Contains spoilers.
Just as I thought, this week’s episode was more exciting than the pilot. In my mind, a show’s beginning needs to open up questions and the viewer needs to hunger for the answers enough to watch every week. They have certainly opened up questions, but I wouldn’t say I’m addicted:
- Who is Grace and what part does she play?
- Who is she talking to?
- Why is Rachel (Charlie’s mom) working for Monroe?
- What would actually happen if the power turned back on?
This episode introduced Nora, an character with whom Miles has history. He goes straight to looking for Nora because he doesn’t think they’ll find Danny without her – that is a significant amount of faith coming from such a hardass like Miles. I think we can expect some pretty badass things from Nora.
We also got a look into Charlie’s past and the characters of her parents, specifically that her mom had the conviction to shoot a man robbing them of their food supply when her dad was about to let him go. I think that was an interesting memory to focus in on because it shows the switch between civilized mentality (“I’m going to let myself get mugged and cut my losses”) and survival mode (“Someone ever tries to kill you, you try to kill ‘em right back!” – name the speaker and you get a fictional cookie).
I still don’t quite have a good grasp of Charlie’s character. I don’t find Tracy Spiridakos to be the most expressive actress in the world and so far Charlie just seems to be a sheltered kid who’s only now seeing how violent the world is outside of her safe village (even though she clearly watched her mom murder someone, but whatever). The revelation that Rachel is alive is exciting but not all-together mind blowing since countless other shows have pulled the “the character you thought was dead is secretly alive” bit. It will still be interesting to see how she got there.
I was really excited for this show but I think so far it’s scoring about a 3.5/5.
