Exotic Evil

There’s plenty of evil in the world.  Most of us spend our days fighting everyday evils of one sort or another—poverty, discrimination, unfairness, injustice, nasty coworkers.  But those things are difficult to explain and even more difficult to beat.  So perhaps it’s no surprise that summer television is presenting us with a bunch of exotic evils and exotic approaches to challenging evil.  Exotic evil is easier to explain than everyday evil—which makes it easier to beat, easier to treat like a game, and easier to compartmentalize from the ills of society.  And anything that makes evil easier to vanquish—even if it’s deeply silly and unnecessary—might make nice summer comfort food. 

I’m not against that—overcoming the forces of mysterious or supernatural evil is sort of a summer tradition, and I’m glad for it.  But TV has the power to make inroads against real everyday evil, too—by humanizing the different, demonstrating diversity, modeling justice—and it’s odd to me that the shows that vanquish exotic evil all too often ignore, or even perpetuate, the assumptions that give everyday evil its foothold.  Science fiction and the supernatural have great potential to reveal and subvert injustice by coming at social issues from the side rather than head-on.  But these shows don’t seem to hot on metaphor.  Or if they do, it’s not particularly helpful metaphor.   That doesn’t necessarily make them bad (although they may be).  But it is definitely lost potential.

Tatau (BBC America, UK/US simultaneous release, new.  Supernatural mystery.)

Watched:  first two episodes

Premise:  Tourist sets out to save a local woman after a drug trip shows him that she’ll be murdered in the future.

Promise:  The setup and tone feel closer to a SyFy original movie than what we’ve come to expect from BBC America, but that's really just a reminder that BBC America is the channel that gave us not only quality standouts like Orphan Black, but also supernatural interactive silliness like Hex and Bedlam. So:  this one is set on the Cook Islands, and is full of exoticism, with a white hero saving the native girl by embracing the island’s exotic mysticism.  In all other respects, though, it’s a relatively classic British mystery, with the sort of formula one would expect of Agatha Christie or Death in Paradise or Rosemary & Thyme.  If I found the hero less nagging, or if I found his sidekick best friend any less grating, or any of the characters more multi-dimensional, I’d keep watching, because I quite enjoy that sort of plain ol’ mystery.   

Verdict: I wasn’t willing to watch these annoying and/or flat characters go through the motions of solving the mystery.

The Messengers (CW, new. Supernatural drama.)

Watched: Pilot and first 10 minutes of second episode

Premise:  Five strangers are given angelic superpowers to fight the devil.

Promise: The premise is actually very unclear from the pilot, which is basically 5 disparate and deeply trope-filled stories that end with everyone coincidentally being on their way to Houston.  But the premise thrown at the viewers like a bucket of water at the top of episode 2.  Which is where I stopped watching it—to save it for interactive viewing with friends.  I think the show has genuine potential as interactive television.  Here’s the setup:  everything that happens in the show is based on coincidence, which they can pretend isn’t ridiculous because we’re conveniently told that there’s no such thing as coincidence.  The superpower lineup is equally ire-inducing:  A mom (healing touch); a teenage boy (super strength); an outlaw (mindreading); a televangelist (precognition); and a scientist (….really wanting to find her kidnapped son?  Because even scientist moms aren’t good for anything but being emotionally manipulable caring healers?).  A woman wakes from a coma and announces to them that they’re the “messengers of the Apocalypse” and they have to fight the devil.  Because I guess 5 people with superpowers is (a) necessary and (b) sufficient for that.

Verdict: YEP I’M ON BOARD FOR YELLING AT THE SCREEN ON THIS ONE.  (Or at least we’ll see how episode 2 goes.)

Stitchers (ABC Family, new.  Sci-fi banter procedural)

Watched:  Pilot

Premise:  Young, socially maladroit doctoral candidate is recruited into a high-tech government agency that hacks into the memories of dead people to solve mysteries and avert disasters.

Promise: This show has many of the same problems as Scorpion, equating intelligence with neuroatypicality or social unacceptability—in this case, the smart dudes are sexist assholes, and the smart women are socially and emotionally inept.  The heroine has a made-up condition called “temporal dysplasia,” which serves as an excuse to take away her social filter. The condition apparently makes her unable to perceive the passage of time, and the show never explains why that also makes her unable to foresee the consequences of her actions or unable to experience or perceive emotional cues.  I guess they made up a condition so they didn’t need to portray a coherent set of symptoms.  But if they’re going to assemble a random set of symptoms, you’d think they’d pick them for a reason.  Early on, our heroine learns that she’s uniquely qualified for this deeply strange job of inhabiting the memories of the dead. But no one ever explains why her condition wouldn’t make her worse at it rather than better. 

But I digress.  (Turns out this review is going to be long.)  The show is full of things like that—slapped-together moments that pull us out of the story to ask “why?” and observe “that can’t possibly be how it works.”  She’s inexplicably “suspended” from her Ph.D program for “academic sabotage.”  She’s thrown into an incredibly dangerous high-tech position with exactly zero training.  She’s given an investigatory job despite what appears to be a very high level of expertise in computer science. She’s forbidden from leaving the lab to conduct follow-up investigation.  And—here’s the real biggie—apparently they need someone to dive into the memories of the dead to find out totally publicly available information like “who was the dead person dating and where did she go to school.”  Perhaps it’s a good sign that I care enough to be bothered by these things.  Perhaps the pilot elided them so we could get to the procedural meat or the arc plot. 

I thought the show was going to embrace its camp, fun roots as soon as it put its sci-fi lab behind a secret door in a Chinese Restaurant.  But no.  The show has a couple of familiar SyFy channel faces I like, and the arc plot may actually be interesting.  But its tone is too serious to be campy fun, and it’s all banter with no emotional resonance behind it.  And I think there’s no way it can ever make me like the characters who belittle the CalTech-Ph.D-candidate heroine by calling her “emotionally vacant and relationshiply void,” call her “princess,” “fake geek girl” her  by demanding she name all of the actors who have ever played Doctor Who, and sexually harass her as she’s engaging in physically and mentally dangerous work. 

Verdict:  I was thinking I might watch episode two.  But now that I’ve processed my opinions into this review, I’m out.

The Whispers (ABC, new.  Supernatural drama.) 

Watched: pilot

Premise:  unseen forces (aliens?) manipulate children into killing their parents.

Promise:  Based on a Ray Bradbury story ("Zero Hour") that I haven't read, but the Bradbury roots actually explain a lot of my reactions to it.  All signs in the pilot point toward the idea that the unseen forces are trying to influence the course of American history and/or politics, and I find that disappointing.  It seems such a banal and small-scale use for such an amazing talent as manipulating the minds of children.  And in fact, much of the show feels like missed opportunities—the characters seem very conventional and the show seems determined to reinforce traditional ideas of what is normal.  Men are powerful and keep secrets. Mothers occupy a suburban and child-focused world, except the FBI investigator who specializes in crimes committed by children (I guess that’s a specialty?  And of course it’s ok for a woman to do because it’s about children). The Deaf child who regains his hearing describes it as being “fixed.”  I don’t mean to imply there isn’t something interesting here—the idea of manipulating the innocent, and of adults trying to understand that manipulation through their veil of assumptions about children—is intriguing. But the show could do so much more with it.  Just as Extant did (perhaps) too much with its fascinating premises, this show feels like it’s doing too little with a similar set of premises.  But we’ll see.

Verdict:  Too tropey, but not awful.

In the hopper:  Aquarius and UnReal.  Maybe others.