Helix

The story

The CDC go to help some scientists in the arctic and manage to make everything worse. And no one acts like a real scientist.

Thoughts

This show takes itself way too seriously. Everyone is dramatic and mysterious which is not a good combination especially if you’re trying to make a serious science fiction show.

The characters don’t really stand out to me. At about half way through I couldn’t name any of them except the brother Peter and that’s because they kept saying his name.

The only characters I liked was the blond lady who turned out to be Dr. Doreen Boyle and plumber guy who I still don’t know the name of (and can’t really be bothered to find out).

The blond lady seemed aware of what genre she was in. While sneaking around in the dark looking for monkeys they find cages that have been broken. She turns to plumber guy and says ” Something busted out… from the inside.”

Then when they find a live monkey and she acts like the guy from Prometheus who tried to make friends with the strange alien snake. It turns out about as well as that did.

The main guy though is very boring and the worst offender for being dramatic. His main characteristic is he likes to date progressively younger women as he gets older. Although he may not be dating the pretty lady yet (it’s not clear and oh so boring).

I can see the pretty woman’s arc a mile away. Everyone thinks she’s too young to be a CDC agent so she proves them wrong by being capable and intelligent.

It’s like the makers of the show thought we need a few really attractive women (as all shows seem to think this) but let’s try to justify at least one of them and have her keep telling everyone how smart she is and giving speeches about how capable she is but not actually show her being capable. Instead she’s going to get in trouble and be saved by main boring guy.

The other female character is the main guy’s ex wife who spent most of the episode running round trying to show him stuff. They also have no chemistry.

This is actually quite a good show for female characters I guess. There’s quite a lot of female characters who are scientists running around and the blond lady is neither young nor skinny.

As far as pilots go this isn’t too bad. I’ve seen a lot worse but as I said at the beginning of the post it takes itself way too seriously but without the writing to back it up.

I think I’ll only watch it when there’s nothing else to watch and I feel like laughing at all the scientists not acting like scientists. It’s a bit like the way I watch really awful horror movies so I can be exasperated with characters doing stupid stuff. I think it’s entertaining in a way they probably didn’t intend.

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