Episode 04 – “Cal Sweeney”
With three episodes in the bag it’s easy to presume that we have the formula of this show down pat. Well to be honest we do.
With all the inmates of Alcatraz returning we get the return of a sweet talking bank thief, Cal Sweeney (Eric Johnson), who’s out robbing banks. While I have little issue with the idea of the weekly procedural drama as it is I feel like this show is one of don’t tell and don’t show. We’re told that these people are coming back inexplicably from the past and the show tries it’s best to insinuate that there’s a bigger plot a foot but we never see anything to indicate the opposite, other than these mysterious keys (which we get a flashback explanation for in this episode) that in both this episode as well as the pilot we see our criminals of the week attempting to procure.
What I believe stretches my imagination the furthest with this show is that these men, who’re thrown into the technological age, find themselves here and decide with almost no break in their train of thought to commit the same crimes that they were imprisoned for over fifty years prior. You would imagine that the shock of this form of time travel would lead them to spend at least a little time trying to process it all rather than having, Ernest Cobb killing random people from a sniper scope (rare to be found in a shop these days) or Kit Nelson kidnapping an eleven year old boy. The show never addresses the psychological implications of what this transport would do to a man. Unless of course these people have been altered with somehow, and this is where I get into theory of where this show is going, which I will hold off on getting into for a few more episodes.
What made this episode particularly bearable was how charmingly vile Sweeney is. It almost reminds me of Sawyer in LOST for all the wrong reasons. From the first time we met Sawyer we were intrigued, we loved to hate him. Since he as a character, and the show, lasted a while we eventually found reasons to sincerely love him, but here we get just a forty-five minute block of hate filled love for a character that by next we’re going to barely try and remember even existed.
I’m starting to more and more believe that the story I want isn’t of Rebecca, Soto and Hauser chasing down a random criminal every week but the story of these criminals being in Alcatraz in 1963, without the whole disappearing act.
The Prison Thoughts: Are they all dead? No. They did that already. Awww… well.
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