If we wanted to break down the themes of this week’s edition of The Tomorrow People to their basest elements, they would be: sex and family. The latter has been par for the course at this point in this show’s inaugural season, but the former … now we’re getting somewhere.
Okay, so there’s not that much sex involved in the show. This is primetime network TV, after all. But what there is does carry with it a lot of thematic weight. Jedikiah is largely absent from this episode, but his one appearance reveals that he is fooling around with a Tomorrow Person. Their sole scene together culminates with him getting telepathically undressed by his lady love.
The real capper comes at the end of tonight’s installment as Cara and Stephen finally give into their attraction and start tearing each other’s clothes off before teleporting to some place “more private.” It’s a fleeting moment, but a pretty hot one.
The implications of the dirty stuff won’t come to light until future episodes in the series, so the focus returns again to family concerns. This week brings out the backstory of one of the show’s most borderline obnoxious characters, Russell.
A former piano prodigy, he lived under the thumb of his hard-ass father, while also slipping out to do a little illegal gambling aided by his growing special powers. We catch all this in flashback before and after Russell gets the news of his father’s death and decides to go to Oregon for the funeral.
The storyline is a surprisingly tender one, and filled with more emotional nuance than we’ve come to expect from this show, or from Aaron Yoo’s performance. Here’s hoping we see more of this in the future.
The other family dynamic involves a new breakout named Piper. A pool hustler struggling to make it in New York while looking for her long-lost older sister, the Tomorrow People catch up with her and attempt to keep her safe from Ultra. The wrinkle is that her elder sibling happens to be Darcy, the agent who works closest with Stephen.
It’s an absolutely convenient plot point, but again, this show has not been known for subtlety. And it only gets interesting when Stephen decides to reunite the two, a move that results in another Ultra raid and Darcy getting gunned down as she tries to protect her baby sister.
When looked at from overhead, everything in this episode was really put together for those last few minutes when Cara and Stephen go at each other like crazed animals. The death of Russell’s dad got him and John out of the picture, and the hunt for Piper helped bring the two new lovers closer together. Add a little brooding over the death of a colleague to the mix and some corny ass dialogue about Stephen’s greatness, and well, the naughty action was inevitable.
The buildup managed to be worth the few seconds of release that we got by the episode’s end. It likely spawned a million pages of slash fiction but that, too, was an inevitability when you put sexy young things together in one TV show. At least we have that and our own filthy imaginations to keep us company until we can find out how this all plays out next week.