CAN I BE OF ASSISTANCE?

Sunday, March 03

Art

Down The Rathole

Touch looks like it's made the Tru Calling mistake - introduce a bad guy and simultaneously try to explain the basic premise.

There's a rule of thumb in speculative fiction, that for each story you're given one wild card.  You can also pick and choose from the standard tropes, even if they're impossible - if you need FTL to make your space opera work, you get that for free as long as it's not the key to the entire plot.  Same for dragons in a fantasy adventure; so long as their mere existence isn't the beginning and end of the story, they're a standard enough element that you can just borrow them into your world.

In Tru Calling (and this isn't much of a spoiler) the wild card is time travel, of a specific and limited sort: What if you could reset your day and start again?  And it worked really well as a plot hook, and allowed them to tell spin out some pretty complex hypotheticals.  And then they started to lay out an explanation for how it works, and at the same introduce an adversary, and the show went down the drain and got cancelled.

In Touch it's magical savants.  The idea is that some people on the autistic spectrum (just a handlful, not all of them) aren't just wired differently, but instead (and possibly literally) god-touched, able to see patterns in mathematics and in the world to such a degree that they can predict the future - of people they have never even met, and then change that future.  And the way the stories are told, and the fact that in reality people are more interconnected than you might think, makes the whole thing work.

So in the second season they've introduced a bad guy and started to explain the underlying mechanism of it all.

Also it lacks a young Eliza Dushku, so that's two strikes, maybe three depending on how you're counting.

Bet it's not back for a third season.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:34 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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