SPOILERS!
Not a bad first new show that I've watched this season.
We have the premise of a world fifteen years after all power goes off, even things that shouldn't have gone off like mechanical old cars. There's one line about how physics isn't working right, which will hopefully pan out majorly in the overall story arc of the season. We have people wearing modern clothes that don't look at all like they were made at home, with hair that doesn't look dirty or unstyled, but pretty people might just like to be part of what we have to suspend disbelief on. We have a guy who used to work for Google, who, so far, was the most entertaining part of the show. We have an English doctor who trusts no one. We have a young female protagonist who is basically Katniss without the benefit of a regular bow's easy reload-ability, her dead parents and aunt and uncle who probably had something to do with the power-outage, and her kidnapped brother. We have her uncle who used to be friends with the Big Bad and is now on the line because he's the last one who knew the dad who knew what happened to the power.
As the episode unfolds, we also get a young militiaman who is not, so far, a deserter, even though that would have been more interesting and more complex, character-wise. We get a lady living out on her own in the country who happens to have an ad hoc, home-built computer that seems to run DOS or something older. We get General Monroe, the Big Bad, who somehow has power. And we get a flooded and seemingly lawless Chicago that could be a really fun setting, and is certainly an impressive and neat-looking wilderness landscape.
The plot was pretty straight forward for most of the episode and the twist at the end wasn't really unexpected, but everyone seems to be pretty likable and there does seem to be a lot of story that isn't yet explored, which is great. There's the idea that not a single person, except maybe Katniss-like, who is actually telling the truth and letting on everything that they know about what's going on. Depending on how the rest of this season could go, the weight of all that story could be the make-or-break of the show--it could give it a lot of story, and a lot of JJ's signature plot to explore, or it could bury it under its own weight before it can get enough of a fanbase to survive.
Looking at it as just a start, it seems like it's a good one, if not the most original, yet. If it can pull it off, and bring in the best of what JJ Abrams's shows are known for--lots of stories, lots of mystery, weird science and strange ideas--and marry it to the addictive and emotionally involving quality of Kripke's Supernatural, it could be good. It could fill the Lost Gap at long last, could give us the multiple timeframes that Flashforward never quite handled well. It could take off.
But the next few episodes will tell whether it'll go that way or not.
What did you think?
Samantha Tweets, Tumbles, Blogs and is pretty sure the apocalypse would be grosser, but is glad there's still good tanktops there.
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