As I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, it would appear that what was hampering The Tomorrow People this whole time was exposition, needing to make sure viewers were fully informed on how all these major characters got to this place. With that almost completely out of the way, now the show can really dig into some interesting storylines and wind up the viewers into tense knots.
Key to that goal in this week’s installment was Hillary, the suspicious Ultra agent who found out that Stephen was using his powers in front of his best friend, Astrid. She brings this to the attention of Jedikiah, setting in motion Astrid’s potential death for being in the know.
While that’s going on in the big city, Stephen and his family are being treated to a camping trip with Peter, his mom’s beau. He didn’t want to go, but fears that the mystery man poses a potential threat to his mother and brother. So instead of enjoying the scenery, Stephen works to get Peter to fess up to hidden powers, to the point of pushing him off a cliff. The ploy fails, but he succeeds in driving a wedge between his mother and her new man. What does come out of it at the end of this week’s edition is that Stephen’s sensing of powerful powers in his midst might actually be coming from his younger brother. More on that next time, I’m sure.
The discomfort of those scenes served as a nice release from the white-knuckle action of the rest of the episode. Stephen wisely asks his Tomorrow People friends for help looking after Astrid, a job that John takes on. And it’s John who saves Astrid from getting pumped full of bullets, taking a slug in the process. He survives, of course, but not before his poor charge is forced to yank a bullet from his side with her fingers, and not before Cara comes to the rescue, beating up copious Ultra agents and forcing Astrid to wield a gun to protect them both.
Where the show is getting ridiculous is in Jedikiah’s supposedly not seeing that Stephen is working as a double agent. Maybe Mr. Ultra is playing the long game, figuring that, eventually, his nephew will help lead his men to the Tomorrow People’s underground lair. Or perhaps he’s not as bad as it seems.
But with Astrid now gone into hiding, and Ultra knowing that Stephen was using his powers in front of her, I get the feeling that something substantive is going to drop during this last part of the first season. And if it keeps on going as it has, I’m going to need some kind of medication to help ease the strain on my eyes after I roll them as much as I surely will in the weeks to come.