No Ordinary Family episode 10 review: No Ordinary Sidekick

This review contains spoilers.

10. No Ordinary Sidekick

I’m running out of things to say about where this show went wrong, and where it continues to go wrong. The writers’ plan in this week’s episode appears to have been to cause the two ‘sidekick’ characters to flip against their normal characters and suddenly become egotists.

Quite why they thought this would be fun is beyond me, because I found this entire part of the show tiresome in the extreme. It also generated some head-slapping moments, like when Katie Andrews is told by The Watcher that his name isn’t Will, but Joshua, and she accepts it like he’s just told her he changed cologne. I know she’s supposed to be somewhat naive, but nobody is that stupid, surely?

And to cap it all they introduced a plot hole that you could drive a Mack truck through, when The Watcher arrives at the Powell home to find only Daphne home alone. This is the bit of the show that they labelled in pre-production as ‘drama’, because according to the No Ordinary Family playbook, each episode must have a touch of drama, along with some sappy teenage angst, and some truly painful father/son or mother/daughter moments.

For just a split second I thought they might kill off Daphne, and inject some genuine edge to the show, but alas, instead she has her mind wiped! I groaned so loudly at this point that a neighbour came around to check I hadn’t had a coronary.

The logic of this entirely escaped me, because if The Watcher can erase people’s memories, then why is he leaving a trail of bodies everywhere? Surely it would be much easier, and less likely to attract police interest to give them amnesia than to kill them?

The whole subplot here about The Watcher wanting permanent superpowers, not just the injected variety, was entirely lame, because even if he did find out how the Powells are different, he’s not got the skills to use that knowledge.

After ten episodes, this show hasn’t really gone anywhere in particular. The only time all four of them got together to solve a problem using their powers was when the old Mustang broke down, which is possibly a metaphor for this show.

The problem from the outset is the writers won’t decide if this is a new version of the Brady Bunch or a rehash of Heroes, seemingly believing that they can have both and get the collective audience. I don’t know if they’ve noticed the viewing figures, but they haven’t found a new perfect combination.

I actually like it when the show gets darker, but if anything it’s got lighter as the weeks have progressed. The cast is trying very hard, but they need much better scripts than they’ve been fed so far.

Using my secret abilities, which I call ‘googling’, I can tell you that No Ordinary Family returns on January 11th. The dispersal of that information probably classifies me as a super-villain.

Read our review of episode 9, No Ordinary Anniversary, here.

Follow Den Of Geek on Twitter right here.