The Sword and Laser discussion

Watched the series premiere of Alphas.

Wow! What a heap!!

Pandering storyline and multicultural rainbow of characters. Typical power cliches. Poor acting goosed and punctuated by overwhelming and cliched music score. Lame special effects.

And poor, poor David Strathairn. Such a capable and talented actor saddled with this dreck. Yes, this is the same Academy Award nominated actor who portrayed Edward R. Murrow in Good Night and Good Luck.

How I loathe SyFy.

Word to your maternal unit sir. Alphas isnt fit to carry the numerous comparisons to Heroes its going to get. Why must they get syfy all over our science fiction?

It's not scifi, it's 'skiffy'.

sounds like the crap that "SyFy" puts out these days....that and wrestling /puke

Yeah, I wasnt happy with the pilot. On the face of it, I was not inclined to give syfy another chance to cancel a show I was liking, but watched anyways. Shallow and derivative, reminds me of Covert Action.

The pilot was mildly intriguing. I see potential in this series and its take on the CSI style of crime show. I hope that they can elaborate on some of the stuff they hinted at. I feel that this show is walking a fine line between potential awesome and potential ruin .

For a pilot I didn't think it was bad - it was certainly enough for me to come back for more. Like most pilots there was a ton of info-dump, and the actors are clearly not comfortable in their roles yet - but the series definitely has potential. And most importantly, it isn't wrestling.

I kinda liked it. I liked the interesting powers and the guy that plays Gary was on bones up until recently and he has good range. I am very excited to see an autistic hero.

I liked it well enough. The kid playing the autistic (or autistic-seeming) alpha Gary is brilliant. Are all Brits except Michael Caine born with the ability to do American accents? Strathairn is the calm center the show needs.

I'm hoping it gets ballsy and kills off some main characters, something Heroes wasn't allowed to do by network diktat.

It has potential, but I gotta disagree about the autistic kid. The character is super annoying and if I stop watching the show he will probably be the reason.

I am glad so many of you were able to make it through the entire pilot. I couldn't finish the first show after two tries.

I am agreeing with Dobie and Alex. So far, it isn't that bad. I liked this more than the first few episodes of Heroes. Now THAT (Heroes) was a train wreck, and it took that massive redesign not even half way through the series to 'fix' things.

I may be blowing out too much praise for the show, as i've only seen the pilot and "Cause and Effect" so far, but it definitely has potential. But then again, i thought The Cape was pretty good, and look what happened there.

It is summer though, Game of Thrones is done, and (here) Dr. Who doesn't come back until the 17th of August. What the hell else am i going to watch? Rookie Blue?

so wow, color me surprised, i was at my buddies house and watched episode 4 and liked it. Some decent villian characters, including the most interestingly compromised archvillian since Mr Glass. I enjoyed seeing the actress who played Murphy on the woefully miscast Dresden files show. I hate when i have to go and change my mind

It's definitely getting better.

The Red Flag group was interesting, and it's hard to paint them as simple bad guys because their point of view is not entirely without merit. Their methods are extreme, but they were forced into it to some degree. It's a nice bit of nuance that reflects the complexities of the real world. The sci-fi and superhero elements are the spoonful of sugar to help the metaphor go down, as it were.

I will re-state that Gary is the most interesting character I've seen on TV in a very long time. I could watch an entire series just about him. How Red Flag dealt with his abilities was very clever. Kudos to the writers for that one -- it's nice to see a smart villain take advantage of a hero's weakness in a logical manner and turn his strengths against him. It reminded me very much of the superb characterization in classic 1980s SF films like WarGames and The Manhattan Project.

I agree, the show is Al Blahs. Looks like a cheap knock off of X-men. I may like it better if it were a 30 minute show given the 'weakly' storyline. However there is something building up with that government facility & Dr. Rosen that I will admit got me curious enough to watch. I still have to watch the last 2 episodes, so I'm trying to give it a chance. I also gotta admit that the character Gary Bell is awesome. To read a wide range of frequencies & intercept encrypted messages is......well goodbye TV, phones, radios & computers.

I watched the pilot and thought I'd give the series a chance after that. Started to watch the 2nd ep and realized I didn't care one bit, so I stopped.

I heard they had a crossover with Warehouse13 which is kind of cool as that's one of my favorite shows. But I won't go back to watch that episode.