The Crossing 1.2: Calling for More Time Travel

The Crossing moved into its regular season last night - or maybe it did a week ago, when its first episode was rebroadcast on ABC, having first played earlier on Hulu - but the series is anything but regular, and I mean that in pretty much a good way.

It's part time travel, part super-humans ala (I guess) Fringe, and part fast-driving FBI and local law enforcement caught up in a conspiracy and a plague from the future and all kinds of things.  Readers of Infinite Regress won't be surprised to find that the part I find most interesting is the time travel, but that part's been the least developed so far.  It's only the second episode, and there's still time to roll this out, but so far we have no idea how the time travel was created or stumbled upon, only that hundreds of "commons" came here from the future, that some number have been here for a long time already, and that at least one super-human or Apex came along for the ride, too.

Instead of the time travel, we've seen a lot of scenes with the Apex - a mother who loves her common (adopted) girl - finding the girl as a little baby in the future, and frantically looking for her in our present where (when) they both traveled.  She has a tempestuous (so far, only professional) relationship with the local sheriff, and manages to survive massive hit squads, though not unscathed.

Another Strike Force show we don't need - though the first rendition of that series was excellent, and I'm starting to watch the second.  Instead, we - meaning, I - could use a well-done time travel narrative.  (I can always use one of those.) But for this to happen, we need to see more time travel in The Crossing, and learn more - much more - about it.

In terms of other similar series, Lost was hit and miss (but mostly hit), the same for Fringe, but The Event (whose producers Jay Beattie and Dan Dworkin also are creators of The Crossing) and Alcatraz never really got off the ground or hit their stride because they lacked a clear allegiance to the time-travel genre or in fact any genre.  Will be fun to see if The Crossing is more like Lost or Alcatraz.

See also The Crossing: Lost Again, But OK

Revolution: Preview Review

I caught the complete first episode of Revolution last night - set to premiere later this month on NBC - courtesy of NBC putting this up On-Demand. Herewith a review, with soft (non-specific) spoilers.

Revolution is J. J. Abrams' latest. Now, I know what you're thinking - or, what I was thinking, anyway. With the exception of Fringe and (to a lesser extent) Person of Interest, Abrams has not come anywhere close to his extraordinary triumphs of Lost or even Alias. Half of his efforts have been like last year's Alcatraz, promising at first but pretty soon an irredeemable turkey.

So I approached Revolution with caution, and - I found the debut episode superb! It's chock full of punch-in-the-gut surprises, with characters we think are major dying on and off camera, and big, unexpected revelations right up until the end. The set-up, though it might seem at first glance to have too much in common with the ill-fated FlashForward and the high-flying Walking Dead, turns out to be refreshing and original.

The world has been beset by a power failure from hell - all electricity is gone, including battery power (which, in our real world, the Amish use instead of electricity from power plants). This means that everything digital is gone - useless - too.

We follow a family - no Family Robinson - in the Chicago area. (You notice how often Chicago is popping up in television drama these days? Boss, Revolution, Chicago Fire, last year's Playboy Club - probably another good consequence of Obama, seriously). Charlie, the daughter - a little under 20 - is strong, attractive, and believable. The others are good, too, and I found myself disappointed when the first episode was over - disappointed that I couldn't see more.

There's an endearing hipness about Revolution - the Hurley-like character (we had one, Hurley himself, in Alcatraz last year) - was a big exec at Google, before the permanent blackout. So far, I like this guy better than the Alcatraz guy.

"You say you want a Revolution, well, you know ..." I'm looking forward to this one on NBC.




"As a genre-bending blend of police procedural and science fiction, The Silk Code delivers on its promises." -- Gerald Jonas, The New York Times Book Review

"Daddy, this the best book I've ever read!" -- Molly Vozick-Levinson, age 12 at the time

"cerebral but gripping" -- Booklist

Alcratraz Season One Finale: Pros and Cons

So, with the two-hour Season One finale of Alcatraz on Fox last night, I'm still not sure if this new series is worth watching.  The fact that the single best part of every episode is Sam Neill's (Hauser's) dead-pan, chilling voice-over intro is probably not the best sign.  Still -

It was a good to see that the warden, as I thought, was the bad guy - he's a suitably creepy villain. The addition of the guy who plays SecNav on NCIS as the warden's superior was a good touch.  So is the silver colloidal blood as elixir, which brings back Lucy, and I suspect will do the same for Rebecca if the series jumps through time and lands in the Fall 2012 line-up.

But it needs to do more than just spin out a series of mostly unrelated stories of 1963 inmates finding themselves in 2012.   The stories on their are own are just not that compelling.  And although Hauser, Doc, and Rebecca as a team are ok, and better now that Lucy is back, the best part of the series still resides in the way that the time shift took place, and for what purpose.

If Alcatraz returns, I'll certainly start watching it in hope of that deeper, more fascinating tale making the front page.

See also Trying to Like Alcatraz ... Alcatraz 1.11: Lucy, Lucy, Lucy


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The Plot to Save Socrates
"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book

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Alcratraz 1.11: Lucy, Lucy, Lucy

Alcatraz 1.11 moved up to the two-hour season finale next week, with an episode that brought us more information about Lucy, and had her come out of her coma in 2012 at the end.

As Dr. Diego and Rebecca note, Lucy is one of the keys to what's really going on with the time shift of prisoners and a couple of "good" people from 1963 to the 2012.  As far as we know, Lucy and Dr. Beauregard are the only high-level officials in the prison who shifted (we don't know about the warden, and that's significant).  Both are thus of keen interest to Hauser.

But Lucy, as we see more evidence of in 1.11, is important to Hauser in another way.  As a prison guard in 1963, he was falling in love with her.   Bringing her out of her coma in 2012 is thus his single most important goal.

Why, in 2012, did Cobb shoot her?   Presumably, if there was a deeper reason beyond his murderous ways, to keep her quiet.  But on whose orders?

The obvious bad guy at the root of all of this, it seems to me, is the warden.  He has shown himself a first-rate sadist in episode after episode.  And, he, too, back in 1963, was attracted to Lucy.   Did he get Cobb to shoot her in 2012 so she couldn't be with Hauser, in addition to preventing her from helping Hauser get to the bottom of the shift?

The obscuring mists in this dark drama may be clearing just a little next week.

See also Trying to Like Alcatraz


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The Plot to Save Socrates
"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book

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Enjoy listening to audio books? Get a free audio book copy of The Plot to Save Socrates - or any one of 85,000 other titles - with a 14-day trial membership at Audible.com ...

Trying to Like Alcatraz

Well, I've been watching Alcatraz - seven episodes so far - the latest J. J. Abrams production.  That in itself was a good reason to watch it.  Although I disliked the ending of Lost, the series at its best was one of the best ever on television.  Alias was also superb, as has been Fringe these past two seasons.  And I'm enjoying Person of Interest.

And there other things to commend a television show about Alcatraz.  The Birdman of Alcatraz is a fine movie, and this television show is about time travel - in my book, you can go wrong about that.

But the problem with Alcatraz is that it doesn't have enough of that.   Although time travel figures in every episode, there's little about the paradoxes and narrative joy of really confronting what it's like to run into much older versions of people you  knew when you travel 50 years into the future.  There are hints of that, intersections with characters who lived through those 50 years, including, especially, Emerson Hauser played by Sam Neill.

It's great to see Neill, probably best known for Jurassic Park, on television (he was great in the Tudors, and years ago in Heartland).  And he does a fine job when he's on screen in Alcrataz.  So does Hurley - Jorge Garcia - who basically plays Hurley as a PhD comic book expert.   So does Sarah Jones (Big Love) as Rebecca Madsen.

But the problem is that emphasis on the individual stories of the people - mostly criminals - whisked into the future gets in the way of the really interesting stuff for me, which is why and how they were whisked.  Without that mechanism more in the limelight and explored, Alcatraz remains little more than a Criminal Minds without its intensity, and with intimations of immortality as yet unrealized.

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The Plot to Save Socrates
"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book

---

Enjoy listening to audio books? Get a free audio book copy of The Plot to Save Socrates - or any one of 85,000 other titles - with a 14-day trial membership at Audible.com ...