Season 1 - 6 Episodes (2016)
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| Glitch - Season 1 |
Created by: Tony Ayres , Louise Fox
Starring: Patrick Brammall, Genevieve O'Reilly, Emma Booth
Rating: TV-MA
Plot
In this Netflix distributed series set in Australia, a police constable is called to a cemetery and discovers six people alive and risen from the dead, perfectly healthy.
The newly living have no memories, and the police constable and town doctor struggle to keep the case secret and determine who these people are, discovering that each of them is inexplicably linked.
Verdict
The first two episodes were great, truly great. While the six episodes kept the pace quick and had no filler, the story itself doesn't hold up. It succumbs to cliche romantic subplots and unnecessarily complicated conspiracy arcs.
This is still a good show. The disappointing story took this from a great series to pretty good. By the end of season 1, I still don't have any answers, and we should have gotten some answers rather than more mysteries. These mysteries don't reconcile. I will definitely watch season 2 hoping for answers, but I'm concerned that the story will fall further into the typical conspiracy tropes.
Watch it.
Review
The story itself isn't very original. Before this was the French series Les Revenants and the American series The Returned. The dead rise from the grave or mysteriously return, completely fine and un-aged. I saw the first episode of The Returned and it wasn't bad, though Glitch was much better.
The pilot was perfect. It created a great mood with a great hook. This happens in the small town of Yoorana, Australia. Six people are back, having crawled out of their graves. I don't know how they dug through six feet of dirt, but maybe Australia buries them shallower.
One has been dead two years, another more than one hundred and fifty. The first mayor of the town is one of the resurrected, though he doesn't seem like a good guy. He just so happens to be found by a teenage boy that we later find out is his relative.
Each episode slowly provides more information for the undead, each having links to the city and different people in town. The cop James and the doctor Elishia want to hide the undead to protect them, but this becomes a conflict when Elishia hides them from him.
The undead heal rapidly... sometimes. One of the undead is completely healed from a mastectomy, but another has scars on his back from a flogging and scars on his face. Why didn't those heal?
We soon realize the undead can't leave Yoorana. When any of the undead try to go past an imaginary radius, they clutch their stomach and bleed from the eyes. I still don't know how that works. This started with an SUV leaving the cemetery in which all these people rose. It has to be a connection, but by the end of the season there is no confirmation.
An underlying theme the undead ask is whether this a miracle or a punishment. Some of them flip between the two rapidly. The unfinished business theory seems less likely than some kind of experiment. Noregard Pharmaceuticals, a large facility in the town is definitely linked to this.
As good as it began, it became cliche. The cop that found the risen discovers his dead girlfriend is one of them. Complicating matters is his pregnant wife. This story line was easy to see coming a mile away, and it didn't add anything other than unnecessary drama. The show builds the three of them meeting into this big moment that doesn't really go anywhere.
Towards the end this becomes a conspiracy that stretches credibility. There is a subplot with another cop, Vic, that should have been scrapped or explained. His purpose seems to be the show needed a bad guy, and he was the easiest character to write into that role.
He further complicates how the process of returning works and adds a body snatchers type conspiracy that I'm still trying to figure out. We get no explanation on him until the end, and that just consists of the doctor stating that crazed killer psychopath Vic suddenly became, that wasn't really him. How? If he was body snatched, this show goes out of it's way into tricking us and obscuring he was switched, unless the returning process can alter people's mindsets.
Vic also seems to have the healing factor like the other undead, but he begins to lose that towards the end for some unexplained reason. Somehow he knows the doctor is in on it. By the end, it's confirmed that she is linked to Noregard, and an even bigger bombshell is dropped at the end of the final episode.
What undercut her arc, was that the show paired her off with one of the undead. The same one that is more animal than man and tried to choke her out. Why would she sleep with him? Unless he is a walking aphrodisiac, this makes no sense. Unless it was for science?
Worse than the contrived story lines and muddles conspiracies is Kate fixing a motorcycle. I love when shows have someone work on a motorcycle that's been sitting in a barn for twenty years and they don't have to order parts or even take it apart. A screwdriver and some duct tape is all that's required. Not only that, we don't hear Kate yelling or see her throwing anything a single time. That's just not realistic.
The last episode piles on the questions without providing any answers. The mysteries aren't detrimental to the show, it's only after you stop watching that they begin to add up into a confusing mess. I don't know how the show will write its way out of that unless it just skips over it and gives us an even bigger bad guy in season two.
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