ALCATRAZ
Air Date: January 30th, 2012 “Cal Sweeney”
Review by Andy Greene
JJ Adams and his production team Bad Robot’s newest creation is FOX’s ALCATRAZ, the third show after FRINGE and PERSON OF INTEREST that attempts to jazz up the TV procedural a little bit by infusing LOST-like mythology into the mix. As Sam Neil tells us in an ominous voiceover during the credits, Alcatraz didn’t shut down in 1963. The inmates and guards all disappeared, and now, almost fifty years later, they are coming back, without having aged or changed their predisposition to killing in the slightest.
Created by LOST alum Elizabeth Sarnoff (LOST) as well as Steven Lilien (KYLE XY) and Bryan Wynbrandt (KYLE XY), the show has potential with its intriguing high concept. But right now it’s simply a mediocre procedural set in San Francisco with only hints of the overarching storyline. In the mold of Anna Torv (FRINGE), Sarah Jones plays the tough and sexy Detective Rebecca Madsen, who’s involved not just to catch bad guys but to find clues about her grandfather (SPOILER: he’s one of the un-aged and killed her partner in the pilot). She’s joined by great LOST alum and Weezer cover boy Hurley, ahem, Jorge Garcia, as Dr. Diego Soto. He’s a comic book nerd with two doctorates and an Alcatraz obsession, and they need some humor to distract from Sam Neill’s stern face. Neill is Emerson Hauser, the mysterious benefactor with an unknown motive to track these guys down.
Now on the fourth episode of the show, Alcatraz still has some work to do. This week’s installment, “Cal Sweeney,” is written by Robert Hull (Gossip Girl) and directed by Fringe veteran Brad Anderson. While it’s still clearly early, the show hasn’t found the correct balance in terms of procedural and serial storytelling to this point. In the episode we follow, guess who, Cal Sweeney (played by Eric Johnson of Smallville semi- fame), who has a soft spot for safety deposit boxes and tellers. Cal finds lonely middle aged tellers and preys on them, seducing them during bank hours and luckily finding himself in the safety deposit vault where he then drugs the lady, and robs the boxes, not the cash (or else the Feds get involved). As a former employee at Bank of America, it’s hard to describe how wrong and insulting the idea that any of this would actually work, even with the help of a besotted teller (tellers rarely have access to vaults, they can’t turn off security cameras or the alarms in the vaults, and if they could, everything is under dual control with another employee, etc.). Let’s say Cal’s present day accomplishments would’ve been better suited for the 1960s, as would the whole plot because maybe we wouldn’t have seen it before.
As in every episode, the criminal’s return in present day is paralleled with his time in Alcatraz in an attempt to learn more about our villain in mini Criminal Minds fashion. We find out that Cal runs an illegal business selling and distributing contraband through the prison’s laundry system, and is showing young Harlan (Steven Grayhm) the ropes. Soon, the Kyle MacLachlan look-alike Deputy Warden E.B. Tiller (Jason Butler Harner) is onto him after tossing his cell and demands 50% of Cal’s cut or else he’ll reveal Cal’s business to the Warden. With the help of Harlan, Cal hatches a plan to recover what E.B. stole from his cell and to change his mind. The plan is to get E.B. alone at his birthday party and talk him out of it... Really....
16 THE GRAVEYARD EXAMINER
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