Thanks to the Fox marketing department and the fine folks at Frontier
Airline, I got a chance to watch the first half of the two hour premiere of
“Alcatraz” as I winged my way to Milwaukee a few days ago.
With the proviso that I haven’t seen the second hour and reserve the
right to change my mind once I have, I thought I’d give y’all my initial
impressions of the JJ Abrams produced drama. Spoilers abound ahead.
I swear I went in with the highest of hopes for “Alcatraz.” Love me
some Jorge Garcia (and he is, unsurprisingly, the best thing about the first
hour). I dig the hell out of “Lost” and “Fringe,” and the setting of Alcatraz
Island is just a phenomenal place to center a TV series around. Throw in the unsettling presence of Sam
Neill and character actor extraordinaire Robert Forster and it should be a
great mix of mystery and badassery.
So why did I finish that first episode with such a feeling of
disappointment?
I suppose the most obvious culprit would be Sarah Jones, who plays our
ostensible lead in Detective Rebecca Madsen. JJ Abrams loves strong, beautiful women and has had a knack
for finding capable actresses for his leads. He is the guy who found Keri Russell, Jennifer Garner,
Evangeline Lilly and Anna Torv, who took a little longer but eventually found
her footing as the lead on “Fringe.” So it is entirely possible that Madsen
will grow into a strong and compelling lead with a rich back story and distinct
characterization, but by the end of the first hour, she feels like Torv-lite, a
no nonsense law enforcement officer who is better than most of the men around
her, bangs her co-worker/partner and gets sucked into a mystery bigger than she
can comprehend. The character is
nothing we haven’t seen before, with some explicit daddy issues (another Abrams
hallmark) to boot. Jones was the daughter of the charismatic white supremacist
played by Adam Arkin in the sublime second season of “Sons of Anarchy.” While
she was relegated as a minor but occasionally key player, she left a vastly
deeper impression in her few scenes there, surrounded by formidable actors,
than she does here, where she is the center of 80 percent of the episode.
Or maybe the problem is the premise? On paper, a ragtag group
investigating the disappearance of 300+ people from Alcatraz in 1963 and their
sudden reappearance in the hear and now, un-aged, sounds awesome, but if the
premiere is any indication, it’s going to be a pretty rote procedural, where
one of the convicts or guards reappears, commits a crime to get on our gangs radar,
and then they have to hunt him down before he kills again. There will be variations, no doubt. I
am sure the prison guards that appear will be less prone to murder than the
prisoners. They might even get sent back in small groups!
The question “Alcatraz” wants us to ask is “Where did they go?” “Who
took them?” and “Why are they coming back now?” But the question I kept asking
was “Why would anyone go to all that trouble?” In the premiere, our con of the
week, Jack Sylvane, comes back, kills the former Deputy Warden who fucked him
over back in the 60s, THEN goes and kills some cops in pursuit of a little
black pouch in some rich guy’s safe, and THEN goes after his brother, who
married his ex-wife while he was in the pen. Ignoring the fact that the order
makes no sense (Why take care of personal business before AND after getting the
mystery pouch? Is the pouch more important than killing your brother, but less
important than killing the warden?), this is not the sort of mission that
requires time-traveling ex-cons. Alcatraz supposedly held the baddest of the
bad guys, but all Sylvane does on his “mission” is point a gun and demand the
guy open the safe. No doubt there is a richer mythology at play here, and a
grander scheme than the pilot can reveal, but was it worth removing three
hundred people from the space-time continuum, resulting in a massive government
cover up, for some smash and grab armed robbery?
And let’s talk about that government cover up for a moment, shall we?
After the disappearance of all of the inmates, the show tells us that documents
were forged suggesting everyone was transferred to other prisons, where more
documents were forged that said they all eventually died in jail. In the mean
time, the FBI has set up a super secret task force to investigate this
disappearance (complete with an impressively lit office on Alcatraz
Island). I don’t mind that the
task force seems to be just Sam Neill and Parminder Nagra (of “Bend it Like
Beckham” and “ER,” here underserved as the super-competent office gal). After nearly 50 years, the government
wouldn’t spare a lot of people to sit around just WAITING. But why does Neill seem so READY?
Again, there is more at play than is revealed in the first half of the
premiere, but the fact that Neill has been sitting around for close to five
decades just waiting for something to happen, and as soon as it does he has a
complete infrastructure in place to deal with everything? A fully staffed and
detailed replica of the Alcatraz cell block? Everyone was just hanging out,
shooting pool and playing cards, and then WHAM! Time-traveling convicts are
back! Get into military formation!
I know that is nitpicky, but a show like “Alcatraz,” just like “Fringe”
and “Lost” before it, lives or dies on its ability to create a world. That
world needs rules and it needs consistency. Actions need to make sense in the context of that
world. Again (and I know I keep
saying this, but it bears repeating), I only saw half of what is premiering,
and there is certainly a deeper rabbit hole to fall into as the show continues,
but it already feels like it is plotted in a way that relies heavily on
narrative convenience. Our heroes are one step behind Jack Sylvane from the
outset. A desk clerk at a bath
house is accosted by a lean man in his thirties with dark hair? Show him a
picture of Jack, because that is the only explanation for someone in the city
of San Francisco getting beat up.
The first hour of “Alcatraz” was nothing but thinly drawn characters
obeying the whims of writers.
That’s not to say there is nothing to recommend the show. As I said
above, Jorge Garcia is a lot of fun as an Alcatraz expert who gets drafted into
service by Detective Madsen, and his understated elation is great as he gets to
dive into a mystery based on his greatest passion. No one on TV can get as big a laugh as Garcia by just
looking at someone talking, and he gets several in the pilot as he learns that
there is so much more beneath the surface of his favorite subject. I don’t know how long that can last,
and it’s hard to believe that Garcia’s character, to be useful to the team,
knows significantly more than Niell, who, again, has been preparing for this
for fifty years, but for now, he proves a nice break from the over-serious
bleakness of the rest of the episode.
Sam Niell is sufficient as Emerson Hauser, although he hams it up a bit
when the script asks him to convey that he knows more than he is saying, all
arched eyebrows and self-satisfied smirk.
The end of the episode treats it as a big reveal that he was a new guard
who happened to be away from the prison when everyone disappeared from
Alcatraz, but it lands with a thud, especially when you do the math and realize
that he would have to be about 70, well past retirement age for the FBI, for
that to work.
The other cast member of note is Robert Forster, who isn’t given much
to do as Detective Madsen’s uncle and former Alcatraz guard (he left before the
disappearance). Like everyone on
an Abrams show, he’s obviously not telling all that he knows, but Forster is
such a great presence on screen that it amazes me he hasn’t been tapped for
series work before. He exudes a
quite machismo that Neill lacks, and I hope he gets incorporated into the main
storylines going forward as more than a source for anecdotes and inside
information about the prison.
The show hits a lot of ridiculous beats, like there being a file room
still full of old prisoner’s stuff on Alcatraz, even though the whole island is
now a tourist trap, or Madsen walking through the men’s locker room to give a
message to her boyfriend and kiss him goodbye, but I think the one that
disappointed me the most was towards the end, when Madsen is officially brought
onto the Alcatraz Investigations team and is told she can’t tell anyone about
it, EVER. The “double life”
storyline has been done to death, and I have no doubt that this show is going
to go the route of her lying to her live-in boyfriend and being caught in a
contradiction or denial, or constantly asking him “Trust me.” It’s a hoary
trope to roll out, even on a show where everyone seems to be hiding SOMETHING
(Except Garcia. I’ve never seen
him play anything but guileless).
And that about sums up the show right there. Little we haven’t seen before, but gussied up with the promise
of Alcatraz. I wish Frontier Air
had managed to get the second hour of the premiere as well. Not just because it was a long flight
and my laptop doesn’t hold much of a battery charge any more, but because the
thing the first episode left me wondering, more than any of the mysteries it
presents, is “What will they do in the second hour to get people excited?”
because this warmed over episode of “Law and Order: Special Prisoner’s Unit”
ain’t gonna get it done.
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