Maybe I judged too soon, or maybe my expectations were so low there was no way to go but up, but I must confess that I enjoyed this week’s episode of Believe. I won’t go so far as to say it’s quality improved—yet somehow its plot holes, bad dialogue and unrealistic chase scenes charmed me.
In “Beginner’s Luck,” we learn a few more tidbits about our cast of characters. Milton Winter used to work for the CIA with antagonist Roman Skouras, but kidnapped Bo to protect her. Skouras is a geneticist who turns out not to be as evil as he seemed in the first episode. He, too, wants to protect Bo, but through the government. Winter believes the government would use Bo as a weapon, so he’s taken her. This moment was where I started to give the show a second chance. Television is past the days of pure good versus pure evil. I was happy to see the antagonist, Skouras, have a legitimate perspective on why he is trying to keep Bo under the government’s protection. And when I consider how Winter sends Bo running from city to city, sleeping on the floor of public bathrooms like a homeless person, spending her days at the casino, I wonder if Winter is doing this girl any favors. Maybe it’s because I’m looking at this show through the lens of a schoolteacher, but I worry about Bo’s education. I know she has “powers,” but at the end of the day, if this has been her life, doesn’t she need to know how to read and write? Later in the episode, she helps Tate win money at a casino. He play craps, and she turns the dice to make it seven. I was relieved to see she knows simple math.
At the beginning of the episode, Tate somehow lacks the foresight to think that a fugitive from death row would be chased down, so only after his face is plastered over every TV screen does it dawn on him to change his look a little. He somehow finds a hairdresser’s electric razor and shaves his head in the bathroom. When Bo’s picture is put on every screen as a missing child, he uses similar Groucho Marx disguises by giving her a baseball cap. The episode is basically a chase scene from this point on, with various parties trying to catch Bo and Tate. Then, for some reason, Winter and his team disguise themselves as real cops, and arrest Tate and Bo. All seems lost, until Winter removes his disguise and gives Tate a “gotchya” smile. Bo finds this all very funny, and Tate is annoyed.