There was a lot of buzz, a lot of hype, and a lot of hope that Alfonso Cuaron’s Believe would bring something new and fresh to NBC. But after the premiere episode, we gotta say: not so much. Here’s a scene-by-scene recap, if you can stand it.
Short Version:
Death Row convict is sprung from prison moments before his execution by a mysterious bunch of Good Guys, so he can become the protector of a little girl with vast psychic powers, on the run from an evil megacorp. Why choose this guy, now the subject of a national manhunt and no discernable skills, to protect the most potentially powerful little girl in the world? What actually makes this little girl so special? And why should we care? Just a few of the many questions left unanswered in this very disappointing first episode.
The Long Version:
I want to like this. I really do. Alfonso Cuaron’s a talented man, and his heart is obviously, and always, in the right place. But I have a lot of problems with Believe, from the premise on out.
First: let’s face it, the premise is Firestarter 2014, right down to the fact that “Bo” looks a lot like a young Drew Barrymore from the original movie. In fact, there are major lifts from King all over the place: the psychic girl, the prison break right out of Shawshank Redemption, the evil corporation pursuing her (it was the evil government, specifically called The Shop, back in 1980, but 35 years later the only thing we hate more than the government are the corporations), the big bull of a guy (John Rainbird in Firestarter, Delroy Lindo’s Milton Winter in Believe), who may or may not be a friend…suffice it to say, we’re not talking original concepts here.
And that would be perfectly fine if there was something more, some fresh new hell here beyond the impressively high production standards. Mostly, though, we have a show filled with cardboard people we can’t care about doing things that don’t make much sense.
From the top…
We open on a dark and stormy night (oh, please). Bo, the pretty and clearly very talented young actress Johnny Sequoyah, is riding in a car with her faceless foster parents. They’re not on the run, they seem to be happy despite the crappy weather and late hour. The driver Dad even complains about the tailgating truck…until it rear-ends them. Then suddenly it’s, “Oh, my god, they found us!” They’re forced off the road, crash into trees, turn over. Bloody Foster Dad tells Bloody Foster Mom to take remarkably unbloodied Baby Bo out of the wreck and just run. Moments later a lovely English woman comes down the hill from the offending SUV and kills Dad with the patented neck-twist-crunch. She finds the Bloody Foster Mom and Bo in the bushes (at least that seems to be the case; it’s all so dark). And neck-twist-crunches her, too. And she’s poised to do something – probably kidnap – Bo when a doctor and emergency vehicles miraculously appear, and she is forced to retreat.
Okay, Problems already. As we find out very quickly, before the first break, Bo is a remarkable young girl, and the nameless Bad Guys want to possess her – not kill her, but to possess and control her. So when they finally locate (or re-locate) her, what do they do? Drive her vehicle off the road in a storm, into trees, with such violence it quite nearly kills everyone in the car. Why didn’t they even try to stop the car and just take the kid? Why risk her death when her death would ruin their plans? And since we’re seeing this scene in virtual real time, how is it the doctor and ambulances arrive so quickly, and at just the right moment, in the middle of night in a major storm on a rural, unlit road?
Why? We have a term for it in professional storytelling. It’s called “bad writing.” Well…”lazy,” really, more than bad. You’d think this would have been a good time for the little girl to display her amazing powers, rock our world, show us, rather than tell us, how amazing she is. But no. Not yet.
Cut to a maximum security prison. A Charlie Manson-lookin’ man of indeterminate age is about to be executed. We know this because Milton Winter, dressed as a priest, comes in and tells him so – the beginning of a tortuously long sequence in which Winter tells the convict, Tate, everything that they both already know: that he’s about to be executed, that he was framed, that no one believes him. And then he makes some cryptic comments about how he’s there to help him escape and Tate has “four minutes and 56 seconds” to decide if he wants out.
It’s not real clear why, in the face of this tight window, Winter would waste precious minutes with a biography and cute hints. Why not walk in and say, “Look, dude, I can get you out of here. Here’s the plan.” Oh, wait it is clear: see “bad and lazy writing,” above. The whole scene is there to lay things out for the viewer, and there’s not a scrap of authenticity or logic to it.
Someplace in here, a young doctor at some hospital loses another faceless patient, and has a crisis of faith right out of ER, c. 1995. “You did everything you could do, Doctor.” Yeah, sure. Clearly, we’ll be back.
Elsewhere in the hospital where, a couple of techs try to give the still-unconscious Bo – rescued from the car crash — an MRI. She wakes up, asks them to stop, apparently interferes with the machine just as they glimpse her amazing brain…and then stop. Whoa, awesome.
Back to the prison. Winter is taking more of those precious minutes to lay out the series premise: there’s this amazing girl, bad people are after her, we want to help you escape so you can kidnap – oh, wait, sorry, save – this little girl. (Like a guy moments away from public execution would really care why this is happening, if a guy convincingly said, “Hey, we’re going to bust you out.” Who cares? Out is better than In in any event.
We see that Lindo/Winter has a high-tech back-up team, complete with the inevitable La Femme Nikita Asian beauty (God help any Asian actor who isn’t a beautiful young woman). They use their high-tech skills to engineer a running-jumping-swimming escape for Tate and Winter that makes you long for Mission Impossible III.
The first commercial break isn’t so much a chance to catch your breath – your heart rate hasn’t even elevated yet – as to ask “So what?” Anybody attracted to this sort of show has seen all of this before. Recently. Better.
We’re back: at an air strip, where Tate’s new “friends” hose him down – literally – while he’s hooded and cuffed. Great way to treat your new ally. Then they pile him into a plane and take off. Clearly Winter’s organization doesn’t lack for funds or connections.
Back in the hospital, Bo meets the despondent doctor who, thank God, doesn’t have to tell her about her dead foster parents – she guesses. (Strange: most hospitals I know have mental health professionals around to help break traumatic news like that to young children. Not here. In fact, this hospital seems woefully understaffed and poorly managed in all respects – more on that later.) When Bo shows the Doctor – Doctor Terry, as it happens — that she knows all about him and his loss of faith, he doesn’t ask questions; he does what any good doctor does: he runs away.
The British Assassin introduces us, by phone, to multibillionaire Roman Skouros, played by the ever-creepy Kyle McLachlan, the power behind the Evil Corporation who wants Bo. He tells B.A. to go to the hospital and get the girl before Winter does. She sighs, changes her plans, and does as she’s told.
God, I miss Twin Peaks.
There’s more background about Bo, spoonfed to Tate by Winter, as they clean him up and attach an unremovable GPS bracelet to his ankle. They throw away, almost as background, a couple of sequences of Bo doing cool stuff on video monitors. Winter wants to protect her, y’see, so she can learn to use her powers and then he can “introduced her to the world at just the right time.” Skouros wants to control her so he can, I kid you not, “rule the world.”
Seems to me multi-billionaires are already pretty much ruling the world. And the idea that a single person who can read minds and move birds around could actually help with that seems strangely 1970’s-ish James Bond-ish. But whatever: that’s the premise. Go with it. The irony that both these groups want to control this little girl for their own purposes and neither really gives a shit about her as a human seems lost here. Or maybe it’s just really, really subtle.
All this back story, along with the GPS ankle bracelet, seems to be enough to convince Tate to go along. There’s not even a hint of “wtf” or any awe at the changes in the world in (at least) seven years. Sure, this isn’t exactly Sleep Hollow, but be clear: when he went in, were were at war in two foreign countries, George Bush was president, there hadn’t been a financial meltdown and there wasn’t any such thing as a smart phone. (The iPhone was introduced in 2007, about the time he went onto Death Row). But Tate fits right in without so much as a moment of dislocation, because, come on, we have a story to tell here.
And oh, yes: no guns. The fate of the world or simply the life of the little girl hangs in the balance, but Winter’s people won’t use guns. They’ll break violent felons out of prison, lie and cheat and steal, allow their operatives to beat the crap out of people (as we’ll see), but no guns. Because, see, they’re the good guys.
Even Tate doesn’t buy that shit. But we’re supposed to.
Back at the hospital: the Terry the Despondent Doc is giving notice (maybe he should; he seems incapable of speaking in full sentences or actually doing much of anything.) The Winter Group smuggles Tate into the hospital as a crash victim, at the exact same moment there’s a bus crash, so nobody – and I mean nobody –looks at him. Not even a one-minute triage, at which time they’d notice the head injuries are make-up. No, they just take the fake EMT’s word for it and run away, allowing Tate to peel off his oxygen mask (why was that there again? To hide the face that nobody knows?) and slip away…even though we clearly see one nurse looking straight at him as he gets up off the gurney, obviously uninjured. Still, he’s good to go. He literally bumps into the British Assassin in a white coat, and they go their separate ways to make mischief.
After the commercial, we see Tate has acquired a set of blue scrubs (which clearly is all you need to wander the halls of a major American hospital unnoticed these days). No real sense of urgency here, just life and death, but he eventually wanders in to a room to find a sleeping Bo, gazes upon her, and weeps two tiny little tears…until she wakes up and tells him, “You stink.” Thus begins their “meet cute” back-and-forth dialogue, all tough and wry and once again, right out of Firestarter. She doesn’t know him, but she knows he’s a liar. She refuses to go with him until he mentions Milton Winter (and why she couldn’t just read his mind about that when she’s already read his mind … well, there’s an advantage to not outlining Bo’s powers with the same specificity as her or Tate’s backstory. So you can change the rules at will. Which they do. A lot.)
As Bo and Tate are leaving, they run into the British Assassin. This leads to prolonged and laughable hand-to-hand combat in the hospital corridor (are there no other doctors or nurses, no security at all in this place?). Bo saves the day by injecting the B.A. with sedative in her butt. (“Not! Cool!” says the B.A.), and they escape … just long enough for the B.A. to pull out a big-ass pistol and screw on a comically HUGE silencer, as big as the gun itself, and parade through a sudden phalanx of nurses and patients in pursuit. (That’s all we see of them. In the next five minutes, she’s left to pursue Bo and Tate, stalk them, steal drugs, and escape … and we don’t’ so much as hear an alarm or see a security person or anyone else). Bo and Tate hide in a locker. B.A. enters and kicks open every other locker in the room but just happens to miss theirs (‘cause she’s all drugged up, y’see). She then bashes open a medicine cabinet and pulls out an ampule of … something … that she slams into her thigh. Apparently she knows exactly what drug Bo gave her, and exactly what readily available injectable will instantaneously counteract its effect. While she’s doing all this, Bo and Tate sneak out of the cabinet, not ten feet behind her, and climb out a window. They don’t run for the door, they don’t head for the stairs, they don’t flee down the hallway screaming for help, they climb out a window. (And when was the last time you saw a hospital that had windows that even opened? Climate control, dudes!). By the time the B.A. recovers, she’s lost track of them, and Tate and Bo have made it to the sidewalk, where they just happen to catch a city bus that pulls up in front of them. (Amazingly accommodating, these bus drivers: to give a free ride to two people in hospital garb, running from the hospital clearly in a panic, without question. Wow, some people are just great, aren’t they?)
Commercial break. Ample time to put your head in your hands and weep for the state of network television. Sad to note that the State Farm commercial about the kid with coins in his hair is more entertaining than the program around it.
Maybe this is the place to note that Believe doesn’t actually have any dialogue at all. It just has two kinds of inferior speechifying: exposition and bickering. Between Bo and Tate, between Winter and his cohorts, between the B.A. and Skouros: bicker and exposition. We know nothing about these people; we really don’t want to, since they’re not terribly new or interesting.
Anyway: on the bus. Skip any awkward exchange with the bus driver, they’re cursing through a Bad Urban Neighborhood (you can tell because there are pedestrians all over the place. Ew!). Bo has a flash about the despondent doc, Doctor Terry, that implies she can tell the future as well as the present. Tate tells her to shut up – that charmer! – and looks away for one second, which gives her enough time to get up and leave the bus. Or maybe teleport, I don’t know. Could someone leave the seat next to you and actually leave the bus – passing in front of you, to do that – in 1.5 seconds, and you not notice? But at least Tate tells the entire bus, as he’s leaving, that “she’s not my daughter.” Oh, good. The escape convict chasing the little girl want to make sure that everyone knows he’s not actually related to her. Cell phones, anyone? 911? Amber Alert? No matter: Tate loses her on the street anyway.
We follow Dr. Terry back to his rundown apartment, where we find he is caring for his bedridden and either sleeping or comatose father. He sits down to do some exposition for us (classic, actually: not a dialogue but a monologue, in which we find out he’s a terrible wimp – even after at least seven years of medical school and residency and who knows how many years in the ER – and that his father told him repeatedly he was a terrible doctor. Which is why he just quit, because he lost a patient he thought he could save for the first time. Oh, parents and their puckish sense of humor! And we’re supposed to like this guy?). It’s hard to even feel sorry for him.
Anyway: Tate’s still searching for Bo on the mean streets of …. some city or other. Somewhere. He finds her in an internet café of some kind, where she’s somehow managed to use a PC without any cash, and because she needed to find a particular address (again, her psychic powers crapping out at an opportunie moment). They leave with address in hand, and the Beautiful Asian – Channing is her name, we discover – rolls up; she must have used that GPS ankle bracelet to find him, though it’s never mentioned – and takes them to an abandoned warehouse. (What, Winter can afford private jets and high-tech vans, but he has to use an abandoned warehouse for his HQ? No, wait: we need a nice big loft-space for upcoming fight scenes and for Bo to actually show us something.) Bo greets him with great joy; we fidget through another five minutes of exposition, basically a repeat of the earlier exposition, except now we know that Tate is going to be Bo’s teacher, protector, etc. for years to come, at least as far as Winter is concerned. Oh, and though we haven’t seen any of this, we’re told there’s a national manhunt underway for him, so “he wouldn’t last ten minutes out there” without their protection. Which he blusters about, but basically accepts.
Tate asks the same question we’ve all been asking: why him? Why put the fate of the most important little girl in the history of the world in the hands of a violent convict who’s being sought by the entire country – a guy with no experience with kids or teaching, no apparent combat skills (he got his ass kicked by a woman smaller than him), and anger management problems? Why not have the girl stay with Winter or Channing, both of whom clearly have real rapport with her?
Winter refuses to answer. Guess that’s the big mystery, eh?
Meanwhile, the British Assassin, backed by Skouros’ super-high-tech Command Center, tracks them down to the one piece of property that Winter bought before his faked death where they just happened to be staying.
Maybe that’s what they should have called this show: not Believe, but It Just Happened.
Commercial break, where we check to see who’s on Jimmy Fallon tonight. Then…
Big fight scene in the loft with the B.A. It usually wouldn’t be worth breaking this down, but it is so emblematic of everything wrong with Believe so far, let’s have at it.
The B.A. crashes through the double doors on the lower floor, alerting everyone to her presence. She doesn’t even try to reconnoiter to see if they’re actually there, or to sneak in and get the jump on them. No: just crashes into a probably abandoned building. But of course it does alert them, and since they have no guns – remember? Good Guys? – she shoots her way to the second floor with no problem.
Winter and Co. actually do have time to escape, but they don’t. Bo just has to have her stuffed turtle before she runs, even if that means risking everyone’s life (and she knows this already, right? Because she’s Bo.). So she keeps them from escaping. Meanwhile B.A. comes in and sees that same stuffed animal in the middle of the floor, which tells her right away the kid was/is there. (Did she even see that toy before? In the hospital? Chasing the kid? She barely glimpsed the kid between fighting and running and being drugged, and there was no shot favoring the damn toy. Never mind; we know it, so she must know it.) Bo comes back into the open to get her turtle. When Winter and Channing try to stop her, she use her superpower to stick them to the ground – forced Freeze Tag, the little brat! But why doesn’t she just use the same mind-energy to Jedi the toy across the room, into her hands? Because then she couldn’t get caught by the Assassin, silly! Meanwhile Tate doesn’t join them at all – he’s putting his bag o’ money on the fire escape and running off in an entirely different direction, even though the much-discussed GPS anklet is still in place.
B.A. confronts Winter and shoots him … in the hand. This is a master assassin who’s blasted half a dozen people, and he’s a dead solid motionless target twenty feet away, but – the hand. Even better, when she fires her ridiculously silenced pistol, it makes a big-ass gun sound as if there was no silencer at all. No little cliché’d thwip-thwip, as if that mattered. So we’re not even trying to make sense at this point, are we? And after a very boring hand-to-hand sequence, done better since – what, Xena, Warrior Princess? – Bo steps forward and uses a sonic scream, stolen from the X-Men’s Banshee or the Birds of Prey’s Black Canary, and causes B.A. to be attacked by a swarm of…pigeons. Pigeons. But such a swarm she becomes totally disoriented even though she’s still clutching a loaded pistol, and Tate and the others have a chance to escape. Does Bo use this same power to pluck the gun out of the B.A.’s hand and throw it to, say, Hawaii? No. Does the B.A. use the gun in her hand to even try and shoot at the offending bird-swarm or the escaping Tate? No. And the bird-nado only lasts long enough for Bo and Co to get downstairs and into their waiting van, with the B.A., still armed, in hot pursuit.
In the car, Bo shouts, “What’s going on? I don’t understand!” as if she hasn’t been pursued by armed people – including this very same woman – for the last few hours and days. NOW she asks? And of course, she gets a bland, if panted, non-answer from Winter. “These are just like the other spookies, only … bigger.” Oh, that’s comforting.
Winter drops Tate and Bo off under a bridge with a wad of cash. “Where will we go?” Tate says. “Bo knows!” Channing tells him, even though Bo was screaming “I don’t understand!” about thirty seconds earlier. Still: get out! Go, go! “We’ll try and find you!” Channing says as they screech away. Try? Weren’t we just talking about the GPS thing, that’s still in place? Never mind: screech away. And uh-oh: Tate’s injured. Blood on his hands.
Commercial. It’s almost a welcome thing.
Apparently Bo does know where to go: to Dr. Terry’s house. He comes out on the porch for the most wooden doorstep acting seen since the early days of Law & Order. Apparently everyone’s forgotten about the GPS: Tate’s acting like they’re never going to see Winter again. “120 bucks for ten years,” he grumbles, waving his bloody flesh wound around on the open street. How is this guy not getting arrested again?
They get inside, Terry shoots Tate with antibiotics (apparently he keeps injectable ab’s around the house, but not local anesthetic), sews him up without, admirably, using the term ‘flesh wound.’ Bo channels Comatose Dad, and tells Terry that Dad thinks he’s a good doctor and he’s proud of him, which Terry accepts like this sort of thing happens all the time (I mean, she did guess a couple things at the hospital, right? So this has got to be real.) Then, even though he says he quit that afternoon, that same hospital calls him to cover an emergency in the, you know, emergency department, and he heads out, apparently moved by Bo’s channeling of Comatose Dad and her story about how he’s someday going to help somebody named, she thinks, “Senga,” though “sometimes I get things wrong,” (This being another excuse for constantly changing the rules about Bo and her powers).
On their own again, the skeptical grown-up who can’t go near public transit does the logical thing: he asks the kid where they should go.“ Philadelphia,” she pronounces, though I’m not sure $120 will get you two one-way bus tickets from Somewhere City to Philly. But that’s what they do, the Most Wanted Man in American taking a bus with an underage kid, without so much as a nervous look.
And since Terry was just a one-episode Touched by an Angel-type subplot, that has to get tied up: the emergency that got him back to the hospital is to perform surgey on a young woman named Agnes. He saves her, and we see her sitting up in bed and playing her guitar and her name is in big letters that reflect in the mirror and OH, MY GOD, “SENGA” IS JUST “AGNES” SPELLED BACKWARD!
Wait, wait. I…I need a moment.
And then finally, finally, we’re subjected to a quick set of end-of-episode bangers, where we learn (a) The Good Guys have abandoned their van, but escaped the British Assassin, (b) Skouros and Winter used to be partners, and (c), the biggie, TATE IS BO’S BIOLOGICAL FATHER! WHOA! Which is why it was worth springing him from prison and giving him custody of her in spite of being a wanted criminal with no special abilities who is also being pursued by an evil megacorp.
And why not tell Tate this? Why not increase his clearly lacking motivation by explaining this is his daughter?
Not for any good reason. Only because it makes for ‘good’ episodic TV. Or so they think.
Cue one last round of bickering instead of dialogue between Bo and Tate, no safely in Philly and … we’re out.
Despite heavy promotion and Alfonso Cuaron’s name attached, it seems pretty unlikely that Believe will be with us for long. Still, we’ll continue recapping to see if it gets any better. But…no promises. I just don’t…BELIEVE.
And that’s just the beginning. Check out the SR of Episode 2 here.
