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

I didn't realize JJ Abrams invented sound effects.

 

Yeah, he did that.

But first he had to invent time travel.

 

I give both episodes a "good." Sam Neil is, surprisingly, the weak spot here; he's over the top in the wrong places and subdued in the wrong places. I'm hoping that there's a reason for this.

Jorge, of course, is great; I just adore him. I hope he gets more to do.

Not sure how the "criminal of the week" theme is going to pan out; that seems like a very limited premise. I'm assuming that some sort of bigger arc is going to blend them all together to make it less boring than it sounds.

I'll definitely give this one a few more episodes to see how it progresses.

 

The only real flaw in the show for me is the JJ trope of "people not asking/answering obvious questions".
I mean wtf?
No one really interrogating the first guy for the obvious question of "who are they?"?
Sarah just taking the situation in stride without demanding a full briefing on the background of the situation and what Sam's character has learned over 40 years?
Not asking the first guy what he was supposed to do with the key once he got it????
Just some questions that immediately popped into my mind that would have been asked if I had been Sarah/Sam:
Where did the guys get the money and other items?
Is the money traceable?
The purchaser of the ferry ticket?
Where did sniper boy "wake up"?
The gun store guy said sniperboy paid with a pre-paid credit card. Where was it purchased?
Why do we see sniperboy pulling out a wad of cash to pay in the video?
All of the inmates/guards vanished at the same time, yet are re-appearing at different times, which implies a certain degree of control. This is backed up by the resources the inmates find supplied at their point of "return". What purpose is being served by each inmate that has returned so far?

More questions will undoubtedly follow....

ETA: Oh yeah, Sarah "the great detective": huh, my grandfather was an inmate, not a guard.

 

but it's not just criminals.

Who ever is behind the curtain on this one took "good guys" too.

Does that mean that that who so ever is manipulating the situation believes that s/he can 'turn" the guards, or that the Guards have less murderous missions in 2012?

Or...

Are there two forces working in opposition?

One side took the prisoners and the other took the guards.

Some might have specific missions, and sometimes the distant future in charge of all this, might play guard against prisoner or prisoner against guard depending on the severity of the "mission" that counter intelligence might be a usable tool in this game.

After all this, are we even sure that the "architect" of all this is from the future, because that Babylon 4 thing always swung me for a loop when it went to the wrong great war.

HG Welles and Howard Huges?

Tessler?

Tessler vs. Edison trying to map out the more perfect future!

 

Well, I watched both episodes and coming in not watching Lost or Fringe I enjoyed them. However, I have this suspicion that it will suffer a bit of a Heroes syndrome. The first season will be good, then the second season will become stale and I start wondering why I'm watching this show. Hopefully they don't make it "prisoner of the week" and as we get deeper and deeper into it and more of the mythology is revealed.

I'll keep watching for now as I did enjoy it, the blond chick was hot, I loved the twist at the end, and it's a Bay Area show but if I start getting bored of the repetition, I might cut it off.

As for the characters, I liked Garcia's character, as well as Sarah Jones. Sam Neil's character was better in the second episode than the first.

 

i thought both episodes were pretty good. i like the premise. there is just enough of a mystery going on to keep me interested week to week.

 

Probably.

Just like there was Kelvin references in both episodes.

I missed the red ball though, or maybe there wasn't one?

 

A prisoner-of-the-week show, but with a little more. Prisoners aren't forgotten about in the next episode and there are some interesting hooks. It's not riveting television, but I'm interested enough to want to see what happens.

 

Bah I missed it, I'll have to catch it On Demand this weekend.

 

Okay, I know this is a minor thing to be hung up on but I kept wondering how old Sam Neill's character was supposed to be? Sam Neill is 64, born in 1947 per imdb. If his character was old enough to be a rookie cop in 1963, say he was 21 years old at the time, so born in 1942. If the show is taking place in 2012, that makes the character 70. And I don't see a 70 year old charging up multiple sets of stairs and down again and up another set to catch the sniper killer. Then again, I bet Terra Nova's Taylor at 70 might still be able to do it LOL but again that actor at the moment is "only" 59 and still being physically bad@$$. It was just bugging me that while I'm used to actors playing younger than they are, it was odd to me that Neill seems to be cast as a character that's several years older than he is, yet his behavior didn't match the character's seeming age. Then again, that could be a mystery of the show - he doesn't look 70 either.

 

I really enjoyed both episodes. Although I do agree that if they don't play up the mythology more as it goes on it could get too repetitive. But at the moment, I find what we are getting interesting enough that I'm looking forward to more episodes, and plan on sticking with it for a while at least.

 

I watched both episodes and thought they were or okay. I thought sam niel was going to be the good guy not the persudo villiam.

Now let get this strieght both the prisoners and employees who were on the rock are gone and will be returning. and the Indain dr. who is working with sam niel has something to do with it.

 

My verdict: I'm not really buying into the plot yet, but I really like the cast, especially the female lead and the writing seems solid. I look forward to seeing more of this show, hopefully the ratings are adequate.

 

http://tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com/20...day-alcatraz-premiere-tops-terra-nova/116692/

8PM FOX Alcatraz (premiere, 8-10p) 3.3/8 9.968(Million Viewers)

 

Average for both - I'm intrigued enough to keep watching, but they better start justifying all the X-Filesy tropes they are throwing at us within the next few episodes, which right now just seem to exist for their own sake.

Why can't Hauser tell Diego and Rebecca everything he knows, or at least enough to do their jobs sensibly? Why doesn't it occur to Diego or Rebecca that the public deserves to know the truth, despite its implausibility, just so they can take steps to defend themselves from time-travelling psychos?

Is there anything wrong with releasing the photos of all the prisoners, and asking at least the conspiracy-minded segment of the population to keep an eye out for them? I'll bet there are thousands of Americans who would believe any crazy conspiracy, or at least look at the pictures on the internet out of curiosity. All it takes is for one member of the general public to spot one of those guys, and you've justified the whole program.

And for that matter, why are the Alcatraz prisoners so much more dangerous than all the nuts that exist among the population today, that so much effort is going into hunting them and locking them up in a fancy, gleaming prison? Given the state of California's prison system, I'd prefer for that money to go towards keeping the non-time-travelling psycho population locked up in non-fancy, non-gleaming, non-underground, regular old cells. You could built twenty regular prisons for what they spent on their little Batman Gitmo.

If this is going to be the Lost model of just stringing us along indefinitely, that's not going to work this time around, because the characters are not compelling enough and the locale not exotic enough (or even convincing; it was easy to see the switch from SF to Vancouver between the two episodes). The absence of passably hot guys among the regular cast is a huge disincentive to me to keep watching despite the flaws.

Another problem: Sam Neill and Jonny Coyne's "American" accents are painful to have to listen to. I can hear the strain in Neill's voice, and it's distracting. Coyne's accent is a kaleidoscope. I can't tell whether it's Irish, Southern or Latin American. One of Batista's minions, perhaps, who skedaddled one step ahead of Castro and got himself set up nicely in the US prison system, courtesy of his pal Jack Kennedy...? Entertaining, but unintended, I'm sure.

Also distracting: the music, which is too reminiscent of Lost. Or perhaps it's a warning?

 

So, you can't think of a good reason not to tell the world this is happening? How about religious nuts? conspiracy wackos as you mentioned could also be more problem than benefit. The implications behind the vanishings/reappearances are really pretty staggering in a number of ways. Better to quietly find the escapees than to cause a general panic.

Release the prisoner's photos? Even if you didn't identify them how long do you think it would be before someone made the connection and your whole coverup unraveled?

 

Even if you wanted to kill a lot of people, grabbing the whole population of Alcatraz, including guards, and somehow storing them until "present day" San Francisco, has got to be a grotesquely roundabout way of keeping a supply of assassins on tap. If the show is starting with a creaky Rube Goldberg plot, the continuing storyline has to go down hill really, really fast.

Characters are what they do, and since Emerson Hauser makes no sense, not even Sam Neill can bring him to life.

To put it another way, wandered away from the set early in the seond episode and got lost doing something interesting.

 

Thought it was better than Terra Nova but not as interesting as Fringe. The over all back story needs to be fleshed out much better. There is no doubt the grandfather holds one of the major plot points in his little pocket.
That also was one of the worst comic shops I have ever seen.

 

I thought all of that was because of what they are, not who they are. I interpreted it as them wanting to have their own secure facility where they could interrogate or torture or do whatever they want to them.