Things are now beginning to kick off in an interesting way for Alcatraz, essentially because the characters are now beginning to have some personal investment in the over-reaching story.

Of course, that’s always been the case, but since the whole conceit of this show demands a slow drip feed of facts and misleads, it means that all the actors have to be careful to do no much more than sketch in their characters, taking care not to colour over the edges.

The conceit is more suffocating than we originally thought, too: A villain escapes in Act 1, does something bad (or at least interesting) in the middle act, then manages to get himself (so far, it’s always a he) caught by the end of Act 3. A show that you can mouth the plot lines to without even being in the room was old when TJ Hooker was around. (Though why we’ve chosen TJ Hooker as an example is perhaps something we can dwell on another time).

This time around, then, there’s a twist… Rather than a prisoner, the returning Sixty-Three this time is one of the good guys, Guy Hastings – at least on the face of it. In 1960, he was/is prison guard, albeit one that’s still frustrated and angry that his life has been ripped from him. This episode’s morsel of Probably Important Information is that ‘They’ (whoever ‘They’ are – presumably those enabling these time jumps) are commanding/making him do bad things.

However, it’s in his flashbacks that we see that Rebecca’s Uncle Ray is significantly more involved with the backstory than has been previously suggested. However, such a surprise isn’t really, well, a surprise, since our expectation is to have our expectations confounded at every turn.

If Hauser (Sam Neill) has indeed been trying to recruit members of Rebecca’s family for some years, then it’s probably not much of a leap to deduce that characters we’ve already met and somewhat got the measure of (like the lead cast, for instance) may turn out to be nothing like who we assume them to be, much like some of the characters in Dollhouse in its later episodes.

In short, the smoke and mirrors are still entertaining, but hopefully there’s something underneath all that subterfuge. With Lost, all that we had was the rug pulled from under our feet. This time, we might not wait so long for such a cheap shot.

Aired at 9pm on Tuesday 10th April 2012 on Watch.

> Order the Season 1 boxset on Amazon.

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