Even if this was the best show on television, this would still be a ridiculously bad plan. And Past Life is far from being the best. It's no surprise that the network airing it is Fox.
The premiere didn't do a bad job introducing the characters, but they simply were not that interesting. Dr. Kate McGinn (Kelli Giddish) is the past life specialist and Price Whatley -which, by the way is a ridiculous name - (Nicolas Bishop) is a former cop, now PI who works with her. The only thing of note about Kate's personality is that she and her mother both don't like clingy men, and that there might possibly be a past life experience of her own that got her where she is, maybe, but that was not really touched on at all.
Price, on the other hand, has the typical former cop story. His wife died, he began to drink and got fired. Now he's trying to get his life back together with this job. I suppose that points for creativity should be given because, instead of killing her in a car accident, which is usually the case, he convinced her to jump off a cliff, and when she did, she broke her neck.
Okay, so there was water at the bottom of the cliff, and she dove in, but still.
So the main characters aren't enough to get me to watch the show again, but is the science? Well, they spent the episode trying to get clues about who killed the kid in his past life by putting him in situations that might be traumatic enough to get him to bring back his memories. Oh, dogs were barking? Let's get a bunch of dogs to bark while we film you and see if anything interesting happens?
Then, you have the questions of the soul, which they did not at all address. This boy was born one month after the disappearance of the girl he was before. We don't even know in that month when she died. But we do know that less than a month before he was born, her soul entered into his body. Are we talking a soul merger here? Or are we establishing that the soul enters the body only moments before birth, so all you people who don't like abortion, what are you worried about?
If you are going to deal with a question of that nature, you have to be careful. Frankly, I don't think the writers even considered the controversialness of what they were writing. Sigh, grumble, grumble.
So that's what I think of Past Life. Do you think I judged it fairly?
*Addition to Post*
Since I typed this post, Fox has pulled Past Life off the air. It might air the remaining episodes in the summer, but the crappy ratings aren't worth keeping it on. Why they thought this show deserved a Thursday spot, and why they chose to have it compete with the Olympics (to which American Idol's episode determining the top 24 also lost) is beyond me.
No comments:
Post a Comment