Last night I watched the series pilot for Sci-Fi channel's new show: Painkiller Jane. It wasn't terrible by any stretch of the imagination, but it wasn't good either. I'm not familiar with the comic book, but the world-building seemed shallow to me - all "Neuros" (the mutants of the show) were up to no good. There was some technobabble about how this was because the mutation affected the brain's ability to tell right from wrong, but that's weak sauce and it justifies the overly simplistic black/white division into secret government organization (the good guys) fighting the mutants (the bad guys).
Throw in Kristanna Loken's wooden delivery and it's not a winner (in Terminator 3 her delivery made sense - she's a terminator. When she's a (presumably human) DEA agent it's less believable). The worst part of it the only time she showed any plausible emotion is when she was in pain - but wait, I thought she was immune to pain? Throw in the terrible writing of the voiceovers and it's not a winner - the line where she says "I didn't just overcome pain - I murdered it." was especially awful but not unique. It took me a couple of episodes of Dresden Files to decide it wasn't going to get better, but I'm ready to give up on this one after the pilot.
But hey, Eureka comes back in July, and Heroes finally resumes next week (yay!). So the short-term prognosis for televised sci-fi ain't that bad!
technorati tags:SciFi, Television, PainkillerJane
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