Airs: Thursdays at 10pm EST on USA
Review: Pilot
Finally! A series that doesn’t start in the future and then go back to “X hours earlier.” Colony is one of the new series that I was looking forward to this season. It didn’t disappoint, but I have some concerns. The foremost is the cast. Sarah Wayne Callies (Prison Break and The Walking Dead) and Amanda Righetti (The Mentalist) are not my favorite actresses – I find that their acting leaves something to be desired. This concern is not apparent in the pilot episode, fortunately.
The pilot begins not with some random chase/action sequence which we know we will return to later, but with a seemingly normal family. Our first hint that something isn’t right is when Will (Josh Holloway of LOST) drops an egg. He shows some undue concern over a simple broken egg. Through the course of the episode we learn why – while we never see an alien, it is strongly hinted that an alien race has taken over the earth (i.e. colonized it), with references to “the arrival” and a scene with the launch of a spacecraft. Rationing becomes the new order – food (e.g. bacon is a luxury item and not consumed by the populace) and medicine (insulin is considered non-essential [though I don’t understand why a hospital would have a huge stockpile if it is non-essential). As with any colonization the populace is split into two groups, collaborators and a resistance (there is a third group – the I’m-staying-the-heckfire-out-of-it group, but they aren’t very interesting.)
This is only the pilot episode (episode two has aired, but I have not yet watched it). There was a nice twist at the end of the episode 1, that frankly, you should see coming, but it is still good to set up a conflict for the series arc. They don’t explain why rationing is even necessary, other than our new alien overlords decreed it. If I can tolerate Callies and Righetti, this series has a lot of potential – very reminiscent of V.
WWYT Rating: 7.2
Nielsen Rating 0.4 A medium-rating. USA is undergoing a transformation. They are trying to move away from “blue-sky procedurals,” whatever those are. They are moving to more “innovative” series – the first series they produced with this in mind was Mr. Robot. This transformation is going to take time and I suspect that USA will be more patient with these new formats. Chance of renewal 90%
FTR…we’re good with this one so far as well (We’ve seen Ep2). Seems to be treading a path similar to a lot of the “Good guys vs. aliens/zombies/future robots/etc” series, though. I’d like to see it try to break new ground.
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