Alphas season 2 episode 7 review: Gods And Monsters

Doctor Rosen locks horns with Stanton Parish in the latest episode of Alphas, but who comes out on top?

This review contains spoilers.

2.7 Gods And Monsters

It might seem entirely out of character, but I liked this episode of Alphas almost unreservedly. That’s not to say it was perfect, but in terms of narrative and pacing this was much better than I’ve come to expect from the show.

But as good as Gods and Monsters was, it only served to highlight a problem that the show runs into almost continually: what to do with characters. Every week can’t have a person who needs pushing, or an electromagnetic signal that needs intercepting, or whatever. And that means problems for individual Alphas who stand around waiting to do their stuff, where an obvious opportunity eludes them.

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This is a challenge, and the only real answer is to make these personalities more complicated, giving them extra dimensions that allow for more interesting interactions, but that requires time that the show might not give them. But enough of the mechanics of TV show construction, where did Alphas take us with Gods and Monsters?

This story played out the objectives that Stanton Parish had when he was working with Jason Miller, the teenager from the hospital who could invade people’s minds. Due to Rosen’s intervention, Jason has got slightly out of control, though in this Stanton sees an opportunity to bring Rosen onboard, and solve all of his problems in a single stroke.

Jason’s power, and how he controlled all the teenagers was very creepy, and reminiscent of a low-budget seventies shocker. I loved some of the little touches they threw in here, like the hair sweeping, and synchronised speaking.

With the entire high school under his control, Jason seemed practically invincible and frankly the early attempts to stop him were also rather pathetic. Rosen’s hubris in thinking he could just walk up to him and resolve the matter seemed remarkably dumb, but then it is one of his character traits that he acts without fully considering the consequences.

But these events were actually a sideshow to the Rosen/Parish clash, where it’s pretty obvious from the outset that the good doctor is mentally out-gunned. Given that he’s lacking in this respect, he’s due a break it appears, which is to get pulled into Jason’s hive mind along with his nemesis.

But before we get there we did get a very clichéd sequence where they lock Parish in a plastic cell and put two heavily armed guards to watch over him whose combined IQs couldn’t make a two digit number. His escape was the most predictable event this week, and it made Rosen look pretty stupid.

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That was a low, but the high was that we did get was a resolution of sorts to the whole infiltration subplot, where Rosen sees into Parish’s mind, and glimpses a picture painted by his daughter. What we all want to know now is how he’ll use this information, because I can’t see he’s just going to walk up to her and ask why she’s betrayed them? Sadly, the trailer for next week suggest he does exactly that.

More interesting perhaps could be that while we got the Rosen montage of what he was seeing in Parish it seems reasonable to assume that the reverse also occurred, and Parish saw things in the doctor’s head too? Possibilities.

Episode 8, Falling, which screens next week, looks like the first proper Kat story since she was introduced, and I’m glad she gets something better to do that be irritatingly chirpy all the time.

Read Billy’s review of the previous episode, Alphaville, here.

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