This.
It was OK. I was expecting it to be worse. I’ll keep watching as long as it doesn’t get any worse.
It didn’t “pull me out of the show.” I can accept as a premise of the show that there’s some temporal wierdness, possibly related to nefarious Gov’t Experiment, etc. I kind of liked Brimstone, and this appears to be in that vein.
It’s when mundane things are used incorrectly that it’s…jarring. Like the hole in your gum line after you’ve lost a tooth.
Oh crap… people notice this!
I don’t think any amount of gun research* would be able to satisfy all the gun afficianados out there. My solution would be to make up a gun. Call it Winchester 71 or whatever, make it sound close to real. Since most people don’t know, they wont care. And the ones that do can’t complain when a fantasy writer endows a rifle with magical properties.
*: There are other details that special interest viewers harp on, too.
That’s a pretty big jump in logic
We only saw the one guy show up in Alcatraz. We have no idea where Cobb appeared. Considering that the good guy’s base is ON Alcatraz, I think they would be on the look out if that’s where everyone showed up.
Anyway, I liked it. I thought the second episode was a lot stronger than the first (mainly because they spent a lot of time on set up in the Pilot). And I totally called
The doctor being from the 60’s too.
Also, I didn’t realize that Sam Neill was 64. I thought he was too young to be a guard in the 60s at first.
How the sniper premise was handled bugged me in several places unrelated to the rifle itself. Ladycop and the Fatman go looking for the sniper’s perch and find it first at 500 yards because the regular cops are mistakenly searching at 750? Huh? Why would they automatically assume a sniper who showed excellent accuracy would be at the maximum possible range of his weapon? Even 500 yards is damned impressive for killing crows for a guy in the kneeling (as opposed to prone) position, using a silencer(!), but I guess we’re going to have to buy into the prisoners showing superhuman ability, like they did (though more overtly) in Brimstone.
And when she finds the shell casing, Ladycop casually picks it up with her bare hand. That annoyed me - I get that she’s buying into the whole “Men in Black” methodology where the crooks they’re chasing will never see a court of law, but did she really lose her crime-scene evidence-gathering habits that quickly?
So, in the first two episodes there have been… what… seven murders? That’s a month’s total for San Francisco, right off the bat. When the prisoners start popping in weekly, SF’s murder rate is going to jump to mid-1980s Detroit’s, and since these guys are getting quietly arrested and shuffled off to New Alcatraz, their murders will officially remain “unsolved.”
I kinda like the premise (and the whole “[bang!] No more shooting for you!” bit was classic), but there’s a huge suspension of disbelief required.
I’m curious about Sylvane…I think we were clearly meant to sympathize with him a bit…in jail for stealing food, the assistant warden was a huge jerk to him, planting the shiv, then taunting him in solitary, his wife leaving him for his brother, then bang, he kills that guy and 2 police officers in cold blood. Does he really not know what’s going on?
If you dropped someone from the '60s straight into present day, wouldn’t they be a bit more disoriented?
(Oh, and that whole “robbed a grocery store that also stole stamps, hence its a federal offence” seems like it was stolen straight from Murder in the First. I know both cases are actually based on Henri Young, but they both whitewash him the same way.)
I liked it.
On Lost many characters were named after Philosophers. Did I imagine that the first murder victim was named Elijah Bailey Tiller? Elijah Bailey being Asimov’s detective in the Caves of Steel and the Naked Sun? Could this be a trend, characters named after Science Fiction detectives.
I think that’s part of the mystery. Jack was clearly surprised when he woke up in present day San Fran, but something was still guiding him to kill that one guy and take the key.
The mind control division of the Dharma Initiative.
Bryan: I had exactly the same eye-rolling you did on viewing those scenes.
What got to me in that scene was after they determined that the older weapon wouldn’t have been able to kill from 750 feet (from a building) they looked off in a completely different direction and pointed to a bluff that was closer. Yes, the bullet hit the victim in the chest and the victim was standing this way, but let’s look over there, 45° away from the buildings, because it’s closer! Good police work, that.
I enjoyed it. I was hoping the “Bad Guys” would be a little bit more clever than they were. The captures seemed to be a bit anticlimactic to me.
I’m also expecting that the Philadelphia Experiment will come in to play in this show some how.
We only saw one guy show up anywhere, and that was in a cell in Alcatraz.
There are really only three possibilities:
-
they show up at completely random locations
— I hope you’ll agree that if that’s true, the odds of him showing up in a cell in Alcatraz, out of all the places in the world, are infinitesimal. And he had a damn TICKET for the boat, so how random was that? -
they show up at the place that is the most connected, in a way we don’t know, to their past life
— OK, both guys were apparently recently transferred to Alcatraz – Sylvane from Leavenworth, and Cobb from McNeil Island. But Sylvane’s wife visited him in person at Alcatraz, and his brother apparently lived nearby, so he could well have deep roots that area.
But they showed a map of Cobb’s previous shootings, and they were in various locations around the country, but none were near San Francisco. So there was no indication he had ever been there before being sent to Alcatraz, and no reason for his current shooting spree to be in SF unless that’s where he materialized. So there’s no reason to think he had any previous connection with SF other than being in Alcatraz.
So either the location is not connected to their past, or the mere fact of being in Alcatraz makes that the most important connection with their past. Which is the same as…
- they all show up where they disappeared from, in Alcatraz
— that’s really the only viable possibility.
So yes, maybe they didn’t know for sure the guys would turn up in Alcatraz before it actually happened, but now they do, and that should be it. Hopefully one of the writers will realize this, and the next episodes will have people showing up elsewhere, but it was a huge plot hole that none of these super-brains even remarked on the fact that 2 out of 2 of the inmates appeared in the immediate vicinity of Alcatraz, and, um, maybe we should not allow little girls in tourist groups to wander around Alcatraz until we see if more of them are going to show up there?
Well, it DID have the technique we all loved so much that JJ Abrams mastered in LOST, i.e. The Character Who Knows a Lot But Won’t Share It With Anyone. :rolleyes:
Well, it is complicated.
I liked it. I think I’ll stick with it for now. Does it only have 12 episodes this season or more?
They describe a bunch of Alcatraz guards that disappeared, too. Now, I get that they’re setting up 1960s Alcatraz as an overall evil place where the warden and assistant warden were fond of pointless sadism, but are the guards going to be evil, too? And how were their disappearances covered up?
For that matter, are all the prisoners going to fall back into their pre-disappearance M.O.s? Is the fat guy kept around to expositionally say things like “Well, a train just got hijacked by a guy holding a teddy bear, and that was the M.O. of Prisoner #2071, Train-Robbin’ Bear-Huggin’ McGurk, and we can expect him to rob another train in the next two days…”
Well, that was really unpleasant. I shall not be watching any more episodes.
If they really want to follow the LOST pattern, this will turn out to be The Character Who Behaves As If He/She Knows a Lot But Won’t Share It With Anyone, When Actually He/She Doesn’t Know Squat, But Works for Someone Else Who Does, Only That Character Also Turns Out to Be . . . [continue repeating loop until end of series].