I thought this episode was pretty good. The kid handled his scenes pretty well, and there were a few nice, well-written moments in there. There were a couple questionable plot points, like how did Cooper know when to call the pay phone? But this show always has the nice out: it’s a dream, so it doesn’t have to make sense!
I’m trying not to fixate on questions about the overarching mechanics of how the two realities / dreams are working, but I can’t seem to completely avoid it. Anytime we see these scenes without the main character, I wonder a bit about exactly what is supposed to be happening.
I’m still watching even though it’s opposite Archer and even though I didn’t think the last episode was as good as the previous one. I hope the parallel universe doesn’t just turn into an oracle to help him solve crimes. I really like the concept and the acting but I have my concerns over how they intend to sustain the narrative. Still, critics seem to like it: If you’re not watching Awake, you’re the reason TV sucks
What’s his face, the creator of the show has said he didn’t care which world was real and which was fake. So I honestly think things will happen that will make it impossible to determine which is which. Kind of like Matt Groening will never reveal where Springfield is.
Frankly I find it slightly annoying that the one biggest part of the show, the one thing that makes it different from other crime dramas is something that…looking it up…Kyle Killen doesn’t want to dwell on.
I think I’m done with this after my mandatory three-episode tryout. The two-reality aspect is just a device to turn the rest of the story. The creator of the show admitting that he doesn’t give a shit about resolution of the premise leads me to not give a shit about his show.
The clumsy scene with the phone: she calls her home phone at a random time, hears the message, cop runs outside and the Magic Negro somehow knows that she has called her message service and that it’s time to call that number. Both the kid and the kidnapper are talking on a phone that is still on-hook. Okay, maybe it’s got speaker phone. But he never disconnects.
Oh, and that fucking cheesy tuneless music is driving me nutso.
I liked this episode a lot more than the second one. Actually the son motorcycle subplot was nice but I didn’t like the mythology stuff.
This episode he used real detective work in a manner consistent with both universes being real, and that works so much better and is so much more satisfying than when they have him using random synchronicity of similar numbers and familiar faces that could just be subconscious weirdness.
A lot of people seem to be confused by this for some reason. How long he is awake in one world bears no relevance on how long he sleeps in the other. He can spend an entire waking day in one world during a cat nap in the other.
I wonder if they’ll at some point have him get shot and go into a coma in one of the realities. That might make for an interesting twist. Having him wonder what happens if he dies in one of the realities.
The title of the most recent episode is Oregon. I live here. So I watch it and see that one of the worlds might be here. That would make three shows now featuring Oregon including Grimm and Portlandia.
But for non Oregonians there’s also the fact that there seems to be a killer in the same situation as he is. That can be interesting if done right. And he wasn’t having a conflict with his son or with Fez, I mean Detective Vega, something I was getting annoyed with.
I was seriously considering dropping the show, but these new developments will keep me watching a little while longer at least.
What do you guys think? Is the show getting better? I think it needs to improve a lot myself. But I do think the possible two world villain is a good start.
I’m not sure it’s that definitive. All we’ve seen is ~6-8 hour sleep cycle; he seems to wake up at the same time every day. We haven’t seen whether things like fatigue can be transmitted from one world to another–only his consciousness and his memory seem to do so (so far).
As a side note, I think it would be incredibly tiring to never feel like you’re actually asleep.
Like Phil Connors in Groundhog Day, I think the character would simply go insane at some point, trying to keep the worlds straight. I appreciate that the show is exploring some of his strange behavior to his colleagues: his partner, his captain, and most recently, an FBI special agent.
