Alphas: Season 2 Premiere

If you missed the first season of Alphas last year, you missed quite a charming spin on the good ol’ mutant/superhero genre. You see, this show suggests that having superpowers is actually pretty sucky and alienating. Imagine having super-heightened senses—so much so that even soft conversations happening next door, or the smells of a restaurant a few blocks away are enough to give you screaming migraines. That’s what Rachel Pirzad (Azita Ghanizada) goes through every day. And then there’s Nina Theroux (Laura Mennell), who has the ability to make anyone do exactly as she says. It sounds like that would be a dream come true for most people, but man! That girl has got a whole boat load of intimacy issues. For every benefit, there seems to be a shady underside that just makes life hard to deal with. Along with these two, we learn of Bill Harken (Malik Yoba) and his hulk-like strength, which of course comes with hulk-like problems. And there’s Cameron Hicks (Warren Christie), who is unable to escape the thoughts of inadequacy after he finds out that his perfect aim is a mutant ability. He wrestles with the idea that his glory days as a baseball player were nothing more than one giant unfair advantage. The last Alpha that rounds out the team is Gary Bell (Ryan Cartwright). Gary is autistic, and he also happens to have the power to “see” wireless energy fields. That means that there is full-time cable and internet in his head all day, every day.

So what do these folks have in common? Why, the charmingly self-aware, capable, hippie-like psychiatrist Dr. Lee Rosen (David Strathairn). David discovered Alphas, and has been treating them as patients, teaching them how to face and overcome their “disabilities” ever since. But the government has other ideas. There are lab facilities where captured Alphas are held against their will and experimented on, and there’s an indefinite detention center as well. And the only way Dr. Rosen can keep his friends and patients (the ones mentioned above) safe from such places is to make a deal to form an elite crime fighting team of his Alpha friends in order to catch and detain other rogue Alphas.

Sounds pretty good right? Well, it was. Especially considering that this was a smaller SyFy channel series. But now, at the beginning of season two, things feel a bit stale. The whole episode was spent reintroducing us to the characters and bringing about events that we already knew were going to take place the minute they signed up for a second season. Perhaps this is savvy marketing, allowing new audience members to understand which character does what and what the previous events were. But as an avid watcher of the first season, I was bored out of my skull. And really that is the only thing I can come up with to excuse this episode. For all it seems to be is a parroty rehash of the basic events of the first season.

But you know what, that’s fine. Sometimes small shows have to do that if they want to get a bigger following on their second attempt. Enough buzz has built up, and now they have to answer that buzz with exciting events while at the same time filling in the pieces that were missed by new viewers. And that’s what they did, but they could have done it much more smoothly and with better effect had they leaned on their stronger characters. Dr. Lee Rosen and Gary Bell are what make this show. The other characters are good, but those two are great. They are quirky and true to themselves and fresh as hell. But they took a back seat in this episode, and that’s the only true flaw that I cannot excuse away with demographics and marketing.

So yes, there was excitement—explosions even. But key ingredients were missing, which made this episode taste a little off. If you have to submit to conventions such as the ones described above, at least tell those conventions through the eyes of your most interesting characters. It makes the pill far easier to swallow. Happy writing.