World Enough and Time

Last night I watched the pilot episode of the Chris Carter show, The After.

What an ill-conceived show.

The problem was, it made no sense. It appeared at first that nothing electronic, electrical, or mechanical would work - but then some things did work. The initial characters, six people stuck in an elevator, appeared to be random - and then turned out to have the same birthday, though not the same date of birth. In all the general sense of hysteria, panic, and confusion, no one expresses surprise or speculates as to why this may be happening. Our protagonist, physically attractive but not too bright, risks life and limb to recover her cell phone - twice - when the phones aren't working and her battery surely can't last much longer anyway. There was a lot of shouting and some gunfire, but nothing much in the way of coherence.

The only that almost made it interesting was the appearance of a funny-looking alien, but even that was brief, unexplained, and unremarked. And the characters? It was fun to see Aldis Hodge (from Leveage) and Adrian Pasdar (from Heroes), but they seemed to have no personality - except the left-over personalities of Hardison and Nathan Petrelli. That may have just been my interpretation, having nothing else to go on - least of all script.

Makes me long for the old X-Files days.