24 The Movie

Reaction to Touch Episode 1 Season 1 starring Kiefer Sutherland.

Whilst we await more news on the 24 movie I thought I’d give some attention to another Kiefer Sutherland show, Touch. The pilot, or first episode, aired mid February 2012 and will continue with full throttle about mid march. It’s an odd approach, but the gap between has allowed fans to speculate over the future storylines of the series. I’m sure the writers and producers will have taken a careful look at reactions on forums to help them decide how to shape the rest of the series.

Touch Season 1

Overall I enjoyed watching Touch, but it was not without its faults. I like series or movies that deal with science or unexplained aspects of nature. To summarise, in Touch, Kiefer Sutherland plays a father who’s son is a mute. The son also shuns contact with his, widowed, father. The son does display a fascination with numbers however and it appears he may be trying to communicate after all, albeit through Maths. Finally, a meeting with Danny Glover sheds some light on the boy’s condition as it appears that he might see the world in a different way from us normal human beings. He sees the world as a mathematical equation where everyone is connected and can visualise future events via cause and effect.

That concept alone, is enough to make me want to give Touch a fair chance when it starts airing again in March 2012. However I hope the writers can address some alarm bells that started ringing during the pilot episode.

Touch seems to be a show where we’ll be exposed to several characters in isolation throughout the season before we’re shown how everyone is connected and character storylines begin to merge. This isn’t a surprise as this is something Time Kring did a lot with Heroes. The pilot episode had some really odd ways off achieving this however:

Without having to describe an entire episode lets just say that a mobile phone is passed across the globe. It starts by someone trying to raise awareness of a singer and they hope that by filming their friend on a phone they can then pass it on to a stranger and her talent will spread like wild fire. They don’t just share the video file though, they pass on the entire phone. It’s almost like YouTube doesn’t exist in Touch. The phone goes from Ireland, to Tokyo to Kuwait. Meanwhile, in Kuwait, a kid desperate for money is cornered into being a suicide bomber so that his dear old mum can buy an oven and bake bread. The original owner of the phone is desperate for his phone back (it has photos of his young daughter who died a year ago. He never made a copy of these or stored them on the cloud, woops) and events lead to a call centre employee (who just happens to be the same woman on the phone who is singing) acting as a ‘middle man’ as she barters with the young suicide bomber to deactivate the bomb, thus saving the phone and it’s precious photos, in return for an oven, which just so happens to be readily available from the original owner of the lost phone.

Touch itself can be a great series as it has a solid cast. It seems evident that it can go one of two ways: deal with human behaviour in a realistic way and be great solid sci if drama. Or be lazy and have events happen that defy normal human behaviour. Fingers crossed its the former.