So, another television series from the stable of JJ Abrams (Lost, Fringe), and expectations are suitably weighty, particularly when the concept is high and slim enough to be delivered in portentous tones in a single trailer: All the inmates of the world’s most infamously inescapable prison disappear one night in the 1960’s, only to start turning up in the present day.

The concept of villains turning up through a wormhole in time and space located within Alcatraz isn’t as restricting as you might think, as long as the team get it right. Indeed, The Rock serves as this decade’s version of a Hellmouth, spitting out this week’s Big Bad, armed only with a classic rifle, buzzcut hairstyle, and presumably 1960’s attitudes to women, race and song. What remains to be seen is if that’s varied enough a conceit to maintain our interest over several seasons.

There are ways that they can twist the concept, of course: you assume that come Season 3, when audiences begin to dip slightly, that the team will find that the wormhole goes both ways – and there’ll be at least an episode or two when we’re trapped in the era of Mad Men. But for now, we’re simply clearing the decks for the big hook… which might just be a bit softened.

There are plot holes large enough to drive a laundry truck stuffed with prisoners through – if Sam Neill’s team have been waiting for a mess of murderers and rapists to suddenly turn up, why not lay on extra security and catch them as they arrive, rather than letting them loose on an unsuspecting public? It’s not like they’re wanting for time and money.

And when one character states that these murderers from another time can re-start their crimes undetected, that’s already been proven to be patently untrue, since this week’s villain has already been named – within seconds – by whatever version of Google search FBI is using these days.

However, it’s a slick enough hour of entertainment – essentially an expanded X-Files episode with some of the DNA of procedural sci-fi shows like The 4400 blended in – but at the moment, it’s not nearly as demanding as its own concept seems to think it is, particularly as the whole business of ‘why?’ and ‘on whose authority?’ can be treated as pretty much an irrelevance until whenever the final season homes into view.

Until then, as fun and as enjoyable as this undoubtedly is, it remains to be seen if Alcatraz will hold you prisoner.

Aired at 9pm on Tuesday 13th March 2012 on Watch.

> Order the Season 1 boxset on Amazon.

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