I just finished watching the pilot, if you haven’t seen it yet you can watch it over on hulu, and it’s on iTunes too. I’m interested to see if the strategy of making the pilot available helps or hurts the show when it finally premieres next month. I know a few other shows have done it, and I could probably find out how it helped by doing a little bit of research… But anyway… Spoilers ahead.

I like the show. It doesn’t blow me away or anything, but it has me interested enough to keep watching. It’s another in a long line of shows where the main character is some kind of criminal investigator who uses the hook of the show to solve their crimes, or the crimes have to do with the hook of the show. The Mentalist, V, Person of Interest, Alcatraz, the list goes on and on. Nothing wrong with that, but I wonder if this premise could work without having to be about a detective/cop. It does make things interesting though, as there really isn’t a lot that’s more exciting than chasing down bad guys, car chases and shootouts, so I won’t hold it against any of these shows.

A short while after the first trailer for the show was released, I made the prediction that the main character is the one who actually died. My mom said, “what if all three of them died?” and I said that’s possible too, but either way we’re seeing the story from the dad’s perspective so it only really matters if he’s dead or not.

There are some logistics that I’m sure will be explored further… First, doesn’t he know the date of the reality he’s in? It would make sense that he would repeat the same date, meaning one of the realities is always experienced first (I don’t see how they could switch). This kind of sucks as far as finding murderers, since they would presumably be successful in the one reality before he can solve the case in the other. My friend Megan also brought up the point that he must be tired all the time. I think that he only sleeps for 8 hours each night, but experiences a full 16 hour day in that time… So he’s living a total 32 hour waking day back to back to back. That’s gotta be wearing him down, no wonder he’s going a bit crazy. And what happens when he takes a short nap?

I thought it was a bit over the top when he didn’t have his red bracelet on and went nuts, cutting his hand and everything. I forgot to pay attention enough, but was his hand still wounded in the other reality? The challenge of this show, for the makers and the audience, are the consistencies between the two realities, and dealing with the timing of everything. He doesn’t just flip back and forth like they do in the editing, I assume he has to live out the full day in one before living out another full day in the other. The first few minutes of the show did a really good job of establishing what’s going on, though it may have helped that the trailers explained it pretty well over the past several months.

I got the feeling that he is going to have a thing with his son’s tennis instructor at some point which will add another layer of strangeness to his situation. Whether it does happen with her, or someone else, is it cheating on his wife if it’s in an alternate reality? Let’s ask Peter Bishop.

The bummer about seeing the pilot of a show before it begins airing is that you have to wait so long for the second episode. I’ll be waiting, but for now I am more than satisfied with my weekly fixes of Fringe, Justified, Alcatraz and Person of Interest. Thanks for reading!