Evil 1.2: Miracles and Racism

A really excellent second episode of Evil on CBS last night, confirming what I thought after the debut of this series last week: it's the best new series I've seen so far this season on network television.

The subject of the episode was miracles, in particular the miracle of a young woman declared dead coming back to life.  As we saw last week, our characters are unafraid to confront the most profound problems.  Kristen Bouchard (very well played by Katja Herbers) spotlights perhaps the key problem with belief in miracles: why do they "happen to some people and not to others".  This an especially crucial problem for her, and not just professionally: we learn in the same conversation with David Acosta (also very well played by Mike Colter) that Kristen's young daughter may have a heart valve condition that could kill her before she reaches the age of twenty.

Meanwhile, the pendulum between spirit and science swings back and forth, just as it did last week. Kristen's daughter sees George the demon!  Evidence, then, that he's real?  It might seem so, until Kristen learns that he's a character in a horror narrative that is streaming ("streaming," her daughter corrects Kirstin, not on television) and that Kristen has seen and her daughter and the other kids regularly watch.  This pendulum between occult and mundane keeps us on our toes about what is really going on.  In the centerpiece story, the young woman who comes back to life is African American, and our investigators discover that she was pronounced dead too soon, because the hospital tends to do that with African Americans.  Her coming back to life was not a miracle, but "implicit racism," as David aptly puts it.

Speaking of good acting, Evil also features Michael Emerson (from Lost and all kinds of sometimes great series) as Leland Townsend, who is a fit evil antagonist for Kristen and David.  He's a psycho, David explains, who "wants to kill hope".

I noticed something else about Evil last night.  Its creators are Michelle King and Robert King.  They were the creators of The Good Wife.  This makes me hope that Evil will be even better than just sometimes great.   I won't let Leland kill that hope.  Indeed, his complex character enhances the possibility that this hope will be fulfilled.

See also: Evil: Incubus Mystery

Intelligence Debuts

Intelligence debuted with a strong episode tonight - cerebrally as well action-wise - along with a good starting plot and set-up for the series, and a generally outstanding cast.

Leading that cast is Josh Holloway in his first major television outing since his portrayal of Sawyer in Lost, one of the most memorable characters in that now classic series.  Michael Emerson who played Ben in Lost has done well for himself in Person of Interest, so Holloway had a lot to live up to.  He's doing fine so far with his customary mix of sarcasm and no nonsense, a good persona for the lead character who is a master operative with the added advantage of a brain that's hooked into the Internet.   It's a good premise for a series for our day and age - the digital equivalent of The Six Million Dollar Man - and Gabriel (Holloway's character) even has a lost love he is searching the world to find.

Also excellent is Meghan Ory as Gabriel's secret service agent protector Riley - yeah, he's more important than the President - with a good combination of mental and physical agility.  Gabriel loves his wife, but there's a chemistry between hum and Riley that's bound to lead to interesting complications sooner or later.

Marge Helgenberger as head of the unit Lilian I'm not so sure about.  Her cool, deadpan performance as Katherine on CSI worked great for that almost anime-come-to-life series, but in Intelligence ... I don't know, I'll need to see more before I buy her as someone with sufficient wisdom and vision to be running this whole operation.

Meanwhile, the world depicted in Intelligence is sufficiently different from and similar to ours to host good continuing story.   It's not the Chinese who are our enemies, it's a conservative militant group within China, in the classic James Bondian tradition.   And the set-up recognizes and in fact is predicated upon the increasing interconnection of all forms of communication and information delivery - indeed, this is what makes Gabriel's connection to the Internet so powerful and effective.

The series moves to Monday night next week, replacing Hostages on CBS, which had its moments, but was based on a fundamentally absurd premise through the very end.   In contrast, Intelligence is a realistic as tomorrow's app, which Gabriel is well aware of, and which makes the story, at least in its premiere, refreshing and convincing.





#SFWApro

Person of Interest 1.8: Widmore and Ben, At It Again

Hey, fans of Lost - and I was a devoted one, until those ruinous last few minutes of the finale - will be happy to know that Widmore and Ben were up to their old tricks on Person of Interest 1.8 the other night.

Well, not quite Widmore, but Alan Dale, who played Widmore so well in Lost, is back on the kill in Person of Interest.  This time, Dale as Ulrich Kohl is a former Eastern German agent, recently out of prison, and determined to end every member of his former team he holds responsible for the death of his beloved wife Anja, years ago.


Reese and Finch (Ben aka Michael Emerson), then, soon realize they are out to intervene with a perpetrator not a victim.  Kohl gets the drop on the usually almost invincible Reese - as I've said previous reviews, I like when heroes are not perfect, makes them more human and believable - and Reese and Finch have to work especially hard to finally get the drop on Kohl.


Two good twists in this episode - Anja is alive and well in NYC, and Kohl who feels betrayed by her turns out to be bluffing when he makes to kill her (and this provokes his suicide by Reese, which he is not happy about - where's Desmond and his time traveling when you need him).   And Carter and Fusco have a little more relevance than usual, almost closing in on Reese in the park, a few minutes after he shoots Kohl.


So Widmore again dies, if not by Ben then by his partner Reese (or whatever exactly Reese is to Finch - not quite his partner, but not quite his employee, either).  And we get some good flashback scenes - which seem to have a become a television staple since Lost - of how Reese got into the business.  But, hey, they're both J. J. Abrams' shows, and he's entitled.  It's not plagiarism to take from yourself.

See also Person of Interest of Interest  ... Person of Interest 1.2:  Reese and Finch ... Person of Interest 1.5: Potentials ... Person of Interest 1.7: Meets Flashpoint and The Usual Suspects

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The Plot to Save Socrates
"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book

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Person of Interest of Interest

I was interested enough to see the first episode of Person of Interest.  It's Minority Report (an operation identifies crimes before they're committed, and tries to stop them), Medium (sees the future), Mission Impossible (you know what that is), a bit of 1984, and a few other touches all its own.  I liked it a lot.

Michael Emerson (Ben from Lost) is one of the major characters (Finch) who is so much like Ben (Finch even gets roughed up like Ben) that it could have been Ben, but that's ok, because Ben was one of the more fascinating, provocative characters on Lost.   Here he plays a computer genius who built a device, in the aftermath of 9/11, that could track potential terrorist attacks, with a view towards our government's intercepting them.   An unintended consequence is that this special super-computer could also ID potential non-terrorist crimes like individual murders and kidnappings.  Ben - sorry, Finch - built a back-door to his program, and he's determined to stop as many of these one-on-one crimes as possible.  Not as easy, of course, as it sounds, and complicated by the fact that the computer program cannot be sure whether the person of interest it identifies is the victim or the perpetrator.

Finch needs eyes in the field.  Not only only eyes, but moves that can stop the crimes.  He's not government, but he has plenty of money, he's off the grid, and he's in the market for a James Bond kind of agent.  That's where Reese comes in, played by James Caviezel (who was excellent in another science fiction story, Frequency, one of the best communication-back-through-time movies ever made - in fact, the best).  My Mission Impossible reference gets to the complexity of Reese's assignments, and 1984 points to our government still watching all of us through Finch's massive computer and its omnipresent lenses.

The premiere was good,  the show has potential, and I'll keep watching it.  I'm always a sucker for stories about the government watching me.  And, hey,  J. J. Abrams - one of the executive producers - has done some pretty good previous work with Felicity, Alias,  Lost (except for the ending, which I don't think was his fault),  and Fringe.

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The Plot to Save Socrates



"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book

---

Enjoy listening to audio books? Get a free audio book copy of The Plot to Save Socrates - or any one of 85,000 other titles - with a 14-day trial membership at Audible.com ...