Has it really been a month since we’ve had our taste of sci-fi/supernatural melodramatics? Oh, how I’ve surprisingly missed you. Or at least I thought I did until the Tomorrow People decided to vote on a new leader after John fessed up to the team about his ability to kill, picking their new superior by teleporting candles in front of their choice (Cara, by the way). I think I strained an ocular muscle rolling my eyes at the TV when that happened.
The good news is that everything surrounding that dumb little scene had an appreciable amount of darkness seeping over it like lava. Where was this for the first nine episodes?
It’s not just about the creepy starting point where we find the Tomorrow People killing Stephen and then bringing him back to life so he can contact his father in the space between life and death. (Okay, that scene in the spirit world was pretty ridiculous too—all blue watery graphics and teary-eyed reunions.) The really black material comes with the breakout of a homo superior from The Citadel, an asylum/laboratory where mutant folk are experimented on.
A burly, powerful gent named Erroll escapes—using the severed hand of another inmate, no less, in a kind of handcuff switcheroo—and goes on the run. How powerful is he? So powerful in fact that he can “push out” people trying to telecommunicate with him … to devastating effect that looked a little too close to what the kid could do in Looper. Once the Tomorrow People find out, they wait until Ultra has the breakout and then abduct Erroll—putting a bullet in Stephen as part of the plan—and use him to find the Citadel.
They, of course, bust into the holding pen of this compound to help the other inmates escape but only succeed in rescuing Erroll’s favorite, a little girl. The scene turns into an ongoing Mexican standoff. Jedikiah shows up and aims a gun at Cara and the little girl. Erroll teleports between them as protection and for his efforts has a bullet sent between his eyes. Then John shows up to aim a gun at Jedikiah’s head. The good guys escape unscathed. And us susceptible viewers are left a little dizzy from the onscreen tension.
After all that, the main plot thread of Stephen searching for his father’s body with hopes of bringing it back from the dead became the least interesting part of this episode. This show would do well to stop furrowing its collective brow and push this hunt for the Tomorrow People’s safe haven and give itself over to the gloom that pervaded this installment. It sure as hell kept me rapt for the full hour, and I can only hope it did the same for its other viewers.