By ANDY GILCHRIST
Staff Writer
The young adult supernatural/sci-fi genre is at the top of the world right now. A movement that began over 15 years ago with the release of the first Harry Potter book has now exploded due to wild success of Twilight, The Hunger Games, The Vampire Diaries, and more. But while stories of powerful young people struggling to save the world continue to be produced, some have argued that the genre has reached its peak, that the stories being told now are nowhere near the quality of those from just a few years ago.
The CW is hoping that this isn’t the case, as they’ve just debuted their newest series, The Tomorrow People. The network could have easily followed the classic hero cycle formula, plugging in the newest and hottest young actors and special effects. Instead, they have produced a series that is very well written, acted, and paced, resulting in a show that not just works well next to the network’s other series, but is entertaining in its own right.
The series follows Stephen Jameson (Robbie Amell), a moody high school student who just doesn’t fit in. But Stephen isn’t like every other teenager; he can teleport and has many other powers he has yet to discover. But unlike most teenagers, who would love and abuse such power, Stephen just wants to be normal. But there are forces fighting a secret war who won’t allow that to happen.
On one side are those like Stephen, people with powers. They call themselves the Tomorrow People and have abilities such as telepathy and telekinesis. They literally live underground, hiding from the rest of the world in an abandoned subway station, which serves as their base of operations for finding and protecting other Tomorrow People. Here, Stephen meets fellow Tomorrow People Cara Coburn (Peyton List), John Young (Luke Mitchell), and Russell Kwon (Aaron Yoo), who are all trying to sway Stephen to their cause.
On the other side is Ultra, a shadowy organization dedicated to controlling or eliminating Tomorrow People because they believe the world is not ready for the next step in human evolution. One of Ultra’s highest ranking agents is Jedikiah Price (Mark Pellegrino), who is tasked with bringing in or killing Stephen. But Jedikiah has a secret connection to Stephen’s long-lost father, who is revealed to have also been one of the Tomorrow People and left Stephen and his family for their own safety. So, which side will Stephen choose?
What made the pilot episode so great were its truly unexpected twists and turns. While the Tomorrow People can do things that regular humans can only dream of, their amazing gifts do have their drawbacks. Some bizarre quirk in their genetic structure makes them unable to kill anyone and a Tomorrow Person passes out if they come close to murder. In a time where every hero is expected to kill the villain at the end of the story, the writers have chosen to go a different way, giving the series a much better chance to stand out on its own rather than get lost in a sea of morally-compromised anti-heroes.
But, the biggest shock is the ending of the first episode. For the first 37 minutes, the audience is sure that Stephen will choose to side with the Tomorrow People, that he will become the savior, the Keanu Reeves, of their revolutionary movement and lead them to victory. But that doesn’t happen. In the episode’s final scenes, Stephen instead decides to join Ultra. What? Impossible!? Hang on, though; this isn’t a show about a man who decides to go to the dark side, choosing to give in to greed and power over the greater good. Stephen decides to join Ultra so that he can act as a double agent, feeding the Tomorrow People information and helping them wherever he can. It’s unclear how long Stephen will be able to keep up the act until Ultra realizes what is going on, but for now, the show is able to spend equal time exploring the characters on both sides of this conflict, with Stephen serving as a gateway to both the good and the bad.
Finally, something that is immediately obvious after just one episode is that this show is going to be fast-paced the whole way through. While many dramas today tend to slow things down for stretches of characterization and dialogue, The Tomorrow People pushes scenes forward without any breaks to breathe. While this isn’t a show that sprints through storylines, like Scandal or most cop shows, it does manage to cover a lot of ground in each episode. In the first episode alone, the audience learns everything about Stephen, his family, the Tomorrow People and the Ultra organization, along with a big opening heist/fight scene and closing break-out sequence, all in just 42 minutes. If the producers manage to keep this pace up for every episode, this show could become one of the most exciting on television.
