TV networks and the producers who supply their programming strive for originality more than most people may realize. That is a good thing, of course. The problem is when the original elements undermine the effect of a show. That’s the case with the Fox TV drama series Alcatraz, executive-produced by J. J. Abrams. Its season finale will be broadcast tonight at 8 EDT.
The show takes the narrative structure of a police procedural and adds a good many impossibilities which belong either to science fiction or paranormal fiction. And in doing so, it foregoes an opportunity to use those elements to explore the roots of current-day social problems, an endeavor that is implicit in the premise and would have made the show much more interesting.
The concept: Alcatraz inmates and guards who disappeared almost fifty years ago, in 1963, are reappearing today, unchanged after a half-century. At the time the island prison off the coast of California was closed, there were 256 prisoners and 46 guards.
The show conveys an increasingly popular mid-60s-style adventure-show atmosphere, which is particularly evident in scenes in the FBI team’s underground lab at Alcatraz, with its shiny high-tech equipment and romantically dingy location. The show also benefits from occasional impressionistic visuals reminiscent of 1930s Universal horror films.
Sam Neill (Jurassic Park) plays the leader of a small, secret FBI team whose duties are not initially made clear. Sarah Jones does a good job portraying the main character, spunky young San Francisco police detective Rebecca Madsen. Her partner is the engaging Dr. Diego Soto, a civilian expert on the history of Alcatraz, played by the oddly charismatic Jorge Garcia (Hurley on the ABC series Lost, also produced by Abrams). Robert Forster adds strong presence as Det. Marsden’s uncle. Forster’s character, Ray Archer, raised Madsen after her parents died.
As a good mystery show should, Alcatraz raises some puzzling questions: What horrible event occurred at Alcatraz around the time of the men’s disappearance? What caused the men to vanish and then suddenly reappear many years later? Where have they been in the intervening half-century? Who is giving them orders now? What does the federal government know about all of this? Why are former inmates being ordered to execute modern-day people?
Unfortunately, those elements are married to a very conventional cop-show formula, and the two don’t fit together well. Each week’s story plays out as a fairly conventional police procedural in which the detectives laboriously track the violator of the week. The sci-fi/paranormal backdrop is left as a mystery to both Det. Madsen and the audience, and clues about it are parceled out with the stinginess that is the norm for these shows. Since the mystery is deemed essential to the show’s interest, the producers are naturally loath to give too many clues too soon. Thus in the early episodes, Madsen’s frustration with Hauser’s unwillingness to tell her what her knows about the secrets behind the events constituted an unwelcome reminder that the show’s producers were treating the audience the same way.
With such a paucity of clues regarding the central mystery, there really isn’t much for the viewer to do each week but watch the investigation play out: we know who’s committing the killings, and we don’t know what’s behind it all, so there’s no point in even trying to guess about it. The mysterious phrase “There’s 47 slats in the picket fence” is a central element in episode 2, “Ernest Cobb,” and its meaning eventually becomes clear, but it ultimately doesn’t mean anything important and it doesn’t contribute either to the identifying of the killer nor in capturing him. It adds some detail to what we’re told about his twisted reasons for becoming a serial mass murderer, but that’s all. And with nothing to be gained from the answer, it’s not worth the effort it takes for the viewer to solve it.
In “Ernest Cobb,” the main detective characters do become more appealing than they were in the ultra-gloomy first episode, as both Hauser and Madsen smile on occasion, as do their respective partners. This provides an occasional respite from the dismal visuals and story lines.
Episode 3, “Kit Nelson,” has a suspenseful premise: the team tries to track down a serial killer of young boys before he kills a ten-year-old whom he has kidnapped. Of course, this is a plot line that has been done innumerable times—every week on Criminal Minds, in fact. In addition, the series concept isn’t used to any advantage: the knowledge of the past it provides simply stands in for some elements of the standard profiling-and-tracking aspects of the standard serial-killer narrative.
Later episodes follow much the same pattern, and there’s some value in it: the main narrative conceit is a good way of suggesting the great impact the past has on the present. Of course, the notion that the past affects the present is blindingly obvious, and Alcatraz doesn’t use the specifics of the premise to full effect: to show how social problems of today have their roots in attitudes that arose in the 1960s.
That would have been a very interesting thing to explore in some detail. Perhaps the producers will do so next season—if there is one.