TV Review: ALCATRAZ - Johnny McKee 1.7

Why have we all been complaining about Alcatraz so much? This weeks “Johnny McKee” was actually pretty impressive, certainly at the beginning anyway. Don’t get me wrong it could have been a lot better especially with the story in relation to Johnny but there were things mentioned at various points in the episode which may be throwing little clues our way as to just what is going on with all of these prisoners from 1963 showing up in modern day San Francisco.

If you caught the preview I put out for this on Sunday then you’ll know they were billing Johnny McKee as a psychopath, I suppose he was really he was prepared to do pretty much anything all because he had been bullied at school by some pretty girl. His modern day character seemed a pretty stark comparison from the one we saw in 1963 though. In the modern day he was very happy to kill people and thought very little of it, that didn’t seem to be the case in 1963 although he did kill the prison bully with extreme ease.

Dr Beauregard came out with something quite interesting during his effort to get Hauser to read to Lucy, “this so called reality we live in” is what he said. What is he referring to? Does he just mean the makeshift identical Alcatraz prison where he never seems to leave, or something else? Any guesses.

Why doesn’t Rebecca Madsen question Jack Sylvane further, I mean she is a detective right? Fair enough Hauser won’t allow her access and there are some pretty heavily armed guards on the doors but they never seem to speak so there is no worries they would shout for anyone. It just seems that for someone who goes the extra mile that Rebecca is currently doing that whilst walking backwards allowing Hauser to drip feed irrelevant info and even trying to stop her from asking anything to pressing when she is allowed access to prisoners. I really do like George Garcia, loved him in Lost but so far he is not really working for me in Alcatraz, he’s frightened of everything which in all honesty he shouldn’t be as he seems to be able to predict everything the prisoners will do on their return. I still feel that we’re not really getting anywhere development wise with these guys just yet. We did get some sort of little clue from Rebecca when she was talking about her grandfather she said that he used to talk about a hole beneath the hole, quite what that means I'm not sure but I think we will be getting to find out.

Alcatraz done really great with the flashbacks again this week, for me these scenes are actually better than the shows main three characters, they also go along way towards making you to want to vote for the bad guys. The reason for that is because of the back story we are delivered, if we got that more with Hauser, Rebecca and Doc then we may cheer a little louder for them week on week. Mind you, who's to say that they are flashbacks? The weekly prisoner Johnny Mckee was always reading a book that was suggesting the future is now. Is there a clue in there somewhere?

Like I said above “Johnny McKee” was a pretty good episode but it could have been so much better and I just wonder if Alcatraz is doing enough to keep the audience interested. Personally, I feel like I’m watching it just to see what happens I really don’t care about the individual story of the weekly prisoner for me Alcatraz fails where
Person of Interest thrives on the weekly story line. If they want to keep up the good mystery then I think they need some characters who can maybe deliver some decent action like the afore mentioned POI,your thoughts?