Persons Unknown - NBC Summer Miniseries from the screenwriter of The Usual Suspects (1 Viewer)

[ChristopherG]

Yeah - I'm still in but I find the new female character extremely annoying. Not sure why but every word out of her mouth brings me pain.

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

I'll stay through the end to find out what it is all supposed to mean, but so far it is mostly just bugging me. I don't mind mysterious and even obnoxious characters, but I do object to stupid ones. And the plot constantly relies on massive stupidity on somebody's part to advance:


1. The elevator. Could they seriously not have engineered that thing so the floor indicator moved when Joe is coming and going from the secret basement? And how about warning him or not opening when someone is standing outside the door? There are camera and motion sensors everywhere, but they can't protect their secret access point? For that matter, why put it in the elevator - which everyone uses - in the first place? Why aren't there multiple secret access points in places like Joe's room and the empty storefronts, where he can come and go without being detected.

2. Joe. Why tell the truth now, why not keep lying? It was perfectly obvious that the new girl was going to withhold the antidote and let him die unless she got the answer she wanted. So he had a perfect excuse for "confessing" to being the snitch. And a very good way to turn the tables on her by accusing her of being the plant. Joe should have been smart enough to do that.

3. The reporter. The dumbest guy in the show. From not making multiple backups of his laptop data on, this character is major league dumb and he never learns. Even as a reporter for a sleazy tabloid he isn't plausible. Those guys have to have some smarts and they have to be able to win trust and convince people to let them get close. Reporter boy is an obvious loon. The way he chased after the guy who pulled a gun on the ambassador is just one of many examples.


His editor, the supposedly level-headed one, is scarcely better. They're attacked by the mysterious guys in blue. She - not he - has the sense to grab a very heavy sculpture and whack one of them over the head with it. (He follows her lead and hits the second guy with a chair.) So they have the presence of mind to disable their armed attackers, but then they run out of the apartment leaving the guns behind and the attackers barely stunned. At the very least they should have taken the guns. Better still, they should have whacked the blue boys a few more times with the chair and the statue and to make sure they were out. Or just killed them outright. Guys with guns break into your place, you have a very good case for self-defense. In fact, the editor's first move - the strike with the statue - should have killed her blue guy anyway. In real life that would almost certainly have caused a skull fracture, which would have killed the guy either very quickly or within a few hours without medical attention.

And even if the reporter didn't have the brains to get a shave and a haircut before he tried to pass himself off as a priest, she should have had sense enough to make him - at least the way her character is portrayed.


Instead we find out that they're both dumb enough to take time out from running away from bad guys to just sit in the back seat of a cab openly discussing their problems and then failing to notice that the driver has slipped out of the cab and run away from it.

Yeeesh.


Regards,


Joe

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

Originally Posted by Joseph DeMartino

1. The elevator. Could they seriously not have engineered that thing so the floor indicator moved when Joe is coming and going from the secret basement? And how about warning him or not opening when someone is standing outside the door? There are camera and motion sensors everywhere, but they can't protect their secret access point? For that matter, why put it in the elevator - which everyone uses - in the first place? Why aren't there multiple secret access points in places like Joe's room and the empty storefronts, where he can come and go without being detected.

None of the concerns you raised would have been an issue if Joe had stuck to protocol. He got caught because Joe went off script and started taking stupid risks -- almost certainly tied into the Foundation's decision to risk his life with the bee-hive ridden cabin and Janet's role in saving him.


And I think it's been made clear that there are multiple secret access points, with at least two (the elevator and the Chinese kitchen) operational from the surface. As Tom made clear an episode or so ago, there is also an elevator directly into Joe's room, however it's unclear whether Joe can operate it. Remember, Joe was supposed to be the perfect mole and not visit the underground lair at all. The most access points accessible from the surface, the greater the risk of one of the other captives happening upon it by mistake.

2. Joe. Why tell the truth now, why not keep lying? It was perfectly obvious that the new girl was going to withhold the antidote and let him die unless she got the answer she wanted. So he had a perfect excuse for "confessing" to being the snitch. And a very good way to turn the tables on her by accusing her of being the plant. Joe should have been smart enough to do that.

It's the psychology of those being interrogated. Once they're forced into confessing or tricked into confessing, the game's up. There's a certain amount of relief at being freed from the burden of lying, and the interrogators rely on that. It's easy to come up with the logical thing to do from the comfort of our living room, but we haven't been on edge for weeks, sleep-deprived and poisoned with anti-freeze.

3. The reporter. The dumbest guy in the show. From not making multiple backups of his laptop data on, this character is major league dumb and he never learns. Even as a reporter for a sleazy tabloid he isn't plausible. Those guys have to have some smarts and they have to be able to win trust and convince people to let them get close. Reporter boy is an obvious loon. The way he chased after the guy who pulled a gun on the ambassador is just one of many examples.


His editor, the supposedly level-headed one, is scarcely better.

I agree that the whole reporter and his editor storyline doesn't work at all. Even if Renby wasn't a moron who walks into obvious danger over and over again, there's a more fundamental issue: if we are to believe that the Foundation is powerful enough to pull off everything we've seen them pull off so far, it's completely implausible that even the more careful and clever reporter alive would be able to evade them for long. I believe Renby's a pawn in this as surely as the captives in the town are, but it still doesn't make engaging television. We haven't learned anything from his storyline that we couldn't have inferred from what we've learned following the captives in the town. He's interesting only because he's Janet's mysterious deadbeat husband. The editor is less than uninteresting, and a pretty poor actress to boot.


In the final shot tonight, there was man in flannel visible in the doorway of the bathroom via the mirror on the bathroom wall. I'm not sure if he was a cameraman that inadvertently got into his own sight line or the guy who made Joe disappear into thin air.

 

[Phil Taylor]

This week's show was interesting and moved the story line along a bit -- whatever that story is ... and raised some new questions. Who/what will replace Fried Won-Tom ... where did Joe go ... who da hell are the Secret Organization with no name ... and how da hell can a two-bit reporter and his mousy editor think they have a snowball's chance in hell to take down an organization of the world's most powerful people???

 

[Robert A. Willis Jr.]

The questions are certainly beginning to grow. I just hope they resolve them satisfactorily.

 

[Josh Dial]

What a strange episode this week.

 

[ScottH]

Strange...and horrible...

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

I was happy to see the revelation of Joe as a priest. It fits what we learned about him before his latest abduction, and muddies the waters in a way that I really appreciated. Tori was also very Hitchcockian ice princess as the "nurse" in the sensory deprivation chamber. And the director of the whole enchilada being the mental patient that's supposedly been committed in that mental institution for the past 25 years? Loved it.

 

[Robert A. Willis Jr.]

I enjoyed this one (although parts of it were very disturbing). We are finally getting an idea on what the "company" is and its recruitment methods. We still need to know so much more.

 

[PhilipG]

That was a terrible episode - and I've enjoyed all the others so far to some extent or other. Whoever invented "dreamy sequences" should be dug up, reanimated, disarticulated and shot.

 

[Phil Taylor]

I liked this week's episode - the show just keeps getting better, if not more far-fetched - but most good scifi does stretch the limits of the imagination. I wish the car salesman would've just fried when he tried to walk back past the fence - then he'd have been a fried donut hole.

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

When the priest was giving his heavy-handed expository summary of the show's ridiculous premise, I was struck by the fact that the truck was parked on the same stretch of road that the taxi had been parked on when the big rig came after Janet and Joe. Therefore, the final shot wasn't a particularly great surprise, but still a great ending. This show could be a lot better, but it's one I look forward to each week. Too bad we have to wait two weeks for the next one.

 

[Joe_H]

So I finally looked up that "The way out is the way through" quote, and apparently it's an L. Ron Hubbard quote. That, combined with the talk of "levels" for Joe, makes me wonder how much of a parallel this is supposed to be for scientology (obviously in an even more extreme manner, of course).


The other thing that made the ending predictable is that it really was the only possible end-game for the reporters. I mean, either they die, which makes their storyline a complete waste, or they get brought into the town. There's nothing else that would have made sense.

 

[Robert A. Willis Jr.]

Yeah, you could see that one coming. Nevertheless, it was a good episode.

 

[Josh Dial]

Was the billboard on the left side of the screen different as Mark and Janet entered the frame? I only saw it for a second, but I thought it was different than what we've seen before.

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

Originally Posted by Josh Dial

Was the billboard on the left side of the screen different as Mark and Janet entered the frame? I only saw it for a second, but I thought it was different than what we've seen before.

I thought the same at first, so I went back to the previous episode where Blackham was able to escape before changing his mind. While we don't see all of it in that ep, it does appear to be the same IWILD billboard.

 

[Josh Dial]

Thanks Adam. I had deleted the previous eps from my PVR (this show is no LOST), so I couldn't check. For a second I thought maybe they had found a second town or something, or, heaven forbid, the show decided to introduce time travel (gah!).

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

I suppose with this show, anything's possible. But if it is a second town, it's one they've built identically to the one Janet, Joe, and co. are trapped in.

 

[Steve Berger]

Check your local listings. My station shows an episode scheduled tonight.

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

The NBC website shows nothing; next episode still scheduled for Saturday.