I don’t think it was a real video game.
Guest starring: every actor who has ever worked in Vancouver.
Battlestar Galactica + Stargate + The 4400.
More are surely to appear.
I thought it was pretty good but borrowed heavily from Twin Peaks (like the moment the father knows his daughter is dead while the mother is on the other end of the phone, look a video, look a locket). I guess it’s Twin Peaks for the rest of us so to speak, but it definitely lacked the unique character of TP.
True. Pilots usually are stiff, though, so perhaps it will loosen up a bit. Twin Peaks was what… 17 years ago now?
It was like the fakest fake videogame this side of a Law and Order: SVU episode. Stuck out like a sore thumb. I never understand why they don’t just get footage of a real game unless it ends up being a plot point. But that kid could have been playing Blops or MoH or Gears or anything. Maybe Sony or Microsoft or Activision don’t want their games associated with such a twerp of a character, but you can’t tell me Ignition wouldn’t have said OK to using Blacklight: Tango Down or whatever.
The fake video game can’t be as bad as the monkeys-with-guns shooter they’ve been playing on House this year.
After the Gilmore Girls, that sort of communal wackiness thing is sort of played out IMO. It’s a relief this doesn’t have any of the quirkiness of Twin Peaks.
Combining the glacial pacing of Rubicon with the deep and intricate plotting of an episode of Law and Order: Criminal Intent might not be the formula for success here. I made it through the first two episodes, but man, is this ever grinding for me. I’m also sick of seeing Ensign Ro in pretty much everything, though at least she’s not an irritating, overbearing bitch in this one. Yet. I’m not sure what to think about the lead actress, either. On the one hand, I immediately like her a lot because if they didn’t make her up to look like a refugee from Winter’s Bone she’s generally the right dimensions for Karrin Murphy. On the other hand, the character thus far has all the gripping personality of a doberman with severe head trauma. Her impromptu partner is also kind of hard to pin down - you generally don’t want to have the skeevy guy hitting on twelve year old girls scene until after we get to know the character well enough to understand that he’s just trying to figure out where people go at this school to totally do sex on each other.
I want to like this, but I’m not sure that the show wants me to like it very much.
Not knowing what Skeeve Cop was up to with those girls is what made that scene interesting, Brian. Your version turns it into every other bad cop show already in existence.
I concur, to a point. I’m just saying that most networks prefer to avoid characters that want to rape for a reason (which really begs for an ATHF reference, but I’ll skip it), so a little bit more setup might have been nice to have, because as things stand right now I still have almost no idea who this guy is, outside of his generally douchey persona. That’s the weirdest part of the series so far for me - I feel like I’ve got a better handle on everybody other than the two people who are, ostensibly, the primary leads.
It is for me! :(
I love shows that treat the audience with a modicum of intellect. Like the scene where the rookie vows to find the killer to the victim’s parents. She just stares at him and walks away.
I get that, but it seemed to be literally stealing details and dramatic beats right out of Twin Peaks, and that was what surprised me I guess.
I’m curious to see where a lot of this goes. I feel like the Sonoma boyfriend angle is going to produce boring melodrama and the gangsta partner seemed a little lazy at first, not just rookie mistake type stuff.
One thing that threw me was when they didn’t realize there was an entire lake nearby when they were searching for a potential dead body. Seems like the first thing you would check for is obvious dumping places like a lake.
And again, the thing you’re complaining about is what made that scene interesting. Because we have no real idea of what this guy is about aside from the relatively few details given - he’s was undercover vice, he acts generally skeevy - and because of the meta-reason that the show is on AMC and therefore is not beholden to any weird, antiquated notions of appropriate television behaviour, there was a genuine tension to that scene that is more or less impossible to generate on a network show. For all we know, the dude could’ve turned full-on Keitel and done something truly awful to those girls.
Instead, we get a great little character study from the two actors playing the young girls - I especially liked how the dark-haired one took one puff and immediately said “Wow, killer weed, I’m so high right now”, clearly indicating that she has absolutely no idea what she’s talking about - and we get a real insight into what makes Skeeve Cop good at what he does.
Since you mention them, the girls in that scene really didn’t fit for me either. Maybe it’s because I was an ugly, gangly teenager that nobody wanted to do sex at, but I found it a little hard to believe that these two random young women would have immediately jumped straight from, “Who is this strange man?,” to “What the hell - let’s give him a throw.” It’s entirely possible that that’s how real children really are with people who are at least theoretically attractive (this particular detective feels to me like a role tailor-made for that one actor who looks like he’s from New Jersey and if you touched any part of him you’d come back slippery), but maybe that part, more than anything, is what put me off about the scene as a whole. That reaction in particular felt a little bit wrong to me, and perhaps that is leading me to judge the character himself too harshly.
Sadly, there’s nothing strange about the girls behavior at all. Hell, I can throw a rock from my office and hit a local women’s shelter overflowing with girls that age who made similarly terrible life decisions with about as much reason.
My takeaway from that scene was that they established he was willing to use an MO of infiltrating a situation to get info. (Perhaps a holdover from his vice days?)
I’m sure it will pay off later and I’m curious to see what trouble he stirs up next.
Well, given his prior behavior with The Only Black Guy in Seattle, whose role at the school I have yet to grasp but I think is supposed to be some kind of teacher or counselor, it seems like he uses his somewhat greasy first impression toward that end. Thinking back, the whole former vice cop theme does seem pretty strong with him.
I watched it last night and I basically liked it, but I echo the concern with the heavy Twin Peaks referencing. It goes right down to a (vastly inferior) synth-heavy soundtrack, and its quite distracting at times.
Really though the show does not seem to be heading in a Lynch-like direction so I suspect some of the references will drop off as the season progresses, which will be for the best. I like most of the casting choices a lot, the show looks great, and while I don’t think it really captures the feeling of the Pacific North-West, it’s not horrible either. Kinda overdid the rain in the first couple episodes anyways.
That’s potentially a very good thing, since it gives the show room to grow.
People go with what they know. What he knows, apparently, is how to cozy up to people. Plus, he was gonna smoke the pot anyway. Why not kill two birds with one stone?