Alcatraz (FOX) "Pilot" & "Ernest Cobb" *Spoilers!*

Not to mention the 6th grade psychology they're using to figure all these guys out - "oh, trauma as an 11-year old means he's attacking 11 year olds" "trauma about his sister means he's attacking teenage girls".

Even the reveal of the other doctor's presence was like "yeah, fine, whatever". I don't think this show is going to hold me.

 

Seems like some of the 'good guys' like the Doctor and Lucy have already come back and are helping the government find out what happened to them and the others that went missing. We know the deputy warden must have been off the island since he was not one of the missing, as for the warden im guessing he disappeared too and may or may not have come back yet.

 

Sam Neil's character sure looks and down and moves his head around a lot.

After 3 episodes of Alcatraz, I'm thinking that my time is better spent watching Being Human at the 9PM timeslot and not having to stay up until midnight catching the second showing.

 

Really, that's what you've picked up so far?

It's pretty obvious that the good guys, aside from Blondie & Tubbs, are bad guys. Sam Neill's character was a close friend to the evil warden and the doctor is a sadist. The only one up in the air is the comatose chick, but she's pretty much 'bad by association' so far.

I'm guessing Blondie's grandfather had something special in his blood that the bad guys' organization was using to gain immortality/time travel/whatever capabilities, and were likely using the 63's as their test subjects. Throw in a bit of brainwashing and reprogramming here and there and you pretty much get what we've been seeing so far.

 

Urgh, I'm not sure how much more of this show I'm going to bother with, if every week is another mundane copy-show story about the same types of criminals who abound on TV everywhere. The serial criminals are particularly annoying in how clumsily they are being written, pop-psychology style. Maybe the bank robber next week will be more fun.

But the larger issue persists: when JJ Abrams and FOX were developing/greenlighting this show, why did they think criminals from Alcatraz would be any more interesting than criminals from any other cop show we could watch instead? Or any more dangerous to the general public?

TV is chock-full of hideously dangerous criminals (as opposed to reality, of course, where serial killers are far more unusual). These guys are not at all distinctive or interesting. They better start revealing some of the background mysteries very quickly because I'm becoming very bored with the show as is.

And those mysteries better be damn good. Which of course they won't be. Maybe I should just bail now.

Now there's the show I want to see. Okay, that wouldn't be the most original premise, but at least it might be worth watching on a weekly basis. If I wanted to see a cop show, there are a dozen I can choose from. How about more sci fi instead?

Ratings news: fell 10%. Overall, a very modest drop for a sci fi series, which have a tendency to fall off a cliff in the second week. The cop-show tropes that bore me are probably what will keep the ratings buoyant, at least in the short term. I can't fault JJ Abrams' business sense.

 

Again, the premise continues to be far more interesting than the characters. Sam Neill continues to be terrible on this show and he comes across as a guy who commands nothing. Sarah Jones looks and sounds a lot like Katee Sackoff did at the beginning of BSG. Maybe Sackhoff would have done a better job. Jorge Garcia is good but he's basically playing the same exact character he played on Lost. I actually find myself liking the Warden the best. The actor seems to know how to play the character for a show like this...hell, he would be a lot more interesting in the Sam Neill role. I could get creepy mysterious bastard from him.

Tonight's story was very run-of-the-mill, although the guy playing Kit was convincingly creepy. The end was interesting but that tends to be the most interesting part.

 

Agreed with the Warden. The scene in the Solitary room with the matches was the best scene in the entire episode.

As for the series as a whole, I'm still liking it but I still am worried of the "Heroes First Season" curse this show might have. They really have to start mixing it up a bit (Like one week not having a prisoner of the week, or having an episode taking place entirely in the 1960s, I don't know) because they can only go so far with the prisoner of the week thing.

 

Why is that guy getting No love here? Did like no one here ever watch Charlie Jade???


The guy in the first episode named Jack Sylvane is actor Jeffrey Pierce. Whom was in the great scifi show Charlie Jade.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDjqixSWsFo

He is the main reason i watch this show, saddly he is in jail the whole time but was hoping he be more part of this show.

 

It's "Them," starring giant ants. But such an easy mistake to make.

 

Thanks for the correction!

 

Since the actor doesn't appear to be listed anywhere online, was that BSG's Doc Cottle appearing as Dr Beauregard?

 

No it wasn't. Donnelly Rhodes (Doc Cottle) did not play that doctor, I looked on IMDB and i can't find who played him, weird.

BTW, I noticed that im all three episodes so far, all prisoner flashbacks have been from 1960. Seems kinda odd that if they dissapeared in 1963 we get no flashbacks from 61 or 62. It maybe nothing, just seemed weird.

 

I am still trying to figure out a few things about this show which will no doubt never be addressed or answered. Where are the guards and the families that disappeared and when will they show up? Who does Sam Neill really work for? How did Sam know they would come back and when and have the forsight to build a prison for them? Is there a point to keeping them alive and in a hidden prison?

 

Good question. Despite killing the bad guy in the last episode (probably showing, that even with questionable goals and allegiances, he has a heart), he was very insistent earlier on catching their targets alive, there must be a reason for that.

 

The actor playing Doctor Beauregard is Leon Rippy.

 

You might remember him as the bartender on Deadwood or the angel, Earl, on Saving Grace.

 

Yeah, He's a character actor that's been around for decades. It might have been hard to place him due to the fact that he rarely has hair that short and neat.

 

The premise is potentially more interesting. I'm going on the optimistic assumption that the premise is not just "cop show with criminals from Alcatraz." Maybe they're clones? Fifty years is enough time to grow all the clones to the right ages for them to be released - we haven't seen anyone who's more than 50 years old so far.

That's certainly more plausible than time travel or alternate realities, though I gotta wonder why Rebecca and Diego haven't considered the possibility that someone is just using plastic surgery to make modern-day criminals look like the Alcatraz inmates and coaching them on how to mimic their MO?

The audience has seen stuff that belies this idea, but Rebecca and Diego haven't seeen what we have. When confronted with an "impossibility," why haven't they considered that from their perspective, there are more plausible answers that don't require believing in anything beyond normal reality, and Hauser is jerking them around for his own reasons? (Because then there wouldn't be a series, which is not an acceptable answer. )

Who am I kidding, I'll keep watching just to see the other shoe drop. It's not like TV is glutted with great sci fi right now.

I checked out part of one ep, didn't remember that actor (although I take it, he was the lead?), but yeah, I do like him. And since they've made a point of showing him in his cell, there's some hope that he will be reintegrated into the story in a more prominent fashion, which besides the other shoe dropping, is my main motive for hanging in there.

I gotta wonder if it would have been better to tell the story from his perspective. It would stop the show from being able to rely on tired cop-show tropes.

 

^True. I'd like to see how it plays out, but I admit my expectations are fairly low.