ALPHAS 01.03 – Mr. Harvey Manages His Surprise
“ANGER MANAGEMENT”
Well, I have to admit I wasn’t expecting this.
Sure, there has been violence in this show already especially in episode 2, but here… well. Spoilers follow.
On a subway a young couple argues, and as the girl gets up to walk away the other passengers suddenly erupt into violence. In moments they are tearing and beating at each other while the girl struggles to make it through the crowd. It doesn’t matter who they are: young, old, businessman or woman, police officer or punk, everyone is doing their level best to kill the people around them. And then someone gets their hands on a policeman’s gun…
Meanwhile, at the Alpha’s new office, Gary (Ryan Cartwright) keeps hearing the humming that so distracted him last episode. After failing to get Bill (Malik Yoba) to a) shoot the antenna that Gary’s sure it’s coming from, b) give Gary the gun so he can shoot it, and c) give Gary a grenade to blow it up, Gary finds that Nina (Laura Mennell) isn’t going to help him push Bill to do a,b, or c.
On the phone, Hicks (Warren Christie) argues with his ex-wife about seeing his son more while bouncing a ball around the office, his ability sending it through the others spaces before returning to his hand, until his frustration gets in the way and it crashes into the wall of Rachel’s (Azita Ghanizanda) office. Inside, she and Dr. Rosen (David Strathairn) have been discussing the pace of her specific treatment, and their attempts to improve her assertiveness. Hick’s isn’t all that receptive to Rosen’s attempts to discuss the situation, but any further talk is interrupted by a phone call from Agent Wilson (Callum Keith Rennie).
The outbreak on the subway is not the first such explosion of unexplained violence, and the DOD turns to Rosen and his Alphas to investigate. With the number of casualties so high, the pressure from above on Wilson is obviously high, and he’s passing that on to Rosen. When Rachel applies her sensory abilities to the subway car, she finds a small toy monkey saturated in pheromones, leading Rosen to deduce that the mystery Alpha is producing them when threatened. Going through the security footage they find the monkey attached to the backpack of a teenaged girl… the same girl who was arguing with the boy on the subway. Finding her is obviously the answer, but how do you find one girl in New York, especially one who doesn’t want to be found?
Luckily the Alphas have Gary, whose ability to see and interpret wireless and electrical signals means every camera in the city is his eyes, and Rachel, whose ability to smell the pheromone trail left behind leads them to the girl. But when another outbreak of violence enables her to escape, the young man she argued with on the subway doesn’t, and the Alphas take him back to their office. But the pace that Rosen and the Alphas are moving at isn’t enough for Agent Wilson, and while Rosen tries to win the trust of the young man, Wilson isn’t willing to wait. Barging into the office, his insistence on taking him into custody reveals that perhaps it’s not the girl they should have been looking for as the Alphas and the DOD agents find themselves driven to uncontrollable violence…
This was, as I said, unexpected.
The explosion of violence at the Alphas office does more than give our heroes some bruises. When all is said and done Agent Wilson has been beaten to death by one of his own agents and the team has been emotionally damaged by the effects, some more than others. Sure, it was likely that Callum Keith Rennie would be leaving the show due to other commitments, but his exit in one of the bloodier bits of television I’ve ever seen on Syfy was pretty extreme. Not bad, but startling. The interesting thing about the character in only his second appearance on the show is how differently he was portrayed this time. In the pilot, he was impatient as well, but more odd than anything else. Here he was far more agressive in his relationship with Rosen, and his impatience and insistance on ignoring Rosen’s timetable got him killed. If we’d had more time with the character I’m sure the two versions would have been reconciled, but as it is it’s jarring. There were a couple of interesting character moments for him though, one before his death and the other, oddly enough after. Before, even in the midst of the pheromone-driven violence, he chased after Matthew, the boy from the subway. As Matthew slipped onto an elevator, Wilson drew his gun on him but didn’t shoot, instead calling out for the boy to stop. I would have liked to see more of this difficult character, who even when driven to homicidal rage fought it enough to not kill.
The second moment ties into one of the really good things about this episode. After a Rosen-centric 2nd episode, here our Alphas get much more focus, especially Rachel. In the aftermath, she tells Nina that she didn’t like Wilson, who always smelled to her heightened senses like stomach-acid and Tums, and now feels bad that she didn’t like the way the man smelled. How is this a moment for Wilson as well? It was a nice touch that the character had an upset stomach… under the circumstances, and being handler for the Alphas, wouldn’t you?
But again, Rachel has the best focus here. When Matthew triggers the outbreak, Rachel is on the phone with her mother, and before she turns to physical violence, she lashes out verbally at her mother. When the most subdued of our characters let loose with her frustrations in anger, it’s not a small thing, and in a moment Rachel has damaged her relationship with her family, perhaps beyond repair. Azita Ghanizanda gets to do some fine work here, between meek Rachel just doing her job on the team and dealing with the emotional aftermath of her actions because of her work.
Malik Yoba’s Bill gets some focus here of a different sort, as the one person not affected by Matthew’s ability. Being able to control his own fight-or-flight response, the pheromones don’t affect him, and we get to see Bill be a bit of an action hero here. His often irritated response to Gary and the humor that results to also nice. You can tell that Bill likes Gary, despite himself.
Laura Mennell’s Nina gets something of a rude awakening here. Used to being able to control other people, her lack of control when exposed to the pheromones shakes her badly. But her best moments are with Rachel, where despite the large differences between the two characters a friendship is forming. When Rachel finds herself estranged from her family, Nina takes her in, not only because Rachel needs a place to stay, but because Nina needs someone too.
Gary does more than use his abilities to find the Alphas targets as well. Imagine never being in the midst of violence before, and having difficulty interacting with people around you because of your Asperger’s. Imagine suddenly exploding with rage and committing violence on those around you, and not really understanding it. Where the others are dealing with what happened as soon they recover, Ryan Cartwright’s Gary doesn’t understand what’s really happened until well after they do. It’s a little pat that it happens by the end of this episode, but that goes with the format. It’ll be interesting to see if there are longer term effects on him.
The emotional fallout isn’t as great with Warren Christie’s Hicks, but he gets to be quite physical here, showing off his Alpha abilities in ways large and small. From bouncing the aforementioned ball, to sticking pencils in the ceiling by bouncing them off a doorknob, to running across the shoulders of a rioting crowd to safety, Hick’s talents may be erratic, but they certainly are effective. Nice too is his demonstration of them to Gary at the end, taking care of that buzzing.
Still, the best reason to watch this show is Dr. Lee Rosen. David Strathairn’s character just keeps getting more and more interesting. I don’t know how much Strathairn studied the way doctors talk to the patients, but I’ve been in therapy, and how he talks to the Alphas often reminds me of the way my excellent psychiatrist did. His interactions with Wilson and Matthew show other sides too. With Matthew, he treats the young man with respect and intelligence, but is clearly guiding him. As for Wilson, while he starts by being conciliatory, the more Wilson pushes, the more Rosen stands up to him. I’m thinking there’s much more to our good doctor here, especially after seeing the box of cassettes hidden in his office. And then there’s the ongoing revelations about Binghamton.
And then there’s Matthew, played by Devon Graye. Here is one of the worst thing that a teenager can be, in love and driven by emotions and hormones, and possessing the ability to drive those around you to rage. One one level you can see his simple drive. he loves a girl, and is trying to keep that love, in spite of his condition. And when the girl can’t take the violence that follows him, it just makes it worse.
If there was one thing that seemed off this episode, it was the musical choice for the violence at the Alphas’ office. You can’t help but notice that it was inspired by “In the House in a Heartbeat” from 28 DAYS LATER. Now I can see how it fits, and I like the song a lot, but the more or less copying of it is something that pulled me out of the moment. It seems a touch lazy. Oh, and there is another thing. When Matthew triggers the pheromones the camera zooms in on his hand, and while dramatic, it smacks a bit of the comic-booky, where heroes and villains somehow are able to shoot beams and the like out of their hands despite the biological unlikelihood of such things. For a show that is at least paying lip-service to Alpha powers being somewhat possible it’s a dramatic touch that doesn’t work. Not to mention that in normal humans at least, pheromones are most present in sweat, and while hands certainly do, studies on the subject tend to indicate the armpit as being the likely source of pheromones. But ok, that’s not as visually cool.
So, looking at our show so far, I’m thinking that it’s looking pretty promising the more it goes along. A decent if flawed pilot, the stronger second episode with larger questions asked, and now this. The Alphas are more of an actual team now, and while the bickering among them is likely to continue, you can tell these people like each other even so. The willingness to kill what appeared to be an important recurring character, in a pretty brutal way. And the continuing questions raised by Binghamton, the DOD’s running of it and their plans, and more importantly, just what Rosen really knows about it. And I for one am not convinced that the buzzing Gary kept hearing was accidental…
