PARADOX 1.4

[SPOILERS] Here's my problem with Paradox: I don't care about the victims. We get perfunctory scenes of people wandering towards catastrophe as Flint's (Tamzin Outhwaite) team struggle to prevent their deaths, but no matter how many cute daughters or babies they include as emotional shorthand, you don't really care if the Indian window cleaner falls to his death, or the black single mum suffocates in a fire. Over a whole hour, the victims hardly receive the depth of the average Casualty patient, pre-A&E. That said, this penultimate episode was the sci-fi drama's strongest hour yet, mainly because writer Mark Greig (Life On Mars) introduced some fun kinks to the formula...

Firstly, one of last week's photos (of a hair salon's window) didn't affect the outcome of the mission in any way, so Gada (Chike Okonkwo) believes the serial rapist who escaped charges is destined to attack the salon's owner. This was a good way of making the show feel less episodic and more serialized, plus it gave Gada something to do under his own steam. Secondly, it turned out that this week's photos were predicting two simultaneous disasters, involving arson and a window cleaner's faulty harness clip, meaning Flint was forced to make a life-or-death decision because she couldn't save both. Paradox's climaxes have been consistently good, but this was undoubtedly the best because of that added torment.

And the presence of those MoD civil servants even started to come in useful, as they helped Flint's team evade problems at work, and Christian (Emun Elliott) is now experimenting to try and detect a wormhole that his satellite is using to send its images back from the future. He's still not considered the fact he's the only sending them back through time, though, because he clearly doesn't read much science-fiction. Still, there was a better reason to get him out of his observatory, if only to run around Manchester with a laptop trying to match a blurred photo with a building.

Overall, I don't think Paradox is as bad as many critics are claiming. It's certainly not great, but the basic premise is good fun and the stories build a decent amount of pace and drama. I wish the potential victims were more engaging as characters, but the format of the show doesn't leave much room to spend time with them, and it's so focused on plot that there's not much time available to develop any of the leads beyond baseline personalities. Also, maybe the show needs to leave the accidents behind more often and start persuing disasters where the villains can take centre-stage over the unmindful victims -- because it would be more interesting to follow the final hours of a terrorist/murderer as Flint's gang solve their puzzle.


15 December 2009
BBC1/BBC HD, 9pm

written by: Mark Greig directed by: Omar Madha starring: Tamzin Outhwaite (DI Rebecca Flint), Emun Elliott (Christian King), Mark Bonnar (DS Ben Holt), Chike Okonkwo (DC Callum Gada), Sacha Dhawan (Jaz Roy), Sohm Kapila (Neeta Roy), Anna Jobarteh (Dionne Hudson), Danielle Henry (Kaila Hudson), Adam Shaw (Derek), Ray Emmet Brown (Graham Hudson), Jason Furnival (Station Manager Sampson), Lorcan Cranitch (Simon Manning), Abigail Davies (Amelia James), Daniel Ryan (Martin Bennett), Emma Pilson (Lorrayne), Judy Flynn (Mrs Wright), Andi Osho (Sonia), Grant Masters (Tony Gooding), Paul Brennen (SOCA Agent), Nick Malinowski (Ciaran), Sebastian Shaw (Shop Assistant), Jonathan Slinger (Stuart Taylor) & Steven Radford (Fire Fighter)