Thursday, February 12, 2004
I've just watched the first episode of Jake 2.0 on Sky. Or at least, I think I did. It slips in to the brain and out again without troubling much along the way. The characters (if that isn't to strong a term to describe them) are bland and formulaic, there's the dumb frat flatmate, who isn't too dumb and fratty, there's the love interest that Jake just can't bring himself to express his attraction to, the bosses, the doctor who keeps taking her glasses off so we see how attractive she is. But there's not one funny line in the pilot. There's also no cringeingly bad ones either. I can't remember any line at all.
We're also talking science-fantasy here as opposed to science-fiction, running into a dark corridor Jake pauses and his nanite-infused blood somehow increases his visual accuity, but he seems to run back into daylight without his eyes needing any time to adjust to more light. He also has telekinesis for some reason, it's repeatedly referred to as the ability to interface with machinery, but by the end of the show he doesn't need to touch it to control it.
This show positively screams that it was designed to fight an hour of otherwise dead air, rather than trying to pretend that there's a greater story involved. I'll give it another couple of weeks and if it hasn't made an impression by then I won't even need to remember to forget it.
We're also talking science-fantasy here as opposed to science-fiction, running into a dark corridor Jake pauses and his nanite-infused blood somehow increases his visual accuity, but he seems to run back into daylight without his eyes needing any time to adjust to more light. He also has telekinesis for some reason, it's repeatedly referred to as the ability to interface with machinery, but by the end of the show he doesn't need to touch it to control it.
This show positively screams that it was designed to fight an hour of otherwise dead air, rather than trying to pretend that there's a greater story involved. I'll give it another couple of weeks and if it hasn't made an impression by then I won't even need to remember to forget it.
