Alcatraz: Episode 3

While watching the show Alcatraz, I take copious notes. These are them:

Two serial killers in a row! Original!

So it's cool if he draws biographical comic books about their adventures? Seems like the people in the secret government conspiracy would frown on that.

Why is it suspicious that he has a police scanner? They're trying to track down famous murderers who are probably killing people all over San Francisco. Also, he's a historian who studies crime. Why wouldn't he have one?

Also a three-day killing time limit two episodes in a row? What is this, Criminal minds?

And two cases in a row where the serial killer was inspired by a childhood grudge to kill someone exactly the age of a sibling? What?

"I pretended to be asleep because I was scared!" And then I didn't mention to my mother about the kidnapping in the morning when my brother was gone!

Alcatraz: Episode 2

While watching Alcatraz for TheAvod, I take notes. These are them:

Thanks for putting your fingerprints all over the shell casing, guys! There's no way there could be useful evidence on that!

"We've got two days to catch him!" No, you can just catch him whenever. It's not like he has the magical ability to disappear. Also, he doesn't know how to get around in the present-day world.

It seems like if you've got unlimited money to chase these criminals you could have more people in the field than Sam Neill and Dr. Neela from ER.

Unless he was programmed like Simon Phoenix, this doesn't make huge amounts of sense. Also, why aren't they asking him why he killed that guy? I mean, if he was going to go straight to his brother's house after stealing the key instead of dropping it off, why waste time stealing it and killing that guy?

Alcatraz is the worst possible place for a secret base. "We've figured out a new clue!" 'Great, let's take a half-hour ferry ride before we can check it out!' They're secret so they can't actually be taking helicopters and speedboats all the time. Frankly, I'd find it more believable if they said 'yeah, after all this disappearing mishegoss we built a secret tunnel to the mainland. Just hop in this sweet customized golf cart and drive to the mainland.'

Alcatraz: The Pilot!

As per the dictates of a recent Avod poll, I watched the pilot of the new television show Alcatraz this week! While while I found it to be a pleasant and diverting enough experience, it was full enough with inconsistencies and bizarre premises to warrant having most of them called out here.

So now, in no particular order, here are the issues I had with the pilot episode of Alcatraz. Keep in mind, however, since this is merely a pilot, I'll be happy to find some of these bizarre choices explained away in subsequent episodes.

Sam Neill's American accent hasn't gotten any better over the years, has it? It's not so bad when he's playing a man of indeterminate national origin, but now he's playing in FBI/mysterious government agency official who was a fresh young guard at Alcatraz when all the prisoners disappeared fifty years ago. Which makes his mid-Atlantic growling just seem odd. He's also named Emerson Hauser, which is one of those distractingly strange television names that exists only to avoid being sued over the similarity to a real person's name. I was going to make some comment about it being preposterous that Sam Neill is playing a character in his mid-70s, but then I looked it up and turn he's sixty-five and just looks fantastic for his age.