TV
Review:
By John Townley, March 18, 2012
We are all interconnected. Our lives
are invisibly tied to those whose destinies touch ours, as if by
durable
threads that may stretch but never break.
This is the hopeful
premise of the new Fox
TV drama Touch
from creator and writer Tim Kring (Heroes, Crossing Jordan)
and executive producers Peter Chernin and
Katherine Pope (New
Girl, Terra Nova).
Blending science,
spirituality and personal drama, the series will follow seemingly
unrelated people all over the world whose lives affect each other in
ways seen
and unseen, known and unknown. At the story’s center is
Martin Bohm (Kiefer
Sutherland), a widower and single father, haunted by an inability to
connect to
his emotionally challenged 11-year-old son, Jake (David Mazouz).
Caring,
intelligent and thoughtful, Martin has tried everything to reach his
son. But
Jake never speaks, shows little emotion, and never allows himself to be
touched
by anyone, including Martin. Jake is obsessed with
numbers—writing long strings
of them in his ever-present notebooks—and with discarded cell
phones.
Social worker Clea
Hopkins (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) believes that Jake’s needs are
too serious for Martin to handle. She sees a man whose life has become
dominated by a child he can no longer control. She believes that
it’s time for
the state to intervene. So Jake is placed in foster care, despite
Martin’s
desperate objections.
But everything
changes after Martin meets Arthur Teller (Danny Glover), a
professor and an expert on children who possess special gifts when it
comes to
numbers. Martin learns that Jake possesses an extraordinary
gift—the ability to
perceive the seemingly hidden patterns that connect every life on the
planet.
While Martin wants nothing more than to communicate directly with his
son, Jake can only
connect to his father through numbers, not words. Martin realizes that
it’s
his job to decipher these numbers and recognize their meaning. As he
puts the
pieces together, he will help people across the world connect as their
lives
intersect according to the patterns Jake has foreseen.
Only the opening
pilot episode has aired so far, but that one definitely
took us by storm. It’s full of mystical and fringe-science
buttons like the
Fibonacci series, startling synchronicities, the mute boy who might be
an
Indigo
child, viral videos on prodigal cell phones, and lots of
ominously-meaningful
math play, all of which, when mixed in with globe-spanning technology,
could
somehow change the fate of the principle players and maybe all of
humankind.
What struck us
first and last was the ongoing metaphor and visual image of penetrating
threads of destiny linking everyone in a total warp and woof of fate
that
grinds exceeding fine, to say the least. Hey, haven’t we run
across that one
before? Oh yes, we have: it’s the very idea of degree areas in
astrology that tell
you who’s connected, who’s not, and how.
We’ve used just that metaphor and
image in “Threads
of Destiny”,
which
suggests that the astrological degrees, and where we share them,
are those
very connecting threads. You don’t need a mystery child to
tune you in to that.
And, because they behave so regularly and reliably, they even allow us
to rectify
a birth chart
by lining them up
to find the right birth time. It’s a working hypothesis that
most astrologers
already have in their toolkit. If
you didn’t catch those articles already, take time to check
them out now.
It’s
really refreshing to see these ideas out and about, even if the
astrological link hasn’t been brought in, yet (maybe by the
end of the series
it will be, who knows?). Right now, it’s just a lot of
mysterious numbers and predestined
coincidences, drawing together unlikely fate-mates at an almost Jack
Bauer/24
pace, with lots of nick-of-time action, one urgency piled upon the next.
The pilot program
was compelling, and it was great to see so many
sort-of-scientific ideas that will please astrologers, math freaks, and
conspiracy theorists alike, not to mention those with a deep faith that
we are
all irretrievably connected, if only by the producers at Fox. Should
substantive plots
and character development follow, this could be a winner and an
eye-opener to
bring wider audiences for many of our favorite theories and pursuits,
scientific
and mystical alike. Or, it could easily become formulaic and
repetitive, and
that would be a shame.
In the meantime,
it’s definitely a bright spot in the TV week this spring.
Catch it Thursdays at 9/8c on your local Fox
channel…certainly worth a few
weeks of watching, to see how it develops…
|
