STITCHERS Packs In a Lot, but Is It Worth The Time?

S1E1 “A Stitch in Time”

ABC Family aired a new show on June 2nd. Stitchers is about fighting crime using the memories of the deceased. Kirsten Clark is a brilliant CalTech student who is recruited into the Stitchers program by Maggie Baptiste. Kirsten agrees to assist the crew after she is put on academic probation for compromising her roommate, Camille Engelson’s, project. Cameron Goodkin is the neuroscientist behind the program, and his partner, Linus, offers comedic relief in the lab.

Kirsten Clark is extremely intelligent and has temporal dysplasia. This means that she can’t feel time, and can’t feel emotions. Her father dropped her off to live with his friend, Ed Clark, and then he disappeared. The man she was raised by is named Ed Clark, and in this episode Detective Quincy Fisher informs Kirsten that Ed killed himself. Once he tells her, she doesn’t react, not even when she sees the body. More interestingly, she informs the Detective that is was murder not suicide.

Kirsten hacks into the Police Department’s computer systems to really find out what happened to Clark, but then she’s kidnapped by Maggie Baptiste. She is the head of a covert government program that “stitches” the memories of the recently deceased to find what happened in their last moments of life, and Cameron Goodkin is the neuroscientist behind the program. Kirsten is a good candidate for the program because of her temporal dysplasia, and she helps to stop a bomb from going off. With that, Kirsten wants to leave the program – but is then informed that her biological father and Ed Clark started the Stitchers Program.

Stitching is a process of inserting a conscious person into the memories of a recently dead person. However, the stitching team only has roughly 48 hours until the deceased person’s neurons are too far apart for someone to stitch them back together and to look into their memories.

Kirsten can’t feel emotions because of the temporal dysplasia. When Ed Clark committed suicide, she claimed she didn’t feel anything because they weren’t close. She later explained it to Maggie like this: once she saw Ed dead, it was like he had been dead forever. She can’t feel time. Crazy. Has she really survived her whole life with this condition?

This makes Kirsten a perfect fit for the Stitchers Program. The girl they tried before her, Marta Rodriguez, couldn’t handle the program and as a result she is now in the hospital.

I was following the first episode really well, up until the point of Kirsten’s kidnapping and the introduction into the program. The show shoved a lot of information at viewers without much of a break, and at the end I asked myself: did all that really just happen in one episode?

The acting in the show is subpar, especially from Emma Ishta (Kirsten), whose character is so unlikable that you question why you’re still watching. Normally when a character comes off as blunt with little to no emotions, the audience has a soft spot for them (think Dr. Gregory House or Dr. Temperance Brennan). Kirsten, however, is just annoying.

Before Kirsten is stitched into the memory of the bomber, she has to put on a low cut, skin tight suit. Why is it that female characters always wear skin tight revealing clothing? Catwoman, Black Widow, Wonder Woman, and now Kirsten Clark. The show even acknowledged what she had to wear and they gave the explanation that the suit makes it possible for the sensors to be attached to her body in the tank during stitching. That still doesn’t explain why the suit was so low cut.

Not only that, but there is forced bickering between Emma’s character and Cameron, and it quickly becomes clear that the writers are setting them up for a possibly romance. Before the stitch begins, Cameron says, very concerned, “I’m with you, trust me.”

Really? These two characters just met and already Cameron shows extreme interest in her and is obviously worried for her – but he barely knows her. To top it all off, when Kirsten bounces from the memory, she is still feeling the emotions of the bomber and kisses Cameron in a dazed state. After that, she passes out, and is taken to Cameron’s apartment. Since she’s passed out, they have to take her somewhere. Why Cameron’s apartment? They could have just as easily taken her to an infirmary in the lab (if they have one) or to Maggie’s apartment. It feels like the writers are trying too hard to set them up for something.

The only thing that saved the show for me was the very last scene: when Kirsten finds out that Ed Clark and her father created the Stitchers program. This brought the beginning of the episode and the ending together, and created a reason for Kirsten to stay in the program. The show also offers a cast that is diverse, but the writers have to concentrate on building their characters and making this show unique to other crime fighting shows (Bones, Scorpion, The Mentalist).