Wednesday, October 22, 2008

My Own Worst Enemy, "The Hummingbird": Childhood's end

Brief spoilers for the second episode of "My Own Worst Enemy" coming up just as soon as I introduce Henry to the concept of Facebook...

Well, that was something of an improvement over the pilot. Both episodes have a fundamental logic problem where if you stop to think about anything -- why it would actually be advantageous to make agents with oblivious cover personalities, why Alfre Woodard would send Mike O'Malley out on a mission with only clueless Henry as his backup -- but the difference is that this one was just engaging enough that I didn't keep stopping to think. (Not as much, anyway.)

With the basic exposition out of the way in the pilot, we got to focus more on character this time. The whole experiment still doesn't make any sense, but at least we got to see Henry react the way an ordinary man might when faced with this ridiculous circumstance: he would do everything possible to prove the reality of his own life. That was kind of interesting, and Christian Slater did a better job of modulating between Henry and Edward than he did in the pilot. The show's still doing a lot of hand-holding about the identity switches, but that's the sort of thing you have to do early in a series. (See previous timeslot resident "Journeyman," which had to wait at least a half a dozen episodes before it could let its hero start treating time travel as a fact of life rather than an excuse to bug his eyes out and act confused.)

I still don't care enough about the show to want to watch it every week, especially with such a traffic jam of programming earlier in the evening, but maybe I'll check back in from time to time to see if it improves -- and/or if they can come up with some vaguely plausible explanation for the Jekyll/Hyde set-up.

What did everybody else think?

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