Every now and then, a show pops up that has a very interesting concept but can't gain the proper audience for it to make it past the first season.
This was one of those shows.
Alcatraz was a 2012 mystery series based loosely on the closure of Alcatraz Island's prison facility. The prison closed in 1962, but the closure was secretly a cover-up because of a bunch of experiments being performed on the inmates and the sudden disappearance of every single individual on the island. Fifty years later, the former Alcatraz inmates begin popping up all over the place. This brings together a San Francisco detective, Rebecca Madsen (Sarah Jones, Sons of Anarchy), an Alcatraz prison enthusiast and conspiracy theorist, Dr. Diego Soto (Jorge Garcia, Lost), and a government agent, Emerson Hauser (Sam Neill, Jurassic Park) to hunt down all of the reappearing inmates and locking them back up before they can cause too much mayhem. The appearance of the inmates is even more mysterious because all of the reappearing individuals haven't aged a day in the fifty years since they were last seen.
Each episode would focus on a specific inmate or set of inmates and their experiences in the prison, mostly their times meeting with the warden (Jonny Coyne, Gangster Squad) or the prison therapist (Parminder Nagra, ER) in hopes of developing an overarching mystery and working its way to an overall conclusion. However, in their goal of earning a second season, the writers wrote themselves into a major cliffhanger and the final episode ends with even more mysteries, unanswered questions, and the possible death of an important character. Although I can understand this decision from a writer's viewpoint, as someone who thoroughly enjoyed the mystery in the show, not giving at least some headway to a solution before ending the season really irritates me. Personally, I think that it would have been better if they could have made the first season into a full arc instead of attempting to stretch the single arc over a possible two seasons. This show is a perfect example of the fact that a television show is never guaranteed more than their first season, and that's if they can even get beyond a pilot episode (I'm looking at you, Mockingbird Lane).
Rating: 4/5 Emerson Hauser "Ya Don't Say" Faces
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