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[Alphas] It's like Heroes but a lot better, seriously.
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Klatu what are you finding wrong with Alphas? It's at an equivalent level, or possibly just better than Eureka's first season.
The characters in Eureka and WH13 grab me more than in Alphas. It could be the lack of a "Jack Carter" or "Pete Lattimer" style char. Goofy, good-guy type.
As I said, I'm hopeful that they'll pick it up a little and it will be enough to pique my interest.
Calling it now, the last ep of the season will be either a mass escape/uprising of all the Alphas from Binginham (or whatever it's called), or the team will be 'imprisoned' there for the cliff-hanger.
Hopefully the angry FBI man and either Nina or Rachel.
Rachel, the adult chick with the overbaring mommy and daddy who constantly get brought up every episode and who is basically a mcguffin of a CSI lab on two legs needs to eat a bullet. Between the teams two abilities to "push" almost anyone into telling you what they know and the ability to track people down by the scent they left when touching something the group is almost overpowered in the detective area. The only bit left is for Bill and generic dude to do some fighting and gun play.
there are moments of solidity and moments of just the worst, most cheesy garbage
the kid who plays Gary is always great, and his dynamic with other characters is good, but...the overly cheerful score, the blunt expository dialogue, the monster of the week style of episode, it just feels really inauthentic
but there are also times when it can be kind of clever or fun, and moments where the writing is good. maybe i will wait a bit and see if season 2 is more steady.
they need to grimdark it a bit too
That said, I still think they're doing a pretty good job of keeping it interesting. I blame most of that on the written power concepts and David Strahairn, who single-handedly buoys his entire team's acting chops department.
Yep, it hit the 5-season SyFy Limit.
I've tried to like Alphas but something about the combination of "look at us doing Science! None of that pseudo-magical superhero nonsense here!" attitude and the uneven acting has turned me off of it entirely. I might be willing to suffer through another hour for Brent Spiner.
The biggest problem, as it's been mentioned here, is that many of the characters are painfully generic. Nina bores me - although her potential backstory may be slightly interesting. Hicks is nothing but amusing anti-hero exposition. (He has a bottle of whiskey! And he always talks about the offscreen troubles with the kid he loves so much! So dark.) Their romance is intensely predictable and boring, basically it felt like the writers decided that the two best looking people on the show were immediately and inevitably paired up - there's absolutely no chemistry to it. And good fucking God do I not give a shit about Rachel and her family problems. Who is she supposed to appeal to? Folks who have hellish personal problems on account of being spineless in dealing with relentlessly shitty and irredeemable family members?
Bill, despite his similar generic outline, is kind of saved by the actor. There's at least a little bit of something to him, some neat little conflict between his original career-oriented motivations and his begrudging affinity for the team and the job. Dr. Rosen is kind of interesting and has more potential than most (especially if/when he questions the ethics of what he does, which they have actually approached). Gary is by far the best character though, and I would probably watch the hell out of the Bill & Gary's Excellent Adventure show if that's all it ever was.
Show's got more potential than it's meeting though. Needs to get a little bolder than it is right now for me to consider it more than a slightly above-average weekly little romp.
I agree with all your positive points and disagree with all your negatives
Nina is the one that annoys me the most, because I despise the concept of mind control and I feel that is pretty much what her power is.
Dr. Rosen seems to be willfully ignorant about what is going on behind the scenes, though that has been changing a bit.
Bill I find to be an interesting character, with his imperfect family life that he is trying to fix. Also Bill dealing with Gary is pretty great.
Rachel to me hasn't really even seemed like a character yet, but they could expand on her eventually so maybe she won't be awful in the future.
Cameron I'm not really sure about, he's just not very memorable to me yet. Perhaps I should re-watch a couple of the earlier episodes and pay a little closer attention.
Overall it's certainly a watchable show, and I think it has potential. Hopefully they are able to fix up the writing a bit (like others have noticed, the quality of the writing seems to vary significantly) and make it a show I go out of my way to watch.
Also I think they already tied Alphas into the Eureka/Warehouse 13 universe at least once with some crossover character that I missed but a friend mentioned.
Regarding the latest episode:
Is nobody going to comment on Brent Spiner being incredibly freaking awesome?
Spiner vs Straitharn is a ridiculous level of badass for a SyFy original series.
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I was sad that
First things, I like it.
Second, why the hell do they only have episodes 1 and 7 on the service? That's almost worse than not having the show online at all.
Lot of small gripes that kind of arise through the show though...
Dr. Rosen being so pushy about forcing Bill's powers back to him (before the emergency situation) seemed remarkably out of character to me. It struck me as surprisingly insensitive.
Is it just me, or did they kind of abandon the drawback to Rachel's powers? I'm referring to the fact that she drastically compromises all of her other senses when she's amplifying a particular one. I see her walking around and seeing just fine while sniffing around the office and it doesn't seem right to me. Also if she heard that they were on the elevator with the prisoner at the beginning of the episode, wouldn't she have been able to identify the bonus heartbeat from Griffin? That seems like something she regularly pays attention to, she really dropped the ball on that one.
I know I'm just picking nits, but there's a ton of little questions like that that seem to arise out of every episode. Liked this one a lot nonetheless.
My understanding was that it's more of a sliding scale thing. Each of them is, normally, higher than a regular person, but she can enhance a given one at the expense of all of the others. So she catches a faint whiff of blood, then focuses on it so that she can pinpoint the location and the scent becomes overpowering.
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it doesn't seem unreasonable that without normal sight the visual element of her manipulation is differently processed or not effective
Also he didn't just suddenly start wrecking shit, he spent hours building up to that. Plus, I don't know much about science, but it seemed plausible to me that locking a guy who does stuff with sound inside an airtight room that he can make echoes and reverberations in would amplify his powers.
If anything I was a bit more confused about blind spot girl - every other show just goes with 'bending light,' but here they interrupt a tense situation to do an optic illusion demo... that just seemed weird.
Anyway, they were both awesome characters and I'm bummed the doctor didn't get to stick around.
I'm wondering if and when Alphas is going to comment on the whole "why are there suddenly superheroes?" thing. Given that they try to always slap a semi-reasonable explanation on powers, it seems that this question has never been asked.
"We're partners now, we're equals so I get to drive." Gary is my favorite thing about this show. I'm finding him a little to relatable. He has a little bit different interaction with each of the characters that i find interesting.
It's come up a few times in past episodes too. I'd imagine that it's on its way.
If it does happen, hopefully it's something that makes logical sense for him to have had for the entire series so far and not "Wait, if he's had that power all along, then why wouldn't he have used it in [past episode]?".
For entirely silly reasons, I hope this doesn't happen.
I'm probably just nervous because of Heroes, but if Rosen (arguably the only non-Powered main character) becomes/is an Alpha, it would strike me as a really bad sign for things to come.
(Do we need to spoilerize this? It's all speculation.)
The thing is, they've already kinda introduced an "Alpha drug".
Only it made, it has to be introduced at a fetal stage to produce mutations, but which might still not result in Alpha powers.
It'd be very weird (and stupid) to suddenly have them produce a drug that transform adults into alphas when they've kinda played out the "drug-give-power"-trope with a twist.
I could see it working if it were sort of a "works for a very limited time" kind of thing. Then you get to play with things like the effects wearing off at the wrong time, or requiring more and more of the drug every time to get the same effect. If it were more like what they did in the second X-Men movie where they isolate the fluid from Mastermind's brain and less like the "permanently gives you a random power" potion from Heroes. Of course, Heroes made several MASSIVE missteps handling the powers that Alphas hasn't made yet. One of which was having two characters who were basically gods from the getgo and then making them progressively more powerful with no drawbacks to speak of. That could happen if they start with secondary mutations or something like that. What they really need to do is limit their powers even more, and force them to use them in increasingly creative ways.
I do like that they haven't really duplicated powers yet. Sure a couple of them have been similar, but none of them have been identical and I like that.
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