The New Season

Half-watching some of the new TV shows this season.  Initial impressions:

"Revenge"  What a dreary waste of time.  It does, however, nicely illustrate the old Klingon maxim: "Revenge is a dish best-served cancelled."

"Person of Interest" This looked a little more promising.  The executive producers are J. J. Abrams ("Lost") and Jonathan Nolan, the lesser-known brother of mega-director Christopher Nolan, and a talented fellow in his own right; among other things, he wrote the story on which the film "Memento" was based.  While not as bad as "Revenge," it suffers from its own issues, primary among which is a "Deanna Troi problem" with the premise.

On "Star Trek: The Next Generation," ship counselor Deanna Troi was a member of an alien race, "Betazoids," who possess certain psychic abilities.  Troi's abilities, though, left something to be desired, possibly because she was only half-Betazoid.

(DIGRESSION: What is it with "Star Trek" and half-breeds?  Spock, Troi--even the fully Klingon Worf was raised by humans.  Doesn't anybody in the 23rd century stick with their own kind?  Yee-haw!  EOD)

To put it another way, Troi possessed just enough psychic ability to be virtually useless.  Consulted by Captain Picard in the midst of a battle with Romulans, for example, Troi might offer such insight as, "I sense great anger and hostility, Captain."  Great.  Thanks.

Anyway, in "Person of Interest," Ray Finch (Michael Emerson) is a reclusive billionaire computer genius, who built a massive surveillance system for the federal government after 9/11.  The idea was that, by monitoring everything--every camera feed, every phone call, every conversation held in a public space--the authorities could prevent the next massive attack.  Of course, in addition to any potential terrorist threats, this monitoring system also captures gazillobytes (technical term) worth of meaningless chatter.  Finch realized, though, that, within the meaningless chatter, one could find all sorts of information on non-terrorist crimes--murders and such--information that was of no interest to the Feds but could still be potentially life-saving.  Finch recruits John Reese (Jim Caviezel), a former Army Ranger and CIA operative, who can kick ass in a variety of modalities, to help him prevent some of these "lower-level" crimes.

Here's the thing, though: Like Deanna Troi's psychic abilities, Finch's system provides just enough information to be effectively useless.  See, the "chatter" picked up by the system can, somehow, identify the person who is to be involved in the next big catastrophe, but it cannot tell Finch anything about WHAT the catastrophe is or even HOW the person is involved: Victim or perpetrator?  No one knows!  Worse yet, there is no way of knowing WHEN the catastrophe will occur: Could be in ten minutes, could be in ten months.  (Given television's known obeisance to the Aristotlean unities, one can assume the catastrophe will occur within a reasonable timeframe for a 60 minute melodrama, but that's about as much as we can conclude.)  So basically each episode will presumably feature John Reese following around that week's "person of interest" until something--hopefully something involving lots of explosions--inevitably happens.

As I watched last night, I couldn't help but wonder how many other garden-variety crimes occur while Finch and Reese wait for something to happen.  Wouldn't society be just as well-served, if not better, if the uberfighter just donned a mask and cape and went out looking for muggers on the mean streets of NYC?

Not helping the situation any is the fact that Jim Caviezel has all the charisma of a rock--and not one of those charismatic rocks, either, like agate.  He's pure pumice, through and through.  (If you want to see Jim Caviezel in something good, by the way, check out "Frequency.")

So far this season, then, I'm 0 for two.  I have the new, American version of "Prime Suspect" on DVR.  I'll let you know how that turns out.