![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
clo_againSo disappointed in Outcasts; I actually doubt that I'll remember to tune in for the next episode. Bah. And the trailers were so fascinatingly pretty too.
Why would you create a character as interestingly complex and of questionable moral direction as Mitchell, then kill him at the end of the first episode? I mean seriously, his backstory was going to be the thing that made me tune back in next week. I get that perhaps they wanted to hold off the reveal of The Big Secret About El Presidente & His Dubious Moral Choices but they spent around two thirds of the episode focused on Mitchell, they built him up as The Big Thing... and then they wiped all that character building out by having him shot. You could've just had him running the fuck away! Then all that time you spent building audience interest in him wouldn't have felt like a complete waste of time spent breathing. Or they could've had Mitchell be offscreen a lot more, focus on the other characters who're obviously going to be the Main Event like Cas, because character development given to them would actually count towards something next week. If they wanted to character develop Mitchell, set him up as the bad guy with half as much screen time, kill him off, then retroactively reveal him as the good guy while at the same time, give your other characters more time to grow in episode one when it's most important that they make a memorable first impression.
Instead you expect us to tune back in on the promise of a character we've heard mentioned twice and saw onscreen for about three seconds, sitting in an escape pod and grinning. Based on this week? It's not enough to spark my interest.
Of the other characters, Cas and Fleur are certainly the best; Cas because well, he's the only one (besides the adorable piece of pretty-with-dubious-morality whose brain gets looked through) with a sense of humour, and Fleur because it's nice to have a girl who stalks off into the woods and doesn't take crap. Although I suspect her desperate belief in the president is going to get annoying if she doesn't lighten up enough to listen when Cas inevitably discovers The Truth and tries to explain it to her (the President doesn't do anything other than make a mind-numbingly cheesy speech and Forthaven as a whole is so depressing, it's hard to understand why she could love it so much It feels distinctly like We Need This Character To Have A Personality; Here Let Me Tell You About It).
Really, you could map where this series is going with chalk and a blackboard. The things in the woods are the ill children who Mitchell was told to kill for the Greater Good but didn't; Cas is going to slowly discover all the reasons why the President is kind of a crap guy-thinking-he's-acting-for-the-Greater-Good; Fleur is going to have a moral and emotional dilemma between her love for Forthaven and the inevitable romance with Cas; Jack is going to be the somewhat-wooden token soldier guy who was just there to sell out Mitchell and doesn't get any interesting storylines at all; Stella who could actually be almost interesting if she didn't have the baggage of a faceless family we've never seen and don't give a crap about because we've heard it all before on better-done shows, is going to get Lily back, Lily will catch this mysterious C-something virus, die/disappear into the wilderness and Stella will get more and more addicted to the Deep Brain Imagery thing while using Dubious-Morality-Pretty to make herself feel better; this mysterious Julius is going to waltz in and piss the establishment the fuck off while charming/bullshitting his way into taking over Forthaven.
And just when it all really goes to shit, another ship from Earth will probably show up to make it worse.
If the second episode, or the third, or the eighth, proves me completely wrong and becomes a dazzlingly good series then I will eat my words. But it'll have to be someone else telling me how good it is, because I won't be watching.
Oh, and that little kid saying the Tyger, Tyger poem over and over and OVER? I love that poem. If asked for my favourite poem in the world, that would be my kneejerk answer. And yt by about the fourth repetition of it by a kid who could act about as well as a plank of wood (though that's insulting to a plank of wood) I was all for taking that entire poem out back and shooting it to put it out of its misery. It wasn't even relevant, wtf.
eta: Twitter agrees with me; hiring Jamie Bamber for a sci-fi show and killing him off in the first episode is a pretty dumb thing to do. Unless you know, you want to immediately lose about half your audience who might have kept watching otherwise. If he only wanted to do one episode, don't bloody hire him in the first place and save yourselves the Twitter!bitching about how crap it was that they killed Jamie Bamber! The rest of the show? Oh who cares, they killed Jamie Bamber! Omg!
(I was extremely disappointed that they killed Jamie Bamber by the way, and only partly because his character was the only interesting thing about the episode. It never hurts to have a litle eye candy around to carry the show through dull spots.)
I have an actual proper post in me somewhere, that one day will get written and posted and have pictures to illustrate! But not tonight. Let this be your monthly notice that I Still Aten't Ded. :) More intelligent/interesting/boring-but-will-get-posted-anyway things will have to wait.
Why would you create a character as interestingly complex and of questionable moral direction as Mitchell, then kill him at the end of the first episode? I mean seriously, his backstory was going to be the thing that made me tune back in next week. I get that perhaps they wanted to hold off the reveal of The Big Secret About El Presidente & His Dubious Moral Choices but they spent around two thirds of the episode focused on Mitchell, they built him up as The Big Thing... and then they wiped all that character building out by having him shot. You could've just had him running the fuck away! Then all that time you spent building audience interest in him wouldn't have felt like a complete waste of time spent breathing. Or they could've had Mitchell be offscreen a lot more, focus on the other characters who're obviously going to be the Main Event like Cas, because character development given to them would actually count towards something next week. If they wanted to character develop Mitchell, set him up as the bad guy with half as much screen time, kill him off, then retroactively reveal him as the good guy while at the same time, give your other characters more time to grow in episode one when it's most important that they make a memorable first impression.
Instead you expect us to tune back in on the promise of a character we've heard mentioned twice and saw onscreen for about three seconds, sitting in an escape pod and grinning. Based on this week? It's not enough to spark my interest.
Of the other characters, Cas and Fleur are certainly the best; Cas because well, he's the only one (besides the adorable piece of pretty-with-dubious-morality whose brain gets looked through) with a sense of humour, and Fleur because it's nice to have a girl who stalks off into the woods and doesn't take crap. Although I suspect her desperate belief in the president is going to get annoying if she doesn't lighten up enough to listen when Cas inevitably discovers The Truth and tries to explain it to her (the President doesn't do anything other than make a mind-numbingly cheesy speech and Forthaven as a whole is so depressing, it's hard to understand why she could love it so much It feels distinctly like We Need This Character To Have A Personality; Here Let Me Tell You About It).
Really, you could map where this series is going with chalk and a blackboard. The things in the woods are the ill children who Mitchell was told to kill for the Greater Good but didn't; Cas is going to slowly discover all the reasons why the President is kind of a crap guy-thinking-he's-acting-for-the-Greater-Good; Fleur is going to have a moral and emotional dilemma between her love for Forthaven and the inevitable romance with Cas; Jack is going to be the somewhat-wooden token soldier guy who was just there to sell out Mitchell and doesn't get any interesting storylines at all; Stella who could actually be almost interesting if she didn't have the baggage of a faceless family we've never seen and don't give a crap about because we've heard it all before on better-done shows, is going to get Lily back, Lily will catch this mysterious C-something virus, die/disappear into the wilderness and Stella will get more and more addicted to the Deep Brain Imagery thing while using Dubious-Morality-Pretty to make herself feel better; this mysterious Julius is going to waltz in and piss the establishment the fuck off while charming/bullshitting his way into taking over Forthaven.
And just when it all really goes to shit, another ship from Earth will probably show up to make it worse.
If the second episode, or the third, or the eighth, proves me completely wrong and becomes a dazzlingly good series then I will eat my words. But it'll have to be someone else telling me how good it is, because I won't be watching.
Oh, and that little kid saying the Tyger, Tyger poem over and over and OVER? I love that poem. If asked for my favourite poem in the world, that would be my kneejerk answer. And yt by about the fourth repetition of it by a kid who could act about as well as a plank of wood (though that's insulting to a plank of wood) I was all for taking that entire poem out back and shooting it to put it out of its misery. It wasn't even relevant, wtf.
eta: Twitter agrees with me; hiring Jamie Bamber for a sci-fi show and killing him off in the first episode is a pretty dumb thing to do. Unless you know, you want to immediately lose about half your audience who might have kept watching otherwise. If he only wanted to do one episode, don't bloody hire him in the first place and save yourselves the Twitter!bitching about how crap it was that they killed Jamie Bamber! The rest of the show? Oh who cares, they killed Jamie Bamber! Omg!
(I was extremely disappointed that they killed Jamie Bamber by the way, and only partly because his character was the only interesting thing about the episode. It never hurts to have a litle eye candy around to carry the show through dull spots.)
I have an actual proper post in me somewhere, that one day will get written and posted and have pictures to illustrate! But not tonight. Let this be your monthly notice that I Still Aten't Ded. :) More intelligent/interesting/boring-but-will-get-posted-anyway things will have to wait.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2011-02-09 11:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-16 11:26 pm (UTC)Jamie Bamber was the only thing that would've made me tune in for episode two. Not only is it Jamie Bamber, he was the only character with any sort of interesting story/potential plot arcs/dubious morality issues that would've been really fun to watch develop. They really failed with this series and it's so disappointing after all the hype. :(