Alcafinale

FOX announced today that it's pulling the plug on Alcatraz. Crap in a hat! I discussed my feelings about the first season in an earlier post, so I won't dredge them up again. Let's just say I had high hopes for the show (since it was sort of a cousin of LOST) but was profoundly disappointed with how it played out.

I was hoping it would get renewed and, now that we'd been introduced to the show's universe, things would kick into high gear and the second season would see a large improvement. Alas, it's not to be. Now we'll never how things would have played out.

This in a nutshell is why I rarely if ever watch TV anymore. I'm always reluctant to get all invested in a new program only to have it yanked out from under me, leaving the storyline in limbo.

It happens to me over and over again. I'm convinced that there's a direct line between my TV set and the networks, manned by a large room full of lab-coated technicians who constantly monitor my viewing habits. Banks of computers with blinking lights and spinning tape spools tirelessly analyze what I'm watching. Hundreds of printouts and graphs provide up to the minute details on my TV preferences. The second it's determined that I'm regularly tuning in to a particular show, the lab becomes a hive of activity as the team springs into action. The lead technician barges into the network President's office, saying, "Sir, we've detected a pattern in the Canada household. Apparently he's tuned into Alcatraz every Monday for the past 13 weeks." "Damn," exclaims the President. "I had high hopes for that show, and the late season ratings were beginning to show improvement. Ah well. You know what has to be done. We don't have to like the law, but we do have to follow it. Pull the plug!" Laugh if you will, but I firmly believe this is true.

Now thanks to FOX I wasted 13 hours of my life on this ferkakta show, for nothing.

I'm pretty much done with network TV for good. I'll just stick with my DVDs of All In The Family and The Monkees, thank you very much. At least I know those shows won't be unexpectedly cancelled.

Alcafizzle

Well, the season (or is it series?) finale of Alcatraz aired last night, to a resounding round of audience indifference.

I had high hopes for this series when it first started. It had a really cool premise-- Alcatraz inmates from 1963 vanish and start reappearing in the present day. It featured some of my favorite TV stars (Jorge Garcia, Parminder Nagra, Robert Forster) and it was produced by J.J. Abrams, one of the creators of LOST. With a pedigree like that, how could it miss?

It found a way.

I enjoyed the first two episodes, but then I worried that the series might suffer from repetition. Looks like I was right. Every week it's the same damn plot: Dangerous inmate reappears in the present day, wreaks havoc for a while and is killed or caught, while the mystery of what happened in 1963 is slowly and maddeningly revealed one tiny piece at a time.

I'd hoped that the producers of Alcatraz learned from their mistakes on LOST and wouldn't drag the mysteries out for too long this time. They have given us a few answers, but they haven't been all that interesting and just as they did on LOST, for every answer we get, another ten questions pop up. It also suffers from the same "Don't Give Anyone A Straight Answer So We Can Prolong The Mystery" syndrome that plagued LOST. Several times this season Madsen and Soto asked their boss Hauser to tell them what the heck was going on, and rather than simply tell them, each time he'd tilt his head, grimace like he was constipated and silently walk offscreen. Maddening!

Last nights's finale jealously doled out a couple of answers to us before ending on the requisite cliffhanger. To be honest, the whole thing was just plain dull. I hate to say it but I'm starting to lose interest in whatever the heck's going on and am very close to giving up on this show.

Some thoughts about the finale and the season as a whole:

• We finally get to see what's behind the Warden's mysterious door in the basement of the prison. So what's inside? Pretty much a whole lot of nothing. Just a map showing us that the Sixty Threes are popping up all over the country, not just in San Francisco. Oh, and some scientist guy we never saw until now, whose appearance was apparently significant somehow.

•  Several characters find out that Lucy is a Sixty Three in the finale, something the audience has known since the second episode. Yawn. Nothing more exciting than watching people find out something you already know.

• Lucy tells Madsen and Soto to ask her anything and she'll answer them honestly. Instead of the logical question, "How the hell did you jump forward in time fifty years" all they want to know is if her boyfriend Hauser was a sweetie when he was younger. Oy gevalt!

• Did the writers do the math before they started this show? Hauser is the head of the project that's rounding up the Sixty Threes, but he was also a guard who was present the night the inmates disappeared 50 years ago. That means Hauser has to be well over 70 years old. And we're supposed to believe he's still running around, kicking down doors and punching out time-traveling criminals?

• Hauser and Lucy were in love 50 years ago, before she disappeared. They've finally been reunited, but she's probably 29 or so and he's 75. Ew.

• Tommy Madsen, Alcatraz inmate and Rebecca Madsen's grandpaw, has some kind of magic colloidal silver blood that heals wounds and apparently somehow causes you to jump through time. Colloidal silver is a real thing, and I'm pretty sure it has no inherent time travel properties. Couldn't they have made up some kind of anti-matter blood or something? Some kind of substance that sounds like it could exist but doesn't?

• As I've stated before, it's very considerate of the Sixty Threes to show up in the present one at a time, once per week.

• There's apparently some kind of Mastermind behind the reappearance of the Sixty Threes who is orchestrating their return and activities in the present. Gee, who could it possibly be? Surely not creepy old Warden James, who no one's seen since 1963? If the Warden doesn't turn out to be behind the whole thing, I'll eat my hat.

• I've always liked actor Robert Forster, but I wish he'd just admit to himself that he's bald. I don't know what's up with that hair-like substance on top of his head, but it's very distracting. You're bald, Robert. It's OK. We'll still love you.

• Doc Soto is apparently very efficient at managing his time. He not only runs a comic shop, but also draws a (monthly?) comic book, in addition to following Rebecca around on cases 18 hours per day.

• Rebecca finally corners her still-young grandpa, Tommy Madsen. Before she can get any answers out of him, he stabs her in the side and escapes. This incident could probably have been avoided if she hadn't been standing literally 6 inches away from him the entire time. A gun is a long-range weapon, Rebecca. You don't need to touch the barrel to a suspect's chest in order for it to work.

• As soon as Tommy stabbed Rebecca and scampered off, I let out a weary groan. Not due to any concern about Rebecca's health, but because I knew it meant that it'd be months, maybe even years before we finally find out the truth about Tommy. I think maybe I'm losing patience with these long-term mystery shows.

• So Rebecca is dead, huh? Wow, what a shocking cliffhanger. I wouldn't worry too much about her though. Given the fact that half the people on the show have magic silver blood and she's the star of the series, I think she'll probably get better.

UPDATE: WHOOPS! Never mind. The show's been cancelled, probably for all the reasons I pointed out.

Alcatraz Update

So far I've been enjoying Alcatraz. It's no Fringe or LOST but it's still pretty good.

One thought I had about the show though: It's awfully nice of the 256 vanished inmates to come back from the past one per week instead of all at once. I guess even hardened criminals can still be considerate.

It Came From The Tube: Alcatraz

Caught the premiere of Alcatraz last night. First time I've watched live TV in... wow, I can't remember. Alcatraz is the latest series from executive producer J.J. Abrams, of LOST, Star Trek and Super 8 fame.

So what's it about? On a dark and stormy night in 1963, all 256 prisoners and 49 guards inside Alcatraz prison suddenly vanished without a trace. Flash forward to 2012, when the inmates begin to reappear unaged and start wreaking havoc in the modern world.

Police Officer Rebecca Madsen teams up with Alcatraz expert Diego Soto (Jorge Garcia, of LOST fame) to investigate the reappearances of the inmates. Along the way they discover a secret government project tasked with rounding up the prisoners, headed by Emerson Hauser (Sam Neil) and his assistant Lucy (Parminder Nagra).

The cast is impressive, especially for a TV show. Sam Neil is great as always. Jorge Garcia pretty much plays himself, which he's done in everything I've ever seen him in. Hey, it seems to be working for him, so good for him. Robert Forster's also in the show and it's always great to see him. He doesn't turn up in TV shows much. And of course I'll watch anything Parminder Nagra's in. I've been crushing on her ever since Bend It Like Beckham.

Overall I was impressed with the premiere. In addition to the great cast, there's plenty of action, a continuing mystery to unravel and even time travel shenanigans. I was intrigued enough by the revelation at the end of the second episode to come back for more.

There are lots of flashbacks to 1963, which lead to unavoidable comparisons to LOST. Hey, much of the action even takes place on an island! Hopefully that's where the similarities will end and the show won't degenerate into the murky morass of abandoned plot lines that LOST turned into. If anything the show's police procedural format is more reminiscent of Fringe, which is a good thing, IMO.

My one fear is that the show could become repetitious very quickly. If every episode is going to feature an inmate showing up and killing some people while the good guys search for him, find him and put him into super time-proof prison, it's going to get old really fast. They'll need to shake things up now and then to avoid the Scooby Doo Syndrome ("Old Man Johnson dressed up like a monster to scare people away from the Big Rock Mine treasure!"). Hopefully they realize this and will adjust the plot lines accordingly.

Take a little bit of LOST, a LOT of Fringe, some Green Mile and X-Files, and even a little bit of Friday The 13th: The Series, shake well and you get Alcatraz.