The Messengers

A meteor crashes onto the Trinity nuclear test site and a man rises from the crater. A shockwave is released and a few selected individuals are knocked unconscious. The man turns out to be the devil. The people hit by the shockwave are strangers who become angels with special individual powers tasked with stopping the rise of the four horsemen and the Apocalypse.

This CW traffics in the Biblical Apocalypse although it may be sacrilegious to turn angels into X-Men. Some of it is simplifying. I'm willing to root for the show which has a couple of familiar faces. It's not until the devil do something more complex and the Angel of Death reveal that the show gets better. It's too little too late as the show gets cancelled after 13 episodes. There is another problem with the story telling since the four horsemen are always expected to rise. If they don't rise, there is no show. It's trying to be a battle but some parts of the outcome are never in doubt. That keeps the tension at a lower level. Overall, it's a good enough, but not great show.

I found this show very entertaining. Nearly everything about it could have been better, but I found it very entertaining anyway. The religious angle is not heavy handed, and there were some clever plot twists that I did not see coming. Like a good B movie, I felt that this show's shortcomings actually added to its charm.

I want to like this show, I really do. But I can't. It's a little too simple, like a rough first draft. The characters are so far one dimensional and each of them has a one track mind. Of course there is the Latino who is into drugs (but really has a heart of gold), the mystical African American who knows all (and what is up with the clichéd African music attached to her revelations?), the scientist who does not want to believe in anything but science (and of course there must be a scientific explanation for God). It could be good, but instead of delving into the mythology, or really exploring these characters, it stifles itself with surface meaning. Oh, and the glowing eyes, a little over that already. Surely there is another way of showing that someone is evil than changing their eyes?

It's one of those shows.

You know, the ones where extraterrestrial or supernatural or other-dimensional stuff happens, and then we watch flat and uninteresting characters navigate contrived plot twists for the rest of the season while some sort of "conspiracy" unfolds.

It didn't forget to include teenagers in the mix, because, you know, the committee which designed this show wanted to appeal to all possible demographics.

At the end of the season there will be a stupid cliffhanger which the writers won't know how to resolve, and then the show will be mercifully canceled and free up the air slot for something far more entertaining, such as a show about optimal ways to fold laundry.

Who greenlit this derivative, soulless schlock in 2014 and thought it was a good idea?

My main issue is that this show is advertised as a sci-fi. It is not! Ironically the two most unscientific characters on the show, are the two people supposed to be scientist. The writing is absolutely horrible, it's still to early to really judge the actual story, seeing how we only have the first episode thus far. But I don't have high hopes for this show, the plot just sounds really boring.

If you want good sci-fi, you need to create an interesting universe, in which you can experiment with different aspects of reality. WALL- E, what if the earth died - GATTACA, what if we could genetically improve our lives before they even began - and so on. It's all about asking what if - and this show completely fails to ask any interesting questions. Honestly I would deem it pure fantasy, but even as a fantasy story it fails, see how fantasy stories are supposed to be relatable metaphors for life - often coming of age stories. But this show is neither, it is just bad.