1x02 Annihilator

Ok so now let's talk about the restraints and genius of Malcolm Bright. It's a lot. I want to dance around the whole episode. First of all Brights mother (Bellamy Young) is clearly the First Lady from Scandal and I'm slightly disappointed I didn't see it sooner.

Ok so these restraints. I mean that's so gaudy. What are they thinking. He has to take 15 pills and still gets night terrors. Where's the psychiatrist character he should be talking to on a regular basis because yet again we have a new york protagonist who lives alone in a gorgeous and large apartment. He's the son of a serial killer why is he that rich?

I think they want to make Bright super intelligent but they can't decide how super intelligent he should be.

Bright: "DId you know the mace was invented in the 13th century"

and that's it. Nothing about the mace and how it's used or how it's changed. Just a random half-fact about the mace. Why? This is some crucial character development. That's being wasted. How is he into weapons AND snakes? Why? Isn't he into murder? Again the most interesting character is his father The Surgeon and maybe his mother with the revelations at the end of the episode which again don't make sense. The Surgeon's entire prison situation doesn't make sense and they have one more episode to get to it and explain how he went from a cage in a room to a room with books and a desk and pens and such. I'm a generous viewer. I'm willing to do a LOT of heavy lifting to explain things. So it should say something when I can't work out why The Surgeon is in his current situation and I'm asking why. There are other unanswered questions but I'm not asking them.

This show is a lot of handwaving around the characters and then they solve a case. In this episode it was a killer who murdered his family. Now at the start of the series I thought this was going to relate more to his father. The first killer tried to copy a 4 kill streak his father did. I thought this was going to be like The Blacklist in that every killer would be trying to do something his father did. But instead it's going to be his father helping with just other killers. Here's the problem with using psychopaths to hunt psychopaths. It makes sense when they're copying each other to ask the original for insight. But it doesn't make sense otherwise. Psychopaths don't have meetings or clubs or communications with each other. Why would they be more insightful on another psychopath? It's just ridiculous. Bright himself goes though the step of outlining how many different types of killers there are and their different motivations and that makes sense because he's spent his whole life researching why people kill. He studied it, he trained in it, he worked it. How does his father get insights? It's not like his father taught other psychopathic killers. He was a medical professional and he killed himself. He might be useful in determining serial killer activity from a forensic perspective but that's about it. Where does The Surgeon get insight on other types of serial killers than he was.