No Ordinary Family episode 19 review: No Ordinary Future

This review contains spoilers.

19. No Ordinary Future

The big, big problem I have this week with this show is time travel. Not that they chose to head down this road, but that they decided some rules to associate with it, but then fail to stick to their own guidelines.

After being injected, Stephanie travels two days forwards and sees a dystopian future where they’re all being hunted, after it becomes public knowledge that they’re ‘supers’.

Yet, when she’s there, nobody can see her, so in some respects, it’s not physical time travel as such, because she can’t interact with them. Well, that’s how it’s portrayed, but having created that limitation they immediately break the rule they created when she interacts with the door to the house, which she opens to walk inside!

Then at no point when she wants someone to not do something does she actually lay hands on them, like she’s being told that won’t work, even if it’s fine with doors.

Time travel stories usually have another narrative issue, which is the ‘time paradox’ problem. The part where Jim is seen by Stephanie revealing their powers has this issue all over it, because the only reason he’s at the location in particular is that he’s been told by Stephanie that George’s life is in danger. But it’s worse than that, because when she first sees these events from her time jump, Jim is looking in the crowd for the assassin when he spots the open van window with the silencer pointing out of it. But when he repeats the same thing, knowing he’s looking for a ‘police van’, he still wanders through all the police officers like the van is somehow hidden amongst them! They managed only to top the stupidity of that when the bad cop wanders past at least a dozen other officers with his gun drawn, attaching a silencer, and not one of them notices.

I’m not even going to be drawn in on the resurrection of Victoria, whom we’re now told Joshua has a crush on, even if I don’t recall anything previously happening to support that idea. Or Katie’s accelerated pregnancy, on which nobody comments.

This story was a long collection of dumb, interlaced with nuggets of pure nonsense, like the whole exercise was worked out about five minutes before the cameras rolled.

The end of the episode underlines one of the extraordinarily poor choices the show’s writers made early on, and crucified the audience with ever since. The Powell children only have one purpose, which is to make very obvious mistakes, the ones adults think they’re above making, and then learn from the experience. But that’s necessitated making them quite dumb, even ‘super-brained’ JJ. Everything Daphne does has to have a ‘lesson’ attached, even if this is both incredibly predictable and twee.

As such, when she managed to erase Chris’ whole knowledge of her while trying to remove the part of his mind that knew of her powers, I wish I cared for her, but I didn’t, because her relationship was vacuous, like almost everything she’s done so far.

There’s one chink of light at the end of this long dark tunnel, and it is that only one more episode of this painful dross is left. After April 5^th, I’m certain we’ve seen the last of the Powells and their less than ordinary TV show.

Read our review of episode 18, No Ordinary Animal, here.

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