Tonight's new Alcatraz was a bit of a mixed bag in my book.On the one hand, the series really deepened its overall story this week. The story of Virginia's grandfather was front and center. We learned that Uncle Ray already knew of the returning "63s." We saw the first guard (rather than inmate) from four decades past. We learned that Ray and Tommy were actually brothers, and got some tantalizing hints of the past between them. All compelling stuff.
On paper, anyway. The thing is, despite all this interesting material, I actually found this to be the least interesting episode of Alcatraz yet. This episode lacked the tension of earlier hours. The case wasn't particularly dangerous, because the "catch of the week" wasn't actually a bad man; it seemed unlikely that anyone was ever in any actual danger.
In short, while I think this is ultimately a direction the show can and should go, fleshing out the larger story, the writing of this type of episode needs to grow. I'm not truly sounding the alarm, but it does make me hope the show doesn't go the way of The X-Files, which soon reached a point where the "mythology" episodes were tedious and labored affairs that had to be suffered to get to the far more compelling and entertaining stand-alone episodes.
We'll see what Alcatraz has in store next week.
1 comment:
Not all the prison guards were nice guys and we don't know their motives yet. Future "guard" episodes might include some danger.
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