Last week: we won’t bore you with the details, but: Tate the convicted murderer is sprung from priosn by Winter the mysterious benefactor to be the protector of Bo, an sweet little girl with super powers. They are purused not only by every cop in creation, but by multibillionaire Roman Skouras, who wants the little girl for his own purposes, and he’ll spare no expense to capture her. The chase is on. They slip out of a remarkably boring version of New York (haven’t they seen any of Person of Interest or even any Law & Orders?), and grab a bus to Philadelphia, because … well, Bo says so. And we’re off…
Bo and Tate are still on the bus (though his beard looks weirdly thicker for one scene). They bicker some more – and no, it’s not cute – with a few “Oh, I get you!” moments where she says she doesn’t remember his parents and he didn’t care much for his. (Even though we know Tate’s her dad, though neither of them are in the secret. Heh. Score!) Then – belatedly picking up a plot thread – the cops show up to check everyone on the bus.
The absurdity of this whole premise – sticking innocent fugitive Bo to who-gives-a-shit fugitive Tate, and teling them why — is hard to avoid at this point. Winter says he’s trying to keep this kid safe and under the radar for years to come, so what does he do? Partner her with the most wanted and high-profile fugitive in America, a guy who has yet to even cut his freakin’ hippie hair or shave his strangely changing beard to avoid detection. Bo saves them from the belated arrival of cops by making the cop car go backwards and forcing them to break off their checkpoint search; let’s skip how ridiculous it would be for cops to abandon a fugitive check like this; instead let’s focus on how really out of it Mr. Winter is at this point. We see him and his team in their new, cool command center, presumably in Philly, planning safe houses for Bo and Tate, even while the fugitives are being menaced on the bus. And as the duo choose the most obvious place in the bus station to hide – the bathroom, which is conveniently deserted (have you ever been in a bus station bathroom that’s deserted?), we discover that they have somehow been contacted by Winter, and that they know they’ll have a safe house that night, but only if they get to Philadelphia.
Now wait a minute. Last week Winter had private planes, massive high-tech equipment, and super vans. This week Bo and Tate have to make it to some undisclosed location hundreds of miles from New York on their own…even though Winter knows exactly where they are. (Remember the GPS?) Why doesn’t he just send a friggin’ limo for them? He could do that out of petty cash. And how is it they even know he’ll have a safe house for them? Did somebody tell that to Bo before they were ambushed? And why didn’t they tell Tate? There’s a whole scene missing here – and believe me, it’s only the first of many. Ach, we’re all of three minutes in and it’s already not making sense…
Oh, boy, new characters! Elizabeth Farrell, the inevitable attractive female FBI agent (damn you, Clarice Starling! You altered the cheesy fake-procedural FBI landscape forever!). We get her whole background in tonight’s first “let’s tell each other stuff we already know for the audience’s sake” exchange with some guy from Quantico. Mr. Quant tells her that they’ve somehow discovered Tate is hangin’ with Bo, so Agent Farrell is hustled off to be briefed by Skouras (apparently the teleconferencing machine is down) – yes, he’s a private citizen, yes he’s erratic, but he’s ours, and now we know the government as well as Skouras wants this kid.
More exposition, just so we can be completely, completely sure of what’s going on: the chase is on between the bad guys (Skouras and the government) and the good guys (Milton and his people).
Back to Bo, sleepin’ in the bathroom. Tate is giving himself a Justin Timberlake haircut, ‘cause THAT will fool ‘em. But god, don’t touch the beard. And oh, wow, he looks TOTALLY DIFFERENT (No. He doesn’t.)
Now we see there’s this whole massive program/facility full of superkids in Skouras’ captivity, and for some reason Skouras is showing Agent Farrell the whole thing … including a spooky kid name Sean. Sean can make things out of Legos and they’re reproduced by flying bricks in the courtyard. (Don’t bother remembering the name; we don’t see him again.)This, apparently, is to convince Farrel that it’s worth capturing this rilly rilly dangerous girl on the run.
Here comes a commercial, giving us a moment to think about just how completely this is ripping off Firestarter. Now Charlie – Sorry, we mean Bo – is on the run with her wisecrackkin’ father (even if neither of them know it), just like in the movie, pursued by a sinister government/superscience hybrid called The Shop, that is to say, Skouros. And the kid has powers that they think will grow to “crack the world like a dinner plate” – a King quote, and better than any line of dialogue in this thing, but you get the point. Are there no new ideas in TV at all? Even the best of the others, like Hannibal and Walking Dead, are from other sources.
Oops, commercial’s over. Skouros meets with Germanically inclined contractors, and introduces us to Marcus Krakouer, a scary big black guy. So here’s our stand-in for Rainbird.
Ah, the haircut worked. Bo and Tate get out of the Atlantic City bus station without incident (we know they do; they pass a big building that says ATLANTIC CITY on the sisde). More bickering. Tate gets a reminder of why it’s not a great idea to get into a bitch-fight with a girl who can move mountains with her mind. And then we move on to another all-too-familiar bit: he’s going to use her psychokinesis to move the dice in a crap game. Her unreliability is re-emphasized, too, just so we don’t think they’ll actually play this premise out in any consistent way. She’s just too young and, y’know, innocent. For god’s sake, Bo’s never even heard of milk shakes or ID. She’s so naïve. Meanwhile, Tate has spontaneously invented some way to cheat the house, and the FBI issues an Amber Alert for Bo.
Commercial! Hey, didn’t we see this pk-dice bit on Twilight Zone, like forty years ago? Oh, yeah! Buddy Ebsen and Dane Clark, 1961 (so more than fifty years ago). Prime Mover. And even Avatar: The Last Airbender reused it. (God, we love Wikipedia.)
Anyway: Bo weirds out the waitress, who seems to appreciate it so much she fades her on the milk shakes, and Tate makes sure to make a very public spectacle of himself as he rolls straight 7’s a dozen times in a ro. (You know, about four rolls into this run in real life, Security would be on him like a duck on a June bug, and surveillance would show him giving the repeated grin and thumbs-up to the little girl in the nearby coffee shop. But never mind. And how Bo can do this thing to the dice when she can’t even see them, or what faces were coming up…oh, never mind. We never get to see the dice either; we just hear the monitor shouting “SEV-en, we have a winnah!.”)
There’s one short bit where Channing tries to convince Winter to tell Tate that he’s a Dad. He just flat refuses, without explanation. Apparently the writers on this show think pointing out the flaws in the plot is the same as actually fixing the flaws in the plot.
Okay, let’s be clear: Tate is a moron. He not only lets his picture be taken on a cell phone (Instagram, anyone?), but he macks on a babe just as the Amber Alert comes up on every screen in the place. They flee the casino, winnings in hand.
Skouros shoves Agent Farrell around, and we already see her as a possible ally, much to Skouros’ teeth-gritting frustration. (Hey, remember when Kyle MachLachlan could actually act? Wow, those were the days. Have I said how much I miss Twin Peaks yet this week? No? Well, I do.)
It just happens that the Casino Waitress drives by and picks Bo and Tate up outside the Casino. And ahh, there we go, she and her cancer-patient kid Jessie are the Touched by an Angel B-story this week. And Jessie the kid may or may not have psychic powers of her own; she and Bo have a talk, and Bo makes the animals float. Yay! She really WILL rule the world!
Still, enough with the B-Story. Time to roll. Bo and Tate ,make it to the train station, and WOW, is that Tate a master of disguise! Not just the haircut, but he actually adds – get this – a baseball cap to complete the transformation. With the FBI looking for him. In Atlantic City. At the Train Station. Are we sure these are the same law enforcement professionals who found the Boston bombers in a few hours with random surveillance footage and facial recognition software? Maybe not. This must be the night shift.
On the train, Bo reveals she gave away all but a couple of bucks of the $30,000 Tate made at craps to the B-Story cancer patient. (So much for the B Story. Ka-ZOOM!) Moments later, before Bo even has a chance to properly whine, Bo gets noticed as the Amber Alert girl. Seems like AmTrak has no security people, or at least nobody calls them, because Tate is suddenly confronted by an angry mob of beefy train travelers. He uses the classic fake-gun-in-the-pocket thing (That Tate! What a genius!) and bluffs his way off the conveniently stationery train; They run, cops all around.
Commercial. We blame AmTrak. No guards, no station security, and apparently they’ll sell tickets to anybody, even American Most Wanted and the Amber Alert Kid. Oh, wait: they do have security and they wouldn’t sell to fugitives; they have posters and everything. So what else could explain it? Lazy writing, maybe?
Back to Winter, who’s watching but intentionally not intervening. Wow, he really does love this little girl.
Then comes a really disturbing little sequence between Roman and the woman who runs his Special Kids in Cages program now. He is watching a video of a younger version of Bo and Winter playing together, and he’s clearly and sincerely touched (he’s all by himself, there’s no one around to put on a show for). He misses the little girl. The New Boss reminds him that Winter took Bo because “the agency” would want to turn her into a weapon if they found out what she could do. And the big, hardened, manipulative mean-ass billionaire looks baffled and says, “How could they do that?” Does he mean he doesn’t understand any of what’s been going on? Or that he doesn’t think she can be controlled? Either way, is this is the same guy who’s been guiding the multinational search for the little supergirl? He expresses doubt that Winter may be a good guy at all, but now we’re left with the weird idea that Skouros and his people are sympathetic, somehow, because love this little girl so much they have to put her in prison for ever and ever. What exactly are we condoning here? For either faction?
By the time we get back to Bo and Tate for a little more bickering, they’ve evaded all cops (hey, that would have been another good scene to see!), and have already stolen a fancy car and they’re on their way to Philly. (And seeing that scene would’ve been good to see too, wouldn’t it? Did Bo use her powers? Did the fugitive I’m-not-really-a-criminal criminal hotwire the thing? Nah, why show us some action when you can have talking?)
Uh-oh. Bo has to pee, and she won’t do it in the bushes. She’d rather risk imprisonment than squat in the tall grass. At the gas station, Black Rainbird attacks Tate. (We glimpsed him at the train station, so that, presumably, is how he found them. He’s been following them ever since, even though no one else can.) He asks “Where’s the girl?” before he beats the crap out of Tate. Apparently he didn’t see Bo come out and wave the bathroom key at Tate in plain sight not five seconds earlier. But no worries: she comes out and shows herself to him at just the right moment – e.g., right after Black Rainbird has pistol-whipped Tate with the gas pump nozzle. Talk about your extra-sensory perception.
Commercial! Wow, now it’s getting exciting! Let’s just take a moment to talk directly to the writers: People. Having your characters do inexplicable things (like leaving Bo and Tate out in the open even when you know exactly where they are and have the means to rescue them) is not ‘mysterious’ or ‘intriguing.’ It’s ‘annoying.’ And P.S., why even bother with a B-Story if you’re going to set it up and resolve it in about two minutes of screen time? Barely seems worth the –
Uh oh, we’re back. Black Rainbird approaches. Once again, we are not bothered by witnesses, bystanders, or gas station attendants as the big, scary black man beats up the skinny white man and then grabs the little white and throws her into his van right out in the open, on the edge of a busy highway. Black Rainbird is about to set fire to the station when Tate, recovered, climbs in. Short fight, Bo does nothing to help, but they manage to kick B.R. into the station just before it blows up and they flee in the van. Meanwhile, B.R. just happens to have another car just down the street. He picks it up and comes after them.
In the van, Bo and Tate tell us more stuff we already know. He’s been injured (though he looks pretty good for a guy who was just been beaten with a nozzle. Hey, swelling and discoloration is for pussies.), he’s a fugitive, she’s an Amber – YEAH, WE GET IT! Jeez. And they do it again: they point out the plot point that she didn’t do one of her “things” to help him when B.R. was beating the crap out Tate not three feet from her. “I was too scared,” she says, which makes perfect sense, because she wasn’t scared at all when she made the bird-nado to save the same guy from another person with a gun in Episode One. Totally consistent.
Almost done? We wish. Suddenly the stolen car just happens to have a flat. (Why? Nah, Black Rainbird didn’t shoot it out; it just happened.) Then two New Jersey State Police cars come roaring up – hey, how did they find them? — And get Tate out of the car, hands behind his head. Even though he’s just talked to Bo, like, three minute before about doing ‘her thing,’ her tells her not to do ‘her thing’ now. He surrenders. They throw him in the cop car…just as Black Rainbird just happens to drive by and reports to Skouras that, no problem, done in one, Bo and Tate are in custody. Skouras and the New Boss have a tearful, genuine moment of relief. Their baby is coming home.
Except … they’re not. Still in the car, the Staties reveal themselves as Winter, Channing, and Co. in cop drag. They roar off to a safe house. The end for now.
What. The. HELL? WHY did Winter take that moment to intervene, after letting these guys fend for themselves for the last 8 hours? And what’s with the disguise? There was no one else on the street. There were no witnesses of any kind. (And don’t tell me it was to fool Black Rainbird. There’s no indication they even know B.R. exists; he’s not mentioned at all. And he doesn’t come along until after they’ve pulled off the whole fake gun-pointing thing and they’re putting them in the car.) Winter & Co. could have driven up in a big black limo, waved Tate down (without benefit of a flat) and said, “Hey, get in,” and no one would have noticed. WHY BOTHER WITH ANY OF THIS? (Though canning does look good in her uniform.)
There’s a shot snippet with Skouras and Agent Farrell after he’s found out he’s been bamboozled. And hey, wouldn’t that have been a nice scene to see, like the car theft earlier? To actually see his anguish and anger when he’s told he’s been punked, and his little girl isn’t coming home to the nice pretty cell he’s built for her? Might actually have been revealing in terms of character. But…nah. Let’s just have Kyle grit his teeth some more.
God, you could make a whole different series just based on the scenes you didn’t get to see in this version of Believe. And a better one. But meanwhile…this is all we’ve got.
Want to read the recap from Episode One, the pilot? We didn’t think so, but click here to prove us wrong.
