Alcatraz: The Story So Far...

Alcatraz’s fifth episode airs tonight, and the series started off with a bang, and ratings are still strong (it’s winning Monday nights, even against the Bachelor). But I’m really hoping to see something pick up this week, because while there are a lot of things I really like about this show, I’m starting to find a lot of things I don’t like. (Warning: Spoilers ahead for up to the fourth episode, which aired last week.)

If you’re not watching it yet, here’s what you need to know:
• In March 1963, two guards went to Alcatraz on the eve of its closing to escort the prisoners off the island and remove them to various other prisons. When they got there, the prisoners were all gone. They'd disappeared without a trace.
• Sam Neill’s character, Emerson, was the young guard, and has apparently devoted his life to following why they’re here.
• Suddenly, in 2012, they’re showing up in San Francisco (looking like they did in 1963), committing crimes similar to their original rap sheets.
• Sam Neill has put together a team of a blonde cop whose name I can never remember, and Doc, played by Jorge Garcia, who has written several books about Alcatraz, has two PhDs, and runs a comic book store.
• Before he met the blonde and Garcia, he was already working with Parminder Nagra’s character, who was revealed in the second episode to be a psychologist at Alcatraz back in the 1960s, which means not just the inmates, but the workers in the prison will be time-travelling to the present day.
• When they catch the inmates, Emerson puts them into a cell in a replica Alcatraz he’s built.
• The blonde detective discovered in the first episode that her grandfather was an inmate, so she knows he’ll be one of the ones they’ll be finding, and she spotted him in an early episode when he caused the death of her partner.
• In the first episode we saw Jack Sylvane, an inmate who was mostly innocent and just in the wrong place at the wrong time, who is now on a killing spree. During one of his kills, he goes to a man’s place and takes a key from him.
• Week two was Ernest Cobb, a Giovanni Ribisi lookalike sniper who takes people out with an Asperger’s precision, usually killing three or four to cover up his main target, a teenage girl. Before they caught him, he shot Nagra’s character, and she’s still in a coma.
• Week three was Kit Nelson, a child kidnapper who would take the kids home, treat them to his favourite things (outings, cherry pie), and then remove them to a bunker where he’d kill them 48 hours after kidnapping them. They found him before he killed the kid he’d kidnapped, but they had to kill him in order to do it. Emerson took him to his underground replica house and handed him off to a doctor with instructions to do what he does best. Reanimation? Not sure yet.
• Week four was Cal Sweeney, a bank robber who romances the bank tellers so they’ll turn off security cameras and get him into the back, where he pulls out people’s safety deposit boxes and steals personal belongings. However, unlike his original crimes, he now goes to the home of one person he’s stolen from to find out exactly why their one object was so important, and then kills them. He obtains a key and Emerson now has two of them.

What I love about Alcatraz:
• The flashbacks relating to the present day are building up a mystery about the warden, caretakers, and the prison itself.
• Jorge. He was great as Hurley, but he’s playing a different character here and has risen to the occasion.
• The Alcatraz replica. Brightly lit like the cells the Initiative had on Buffy to house the “hostiles,” it’s a creepy place where the inmates just stand around like little dolls in a dollhouse, waiting to find out what they’ll be doing next.
• The inmates of the week. Most of the stories have been pretty interesting, although Ernest Cobb is still my favourite. I like the idea of Doc tracking them down using his research of their past.
• Geri Jewell. Geri showed up last week as the sister of EB Tiller, the nasty deputy warden. I spent over a year working with Geri on her memoir, and she was delightful, hilarious, and wonderful. This is the first major role she’s had since then, so it’s awesome watching her on it.

What I don’t like:
• Abrams said this is going to be a non-serialized show, like Alias became in the fourth season, which made me unhappy. But that’s not the case. However, the problem with just adding a few serialized elements, which is what they’ve done with it, is that they’re making them seem insignificant and not worthy of exposition, and instead it just comes off as weird. They HAVE to start giving us something here, or it’s going to lose interest. And the inmate-of-the-week thing was fine for the first three weeks, but by now I really thought we’d have something.
• Those DAMN subtitles. Seriously, if they’re in Alcatraz, and the prison is actually running, I GET they’re in Alcatraz. Don’t tell me. And if the scene right before this was set in 1960, odds are it’s still 1960. And if they’re doing laundry, I bet I’m smart enough to grasp they’re in the laundry room. Showing me ALCATRAZ – LAUNDRY ROOM – 1960 is just condescending. Stop with the subtitles. For god’s sakes, we didn’t need them on Lost, and we don’t need them now. For a guy who helmed a show that demanded a LOT from its viewers, he doesn’t seem to be demanding two brain cells of the viewers of Alcatraz.
• The wooden dialogue, mostly the tough-cop crap that comes out of the blonde cop’s mouth. She’s all, “Listen, I know you’re having it rough, but the best thing we can do for her right now is to find this guy now!” No, actually… finding the sniper will not magically bring the coma patient to life.
• I get that Doc has two PhDs. And that he’s super smart. But here are two things my husband and I have been mocking: one, the way he can pull up anything on the giant underground headquarters computer. Blonde cop says, “Pull up the security footage of the bank” and boom, he not only pulls it up, he zooms in on what we need to see. AND… he does it all with two keystrokes. Genius!
• The second thing, and this goes for the whole show, is I hate how conveniently (and implausibly) they wrap up everything near the end. Last week he was all, “I lived in a building once that had air conditioning vents that came in from either side and if we go in through the vents I bet we could get into the bank and I bet the vents go out to” OH MY GOD ARE YOU KIDDING ME?! Insane. I’ve lived in a lot of apartment buildings, too. I couldn’t tell you how the damn vent systems worked. But I guess if you have a PhD in history, that makes you an expert in electrical and heating systems.

I haven’t recognized many of the writers of the weekly episodes, and I’m thinking if you’re going to launch a big new series, you’d pull out some big guns at the beginning. I’m hoping Abrams is about to do just that. Remember David Fury’s fourth episode of Lost? We were already hooked, but when that one happened (I’m referring to “Walkabout”) there was no changing the channel.

Do that, JJ. Give me one of THOSE episodes. Let’s improve this dialogue, show me some more interaction of the inmates we’ve already met (I want to see Cobb and Sylvane talking, or the warden trying to pit Sweeney against Nelson). I get what you’re doing, and it’s very good, but now let me see what’s going on in Alcatraz. You’ve built up four baddies, and now it’s time to show them interacting.

And clearly, in the present, there’s something going on with the inmates that’s not consistent. Cobb and Nelson committed crimes they’d done the first time around. But Sylvane, this guy who was supposed to be innocent, is going on a murderous rampage that’s completely unlike him. He stole a key and didn’t know why. He was killing people and practically apologizing, like he was being controlled. Same with Sweeney. He was a bank robber; now he’s a mass murder who revels in the kill, and again is led to a person with a key. Why? Who is compelling these people? Are you just going to build up a mystery and not give us anything at all? People complained about Lost not giving answers, but they hadn’t begun dropping hints of a mystery this early in the game (at least, not obvious ones at that time). But this is getting a little frustrating.

After all, they disappeared in 1963, and the action has all been set in 1960. Clearly something big is going to happen in that interim three years, and that’s where the story is beginning. So let’s start showing us where it’s going to go.