PARADOX 1.3

[SPOILERS] I don't have much to say about Paradox's third episode. The show is such a tightly-wound formula that there's not much going on beyond the plot. The team receive eight images of a future crime, they slowly decipher them as we watch the victims/culprits going about their day pre-"event", and eventually the team get enough information to prevent the crime occurring at (literally) the last second. Wash, rinse, repeat.

The show tries to weave in a few other elements -- like when Rebecca (Tamzin Outhwaite) theorized that their efforts to prevent the future is what creates it, or seeing Holt (Mark Bonnar) grapple with the news he was fated to die last time, but his possible demise was kept secret from him -- but it's not quite enough. In the latter's case, it just felt odd that a plot-strand from last week was being chewed on, although at least Bonnar's character reacts more genuinely to events than anyone else. Outhwaite's on stern cop autopilot, and Emun Elliott's morose scientist is still being enigmatic for the sake of it.

The big surprise of this episode was the reveal that the Prometheus II satellite is responsible for taking at least one of this week's photos, but it's exasperating that nobody's considered the obvious answer to the mystery: that the images have been sent back in time, via the satellite, by themselves. I fully expect them to discover a "wormhole" in space during the finale, through which they beam the images they've collected back in time -- don't you?

Anyway, this episode was concerned with stopping a serial rapist strike again, and there was mild fun in seeing the team's images take shape in the real world (as usual), but not much else to get excited about. Even the last 10 minutes, which have been handled in a fairly gripping way before now, just felt anticlimactic to me -- although I appreciated the twist that there was no evidence to convict the rapist, so he was allowed to go free. It raises the issue that the team could start stopping crimes before anything's been set in motion -- which keeps any victims safe and ignorant, but also means villains can't be arrested and will probably just commit their crime at another time and place. So far, the show has avoided this by only having Flint's team fit the puzzle pieces together in the dying seconds, but maybe it needs to start exploring the downside to knowing the future.


8 December 2009
BBC1/BBC HD, 9pm

written by: Lizzie Mickery directed by: Simon Cellan Jones starring: Tamzin Outhwaite (DI Rebecca Flint), Emun Elliott (Dr. Christian King), Mark Bonnar (DS Ben Holt), Chike Okonkwo (DC Callum Gada), Kenny Doughty (Gerry Mortimer), Lucy Gaskell (Katie), Lorcan Cranitch (Simon Manning), Abigail Davies (Amelia James), Kevin Harvey (Russell), Jonathan Slinger (Stuart Taylor), Alicya Eyo (Jean Fellowes), Andi Osho (Sonia), Benedict Power (Josh), Zoie Kennedy (Paula Wilby), Glenn Cunningham (Receptionist) & Adam Foster (DC Rob Ritchie)