a5c7b9f00b Following the death of a witness in a court case, Dr. Lee Rosen leads a team of &quot;Alphas&quot;, (advanced human beings) who have have a number of special skills that makes them a formidable team. As Rosen mentors them and teaches the team to harness their considerable skills, they begin to realize that there are powerful forces behind the courthouse murder, including one of their own. Alphas is a science fiction drama focusing on a team that investigates people with supernatural abilities. I&#39;m not much into superhero stuff but I like Sci Fi so I risked watching this after a little prevarication. Some of that trepidation continued for the first few episodes, but the series slowly got a grip on me and I finished it with a very positive impression.<br/><br/>The stories themselves were okay, the powers the characters had were more DC comics than anything even vaguely scientific, but it was all nicely dressed up and I found it less irksome than I&#39;d expected it to be to suspend my disbelief. The acting was really pretty good, industry standard, I suppose, which seems quite good these days. The actual characters themselves were an interesting bunch, each with their own plausible strengths, quirks and problems.<br/><br/>What I felt was best handled in this show, though, and better than in any other I&#39;ve seen, was the way the various characters struggled with their personal moral responsibilities to themselves and to the community at large, and their sense of loyalty to their leaders. The distrust of high level decisions, the damaged trust at bad decisions, the situation where rebellion would mean effective defection to a &quot;terrorist group&quot; but acquiescence meant becoming a &quot;government flunkie&quot; and the various ways in which each character was less than perfect were all facets which were scripted and handled well.<br/><br/>We live in a time when one does not need to be in the slightest paranoid to understand how sometimes malevolent and sometimes stupid government decision-making can be. Recent history has shown there have been many dark conspiracies and dastardly doings by almost all governments: the more powerful the government the worse their misdeeds seem. Usually, in screen dramas with this sort of derring-do scenario, this is dealt with by perhaps a scapegoat at the top who gets caught, or maybe the heroes directly fighting uniformly evil government baddies, or the issue is just played down while the government tries to lead everyone in doing the right thing. I felt that Alphas was well written and acted and directed around this issue and serveda nice exploration of the moral quagmire surrounding the questions of public and private politics and power and our decisionsto how we should act. This show has a really decent start keeping the paranormal activities on a somewhat explainable level. The most impressive role is probably that of Gary. Bold move to have a main character which is very autistic. But it works really well too. Acting is very decent on most parts and in the beginning there are some larger threads woven, especially with Nina&#39;s past.<br/><br/>However,the shows process, it kinda loses it identity and has too little progress in the overall line. What startsa group of gifted people who need to control their lives along with those gifts who in spare time try to help/save/find others with said powers quickly turns into a self controlled government spin-off with all consequences coming along with them. Now this doesn&#39;t have to be a bad thing, butthe cases continue it&#39;s more about the cases (and later on Red flag) than the actual life work which, in turn, causes Dr. Rosen to become quite redundant in the group (or at least, the show tries to praise him for more than he actually seems to do).<br/><br/>*** this next paragraph contains some direct references (spoilers), I tried to keep actual details to a minimum. Read at own risk ***<br/><br/>But the most important thing that probably made me lose my excitement is the &#39;suddenly&#39;-factor. The story has too many &#39;suddenlies&#39;. For example, at one point, the government places a holding cell in their building. At the end of the same episode, it gets blown up and never returned. Another episode suddenly caused a &#39;leak&#39;. In the end we learn that a shape shifter took the place of one of our members whereas earlier episodes revealed nothing of that sort (a bit of doubt in the episode before it would&#39;ve sufficed). The show is full of things like these, relating to events but also choices of our lead characters which would help the plot, but don&#39;t seem to make enough sensea whole.<br/><br/>The idea was good and the fx were really nicely made (especially Gary&#39;s radio weave &#39;hearing&#39; is brilliantly displayed). But overall I felt that the scripts were too little thought through beyond the episodes.
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355 weeks ago