The newest shake-and-remake of the heroes-are-people-too concept debuted on SyFy this week with a not-ready-for-prime-time pilot. Alphas grabs hold of a few promising angles, but swings them wide of the mark. For fans looking for Syfy to re-up their sci-fi, don’t despair yet: Strathairn’s undeniable talent and a tighter control of pace and character could run Alphas up to big dog status.
 A sloppy opening and slow second and third acts do eventually coalescence into an episode with enough plot that tricks have room to turn, but the pilot does little to establish how or why the team works or the drama-at-large that they operate in – a story that would better be served by just jumping in and letting us watch them handle a case. It’s a little disingenuous to complain that Alphas is just another scrambled X-Men or Heroes, but the concepts Alphas uses to differentiate itself are less flavor and more full-plot-stop. The X-Factor/X-Files government-allegiances-or-not theme could be a deep well to draw from, but the pilot episode veers too deep into distractions.
The first act quickly drops the Manchurian Candidate set-up to switch to an unnecessary gearbox full of our heroes being everyday, normal people. The bio-science burble feels forced into place and the geek-joke of it mostly fits better with the tongue-and-cheek science of shows like Eureka and Warehouse 13 than the heightened realism the show is striving for. Grounding the team’s abilities in “real life” situations should need little more than seconds, especially in an audience-expectation field saturated with superpowers.
TV fans are used to characters taking stage when they need to, without backstory – and these stretched vignettes delay the scene we never really see – how and why this team works. Worse, the attempts to create government-control plot angles around Strathairn’s character result in a string of exposition-heavy nonsense where Strathairn’s g-man handler withholds direly important parts of the plot for absolutely no reason; in fact, keeping the secret is decidedly against his interests.
 
The big idea of the show is to ground the powers in enough medical realism to introduce drawbacks and characters flaws. That’s great – except this show is saturated with it to the point of inaction. The biggest offender is the kid who can see data – he’s a distracting influence on the pace and direction of scenes that already lack focus. The sensing girl, when she isn’t just an excuse for no-lab-required CSI graphics, is similarly socially awkward – leaving it to the too-cool-for-school psychic and uptight-ex-FBI-guy to take the lead – which they don’t.
The stand-out scene is the recruitment of the newest member of the team – a great piece of writing that comes too late. It introduces the POV character – the character who needs to learn what the audience also needs to learn – but the information has been awkwardly covered already. I won’t give away the fun, but if the pilot had taken more cues from the forward-story-motion of this scene, the show would be off to a great start.
Of lesser worry is that the plot mostly depends on the characters being woefully ignorant or confused… Of great worry is that Alphas isn’t even through the first episode before it goes full-meta: the central plot seems to be that the team exists to counter a team of evil Alphas whose purpose seems to be to counter them…
Now that Alphas doesn’t have to worry so much about exposition, the show could quickly become much, much better. A more balanced mix of the quirky, real-life bits with the heroics; a tighter focus on character-in-action rather than character-in-color, and a little more sense to the plot and Alphas could earn an A.
To quote the pilot: “This is where this gets interesting” – nope. Not yet. But soon. We hope.
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by terrafovea 5 replies.
