I have been looking forward to The After as I know it is the brainchild of Chris Carter, creator of The X files and Millennium. It is the story of a group of people brought together when the SHTF (I'm sure you are all aware of that acronym). The cast has a mix of known and new faces and features :
Adrian Pasdar (Lost) as wade
Aldis Hodge (Leverage, Die Hard: With A Vengeance) - D. Love
Arielle Kebble (90210, The Vampire Diaries) - Tammy
Jaina Lee Ortiz ( The Shop) - Marley
Andrew Howard (Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen) - Mc Cormick
Jamie Kennedy - David
Louise Monot - Gigi Generau
Sharon Lawrence (Drop Dead Diva, One Tree Hill, Rizzoli and Isles) - Francis
The episode begins with Gigi, a wannabe actress preparing for an audition for a part. After her audition she heads back towards the Hotel she is staying in. She enters a lift noticing the large number of police, one of whom gets in the lift with her. A clown arrives and gets in. There are five people in the lift as already in there are an Irish guy and another woman. The lift stops and they can hear alarms going off outside. No-one has a cell signal.
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| Is this the start of a joke? A clown, an Irishman, a policewoman, a diabetic and a French woman walk in to a lift.... |
They open the lift door enough to squeeze out and find themselves in an underground car park. They are now locked in here. Another couple come out of the stairwell and the door slams shut. They make their way to an exit where a crash gate of some sort has dropped. They call to someone outside but he doesn't seem to acknowledge them. He looks like he is in shock. They go back to the car with the alarm sounding and an escaped felon runs toward them. The cop, Marley shoots him in the stomach. As they stare at him another felon, D. Love appears with a shotgun. There is a standoff that eventually eases and D points out that the old lady, Francis has collapsed. It turns out she is Diabetic.
D. gets a jack and lifts the gate up enough to slide under. He goes to get help. As Gigi goes under the gate it drops, almost trapping her foot and leaving the rest locked in. She promises to be back with help. Gigi gets up to street level and finds chaos. To be brief she makes her way through it and back to them with food and drink. Nobody knows what is going on. There is no power. As they start to think about how they are going to get out D. reappears in a fire truck and drives through the gate. They all get in and head for safety. Unfortunately they hit a motorcyclist and the crowd realize that they are not fire crew. D. puts his foot down on the gas and crashes through a barricade and they head toward where Francis lives to get food.
When they arrive D. has to crash through the electric gates to get in. They find a mansion waiting at the end of the drive. Francis must be one of the 1%. Once in the house, in the kitchen they notice a birthday marked on a calender on March 7th. They realize they all share the same birthday on that date. With blatant racial stereotyping, McCormick, the Irishman gets drunk and starts picking fights. They hear a car pull up and it turns out to be the missing maid Graciela being dragged around by a group of kidnappers. As they make demands and disarm the cop D. appears and swings in to action. He shoots at the kidnappers as he gets everybody back inside. They run straight out the back in to the woods with the kidnappers on their trail.
It gets a bit silly for a while like TV thrillers do. For example, Gigi wants to go back to the mansion for her phone despite the psycopaths with guns trying to kill her. Then Wade, the lawyer falls. As this is a story about the smelly stuff engaging meaningfully with the fan he has to break a leg. What would a story like this be without someone breaking a bone? Oh, no! There are no hospitals and I have a bone hanging out. Anyway, now they can hear whispering in the trees. Something comes up behind Gigi and is about to touch her when D shoots. They look down and see an alien. It is bluish in color and appears to be marked with identical tattoos to the ones individuals in this group who all share the same birthday have.
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| ....and the winner of the best OMG expression goes to.... |
What on earth is going on? As they mull this over the aliens eyes open and , lying on its back makes a crab like posture, hisses and scuttles off! So it appears that an alien invasion is under way.
Why did this group come together? Is their birthday significant? Or the tattoos? Is the alien to be their controller?
More to the point, this is just a pilot. Will it get a series? I hope so. The writers ought to think hard though. Many series of this kind like V, Threshold and Invasion tend to peter out and get canned before their run is supposed to end. Its not that they are bad - I loved the remake of V, but when it comes to a credible story of life under alien rule writers appear to struggle. In Invasion, for example, the world was flooded and alien species are swimming around. Even green screens couldn't cut the cost of such a production. Likewise in V all opposition to the aliens had been removed. Conclusion? We would be a menu item from then on. So if this series is to take off it needs a good storyline. One without loads of back filling. Revolution gets on my nerves because it keeps going five years ago, ten years ago, etc. So does The Walking Dead. It feels like cheating to me. Screw the past, give us a good futuristic storyline! If The After gets a series will Chris Carter have something surprising for us?
We shall have to wait and see.
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