Resurrection: Insomnia review

If there’s a television trope that needs to end, it’s the dramatic bad dream…and no one perpetrates this crime quite like ABC’s Resurrection. Maybe the bad dream sequences in Resurrection feel overly heinous and teasing because I’m waiting for something high octane and thrilling to happen. This first season of Resurrection is only eight episodes long, so “Insomnia” is the start of the show’s back half, and yet we still really have no concrete answers or even clues to begin concocting theories of how these people have returned from the dead. We’re inching along and only being fed the smallest slivers of entertainment to keep us coming back each week. Fatigue is starting to set in; we need to start moving forward at a faster pace.

Tonight’s dream sequence sees a swat team bursting into the Langston home and taking Jacob away, but then Bellamy awakes. What a bummer! I’d love to see the FBI come in guns up and shake awake the town of Arcadia. I’d love to see complications and some stakes start to arise, but it doesn’t happen. The whole episode is pretty much dedicated to making sure that doesn’t happen. The once feuding Sheriff Frank and Agent Bellamy reach an uneasy alliance to ensure the FBI investigation of Caleb Richards doesn’t lead them to Jacob. To keep that from happening, Frank and Bellamy need Richards to confess and to reveal where he hid his money.

Naturally, Caleb doesn’t want to help out. He resolves to playing the creepy prisoner role, smiling and whistling in his cell and speaking in vague riddles. After some of that, he agrees to help under one condition: if they can get his daughter Elaine to come speak to him. After some “woe is me” by Elaine and some convincing, she agrees, but she’s livid with her father and wants nothing to do with him. Too bad the scene is tanked by a horrendously acted monologue by Samaire Armstrong, whose shoddy performance is becoming more and more apparent the more time she spends on screen. When Elaine finally discovers where the money is hidden, she hands it over to Bellamy, and when Bellamy goes to rub it in Caleb’s face, things get a bit interesting.

Caleb reveals that he knows about Bellamy’s past traumatic experience, which we see tonight involves the death of a young witness. As Bellamy starts to get spooked, a hacking and coughing Caleb asks for some water, and when Bellamy turns to get him a glass from a nearby water cooler, we see Caleb disappear from the jail cell in the water tank’s reflection, and we’re left with an extremely perplexed Bellamy.

Our latest Returned is Rachel, who Tom is secretly harboring away from his disapproving wife. Rachel still seems a little sketchy, not revealing much about what she remembers either from the moment before she died and the first moment after she awoke. Tom takes her to see Maggie for a checkup, and Maggie discovers that Rachel is two months pregnant, meaning that the pregnancy before her death is still intact. It’s an interesting revelation and I’m curious to see how Tom will eventually take the news.

Jacob’s storyline is still an utter bore. We just keep repeating the same things every week. Jacob just wants to be normal, Henry still grieves for his child and cant fully accept the newly arrived Jacob, and Lucile and her husband still care fighting over how to handle the whole thing. Nothing is changing and there have been no character adaptations. The status quo that was established in episode one continues to be trotted out week after week. I can still say Kurtwood Smith is doing great work, but I’m bored by repetition. If Jacob and his family are the center of this show, than the core is starting to rot. You’ve got three episodes left, Resurrection. Wow me.

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