It might not be fair to turn around and start poking into all the other Bad Wobot properties out there, but that's how they market the damn thing, and that's probably how the producers of Alcatraz got network executives to listen to their idea in the first place, so tough shit. If you don't want your new show to be compared to Lost, don't set it on a mysterious island where mysterious things happened that require lots of flashbacks. Don't cast the most visually identifiable actor from Lost playing an identical character. Don't use the same music guy, or let your new music guy rip off the music of Lost. And if you insist on doing all this stuff to remind people of Lost, don't make all the rest of the show a formulaic cop show, with a premise that screams "villain of the week" and all but shouting at the viewers that you're going to play the least popular aspect of Lost for all it's worth - the mystery tease! In the first two episodes of "Alcatraz" a big mystery is set up, with multiple aspects to it, that is obviously going to be the central story of the show. But at the same time, they make it abundantly clear that they are going to draw that mystery out for far too long, because the obvious episode-to-episode set up is going to involve chasing the criminal who appears each week, with only hints about the major mystery, and dramatic reveals of how big it really is, or how it affects more aspects of the show than you think.

Also, Abrams should stop making shows about chicks. He got it right ONCE, with Olivia Dunham on Fringe, a character who has not appeared at all in the current season. Meanwhile, there was Felicity, Alias and Kate on Lost, all of whom suck ass and were among the worst parts of their shows. The current lead, whom they named Madsen, giving a rather voluptuous and unconvincing "tough" female character the name of an infamous tough-guy actor, is, as I say, not convincing as a tough chick, and has very nebulous motivations or character. She has a fairly stock background ( "I wanted to be a cop since I was a little girl because of my cop father figure" ), is introduced through an implausible action sequence designed to prove her toughness, followed by a conversation in her superior's office designed to reveal crucial aspects of her personality - she doesn't want a partner, because she's a tough loner! You can do stuff wit this character, but you can't have her be a hardened tough chick with daddy/abandonment issues and at the SAME TIME make her the ignorant blank who asks questions for the sake of the audience. That worked for Fringe, because it involved a much more plausible cop stepping into a whole world of weirdness. Aside from the peculiar origins of the criminals on this show, it's just a straight up crime-solving thing. As it is, Madsen just seems dumb, and being a curvy young blonde doesn't help. And short hair does not make her look tough. For someone that young to be as hardened as they seem to be expecting her to come across, she can't be a detective. A detective is not some bum off the street, it is someone who presumably did very very well academically in her police training and courses and had an exemplary record early in her career to be promoted to homicide detective in a big city force before she's thirty, and that does not happen to someone with the kind of life that leaves you tough and hardened by 25 or 27. The same actress's previous notable role featured a character who WAS plausibly tough, but she was a criminal and the daughter of a criminal with a hinted-at messed up family dynamic. What's more, the abrupt demand that she have Jorge Garcia' character for her partner is totally out of left field, and plainly driven to include the actor on the show.

Garcia's character is a man-child similar to Hurley on Lost, who is all into comic books and other geek stuff, but pads out his qualifications by being an historian who has published work on Alcatraz, and is thus very knowledgeable about the inmates who vanished in 1963 and are now running about causing crime in 2012. This aspect of his character was actually the biggest surprise of the show, as I had pretty much assumed he would be a janitor or someone who was included in the main plot because he wandered into the wrong room and witnessed something he wasn't meant to, and staffing problems which resulted from this investigation being run on a shoe-string out of a grimy office somewhere meant they needed all the warm bodies who could be marginally useful. Instead, the investigating unit has a "batcave" dug out under Alcatraz, complete with a sophisticated computer to visually present data to the audience and avoid exposition entirely through dialogue, and a secret prison in the woods to hold all the recaptured convicts, which looks like a state of the art, high-tech cell-block with deliberate visual callbacks to the cellblock shown in flashbacks. With the resources to do all this, why would they need a Hurley? You would think their high-tech databases would have been crammed chock full of every possible fact his Alcatraz expert could recall about the missing prisoners and staff and backgrounds. Huge gaps are left in the capabilities of Sam Neil's investigation, which appear to exist for no reason other than to justify the appearance of Madsen & Soto (Garcia's character) and give them something to do. For instance, this high tech data base, and experts who have been waiting for fifty years for the criminals to show up, somehow missed the fact that one of the most flashy and spectacular killers had a recurring element to all his kills, that would be immediately noticable, with each killing spree containing one victim of a particular gender and age range. It takes the kids about two seconds to spot this, making you wonder what Hauser (Neil) has been doing all these years, before they invented all the high-tech stuff like lie-detector tables, and big-screen wall-mounted computers.

Additionally confusing is the partnership between Madsen & Soto. They give absolutely no reasons why the infamous partner-free Madsen would insist she needs a partner and select Soto in order to force Hauser to include him on the task force, which up until that moment consisted entirely of him and his minion, Lucy Indianname. Soto shows no sign of any useful traits, certainly not of a physical fitness or combat nature, aside from having learned a bunch of things, which could be gleaned from his books, about an historical event, which is revealed in the pilot to have NOT happened the way the world (including Soto) thinks it did! They basically have an expert on the cover story when we are supposed to be finding out the truth. Beyond this expertise, he brings nothing to the table aside from running a comic book store, leaving one to strongly suspect that the role was created to employ Garcia. Thanks to his physique, no one is going to believe he can bring anything to the table beyond mental qualities, but you can't have a genius or expert knowledge character on a show that's all about tantalizing the audience with a gradual reveal of a big mystery. This is not confined to an island where the capable people cannot get rid of him for his own safety, so if he's going to be on the show, they have to give him something to do, but thanks to his limitations, the one thing they can give him to do would totally undermine the show's driving force. Thus, a half-assed expert who knows enough to explain things to the audience, but does not know enough to reveal the mystery or is not smart enough to figure it out. At best a character with his attributes should be a recurring guest whom the action characters consult from time to time, not the protagonist's partner. If you are going to have a show with a cop who has a not-cop partner, that has to be the topic of the show, like Castle or Bones, for instance. When the non-cop's area of expertise is "a prison that has not been used for fifty years, and the people who lived and worked there fifty years ago plus comic books" there is just not a whole lot you can do with him.

The mystery is still sort of interesting, and Sam Neil's Hauser is ambiguous enough to show some promise, but the mechanics and handling of the show are rather badly done. Hauser, for instance, is initially an abrasive man-in-black whose interference with Madsen's investigation sparks her curiosity, and of course, leads her to keep poking her nose in until she has figured out enough for him to reluctantly confide in her and bring her in on the secret mission, but then on his own, he is shown to be much more than just the guy who has been investigating this phenomenon, with strong hints that he might actually be a villain. Some of his inexplicable actions regarding Madsen might indicate he has plans for her or anticipates a role that she is destined to play in the whole affair because of a connection to the prison, but that would require more knowledge than he is show to have, as his somewhat futile interrogations of a captive indicate. It really looks like the creators have not decided how much he knows or where he stands yet. As I mentioned above, he has the power to have a secret prison built and staffed, and to interfere in city police investigations of the murder of retired law enforcement officials (in other words, the kind of case cops will not just shut up and forget about), but at the same time, is so hard up for people to search for the reappearing convicts, that he is forced to agree to the ridiculous terms of a too-young SFPD detective in order to get her to be the third person on his team, which now consists of a morbidly obese guy, a female scientist, a female cop and a man old enough to have been a guard on Alcatraz fifty years ago. If they are going to be tracking all these hardened criminals, shouldn't there be at least one team member who could take a fit adult male in his prime in a fight? Especially since they need these guys alive to get intelligence on WTF is going on (to the extent that they allow a homicidal sniper to keep aiming his rifle, while they try to convince him to surrender, rather than put a bullet in the back of his head). So far, both the inmates apprehended have been shot in their capture which is going to get someone killed eventually or else create a running joke about the show.

Other annoying things about the show is that so much of the stuff behind the curtain is so visible that a lot of surprises are not surprises. When Madsen mentions her family connection to Alcatraz, Soto and her father-figure exchange a look that means it is absolutely no surprise when the end of the episode dramatically reveals the truth about her family connection of which she was unaware. The very first scene of the pilot establishes the unexpected and unexplained disappearance of the prisoners from Alcatraz back in the 60s, and since there would not be much of interest in a show set in the present rounding up geriatric escapees, the audience is already guessing that time-travel of a sort might be involved. Thus when we are introduced to Madsen chasing a suspect across rooftops, with a suspiciously old-fashioned haircut and style, the first thought is to wonder if he's one of them and if we are being introduced to the team in media res. It soon becomes clear that we are not, but then, the episode-ending dramatic reveal shows that her suspect WAS one of the inmates! We know the tricks by now, so when a person's face is never shown during an important conversation, we know that person's face is one we have seen elsewhere on the show. When a female character is introduced, but the camera takes a long time panning up her professional attire before revealing her face, we know she is going to be a face we recognize, and when there are only two women with lines on the entire show...

Another annoyance is the pointless characterization of narratively irredeemable killers, whose actions place them beyond the pale for a network TV show. Usually cop shows get that much into the killers' heads and backgrounds because they are only in it for one episode and it helps the detectives find them, which is the whole point of the mystery. For one of the two inmates pursued, the characterization has nothing to do with catching him, and his actions are such that no amount of characterization can make him anything more than a villain for whom motivation and circumstances that cause him to choose his victims are meaningless.

In summation, while there are interesting-seeming mysteries, and at least one (maybe two, if we account for the first inmate they track) possibly interesting character, the mechanics of the show to date leave me highly suspect about whether the journey to the answers is going to be worth the trouble and the characterization of those two individuals will turn out to be worth it. The over-the-top Lost reminders simply highlight the unoriginality and shallow portrayal of the two main characters compared to the very rich characterization of the previous show, and recall the shoddy handling of the mysteries of that island, leaving me to fear that Alcatraz has all of Lost's weaknesses without the saving grace of its strengths.