MovieChat Forums > Waking the Dead (2001) Discussion > Liked the series, but the pilot was rife...

Liked the series, but the pilot was rife with stupidity and holes

posted 9 years ago by jackmronner
4 replies | jump to latest

Tech gaffs: When the kidnapper uses the hostages phone to call Boyd FROM THE HIDEOUT, there is not reference to trying to at least triangulate the towers is pinged off! Nor any attempt to explain it away. Really? TV tech first semester.

When the forensic scientist is unable to get clean DNA from a five year old corpse (??? They can get it from Mastodons!), she doesn't try to get the familial DNA from the surviving parents. This is not sophisticated science here, nor is it a recent technique unavailable at the time of the first episode.

Procedural gaffs: The know the general area the second girl was in at the time of her abduction, but no attempt or reference to try and catch her on CCTV (and London is the most covered city in the world in this regard), even when they later learn she'd been in the grocery store that afternoon. They'd have seen her getting into the perp's cab.

When the first money handoff fails, 10 cops flood the area, showing the perp that they'd broken the "come alone" demand of the demented, vengeful perp. They should have cut their losses and had the WPC leave alone.

They do this again at the second money drop for no discernible reason, again risking enraging the unstable perp, putting the life of the hostage at risk. And why did they think that he would be stupid enough to have the girl in the same area he'd chosen for the exchange? They weren't to know his plan to abduct the WPC and that the money was irrelevant to his plan, and should've anticipated that he'd have her at another location so that, even he were to have been captured picking up the money, he would have had that card to play: let me go or you'll never find her alive. The should again have let her leave, staked out the area and tried to catch him picking up the money (the absolute standard practice in such dramas).

I'd seen later episodes before viewing the pilot, and found them much tighter in terms of strategy, procedure and logic. Very disappointed with this debut of an otherwise enjoyable series.

[–] Helena727 9 years ago

Just watched it and had exactly the same response, tho you critiqued it more succintly than I could have. It was ludicrous, and I was astonished.

Luckily for viewers, the team got it together with subsequent eps.

Kudos to Alexei de Keyser, who was an executive producer for 37 eps and who is said to have significantly shaped the show. Sadly, he died at age 36.

"All you need to start an asylum is an empty room and the right kind of people."

[–] jackmronner 9 years ago

I see you are an admirer of the wonderful Ms. Lombard. Thought you might like to hear an anecdote about her. Another remarkable woman I knew landed an interview with her at Carole's home. Not a natural blonde, she swept into the room in a dressing gown, fresh from a hair treatment, throws the robe open and says: "Look, they even insist on bleaching my p**sy!!". I'd heard she was a tomboy with a longshoreman's vocab, but this cemented her in my already firm good graces. What a face, what a talent.

[–] Helena727 9 years ago

Yes, I've read that she swore with the best of them. Gorgeous, fun, fun to be with -- she was a real treasure.

(It's funny that the studio would bleach her pubic hair; I guess that tells us someting about the huge divide between the way some people really lived -- studio folk knew she'd have a sex life -- and how movies from 1934 thru the 1960s want us to think all people lived.)

"All you need to start an asylum is an empty room and the right kind of people."

[–] jackmronner 9 years ago

Don't know when the interview took place, but perhaps it was during the pre-code days? Looking back to watching TV in the '50's, all we had on the local NY channels were movies from the '30 - '40's, many of them pre-code and pre-brasseire (!), the amount of quivering flesh exposed was astounding. Even the underwater scenes in the original Weismuller Tarzan movies (you know kids would watch these) were a bit shocking in their "peek-a-boo" glimpses. The same for the Busby Berekely shows. I do believe that it was a hangover from the strangely (for the uptight sexual mores of the times) carnival side-show/Burlesque entertainment. Even the exposition at Angel Island in San Francisco bay, a very elaborate affair with all purpose-built ,ornate buildings, featured a "naughty" review. I suppose the ubiquity of the new motion pictures medium prompted the moralistic censorship. I think that this victory over explicit portrayal of the reality of sexuality in American society deeply affected our sensibilities here, allowing an enduring divorcing of reality from true life as portrayed publicly in all media. The Puritan strain is strong in us Luke! It formed the basis for the OUTRAGE of the Clinton episode (which my French friends found puzzling, having had a president with a mistress and illegitimate child while in office). Here, "morals" essentially means sexual mores: all the
"hot button" issues that the Republicans push are, at base, sexually oriented: Gay marriage, abortion, contraception and media censorship. They are silent, however, on the gross violence and cruelty so rife in our blockbusters. Of course, the moral issues of honesty, venality and hypocrisy that truly are relevant to our elected officials are largely ignored. Go figure.