By David Liss

Alcatraz, I am running out of patience. All you have to do is give me some reason to care about your main story and the characters who inhabit it, and I’ll be happy. Why is that so hard to do? This week’s episode is a big step backwards from last weeks’ mythology-builder, and instead we get something that is episodic and phoned-in, ignoring those the main thing the show does well – intriguing prison flash-backs – and replacing them with a generic and under-wrought generic cop show.

That said, last night, Alcatraz delivered its most literary episode yet – with references to Harold Robbins, Ovid and a character who is obsessed with Jules Verne as imagined by writers who have clearly never read him. All of which, it turns out, is in the service of nothing. Fox had teased that this week’s episode of Alcatraz was going to reveal some important back story, including information on why Tommy Madsen is so important to the show, but that turned out to be a bluff. Instead we get another wheel-spinning installment that drops vaguely suggestive hints at a larger story which it does little to advance.

Our returned psycho this week is Johnny McKee a serial poisoner, who targets people he has decided have it coming – plus those people who happen to be near by. He has a particular thing for bullies, and when we first meet him he is working as a bartender and poisons a quartet of men because one of them was being an over-the-top-dick. So, right away we get a sense that McKee has no sense of proportion. Just as I’m wondering how a guy from the past, who has no present-day identification, can get hired at all, he takes a job as a pool boy and is immediately confronted by more improbable assholery. One jerk throws a towel on his head, so he poisons everyone in the pool. Ultimately we learn why McKee can’t just take a chill pill. The one girl in high school who was nice to him was put up to it by the football team, who ambushed him and threw firecrackers at him, one of which – wait for it – blew off his testicles. I can see how that might make someone angry. McKee goes off, learns chemistry, becomes a wiz at poisoning people, reads lots of Jules Verne, and ends up at Alcatraz. When he was first arrested in the ‘50s, he’d killed more than 70 people, which I think would make him the most prolific serial killer of all time, no?

In Alcatraz he’s just another murderer, but when the local kingpin hires him to kill a rival in the shank business, McKee identifies the kingpin as a bully, so we all know who is going to be on the business end of his homemade poison. These prison sequences tend to be the highlight in an otherwise lackluster show, but this one felt phoned in to me. No real drama, no warden craziness (other than his loony introduction to prison movie night) and nothing that sheds light on the time traveling mystery.

Hot on his heels in the present day, we learn that Soto has the cell assignment of every inmate in Alcatraz committed to memory, that Hauser speaks Mandarin fluently, but without any understanding of tones, and that Madsen is perfectly okay with Hauser stepping all over her interrogations. This happens when Soto suggests they speak to Jack Sylvane, since he was McKee’s next door neighbor. Hauser refuses to let Madsen go to the facility where he is being held, won’t explain who the soldiers guarding the interrogation are, and doesn’t let Hauser answer any questions that don’t have to do specifically with Mckee – including the ones that might shed some light on her own grandfather. And she takes it all without batting an eyelash. Where’s the tough chick now? Given what Madsen has learned in previous weeks, why is she so willing to let Hauser hold back on her and not complain. There’s so much potential for drama and conflict here, and it’s all going to waste. Instead we get vague gestures toward character, such as when Soto goes to visit the hot coroner with a soft spot for golden-age heroes. She finds that fact that Soto doesn’t like dissected corpses oh so cute.

But back to the exciting manhunt. Investigations lead to an abandoned school house chemistry lab – which Madsen and Hauser investigate without backup – and then an 11th hour realization that McKee is plotting to gas a BART train. Madsen and Hauser head to the scene, again without backup. If more than one bad guy ever emerges at the same time, they are not going to have enough personnel to handle the crisis. In the end, the ticking clock is stopped, the bad guy is apprehended, and everyone goes back to not wondering what the hell is going on.

Framing all this is comatose Lucy. At the start of the episode, Dr. Beaureguard declares that he’s tried Lucy’s alternative techniques – which turn out to be more odd ball/new age and less super-secret scientific – than we’ve been led to believe. Shock therapy and acupuncture have had no success, and now Lucy is comatose but dreaming. Dreams later become suggestive throughout the episode. McKee claims not to dream at all, but historical Lucy knows he’s lying, and that his dreams hold the key to the truth about his secret of explosive castration. Sylvane reveals that one of the side effects of being post time travel is that he no longer dreams.

And then there’s the inexplicable business with the book. Beaureguard tells Hauser to read to Lucy, handing her a copy of a Harold Robbins novel, but Hauser refuses. At the end of the episode, Hauser picks up the book and it turns out to be a copy of Ovid’ Metamorphoses in disguise. The significance of dreams – and who has them and who does not – is never explained, and I feel like there is something going on when we see a work of classical poetry disguises as a potboiler, but I’ll be damned if I know what it is. In the end, we get another episode with insignificant forward movement and little pay out. Alcatraz, you are on notice.

David Liss is the author of seven novels, most recently The Twelfth Enchantment. His previous books include A Conspiracy of Paper (2000) which was named a New York Times Notable Book and won the 2001 Barry, MacAvity and Edgar awards for Best First novel. The Coffee Trader (2003) was also named a New York Times Notable Book and was selected by the New York Public Library as one of the year’s 25 Books to Remember. A Spectacle of Corruption (2004) was a national bestseller, and The Devil’s Company (2009) has been optioned for film by Warner Brothers. Liss is the author of the graphic novel Mystery Men and writes Black Panther for Marvel Comics as well as the forthcoming series, The Spider, from Dynamite Comics.

By David Liss

Some stories are so complicated that they require considerable effort on the front end in order to yield dividends down the road. Alcatraz is not one of them. A quarter season of largely generic maneuvering has been in no way necessary to buttress any kind of narrative architecture. The show has been laboring with a set-up that is – to use two similar culinary metaphors – both half baked and under cooked. All that said, it seems that Alcatraz is finally inching toward deploying its various elements to some effective purpose.

Last night’s episode felt like, in most ways, a major step forward. There are still some major problems related to Alcatraz’s most basic premise. Another week, and another psycho from the past is running around in the present day, commit crimes because he’s been programmed to do so or because it’s simply his nature – or, perhaps, both. This time it’s xxxx, who is a serial land-mine deployer. Um, yeah. Okay. I will say that when land-mine wielding Paxton Petty, first shows up, I thought we were going to have a grade-A badass on our hands. Madsen sees him at the scene of the crime, chases him down, and gets the drop on him – until Petty hurls a land mine at him. How cool is that? Except, that’s his last cool moment of the episode. For the rest of the show, he just looks creepily at people and digs in the sand a lot. Meanwhile, Madsen is hot on his trail and figures out exactly how to track him down by asking a couple of people some probing questions. She’s good at police work, that one. Soto tags along, trying to convince himself and everyone else that he has some purpose in the investigation and in the story. Having a Soto geek moment-of-the-week is simply not enough, though I appreciate that this week it was a reference to Sandman – the original pulp Sandman, not that Neal Gaiman stuff.

Alcatraz’s real strength has been its flashback sequences to the prison in the 1960s, but in the past couple of weeks, those segments have fallen off, delivering less dramatic punch and serving more to explicate the less satisfying contemporary narrative. This week, at least, the two timelines are bridged in ways I found interesting.

Since she was shot and rendered comatose in the second episode, there have been hints of a connection between Hauser and Lucy, and this week we get more of the picture, including a budding romance between 1960s Hauser and Lucy. This raises some very interesting questions: mainly how is it that Lucy and Beauregard have come forward in time and Hauser has not; and if they possess time travel know-how themselves, is there some opposing power that possesses the same technology? We also got to learn something about Lucy’s sophisticated reprogramming techniques, which involve ice cold water boarding followed by tea, sedatives, mints and electrocution.
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By David Liss

Last night’s episode of Alcatraz represented a considerable step in the right conceptual direction, and even if the end result was less compelling than I would have liked, it nevertheless bodes well for the direction of the show.

We begin, as regular viewers have now come to expect, with the appearance of the psychopath of the week – though this time there is a twist. The man from 1963 who appears in modern times is not a prisoner but a guard, Guy Hastings. That is pretty much were the differences end, however, as he proceeds immediately to pummel the crap out of a park ranger and launch himself upon a crime spree.

But here is where Alcatraz starts go get things right. Hastings is directly connected to former guard Ray Archer, whom we have been told is Madsen’s “uncle” – which is to say, not really her uncle, but the family friend who raised her after her parents died. Hastings proceeds to abduct Archer because he’s looking for Tommy, Madsen’s grandfather, and the guy who killed her partner in the series opener. See, things are getting all soap-opera-like and inter-connected now. Cool, right?

Yes, but not as cool as I want it to be. Part of the problem is the by-the-numbers feeling of the episode. Another returned psycho, another abduction and ticking clock. The problem with formula is that it begins to feel, well, formulaic, if you don’t distract the audience with enough real drama. Even though Madsen is ostensibly at the center of these events, she still feels generic and uninteresting, and Jorge Garcia’s Soto is little more than an afterthought in this episode. Once again, it is the returned prisoner who is the interesting character in the story, but if this episode had more relevant contemporary drama, its flashback sequences lacked the intensity of previous weeks.
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This post contains spoilers through the January 30 episode of Alcatraz.

By David Liss

Alcatraz, I’ve come to realize, would be a much better show if it were about strange goings-on in the prison in the 1960s. The time-traveling inmates on their psychopathic 21st century crime sprees remain the least interesting part of the show, but last night’s episode demonstrated how transcendently weird and wonderful this series can be when it is allowed to linger on its core strength: Alcatraz of the past.

This week’s time-hopping prisoner is Cal Sweeney, a bank robber who only targets safety deposit boxes – ostensibly because that keeps the robbery being classified as a federal crime (though he ends up in federal prison anyhow, doesn’t he?), but we learn that there is a deeper psychological component involved. In the modern era, Sweeney’s m.o. is to romance a bank teller and gets her to give him unmonitored access to the safety deposit boxes (though, at least in my bank, it’s not the tellers who do that). Then he jabs a needle in her neck, robs the boxes, and tracks down the owners of the stolen objects, whom he tortures and kills. Neat.

Back in the 1960s, Sweeney has a contraband operation going on through the prison laundry room. It’s all going swimmingly until crooked deputy warden Tiller tosses Sweeney’s cell. A precious object goes missing, and when Tiller demands a cut of the contraband business, Sweeney says no way until his beloved box is returned. It’s Harlan, laundry room protégé and next-cell-neighbor, who comes up with the solution. Infiltrate Tiller’s birthday party, held at the warden’s residence, and get a word alone with the deputy warden.

The two narratives proceed much as they have in previous weeks, but never before has the magnetic pull of the flashbacks so effectively dwarfed the contemporary “main” story. Madsen and Soto have come to feel totally forgettable despite their being the stars of the show. They’re there to follow around the bad guy and collect clues so we understand him better. Along the way, we come to care about and be interested in, if not like, Sweeney. We still don’t give a crap about the protagonists despite half-hearted efforts to give them character by showing Madsen loving dim sum or having Soto talk about his (absurd) journal article which used Gotham City crime figures as a statistical model.
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This post contains spoilers for the January 23 episode of Alcatraz.

By David Liss

Last night’s episode of J. A. Abrams’s Alcatraz suffered from precisely the same flaws as the series debut last week, and very little changed to improve the plot and character mechanics, and yet – somehow – it actually seemed like a better show. The series still lacks the excitement and energy of early episodes of Alias and Lost, and the commercial for the new Star Wars online game did a better job of grabbing my attention than most of the scenes. There were also more than a few moments of clumsy cliché and even clumsier plot points, but even so, there are signs of life, some electric moments, and promises that there could be exciting things on the horizon.
 
No one who watched last week’s episodes will be surprised by the episode’s structure. The latest Alcatraz inmate from 1963 mysteriously appears in the present day, and it is up to our intrepid team of one police officer and one comic book “guru” to track him down. In this case, we get an added ticking clock, as the creep of the week is a child-abductor who follows a specific pattern: kidnap on the Friday and return the dead body on a Sunday. Madsen and Soto are on the case, however – even after their efforts are hampered by the even-yet-still-creepier Hauser, who cancels the Amber Alert on the abducted child lest the general public somehow get wind that psychos from the ‘60s are walking our streets – even if it is only one at a time. Get ready for the great cherry-pie-hunt.
 
Here’s what worked about the episode: (1) we get an effective ticking clock. Sure, we saw that last time around with the returned sniper, but now we’ve got a sympathetic child, a creepy psycho trying to make him have “fun.”  These moments where the kidnapper is attempting to force his victim to fish, enjoy a movie or eat cherry pie are almost unwatchably painful. The alchemy worked.
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This post contains spoilers for the pilot of Alcatraz.

By David Liss

Here’s the premise of J. J. Abrams’s new show, Alcatraz: when the eponymous prison shut down in 1963, the prisoners were not transferred to other facilities, as everyone seems to think. They disappeared off the face of the earth, and now they are reappearing – having not aged since their initial disappearance. Upon returning, they immediately get back to committing crimes, seemingly programmed to do so by whomever orchestrated their disappearance. As I write this, it all sounds much more interesting than it actually is.

Unfortunately, based on the first two hours of the series, Alcatraz has not yet found its stride. It fails for a few reasons, but the most important one is the lack of integration between the plot and the characters. Leading the show is maverick cop (ugh) Rebecca Madsen (played by workmanlike Sarah Jones), a babe with a T. J. Hooker swagger. Yeah, she’s a hot chick, but she’s a food snarfing, whiskey-chugging tough gal who isn’t about to let those pencil-pushers make her do things by the book. Madsen has been off her game since her partner was killed while chasing a bad guy they still haven’t caught or identified. Then Federal Agent Emerson Hauser (Sam Neill) assholishly kicks her off a crime scene when she’s investigating the murder of a former Alcatraz deputy warden. Madsen, of course, isn’t about to let something like jurisdiction get in the way of her doing what is in no way her job, so she recruits Diego Soto (Jorge Garcia) a comic-book-writing, comic-book-store-owning, video-game-playing Alcatraz expert with four books and two Ph.D.s under his belt. I guess a second Ph.D. wouldn’t be that hard after you figure out how to complete the first one, but still. This is overkill, no? But I’ll just take it as nerd honey-trap #1.

Evidence Madsen lifts from the crime scene point them to a former Alcatraz inmate long believed to be dead, but alive and no older than he was in 1963, so they head over to the Rock, start digging around in a secret archive that Soto just happens to know about. Then they’re gassed and abducted, taken to a secret facility under Alcatraz, run dickishly by Hauser and Lucy (Parminder Nagra), his hot and super-smart assistant (nerd honey-trap #2!) — and promptly recruited to catch the Alcatraz inmates returning from somewhere in time. Soto tries to get us excited about this (“Is anyone else’s head exploding?”), but really, they all take the situation in stride. Madison wants to catch bad guys, and the time travel component remains secondary to the characters because it is secondary to the show.

Over the course of the two hours we learn a couple of things — but mostly about what we don’t know or care much about. Hauser has got more info than he is sharing. He is transferring the recaptured prisoners to a new facility, whose seriousness is indicated by its stationary military guards and its excess of florescent light. Then there’s Lucy, who is shot during the apprehension of the second criminal they come across, and who turns out — as we learn a the end of the second hour — was involved with these inmates back in 1963, during the federal government’s concentrated push to bring more South Asian female doctors into the corrections system. Then there is the facility under Alcatraz itself. Someone has invested millions of dollars into infrastructure in preparation for the prisoners returning, which means someone knew they would someday return. That suggests the disappearance and ultimate return are part of a predictable pattern — or maybe I’m overthinking it. Maybe it doesn’t go beyond cryptic guys in suits doing things they don’t want you to know about.
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