Believe

This is a new series, of which I have seen the first couple of episodes.  Someone asked me to review this one, so here goes….

The premise of this show is familiar … almost identical to Firestarter, it concerns a little girl named Bo (Johnny Sequoyah) with special powers who is being hunted by a ruthless man who will exploit her for nefarious purposes if he catches her.  She is on the run with a man who was broken out of death row in prison for the sole purpose of protecting her. 

You can probably guess who the man is.  Yep, her long lost father.  There is a group helping them evade capture, evidently well acquainted with the evil man who hunts her.  There are some good actors here, some familiar faces: Kyle MacLachlan o f Twin Peaks fame and Delroy Lindo, The Chicago Code.

I think it remains to be seen how good this show will be, though producer J.J. Abrams has an excellent track record for success.  While the girl’s special powers help them and those they meet along the way, the evil group seems to have nearly supernatural access to total surveillance in finding them.  It’s hard not to wonder why they don’t disappear into a national wilderness, but that would be a different story I guess. 

All really good fiction is about the battle between good and evil.  The characters here are clearly delineated as being on one side or the other, with Tate (Bo’s dad) being the redeemable rogue.  The danger is going to be making them all clichés of the genre, with one-note personalities.  I hope that Bo has some brattiness and that the main bad guy isn’t just the Brain half of Pinky and the Brain (“What will we do tonight?  Same thing we always do; take over the world.”)

The up side is that this is not a teen angst drama!  Adults might actually come to enjoy it.  So, I will continue to watch this one to see how it goes.

A Teen Drama Too Far?

I confess.  I love movies and television.  I love  theater arts.  I love science fiction.  When science fiction and television intersect, I am interested.  I loved Star Trek. I became addicted to the new Battlestar Galactica.  Mind you, the lead characters had mostly seen their majority.

I even grew to like the odd Vampire Diaries, largely because of the eye candy.  That, however, is not science fiction, but fantasy.  It  is teen drama, though.

Which brings me to the new show, The 100.  The premise is interesting enough:  Life on earth died out due to radiation and pollution.  The survivors are the inhabitants of orbital stations.  Now, though, the stations are old and dying, with no way to repair them.  The question is, has the earth recovered enough to support human life?

How to find out?  Why, send 100 teenagers, of course!  Most of them are criminals, so small loss, right?  Naturally, in keeping with the trend of teen dramas, there must be a female lead to root for, preferably beautiful and smart and brave.  (Yes, Mary Sue.)  There is an obligatory hunky love interest, a less hunky but truly heroic second banana, and assorted bad guys and girls.  In orbit are the adults, some attractive, all predictable and perhaps deliberately boring.  All of whom should be shot for not investigating earth’s habitability themselves instead of sending children.

There seem to be some mutated creatures who have survived on earth and are dangerous to provide jeopardy, aside from that provided by the lawlessness that is a group of unsupervised, mostly uncivilized teens. 

There is enough here to suggest I am not going to like it, science fiction or not.  But hey, Cosmos only takes up so much time, so I gave it a try.  Two tries.  I fell asleep both times. 

Now I am 65 years old and my favorite science fiction writers are predictably Asimov and Ellison and that lot.  But I loved the old Podkayne of Mars, a teen drama I have yet to see done properly.  And yet this lot leaves me so uninterested in the future of the species as to fall asleep mid-jeopardy.  The show seems to have some mildly talented actors and very nice production values, but seriously?  What is so bloody hard about creating characters one can care about.  Yes, they have to be a bit deeper than epithelial cells, but a little thought could handle that. 

The potential here is distressing to think about.  What could have been done with some believable characters…or even a believable reason for sending the kids down – a final sacrifice to try to save them, for example.  What about starting from the point of view of the survivors, instead of with the orbital invaders?  There is a load of conflict; it’s just impossible for me to care about the characters…they are not engaging or mildly interesting. I had a ministry with young people for many years…they are simply deeper than this.

Maybe I am just too old.  And maybe television is just too dumb.