Alcatraz: Season 1 Finale

When Alcatraz finished its two-episode season finale, I should have raged at my machines—the TV, the TiVo, the Wii (which has nothing to do with it, really, other than sitting on the same IKEA stand). It was over and probably never coming back. The inhumanity of unanswered questions!

Instead, I deleted the episodes from my queue, made hot chocolate, and watched last week’s Community again. So endth Alcatraz, the no-way-this-is-getting-picked-up-for-a-season-two series executive produced by J.J. Abrams that was just a fraction more fun than solitary confinement.

At the time of my writing this there’s been no official word from Fox, but it doesn’t take a genius to see that Alcatraz’s ratings have dipped lower than the career of a Dancing with the Stars contestant. The network has certainly canned shows for less, so I’m not holding my breath.

What went wrong with Alcatraz is a testament to the creative consequences of riding coattails. If you like A, you’ll love B. (I don’t want to give “A” away, but it rhymes with smost.) Too slow, too answerless, too dully dimensional. As a paranormal procedural with a new villain to hunt each week, Alcatraz was a bundle of problems. Despite an interesting premise (the generic go-to line about the show almost every critic has used, including now yours truly) and a production team loaded with geeky pedigree, Alcatraz is—was—not a show you want to watch twice. It’s barely a show you want to watch once.

In 1963, everyone on Alcatraz Island vanished. Fifty years later the guards and prisoners, all dubbed the “63s,” have returned—some to wreak havoc, others to settle debts. Many, it seems, part of a bigger scheme controlled by an unknown puppet master.

Hunting them is FBI Agent Emerson Hauser (Sam Neill), a young police officer at the time of the disappearance, and his new recruits: cop Rebecca Madsen (Sarah Jones), the granddaughter of an Alcatraz prisoner, and Dr. Diego "Doc" Soto (Jorge Garcia), an expert on everything The Rock.

Alcatraz’s finale had one last chance to hook us, even if it hadn’t done such a superb job of it in the weeks prior. A great ending would have let the show sail off, forever alive in our nerdy subconscious—always there to dissect on DVD, relive through badly written tie-in novels, and complain about while waiting in line at a crossover Alcatraz/Prison Break Creation Convention.

Instead we were given mysteries wrapped in rote wrapped in the lyrics of The Time Warp.

The final episode, titled “Tommy Madsen,” promised to be the missing link, as Rebecca came face to face again with her grandfather.

So what did we learn as the season (series) came to a close?  Surprise after not surprise. The missing “63s” aren’t merely confined to the Vancouverish streets of San Francisco. Shocking. That Ford sponsored this episode. Go 2013 Mustang! That time jumping Tommy Madsen is Seriously (For Reals, Guys) Untrustworthy. Best of all, the Warden is behind everything. I do declare!

Toward the middle of the episode, Hauser lets Doc and Rebecca into his clandestine nerve center under Alcatraz, and Doc asks what we’re all thinking: “Why are you showing us this now?” The finale threw out some very Dharma-esque key words: time dilation, quantum tunneling, cryogenics. None of which racketed up the excitement, particularly while served up in a single throwaway line of dialogue. The question of what happened that night is never answered.

The worst part of Alcatraz was that it wasn’t bad. Not really. Catchy foundation? Check. Acting? Check. Characters…needed work, but it was hardly According To Jim level.

As the lead, Jones’s Rebecca wasn’t unsympathetic, per se, but uninspiring. It’s her life on the line in the finale, from the first bloody scene to the last, and the show turned the interest level up to Zzzleven. The same with Garcia as Doc, the comic book store-owning genius with traumatic baggage, who never got the opportunity to be anyone but Lost’s Hurley with a soul patch.

Neill’s Hauser is overly stoic, but his romantic subplot—the ultimate May-December scenario—with Lucy (Parminder Nagra), the Alcatraz psychiatrist with whom he had a relationship before her disappearance and subsequent return, had potential. Usually when they cast a younger women as an older man’s love interest (see: nearly every movie in Hollywood) it’s sort of creepy and ageist— now it’s just creepy in a tragic, doomed-love sort of way.

Given the amount of great TV on network (yes, network) and cable, plus the discovery of old-is-new-again goodies on Netflix, why would anyone spend time with Alcatraz? Trying to crib off the remnants of Lost (with a dash of The 4400, The X-Files, and CSI) does not a mass audience, nor a cult following, make. Lost is two years off the air, and it’s a lesson still in need of learning.

When Alcatraz doesn’t return (probably; wilder things have happened), most of us who stuck it out will move on, forgetting about it in favor of the “next Lost” to arrive this fall. One group, however, will be giddy it’s over—the National Park Service on Alcatraz Island. Forced to post warning signs against visitors wandering into restricted areas looking for Hauser’s “Bat Cave,” there will be a few happier Park Rangers out there knowing that another J.J. Abrams project didn’t make it past a first season.