First things first: if you’re not watching Alphas you are missing out on a great show. What’s refreshing is that I don’t need to provide any caveats to that. Yes, I’m a science fiction nerd, so I’m more inclined to give these sorts of shows some slack when they underperform. That means I end up watching random mediocre sci-fi because it’s sci-fi. I’m glad to say that in this case, we’ve got a smart sci-fi show that is also genuinely good irrespective of the trappings of its genre.

The finale of this first season — SyFy has already ordered a second season — aired on Monday and it delivered on the promise of so many previous superhero shows with a finale that is explosive not for its action but for its words. Leigh Rosen, played by an inexplicable David Strathairn¹, ends the season with a dramatic action that will spin the story off into exciting and unknown territory that I trust the writers can follow through on. My one fear with the show’s direction is that it might hew to the path of The 4400, whose creator is working in the writer’s room on Alphas, because that show had similar stories to tell, but I think the creative team here is smart enough to resonate with that world without echoing it.

The second thought I wanted to get across here is that the existence of Alphas proves just how ridiculous the people who mock SyFy, or refuse to pronounce the name the way they want, or say the channel’s more interested in putting wrestling on the air than putting out good sci-fi are. This is the sort of show they want to make — technically they want to make this show and have it be a wildly popular and critical hit but let’s not split hairs in this moment of triumph — and when there are people out there who explicitly refuse to watch a show simply because it’s on SyFy, it infuriates me. It infuriated me even before this show was put on the air, but it’s now obviously a stubbornly ignorant position.

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Footnotes

1. I’m so glad he’s doing this show, and I hope that the events of this finale aren’t a way of writing him out of the series barring the occasional guest appearance, but I never would’ve guessed his next move to be a jump to a SyFy series. [↩]

Spartacus: Blood and Sand finished off their first season a couple nights ago and while I had early reservations, mostly related to the gratuitousness of the nudity and violence, the season came together in a really satisfying way. The violence is still ridiculous at times, the nudity and sexuality is often overdone, but the characters survive through those faults. It shouldn’t be a surprise that the show is strongly written, seeing as its creator is Steven S. DeKnight, a veteran of a number of quality television shows. Even more than that, the show was blessed with having Daniel Knauf, creator of one of the best television shows ever made, as a consulting producer.

But I think it’s safe to say that Spartacus snuck up on people with its quality; it’s left me interested in the second season, and pondering where the characters will go before their preordained end. On a related note, it seems as though the show’s name has been retconned as Spartacus, with a season subtitle of Blood and Sand, to allow for the second season to shift out of the gladiatorial ring with the new subtitle Vengeance. So I look forward to Spartacus: Vengeance, though I do hope the show is more willing to forgo the over-the-top violence and sexuality¹ now that it’s found strong characters to base the show around.

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Footnotes

1. The more recent episodes have come with a disclaimer telling viewers the violence and sexuality is there to portray a realistic representation of Ancient Rome, but HBO’s Rome didn’t whitewash the dingier parts of Ancient Rome without having such profuse and omnipresent nudity and violence, so some of it is clearly there for the sake of grabbing attention, and it’s that aspect of the show that I think could go away fairly easily. [↩]

As with season 1 of Buffy, there was a big annoying flaw. I have a feeling that each season has that one thing wrong with it. With season 2, Xander was at the root of the problem yet again. I he wasn’t so damned likable most of the time his annoying douche moments would make him a totally hated character. Before, it was his obsession with Buffy, and now it’s his relentless hatred toward Angel. Even when Angel still had his soul and was working with the Scooby gang all the time he hated him. And he actively encouraged Buffy to kill Angel even when he knew Willow was working to restore Angel’s soul, something for which he never really got any flack with the gang.

The plus side here is that all of this is a part of Xander’s growth. Xander’s hatred comes from Angel’s involvement with Buffy so it makes sense. That doesn’t make it less annoying or a more desirable storyline. Really, the only good thing about these annoying storylines is that they are a part of realistic character developments. Sometimes, you don’t like what kind of person someone was, but that doesn’t devalue who they have become.

Overall, the season was even better than the first, and the interesting thing is that it didn’t seem to follow the formula later seasons dictated. Later on in the series, the show settled into a form more like the first season, where the “Big Bad” of the season in introduced within the first couple episodes with trickles of arc development revealed each subsequent episode. The second season was much more casual with its arc development. The real Big Bad of the season wasn’t revealed until the middle of the season, when Angel lost his soul. The arc was still continuous but it seemed structured as three or four smaller arcs joined together through consequence.

If memory serves, season three is structured differently, and seeing as those two seasons are probably the strongest of the series, I’ll have to compare the two once I’m finished the third season, which should be in around twenty hours or so.