Alpha bits

I've been watching SyFy's "Alphas".

There. I said it.

It's sad that I feel embarrassed by watching anything on SyFy these days. All the same, I felt intrigued by the concept and have been watching it continually since the show started.

There's a few spoilers contained below. If this show even remotely interests you, you should be aware of that.

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Okay, moving on.

The show is a tepid, weak-tea attempt at doing "Heroes" and "X-Men". I think I posted on this a few months back. It's not a great show by any means, but it has promise.

Monday night it realized some of that promise.

The premise is pretty straightforward: there's people in the world who have special abilities. These abilities are often offset with some kind of psychological or physiological issue.

Example:

Bill Harken (Malik Yoba): an ex-FBI agent who can jack up his adrenal glands to give himself super-strength and an inability to feel pain. As a result, he's got rage issues and is a bit of an aggressive dickhead. If he uses his super-strength too often, he gets all woozy and light-headed.

Gary Bell (Ryan Cartwright): A mildly-autistic guy who can "see" radio/cellular signals (except Nokia phone signals... gotta love that). He's easily the most interesting character of the lot.

Rachel Pirzad (Azita Ghanizada): A former FBI forensics student (maybe former agent? I'm unclear on this) who can jack up any of her senses at the expense of the others. So she can smell what you had for breakfast this morning or when you bathed last, but she couldn't hear you talking right next to her. Or she could see the details of carpet impressions at the cost of similar senses. She's actually starting to grow on me.

Nina Theroux (Laura Mennell): A woman who can make you do whatever she says provided you can see and hear her. *Yawn* Boring character.

Cameron Hicks (Warren Christie): A former Army sniper with perfect coordination and a number of substance abuse issues. *Yawn* Boring character. Oh, and he has a very uninteresting fling-thing going on with Nina.

As super-powers go, the good guys don't have much in the way of flashy abilities. They're a mix of dysfunctional, issue-driven nuts who work for the Department of Defense in a vaguely brownshirt capacity as enforcers.

Am I the only person disturbed by the trend of TV shows in which the "heroes" completely ignore the Bill of Rights?

Anyway, this team is led by Doctor Lee Rosen (David Strathairn), a hippy-dippy, and vaguely sinister, psychologist who has no superpowers but understands them pretty well. Actually, Rosen may well be the most interesting character in the lot.

They fight "monsters of the week" in the form of people with superpowers.

Last week they started to move out of the bush leagues. The guest stars were Brent Spiner ("Data" of "Star Trek: The Next Generation") and Rebecca Mader (one of the many walk-on roles in "Lost"). Spiner played a blind guy with the bat-like ability of echolocation. He can apparently amp up his sonar powers over time and eventually bring down buildings. Pretty badass, really.

Mader played a mercenary who can hide in the "blind spot" of the eye through some pseudo-scientific method. It was kind of cool, really.

What started as a clear contest between the so-called "heroes" and Spiner's character (a representative of the so-called villain group "Red Flag", a group who feel a need to sound like an insecticide) turned into a three-way throwdown as Mader's character "Griffin" (loved the Invisible Man reference) entered the fray and expanded the mythology a bit.

It's sad that the walk-on characters are generally more interesting than the main cast.

The show does have promise. There's a vague sense of moral ambiguity as some of the characters (specifically the otherwise-uninteresting Hicks and Nina) have doubts about working for the DOD to take down people with similar abilities and talents.

The show would benefit immensely by ditching Hicks as a character. His backstory is tired and cumbersome. His relationship with Nina feels contrived. The character's abilities are cool, but sadly-underused.

Similarly, the writers should either make Nina less of a vamp-like character or ditch the character altogether.

Certainly both characters could benefit from having their backstories spiced up a bit. Maybe make Hicks a "Red Flag" mole or something.

And "Red Flag"? Really? That's the name of the bad guys? Seriously?

Ye gods.

It would also be nice if the show could figure out if they're going the route of "Heroes" and introducing superpowers where people can read minds, throw lightning and all that or staying low-key (and thus low-budget).