Alphas - Season 1

Season 1 Cast - Ryan Cartwright, Laura Mennell, Warren Christie, Malik Yoba, David Strathairn and Azita Ghanizada

Once more, Netflix helps me to catch up on another now-cancelled series.

Dr Lee Rosen (Strathairn) is a man with a mission, to discover humans with extraordinary neurological abilities - Alphas, in his parlance - and to help them to achieve their full potential. He is not an Alpha himself, although it emerges at the end of the season that his daughter Danielle is. Rosen is a psychologist and the leader of a team of Alphas who work under the auspices of the Defense Criminal Investigative Service to track down and contain dangerous Alphas. Throughout the season they work against both individual Alphas and the Alpha supremacist organisation Red Flag, but all the while it becomes increasingly apparent that their own side is more sinister than at first they might appear*.

Alongside Strathairn's Academy nominated heavy talent, the team - each with their own ability and downside - are played by either relative unknowns or TV stalwarts: Bill Harken (Yoba) is an FBI field agent and hyperadrenal, who gains superhuman strength from his adrenaline rush but is exhausted afterwards and always cranky. Nina Theroux (Mennell) is the veteran of the team and a 'hyper inductive', able to override the will of others through speech and eye contact. Rachel Pirzad (Ghanizada) has the ability to heighten any one sense to an incredible degree, but only by dulling the others to near-insensibility; an ability that the series calls synaesthesia, which kinda makes me want to punch things. Gary Bell (Cartwright) is a transducer; he can sense any electromagnetic radiation and interpret it as images, sounds or patterns. The new guy is Cameron Hicks (Christie), who sounds like he ought to be fighting aliens on a spaceship and is in fact an ex-Marine/ His hyperkinesis allows him uncanny agility and hand-eye coordination.

The basic format is a monster of the week anthology, with the team tracking down Alphas who are, deliberately or unwittingly, causing harm. A double-edged arc plot concerns the rising activities of Red Flag and the increasing evidence of Guantanamo-style abuse at the facility set up to house the Alphas that the team brings in.

The meat of the show is in the characters and their interactions. Bill is constantly aggravated by his amateur teammates, but it is the same informality that sets the show apart. Nina struggles with her compulsion to use her ability to simply take whatever she wants with no consequences. Rachel struggles with a family who consider her ability an illness and Cameron labours under the white man's burden or something (seriously; of all of them, Cameron is the one most cursed with awesome. He's a natural ninja who sometimes chokes up under pressure.)

The show loses points for having the Hulk be the African-American character, but pulls something back for making him the highly-trained professional agent genuinely struggling with his anger management issues and the fact that they keep him from getting back to the job he loved. Likewise Rachel is in some ways a stereotypical sheltered, over-controlled Asian girl, but without succumbing to most of the more obvious signifiers (her parents fix her up with dates, but don't try to arrange her marriage.)

The real triumph of the show is Cartwright, however, whose nuanced performance as Gary eschews typical autistic stereotypes. Of particular note is the relationship between Gary and Anna, a Red Flag strategist and omnilinguist whose own combination of autism and profound intelligence made her the one person in the world that Gary could ever felt truly close to.

It's easy to see why Alphas didn't make it past two half seasons. It's a decent enough show, but it's not doing anything new enough or well enough to stand out from twenty years in the shadow of The X-Files. Still, it did get two seasons, so expect another review somewhere down the line.

* And they first appear as a team of black-suited, faceless government goons who disappear 'bad' Alphas to an upstate compound for remedial time in the maximum fun chamber.