I have to admit, I was fairly excited about this premiere. I've always been a fan of sci-fi shows and anytime we get a new one, I'm excited about the possibilities. To me, sci-fi has always been about just that, possibilities. This show though, had absolutely none of that excitement and sense of wonderment at seeing something different and interesting. TNT has been promoting the hell out of this new show but instead of an interesting and wonderful new show, what we got instead was a rehash of every single alien invasion/post apocalyptic show ever.
It stars Noah Wyle as Professor Tom Mason who is so obviously the good guy that he bleeds rainbows and ponies. He is the father of three, one little kid, another older one that fights alongside him and a middle one that has been 'harnessed' by the aliens (its some sort of mind control thing that the aliens stick to the kids spinal cords and if taken out, they die). There's Moon Bloodgood as Dr. Anne Glass, she is a strong independent woman that speaks for the civilians that the resistance protects. Will Patton is the military veteran who is very tough and will do what he has to do to protect everyone but in the end is just a softie trying to make the tough decisions. The other host of characters are so pathetically cliched that you feel like you can see the rails that move the cardboard cut-outs.
There are probably two characters that interested me the most and show that the show does have some potential. First is the 13 year old Jimmy (Dylan Authors). This kid is taken on missions with the rest of the cast like he was a soldier. This can bring some conflict as we saw on the first episode, but after it happened, they didn't touch on it at all. I'm interested to know why there's only a couple of women fighting and they have 13 year olds with automatic rifles. The second character would be Sarah Carter's Margaret. She is the only one where we actually hear some back story on and the only one I ended up caring about. There is a big problem with this premiere in that it never really wants us to connect to any of the characters.
The biggest problem with the premiere to me was the story. How many times has the outlaw leader holding friends hostage for ransom has been done before? I don't dare count. Other than your run of the mill father looking for son, aliens trying to kill humans, humans trying to survive, this episode has nothing else. It's worse than bland.
There are some ideas that interest me and could do for an interesting series. First, the whole mind/body control thing. Why would the aliens want to control kids? I don't know, but I'm interested in that. Also, one of the characters (the teacher) tells Wyle's character that normally humans always think of their robots as human-like and that it was interesting that the aliens has many appendages and their robots had only two. I hope they didn't just tell me that only to forget it in the future. Also, I have to admit that it was creative to explain what happened through the drawings of the little kids.
There's a lot of work to be done in the next few episodes. The series has potential, but in this cut-throat tv life, you don't get many chances. We'll see what happens. As far as premier's go, though, this one was bland, weak and underwhelming.
"Darn it! How am I supposed to kick alien ass when I left my balls in my man-purse?"3 out of 10
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