RESPECT THE BADGE! comments on Alphas

[stj]

The new season starts tonight on Syfy at ten EDT.

[JD]

I really enjoyed this last season, so I'm really looking forward to seeing where things are headed. Some interesting tidbits were revealed on Blastr today.

[Anthony Sabre]

Gotta say I enjoyed the season premier. The character dynamics, how they interact with each other, are really well done. Also, as powerful as their abilities are, they are all vulnerable in some way. No Mary Sues.

Looking forward to another great season. Now all I need is for The Clone Wars to hurry up and come back.

[Guy Gardener]

Stanton has had 200 years to get his shit together.

But then, so had Wolverine.

Remind me which side he fought for in the civil war?

Bringing back "human" slavery would make controlling America a lot easier once his puppets are in place.

[sojourner]

Oh hey, the episode was one big reset button!

[stj]

^^^But of course! The big climaxes where the next regular season episode takes place months or even a year later skips over the showing the consequences so that the first (few) episodes of the new season get right back to the original show format. We are supposed to see Rosen as ambiguous in himself, not just in that he's supposedly dedicated to helping Alphas yet in practice he does so by arresting them and putting them in a prison hospital. Now he's arresting them and putting them in a regular prison/regular hospital.

Alphas is trying to copy The 4400 and more or less ignore the question of whether the ordinary people who've somehow gained power have the right to change things. Overall, The 4400 and Alphas are pretty much dead set against such a topsy turvy view of the world. Ordinary people having power?

No, no, much more rewarding to dramatize the impurity of Rosen's intentions ("helping" Alphas vs. being powerful.)

It should have been Hicks in Binghamton instead of Gary, though. Dialogue in the show earlier in first season explicitly stated that Hicks had to worry about Binghamton.

[Enterprise is Great]

I suspected a reset button would get pushed when the show got a new showrunner.
He puts everything back together so he can go his own way with the material and not jump off from what the previous showrunner did for the most part.

This show is basically the X-Men with street clothes instead of costumes so it all seems quite familiar. But it's a much better X-Men like series than Mutant X was.

[Guy Gardener]

America is too cubersome to take over.

Stanton should just wade into some civil war torn joke country in Africa with a tyrant dictator and lay waste.

of course this happened in X-men years ago.

there was a fake South African nation which used apatheidlike laws to chemically force intellectual retardation and obedience on their mutant population and then use them as a slave force to impersonate a massive industrialized infrastructure. So after they revolted and threw out the humans... The mutants had their own country, that first got blighted by mutant aids and and then nuked by assholes.

"Sigh"

[sojourner]

^Genosha.

Anyone notice the power levels are creeping up? seems like every time they introduce a new character the power/ability moves one step farther from "plausible" to "fantasy".

[JD]

I thought it was pretty good. Although I think it would have been a little more interesting if they took more time to bring the team back together. Instead of just bring everyone back together in one episode, I think I would have liked it better if they had just focused on one or two character per episode over the course of the first three or four episodes.

[Guy Gardener]

It's only 13 episodes still? Or has it been bumped up to 20 like Warehouse 13 has?

[stj]

It seems that this one isn't popular on this bbs.

Alphas are so bored and poor they have to stage fights?
And people are so blase about alphas they just watch the show? Kicking the internal coherence of the setting to pieces for a dreary fight club intro for the new girl is not a wise move. Notwithstanding the popularity of Nolan, being drab, dim and self-absorbed is not grounded and realistic.

People having personal crises doesn't cover up the fact they promised a sea change in the first season finale, then after we swallowed that bait (those of us who did,) switched to soap. The villain's backstory is no substitute for a real story. Once you make the mistake of serializing a show you have to follow through and tell a serial story. (And the villain dropping in for pointless portentous chit chat is silly.)

This one can't last much longer on my TV set.

[JD]

I'm still really enjoying it. It's got a good cast, and most of the cases and powers are pretty interesting. However, I do agree that the about face after the end of season 1's finale is agravating, but didn't they change showrunners? That could explain why they dumped that set up.

[Enterprise is Great]

Yeah, season 2 has a new showrunner. New showrunners often come in and jettison stuff that the person before them had planned.

[Guy Gardener]

A girl with photographic reflexes was the final nail in the coffin for Heroes with me.



But then she was great on 10 things I hate about you and continues to be excellent on Franklin and Bash.