Quick Take: Alphas, "Pilot"
A superhero show that can avoid the mistakes of its predecessor?
Review: Alphas, "Pilot"
(S0101) Alphas was supposed to be our replacement for Heroes. The hope — nay, the dream — was that we’d get a superhero show that didn’t make any of the mistakes of its predecessor. The characters would be dynamic and interesting. The writing would be tight and the plot would be logical, yet surprisingly... surprising. There would be a line of visual and linguistic narrative, the end of which would inspire us to look back and say, “That was worth it.”
Does Alphas promise to have any of these characteristics? Let’s start with the characters.
Dr. Lee Rosen, a quirky stand-in for Professor Xavier, leads a team of alphas — people blessed or cursed (but really blessed) with peculiar genetic enhancements — on well-funded missions for the government. He seems to be a compassionate leader, using his degree in psychology (his only apparent “gift”) to help the team to work together. Aside from a suspicious moment in which he blackmails new initiate Cameron Hicks to join his little club, he seems to be a remarkably one-sided character.
The alphas themselves — Bill Harken (the strong one), Nina Theroux (the charming one), Rachel Pirzad (the perceptive one), Cameron Hicks (the dexterous one), and Gary Bell (the one who can read electromagnetic transmissions) — form the kind of complementary team you would expect on a show like this. And, of course, their character deficiencies and biological weaknesses match their abilities. The strong one has a hot temper. Who woulda thunk it?
I can’t fault the show for whipping out those particular tropes, but I can’t give it any credit either for playing to them so directly. It would’ve been nice if there was some real internal conflict between the individual and his/her particular “gift.”
Of course, a bigger problem than the character dynamics is that individually the characters seem a bit flat. Yeah, each shows the twinkle of a promise of an episode dedicated to her little secret or his little family sometime later this season, but to my eye, no attention was given to setting up a real arc for any of these characters. Instead I started to fantasize about who would inevitably descend into madness or “turn evil.”
And speaking of “evil," I’m conflicted over whether to applaud Alphas for dancing around that particular expectation or to boo it for playing the shades of gray so obviously. Beginning with the good-guy everyman, Cameron, falling under the sway of mind control and ending with the hard-to-love brute, Bill, being brainwashed in the same way, it’s a wonder that viewers made it to the end of the hour awake. The tantalizing last words of the puppet master himself, that the heroes are “on the wrong side,” suggest a more omnipresent manipulator at work. Was this a desperate stab at revenge or is this inevitably the arc of the show’s first and perhaps only season?
Callum Keith Rennie, who you probably know as Cylon Number Two from Battlestar Galactica, plays the direct superior to Lee Rosen, acting as intermediary between the team and the government. His motives are not nearly as clear as our beloved family of misfits, though I shudder to think that the writers would make the arc of the show so terribly apparent.
Nevertheless, and after so much criticism, it behooves me to believe so completely that the show has a lot of promise. While the pilot was rough and seemed a little too touched by too many hands, it was just a pilot after all. It wouldn’t surprise me if by the end of the season I’ll be kicking myself for being so hard on it. While the show did a poor job with mystery, it did an excellent job of set-up. Perhaps this will free them in future episodes to really speed into the depths that Alphas potentially has to offer.
Is Alphas ultimately more than the solution for “time to kill”? I don’t mind sticking around to find out.
I thought there some nice X Men meets X Files stuff going on, but by the end of the episode my patience was wearing a bit thin already. That said, the final line of the pilot did make me interested enough to want to dig in deeper -- hope they can establish a three-dimensional world where there's true intrigue to keep viewers coming back versus a wacky case of the week to solve.