Bicker! Backstory! B-Story! Rinse! Repeat! Welcome to Believe Episode 4, with a whole lotta nuthin’ goin’ on.
Picking up where we left off last week: still in New York, still a fugitive. But apparently the Worst Pursuit Team Ever has lost faith in technology; even though Bo and Tate escaped their totally cool dragnet in midtown on foot, and are wandering around in plain sight without disguises, the cops aren’t using traffic or security cams to look for them like last week. That’s just the first pull-back in an hour full of repetition, wandering, and non-action.
Most of the first act is taken up in recap, through flashbacks and the inevitable exposition-talk that is the hallmark of Believe. The first ‘interesting,’ and we use the term very loosely, thing comes when Bo does the one thing that Winter asks her not to do; go outside the abandoned building where they’re supposed to hole up for 12 hours (why 12 hours? ‘Cause the script says 12 hours, damn it! Don’t ask questions!). Bo finds a handwritten letter and a wedding ring in the patio’s brick wall. She takes it and leaves while Bo sleeps. Then he wakes up and goes looking for her.
We already know Winter and Skouros were partners years ago, but they’re similar in one other way: their leadership seems to be entirely faith-based – in that they have faith in themselves, and nobody else. Skouros tells the Feds (whom, apparently, he controls without question ‘cause he’s Rich) to call off the Amber Alert, because he’s the only one who can find Bo and bring her in (despite the fact he’s had no success in doing exactly that in months). Winter insists on leaving Bo out in the cold – literally – with her fugitive Dad despite his insistence on being an irresponsible prick who cares only about himself because he believes it will all be okay. No explanation, he just knows. Despite the fact that he’s screwed up everything since the jail break, even to admitting that ‘New York was a mistake.’ What a couple of winners these guys are.
And here again, we see the basic HUGE problem with this show: nobody acts like a human. Bo, supposedly freezing, supposedly scares to death, wanting to be with Tate or Winter or Channing or SOMEbody, finds this letter and walks away, all by herself, into the mean street of New York, telling nobody. She gives her mittens to a street vendor that Tate just happens to run into. He recognizes the mittens and immediately starts to beat on the guy – good idea, attack a man in plain sight when the cops are already looking for you everywhere – who says a little girl gave them to him and asked for directions to an address on 75th. Does Tate ask what the address was? Nah. He just runs for the nearest bus. ‘Cause, you know, 75th in Manhattan is just this little side-street. He should have no trouble finding her. Bo gets to the brownstone in question (does no one ask for bus fare from this kid?) and presents a woman with the letter and ring. She looks stunned.
Why didn’t Bo tell anyone where she was going? Why didn’t Tate call Winter when he lost her? Why didn’t Tate ask for the address from the vendor rather than rough him up? Why are we still watching this? We just…can’t…look…away…
So Bo gets the story (yay! More exposition!) about the letter: The woman, Kate, was jilted by her high school sweetheart Matt, who goes off to Afghanistan and then wrote her a Dear John letter: “I can’t see you anymore.” This letter Bo found may be an “I take it all back” letter – we’re not really sure, we haven’t been allowed to see/read it. Bo suggests the woman’s mean ol’ parents, now dead, hid the letter in the wall rather than give it to her ‘cause they never liked Matt anyway. (And why wouldn’t they just throw it out or burn it? How many times do we have to say this? It’s in the script!)
Meanwhile Tate’s still wandering around, the FBI are having internecine battles for authority and barking out orders a la Tommy Lee Jones, and basically…nothing’s happening. Think of it as drawing small circles over and over and over…
Once again, Tate and Bo have a shouting match and physical confrontation in a public place, just aching for the cops to pick them up. Bo seems even more obsessed with the Touched By An Angel B-Story than usual this week. She’s going to go meet the Afghanistan vet who dumped the (now engaged) sweetheart. He just happens to be living within walking distance of 75th.
And one last rabbit out of the hat: Skouros now has a “telekinesis detector” which can sense any use of mind over matter anywhere in the world, apparently. This will serve as his version of the GPS that Winter has used so badly. We in the biz have a name for this: we call is a deus ex machina, or a “God Machine,” that allows you to skip over pesky plot points and get right to the action. ‘Cause you’re lazy. Or clueless. Or you just don’t care.
At the bottom of the hour, the guy who dropped out of Winter’s team last week – so unimportant to this point I’m not sure his name has been spoken aloud — gets caught by the FBI Task Force. High-action scene: they take him down while he’s standing on a corner. Reading a newspaper. Clearly surprised they even know he exists. Hoo! Wild!
Halfway through and Hero Tate has spent the entire time (a) bitching about the cold and Winter (ha!), (b) sleeping, and (c) looking for Bo, whom he just happens to find entirely by accident (no, really, that happens in New York all the time!).
As we resume: more flashbacks. Before Bo’s kidnapping from Skouros, they tried to make her move objects by giving her electric shocks (and we’ve seen how will she responds to stress). Skouros is for it, Winter’s against it. Skouros bad, Winter good. YES. WE KNOW THIS. THANK YOU. Moving on …
Tate is now pleading with the little girl to stop being mean to him. He’s actually whining. This from the same guy who last week was stealing jewelry so he could ditch the little girl, who was telling Winter not twenty minutes ago, “I go where I want, Chief.” And who has yet again been abandoned by Winter. See? Not human.
Back at the Command Center, The Guy With No Name gets intimidated by The FBI Woman, using some of the worst cop-interrogation dialogue on TV, just one tough-guy cliché strung to another. He gives it up, gives the FBI the address to Winter’s Command Center.
Meanwhile, Roman tests his deus ex telekinetica with his other half-ass psychics. Looks like he killed a guy doing it, but in his mind that means it works: they can now find Bo. They even call it at telekinesis GPS. (And I guess nobody told them that wiping a guy’s brain clear of memory isn’t exactly telekinesis. Never mind…)
Bo finally gets to the jilted high school guy: oh, my god! THIS is why he can’t see her again! HE CAN’T SEE! He’s BLIND, GET it?
I’ve never been so glad to see a commercial.
Bo arranges a bittersweet reunion; Kate of course says she would have loved Matt anyway, but now she’s engaged, so…*sigh*, I have a sad. It doesn’t work out the way Bo wants, she give a little telekinetic fit (why does Tate keep grabbing her? It’s creepy.) and far far away, Skouros’ TK GPS goes off.
The cops raid Winter’s Command Center,based on the Nameless Guy’s tip-off. It is, of course, empty, if it was ever anything but. Skouros just happens to call at that moment and tells them he’s found her: converge on the Upper West Side, just a few blocks away. Boy, what luck!.
Winter calls Tate and tells him to get to the Boat Basin and they’ll escape. But they only have a 15 minutes window. Why? Because that’s what the script – oh, never mind. (If this had been the plan all the time – that he would have a boat waiting for them in 12 hours…why keep it a secret? Why not just tell them? Then maybe they’d have stayed put in the ‘safe house’ for 12 hours and none of this would have happened. But…aughhh…)
The cops are coming. Skouros is coming. Tate and Bo are on the run. They grab a cab, and ten seconds later are stopped by the Feds. They get out of the cab, and Bo uses her brainpower to lift it up, flip it over and drop it.
That’s it. She doesn’t make it explode, she doesn’t run it towards the cops, she doesn’t throw it at the cops, she just drops it. Kind’a off to the side, away from anybody, so no one will get hurt. But it makes the big, tough FBI agents and NYC cops flinch back and go “ooh!” long enough for Bo and Tate to turn tail and run away. In full view of the trained law enforcement officers. Apparently the cops and Feds are so flummoxed by this that (Guess they haven’t seen any of the X-Men movies) they don’t even give chase, because the next thing you know Bo and Tate are at the Boat Basin meeting Winter, and off they go in their little tugboat, unmolested by cops or evil scientists.
Oh, and it turns out it wasn’t Kate’s vengeful parents who hid the letter in the wall; it was guy who she’s now engaged to. In another bit of painfully bad dialogue, he slips up and Kate figures it out, and next thing you know she’s left him and is letting Matt feel her face. Happy Ending.
Finally, we are subjected to some of the most wooden “buddy-buddy” dialogue between Bo and Tate that we’ve seen so far. But at least it explains why the only thing they ever do is bicker. It’s because the chemistry between these two is so absent that’s all they can do.
One sentence summary for this hour of high drama: Bo and Tate get out of New York; Roman has his own GPS to track them. And the rest we’ve seen before. Over and over. Round and Round.
