanks, but we don’t get to know much about his character yet.

We get to know two other aliens, the only others, Isabel (fresh-faced Katherine Heigl) and Michael (Brendon Fehr, aka Jared Booth on Bones). They put Tabasco sauce on everything; definitely a detail that is going to get them in trouble. Alarmed by Max’s revelation to Liz, the alien trio debates whether to flee. We get just enough details to understand their background. They were the only survivors of a crashed spaceship. They have been raised by regular human families for the past 16 years. Prior to that, they were in some kind of hibernation.

Mid-way through, the Liz voiceover returns unexpectedly and unnecessarily. It’s as if the vehicle we’ve been cruising along in hits a big puddle of teen romance molasses. It may be moments like this that led the show’s creators to focus more on the science fiction as the show progressed.

The plot then plunges from character description into a plot where Liz and the aliens have to outsmart the Sheriff. Though it seems the most natural thing for the aliens to leave town, that wouldn’t leave much of a television show. So we know they’re hanging around. We’re left to see how Max and Liz will get together—because of course they will—and how the aliens will continue to allude the authorities. The pilot balances the mystery and the romance pretty well, so if you like either you might just tolerate the other.

Charlie’s Angels

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Image borrowed from Charlie’s Angels Forever

With the announcement that ABC is going to launch a reboot of Charlie’s Angels, I just had to revisit this show that I loved as a kid. (I had all the dolls and their van.) It kicked off with a movie-of-the-week (MOW) in September of 1976.

Other than the slightly longer-than-normal length, there is nothing to give away that this isn’t just a random episode; this is a pilot with virtually no exposition. The premise is laid out for us right in the opening credits, as in every episode. Three female cops, frustrated by menial assignments, left the force to go work as private investigators for a man named Charlie.

As in most episodic police dramas, we open not with the main characters, but with the scene of a crime. At a dusty racetrack populated by female drivers, a car explodes in a glorious fireball; we know we’re in for action.

Our introduction to the trio of protagonists comes as they learn of the tragedy in their office. These three impossibly skinny women with blinding white smiles sit languidly around the posh room, while a cheery-looking man, Bosley (David Doyle) sits at the desk showing slides of the crime scene. Charlie, whose voice we know from the opening sequence, speaks to them by phone, explaining what is known about the case. The head mechanic from the track, Jerry, has hired them to investigate the crash on suspicion of murder.

Each of the women, in turn, asks an intelligent question so we get a good look at each one. They’re gorgeous and well-dressed. Each of their names is worked into the dialogue; Kelly (Jaclyn Smith), Jill (Farah Fawcett-Majors) and Sabrina (Kate Jackson). As if the show’s creators feared we might forget Sabrina’s name, it’s emblazoned as a gold necklace across her tanned neck, and later on a fitted T-shirt.

The gag with Charlie is that he seems to be off living the high life, in perhaps less than well-kept secret, while conducting his business long distance. There is a pretty shockingly suggestive joke, for the era. Charlie is moaning in apparent pain about his lower back, but the audience sees that he is in the midst of a massage administered by a bikini-clad woman standing between his shoulder blades. “It will just be the matter of some deft manipulation before I’m standing as erect as ever,” he declares.

As the case unfolds, we are introduced to the angels’ and Bosley’s under cover talents. Sabrina coincidentally has marginal experience as a racecar driver, so she rolls in as the new girl on the track. Bosley shows up in a battered camper as an evangelical preacher with Jill as his Bible-peddling daughter whose legs inspire anything but piety. Kelly plays the damsel in distress, fiddling with her VW Bug’s engine to attract the attention of a suspicious mechanic.

Possibly one of the most memorable scenes takes place when Jill joins in a poker game to milk information from the pit crew. The blonde bimbo routine, we can predict, will come in handy for her on a regular basis. As she feigns ignorance only to reveal herself as a shark, the audience gets a look at her arsenal of talents, as well as a few laughs. But if she is just there to get information out of the mechanic why does she need to clean house in the game? Oh well…

Variations on the show’s now well-known theme music are used throughout to build suspense. The women find themselves in danger as the culprits grow suspicious of them. There are a couple of intense moments, and we really don’t know what the angels are capable of physically. The toughest thing we see is Kelly weakly waving a handgun toward the end. Personally I think Sarah Walker could kick all their asses. They prevail, of course, over the murderer and his accomplices. We go out on some good-natured ribbing and a shot of Charlie in a hot tub, surrounded by babes.

NOTE: The pilot described above kicked off the first full season of Charlie’s Angels in the fall of 1976. I’ve since discovered, via Ultimate Charlie’s Angels, that a different MOW aired the previous spring, having to do with the angels solving the mystery of a missing vintner. I’ll have to blog about that one of these days.

Mercy

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So Mercy is supposed to be about strong women. This show is earnestly trying to tell us at lot of Truths: that war vets deserve our respect, that nurses can be as smart and competent as doctors, that the human spirit triumphs over adversity… but the message I got out of it was that women fall for men who stalk them.

What is with these female characters and their suitors who just stroll idly into a hospital, traipsing into patients’ rooms and interrupting hospital business? Despite some obligatory kicking and screaming, the women inevitably cave. And no supervisor ever says, “Hey, can you get your ex-husband out of this dying old lady’s room?”

Let’s back up a minute. We meet Ronnie (Taylor Schilling) as she is having a nightmare about being shot while a radio report about a memorial service for a soldier plays in the background. She wakes, in what is apparently her girlhood bedroom with her mother smoking a cigarette over her. Mommy dearest yells something about  Ronnie needing to take back her husband, in light of what Ronnie’s parents shelled out for the wedding.

The next scene is far more powerful and might have been a better point of attack. Ronnie witnesses a car accident and springs into action to save the life of the driver. She saves his life using a soda straw and gets him safely to the hospital, only to have the victim’s fiancé tell her off for being “just a stupid nurse.” That moment paints a clear picture of Ronnie as a smart, capable, and chronically underestimated woman; a character an audience could respect. Even when we learn more, that this hardass veteran who takes Paxil but isn’t intimidated by authority or cowed in the face of bodily fluids, she seems like a protagonist we can root for.

Then we get into the relationship stuff. Ronnie is estranged from her cheating husband, Mike (Diego Klattenhoff), and lives with her liquor-soaked parents and younger brother Bobby—the offspring appear to follow in their parents’ alcoholic footsteps. Her best friend at work is the sexy Sonia (Jaime Lee Kirchner), who is playing games with a lawyer she likes while also being courted by a cop. Further complicating the picture, Ronnie is screwing around with—and possibly in love with—a fellow soldier who is now coming to work at the same hospital.

The hospital atmosphere is Scrubs-like; a mixture of irreverent humor and touching, music-filled moments of human connection. There are some wryly funny moments, like this one: “We’re gonna go get a drink, do you wanna come?” “I’d love to, but first I just have to kill Mr. Weintraub.”

Every workplace pilot has to have a character whose first day it is. In this case that’s Chloe Payne (Michelle Trachtenberg), the sympathetic character if only because she isn’t falling at the feet of some macho douchebag. That is, until the episode’s final moment when all three of the female characters are mooning over a hot bartender. Really? This is how educated, battle-hardened women behave?

Defying Gravity

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I knew when I first saw this show it was going to break my heart. It was too cool to hold up on network TV. It blends science fiction with relationship drama and a hint of philosophy, somewhere between Firefly and Being Erica. It started airing during the summer of 2009, it went away, it came back it went supposedly on hiatus, and in the end the only place to see the last episodes was on DVD.

The story is partially in flashbacks, but the “present” is the year 2052 and a group of astronauts is about to embark on a landmark journey to seven planets, over six years. The story is told primarily through the eyes of the first character we meet, Maddux Donner (Ron Livingston). The opening scene is dark and concerting, showing us a sad picture of Donner’s life at home with his father, who is either an alcoholic or senile, or both. The dreary room is lit only by the television where a group of smiling astronauts is introduced. Donner’s father asks, “Which one are you?” A flashback shows us the tragic end to Donner’s space travel career, as he is forced to leave the surface of Mars amid a storm with two crewmates still on the planet’s surface.

Although the next scene is one of exuberant celebration, opening the pilot this way sets a tone that we, the viewer, cannot shake. Heartbreak lurks beneath the glossy, high-tech surface in this future. The episode is sprinkled with mentions, by the ground control team, of an “it” that is being kept secret from the crew. To be honest, these didn’t catch my attention on first viewing, but in hindsight they hold much significance.

The next character we meet is Zoe Barnes (Laura Harris, playing the polar opposite of her Dead Like Me character). With a simple look between her and Donner, the romantic tension is established. Later in the episode it is suggested, if not spelled out, that the two characters have a history.

Ted Shaw (Malik Yoba) was Donner’s partner on the Mars mission, and though the two of them still work for the International Space Organization, they are marked forever as the men who abandoned their crewmates.

The Mission Commander is Rollie Crane, whose new wife Jen is also part of the mission. Also on the crew are Nadia, Paula, Ajay, Evram, and Steve. We get a snippet of each one as they talk into a camera, reality show-style.

The show’s creators didn’t waste time or energy making the future look “futuristic.” A bar still looks like a bar, and people still wear jeans and tees. They saved the budget for the ship, The Antares. There are beautiful images of the expanse of space, seen through panoramic windows in a shining, pristine vehicle.

The business of explaining the technology is accomplished by having one of the crew members, Paula, carry around a mini-DV camera and talk to an audience of school children. There are holes in the science, of course. It is explained that the astronauts’ suits have special fibers that pull them toward the floor of the ship in the absence of gravity. Yet, their hair lays flat. Not being a physicist, I am probably missing other problems as well, but the story is exciting enough to let those go.

Odd things are happening to both Donner and Zoe. Donner is having dreams about being on the mission and seeing Zoe float naked out into the vacuum of space. Zoe is hearing the far-off sound of a baby’s cries. In flashbacks, we are filled in on the fact that Zoe got pregnant during training, but had an illegal abortion. These moments are just breadcrumbs at this stage but promise to lead to something amazing, possibly frightening.

The twist in the plot comes when two of the crew members, Rollie and Ajay, already aboard the space station orbiting the Earth, suddenly develop identical and unusual heart conditions. Before the ship can start on the mission proper, Donner and Ted must be subbed in for the two ailing astronauts. Ted  knows the secret—whatever it is—that mission control is keeping from the crew.  The question raised, the theme of the episode, is whether fate determined who was on the mission and who was not. We are promised more back story about the training, which may answer that question. But the show appears to be one that will raise as many questions as it answers.

Though many viewers blinked and missed Defying Gravity, I’m not the only one to appreciate it; here is a good analysis from Spill.com.

Surface

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NBC has been toying with science fiction for years now, with a few hits and many misses. Surface is one of the latter, being cancelled after 15 episodes in 2005-06.

The show introduces us to four separate locations and character groupings: some kids in North Carolina, the crew of the U.S.S. Ronald Regan in Antarctica, a group of fishing buddies in Louisiana, and an oceanography team in Northern California. It establishes the strangely-connected-incidents-happening-to-otherwise-unconnected-people-in-disparate-places element that Heroes would do more successfully a year later.

We meet the kids first. Since they’re out drinking and screwing around we can expect something bad to happen, so the suspense builds quickly when one of them, Miles (Carter Jenkins) is separated from the boat. The Scary Thing we’re expecting is more mysterious, since we are not sure what we’ve seen. A dark creature slithers from a buoy into the water, freaking out the kid who witnesses it. But it’s forgotten pretty quickly when the Coast Guard busts the kids for drinking.

The scene on the aircraft carrier has the air of an action movie, something that would star Harrison Ford. A gruff military officer has little patience for the “civilian biologist” and his team who have come to check out an abandoned submarine.

We spend the most time with the oceanography team. The hero is Marine Biologist Dr. Laura Daughtery (Lake Bell). She is the divorced mother of a little boy. The introductory scene of these characters is warm and humorous, conveying that Laura both loves her son and refuses to take any crap from him. She holds a pair of scissors, ready to cut the ear off of his stuffed pal until he agrees to get ready to go to his dad’s.

Once we have gotten to know Laura as a woman, we see her as a researcher. She is off to visit some vents on the ocean floor in an expensive submersible. “More people have been to the moon than have been to the hot vents,” she informs us. Despite being a supposedly highly respected scientist, Laura has a decidedly girlish air, wearing her hair loose and chewing gum while she works; you can decide whether this is endearing or just makes her hard to take seriously. Weird note: in this super high-tech craft she writes with a pen and paper? You would think she’d at least have a laptop.

Things get intense while Laura is on her dive, with some pretty cool special effects and a moment where we would think she was a dead woman if the writers hadn’t invested so much time in introducing her.

The juxtaposition of different settings, and different tones, keeps the audience off balance, always waiting to grasp onto the common thread. We know that thread is some type of sea creature, but just what kind of danger it represents remains unknown until one of the fishermen is killed.  Before long, intimidating government officials have arrived to learn more about Laura’s encounter.  Why are people on TV always smart asses when they’re being questioned by the authorities?

The most exciting moment of the episode comes when one of the creatures bursts out of a fish tank, where Miles has stowed an egg. The moment isn’t a complete surprise, but the look on Miles’ mother’s face is pretty entertaining.

This pilot feels really long. It’s as if you’ve sat through a whole SyFy original movie (which is okay if you’re into that). Perhaps too much is revealed too early. Coming right out with the mention of sea monsters, and even showing them to us, probably could have waited an episode or two. It seems like these writers wanted to tell the whole story in the pilot instead of drawing it out. I have not seen any subsequent episodes, but perhaps this is why the show didn’t last.

Pretty Little Liars

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ABC Family is hyping the heck out of the Season 2 premiere of Pretty Little Liars in January, so time to catch up. This show that looks something like Desperate Housewives for teenagers has a slick look and sinister-sounding previews.

The pilot opens in full-on horror movie mode. A group of cute girls are sitting around a candle-lit barn while the wind howls against the creaky door. They’re creeped out by a sound from outside and stand, as a group, ready to face terror. It turns out to be just their friend sneaking up on them. We do a 180 into a much-too-quick scene of some slumber party chatter. (Is the fact that they like Beyonce important, or is this just an awkward attempt at natural-sounding teen banter?) Then they pass a big cup filled with some dark liquid. There’s a mention of the beverage making people share secrets, and one of them says, “Our secrets are what keep us close.” This last quote is imbued with a kind of weight cluing us into its importance.

In the morning the last girl to have arrived, Alison (Sasha Pieterse, who showed up in the later, less-watchable episodes of Heroes), has disappeared. Up to this point we have jumped from one situation to another with lightening speed and absolutely no chance for character development. So are we shocked that this girl is gone? Not really.

At last we start getting to know one of the girls, Aria (Lucy Hale of Privileged). One year has passed since the opening scenes, and Aria’s family has just moved back to town after her father’s sabbatical in Europe. Aria’s mother (Holly Marie Combs) encourages her to reconnect with her friends, but clearly things have changed. In fact, we are reminded at every turn how much things have changed. This is one example of how this show tells the audience things rather than showing them.

The town is Rosewood, Pennsylvania, the kind of pretty East Coast town with an air of evil reminiscent of Amityville. Aria’s return to school gives the opportunity for exposition and further character introductions. It’s the “Prodigal Son/Daughter” pilot formula. Although Aria’s mother points out for the audience that a year is a long time in the life of a 16-year-old, it feels like the passage of time is treated a little too seriously. “I almost didn’t recognize you,” says a classmate to Aria. “Last time I saw you, you had a pink streak in your hair.”

 The only point about the school social hierarchy that seems important to remember for now is that a formerly geeky girl, who our heroines picked on, is now popular and cute (translation, she got contacts). In scenes with each of the four remaining girls, Aria, Spencer, Hanna, and Bianca, we begin to see that honesty is not a virtue in Rosewood. They lie, they shoplift, and they flirt with sisters’ boyfriends. Each of the girls receives a mysterious message—either by text or note—warning her that someone is watching her unethical behavior, and signed “A.”

Alison’s body is discovered, and a funeral is held. At this point we’ve begun to suspect that one or more of the girls might know more than they’re saying about Alison’s death. Yet, from the cryptic conversation of the girls combined with the semi-anonymous messages, it seems she might not really be dead. Certainly these pretty little liars have a secret, but it turns out that their secret—one of them, anyway—concerns not Alison, but a girl named Jenna.

It’s clear there are a lot of layers here, and while the delivery may not be the most sophisticated, the show promises to ask for some loyalty on the part of the audience. It’s great when a pilot leaves you with no clue what’s going on, and this one does that.

The Walking Dead (in retrospect)

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I always say that pilot can only be truly appreciated in retrospect. You can’t know how good it is until you see how the whole season—sometimes the whole series—plays out. So I’ve waited until now to blog about The Walking Dead.

This show, which had a 6-episode first season on AMC, has been reviewed and analyzed extensively, for the most part favorably (in places like these.) So I won’t bother raving about how entertaining, exciting and original it is. Though it is all of those things.

The thing to understand about this show is, it’s not a zombie show. It’s a suspenseful, end-of-the-world drama that just happens to have zombies. The pilot lets us know that, giving us rich character introductions and a bleak, ominous landscape.

The opening scene lets us know something isn’t right. A police officer, Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln), parks his squad car and makes his way through an intersection littered with overturned vehicles. Beyond that he finds an abandoned camp site where bodies rot in cars. Rick appears completely calm, as though he is finding only what he expected. And, while the sight of him putting a bullet in the forehead of a little girl with a teddy bear and half a face packs a punch to the audience, it doesn’t seem that out of the ordinary for Rick.

In hindsight this opening scene feels odd. Where are we? When are we? When Rick first leaves the hospital, trying desperately to figure out what happened to the world during his coma, he is understandably freaked out. He doesn’t know the ways of the new frontier until at least episode 2. Suddenly it’s not clear when in the timeline of the show this scene takes place; maybe we haven’t seen it yet? Why did the writers choose this point of attack? Just to shock us with Cindy Lou Who getting her head blown off? Rick shows much more emotion when, mid-way through the pilot, he shoots the half-woman crawling across the lawn.

A flashback is used to set up the relationship between Rick and his partner, Shane (John Bernthal). This relationship is crucial to the story arc, and its position in the script suggests that. The writers don’t miss a chance to also mention Lori (Sarah Wayne Callies), the woman who will represent the point in their love triangle. In the chase of a suspect, Rick and Shane are clearly the competent ones. More importantly, they’re both basically good guys. They have each other’s backs, and together they defend the public good. These characteristics will leave us torn as the story unfolds, unable to paint Shane as a hero or villain. This will prove especially true in the opening scene of episode 6, in a flashback to when the hospital was overrun with zombies. The relationship between the men is also a source of frustrating dramatic irony later in the pilot, when Rick radios through to the campsite having no idea Shane is there.

We don’t get to know any of the other characters in the campsite at this stage. We see just enough to see that a group of survivors is making the best of it on the outskirts of town.

The pilot spends a good chunk of its 66 minutes having us get to know the character Morgan (Lennie James); he has a big dramatic introduction and the possibility of a reunion with Rick for later on. There’s no payoff through, at least this season. Morgan, although a rich character, winds up being no more than a device for explaining the world to the viewing audience. (I, for one, want to know if he ever shoots his wife).

One of the questions running through this episode—for viewers, not the characters—was “how far will they go?” This is a horror show on basic cable. The opening with the little girl gives a pretty strong hint, but we wonder how gross, how shocking, how scary AMC will be. The show does not disappoint in this respect.  The pilot leaves us with a bizarre, gag-worthy gut feast that didn’t let us forget about the show until the following Sunday.

Fringe

Posted on by meekthegeek
5

Fringe, from its beginning, is a character driven show. It’s a procedural, to be sure, but the pilot lets us know that three strong personalities are going to drive the action: FBI Agent Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv), Peter Bishop (Joshua Jackson), and Dr. Walter Bishop (John Noble).

We don’t meet Olivia as badass cop woman. We meet her as she is falling in love, in bed with the object of her affection, sweet and almost demure. This is a reversal of the typical female action hero who is usually tough first, vulnerable later. It’s not as if Olivia’s a wimp; we see her in action soon enough. She’s part of a joint task force reporting to Homeland Security, which is called upon when a planeload of civilians die inexplicably mid-flight. Within in minutes we find Olivia chasing down a suspect and, after that, putting her brains to work to solve a mystery. During the chase her romantic and professional partner, John, is hit by an explosion. He winds up comatose, poisoned and dying from an unidentified contaminant.

John is introduced too early to survive. People who are happily together at the start of a drama pilot are destined to be torn apart. But that won’t stop our heroine from trying to save him.

Trying to discover the nature of the poison, Olivia is soon on the trail of a mysterious and insane researcher, Dr. Bishop, living in an institution. She demonstrates her powers of persuasion by travelling to Iraq to coerce the researcher’s genius son, Peter, into coming with her to bust him out. Dr. Bishop worked studied “fringe” science 17 years ago before being locked away in a stony vault.

When the bearded Dr. Bishop turns, ever so slowly and looks up at Olivia, we know we are meeting a powerful character. “I knew someone would come,” he intones. A bit like Temperence “Bones” Brennan, Walter thinks in pure facts. He may be a genius but his social interactions are painful to witness.

The episode is filled with quiet moments; long, awkward pauses at once suspenseful and humorous. Everyone has moments when a parent embarrasses them. It’s just more intense when said parent is a mental patient. Peter sure hates Walter, but as the viewer, we’re not sure whether either one has good intentions or bad.

Peter is a total ass to Olivia, but she doesn’t stand for it. You feel her frustration when she says, “You call me sweetheart one more time? I’d really like that.” It’s not an obvious sexual tension between them, as might be expected. Simply, they’re both strong people who know what they want.

As we delve further into the mystery of the poison, we’re introduced to Massive Dynamic, your basic giant, evil corporation. Its founder, a Dr. Bell, is Walter’s former partner. We don’t meet Dr. Bell, but only his Executive Director, a snippy woman with a super cool bionic arm. The pilot is double-length, basically a movie, so suffice it to say, this is only the beginning. We’re promised a future filled with teleportation, astral projection, reanimation and the like. More importantly, Olivia is at a critical juncture in her life and career.

The snowy cold landscape of Boston provides a distinctive atmosphere. The show is filled with interesting visuals: a cow walking down a crowded university hallway, a man with transparent skin, a woman in a tank hooked up to electrodes. Though it gets compared to The X-Files, and it’s even been suggested the two shows take place in the same universe, Fringe is unique in many ways. We know from the pilot that we’re headed down a conspiracy theory rabbit hole, which could easily get cheeseball, but there is promise that these characters will keep us coming back.