Everyone needs a friend like Drill.
What They Say:
X Marks the Spot – FBI child specialist Claire Bennigan investigates when an imaginary friend persuades children to play dangerous games; a haunting phenomenon comes to light.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
While the summer TV season is still the weakest of all the seasons, there continues to be more new shows coming out than ever before, which is a far cry from my younger days when it was all reruns. With The Whispers, it was given the go ahead a year ago and was planned as a midseason series before getting nudged to a summer debut. The show is one that I was intrigued by from the start since it’s based on the short story Zero Hour from Ray Bradbury’s The illustrated Man novel. A lot of what Bradbury did was essentially TV/movie filmable even at the time it came out, so seeing this given an update works well. Making it a summer series means it’s less likely to be lost in the seas of ongoing shows, and to give viewers something new to sink their teeth into as well. And the promos for it certainly make it look creepy enough.
The central idea of the series is one that’s certainly an interesting one, an approach you don’t see often when it comes to alien invasion shows. At least not ones that are treated seriously when you get down to it. As we see with the prologue here, these aliens are looking for a way to take care of business by working through the children. Not just any children though, but carefully selected ones that will give them the access they need. Seeing the way a young girl is enthralled by an imaginary friend she calls Drill is certainly eerie with how it unfolds, since Harper just views it all as a game and her mother finds it cute. But when it leads to the mother’s death in a creative way, that sets things into motion since the child’s father is the head of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. That elevates things up several notches to be sure among those that investigate such things.
That introduces us to agent Claire Bennigan, an experienced agent that’s good at her job but has taken time off due to the loss of her husband. She’s focused on taking care of her child, Henry, who has his own special needs. There’s not a lot of convincing to get her back on the job, which is good since that would just draw things out, and getting Claire in with the child to talk about things explores a bit more of it. Harper’s certainly cute as she talks through things, using lots of big words, but also provides the reveals along the way that teases it all for Claire, though she’s certainly not thinking it’s invisible aliens whispering to children. But what she gets from it is that there’s certainly some sort of threat here that has to be taken seriously.
While the show plays to the seemingly mostly suburban kind of aspect here that Claire delves into, we also get some fun Close Encounters of the Third Kind material too, taking place in Africa where we see an American special projects type that’s called in to check out a part of an Air Force plane that appeared out of nowhere there. But it’s what else happens while there that really ups the ante as apparently other strange events have been going on. When one hits while there, it reveals… something? It’s hard to tell at first, but it looks like an oversized tree-rock-mecha kind of thing in the middle of the desert. One that has pieces of the plane connected to it as well. And some mysterious blue electrical energy within it. Suffice to say, mysteries abound here, though from the audience perspective you can fill in some of the blanks easily enough, especially when they show some slightly oversized foot impressions within the area as well.
Another subplot that runs through the episode is one that you can also see where it’s going as there’s a mysterious man that looks like he’s homeless, ragged and uncertain in some ways, that’s been around some of these incidences that have gone on, including Harper’s. He’s got a number of very visible tattoos as well, which is something that Claire ends up learning about alongside her partner Rollins, which provides opportunity to connect with him later, since he’s now at a local area hospital after passing out in the street. The character, played by Milo Ventimiglia, is a bit of a blank slate at the start here because when he wakes up in the hospital, he has no memory of who he is. It gets interesting as it goes on though as the doctor talks with him about some of what he did while out of it, such as speaking Arabic in his sleep, a language he doesn’t know, but it’s the arrival of Harper in his room that really provides the key. With her saying that he’s the adult that can help her find Drill, it becomes clear that he’s unlike most other adults in the world that lose the ability to talk to their “imaginary friends” when they get older.
In Summary:
The Whispers reveals a lot of itself here with what it wants to do, and it also brings in a lot of complications as well with the characters and their relationships. Some of it doesn’t really get clear until the end how some of them are connected to each other, particularly with Claire, but when you view it through the prism of the kind of “team” that will come together to deal with these aliens, it hits the right notes overall because of the oddness of it all. Admittedly, I would have preferred that those involved here didn’t have the relationship complications that they do since it makes the story more about them than the invasion itself, but it works in a solid enough way here when it comes to Claire’s family and what we see in the Sahara that I’m really intrigued to see if they can provide enough payoff here. I like stories like this overall, but making it compelling as a weekly serialized show, even just for the summer season, can be a challenge. There’s no real standout actor here to really be a draw yet, so it’s just the concept itself that will keep me watching.
Grade: B
