Eleventh Hour is a stolid, strangely uninvolving Brit TV show. The big draw is Patrick Stewart, who plays Home Office scientific investigator Prof. Ian Hood. (Because lots of British guys are named Ian, you know.) In the classic tradition, he and his assigned body guard, Rachel, show up in various locales just in time to prevent some disaster. The opening credit sequence is clearly designed to evoke The X-Files>. However, the show, while offering admittedly extreme situations, only barely shades over into sci-fi.
More than The X-Files, Eleventh Hour is actually more reminiscent of the old program Doomwatch. That ’70s era show, also British, followed an investigative team that worked to prevent various environmental disasters. Doomwatch has never been commercially available in this country, but a pretty decent spin-off movie, also entitled Doomwatch, came out on DVD some years ago.
The Eleventh Hour DVD set collects all of the program’s four episodes, which run about 68 minutes per. (Presumably the show ran in an hour and a half long slot, and not on the commercial-less BBC.) The first involves illegal human cloning, the second a Hot Zone sort of situation, and the third global warming. Frankly, and I don’t do this very often, but I stopped watching the third chapter about halfway through, and skipped the fourth altogether. The program isn’t bad, but it just seemed I could be watching something better (or worse).
I don’t know, the show just didn’t do it for me. The direction occasionally flirted with that sort of irritating Michael Bay sort if ADD editing, but the real problem was the writing. To be fair, there are some occasional nice touches. Rachel fires her gun in the first episode, and spends much of the rest of the episode grousing about the paperwork this will entail. Given how nonchalantly most TV characters spray bullets around, that was actually kind of neat.
On the other hand, the writing is quite often entirely too lazy. Rachel at one point casually makes one of those horribly cliché Offhand Comments, of the sort that instantly causes Hood to have a light bulb moment. (Thus allowing her character to have a plot impact, of course.) “Rachel,” he replies, “you’re a genius!” Kudos to the writer for that original line.
This leads Hood and Rachel to a library, where they search through several years’ worth of newspaper copies. (Apparently microfiche and the Internet aren’t that big in England yet). Looking for a rich man whose son has died in recent years, Hood finds one story and basically goes, “This must be the guy.” Really? I mean, he’s right, but damn, that’s weak. Then he rips the story out of the archive paper. Add photocopiers to other inventions the Brits need to get going with. And later, when they confront the guy at his house, he of course invites in for the first of several accusatory chats, and never lawyers up.
Speaking of not getting technology (and this from a guy who has a single, rotary phone in his house), at the end of one episode, an evil super-genius Hood has been tracking all over Europe—who I assume would have become a recurring villain had the show continued on—is watched by Hood from a second story window as she slowly climbs into a car, waves, and is driven off. An apparently stymied Hood just watches in mute frustration. Gee, Hood, how about calling the police on your friggin’ cell phone and giving them a license plate number or something? Yeesh.
Meanwhile, the third episode involves a paranoid scientist who (three guesses) was once Hood’s best friend, and “the most brilliant of us all.” Good grief, they felt the need to use hackneyed material like a former best friend in the third episode? I also liked when Hood first introduces himself: “I’m Ian Hood, Scientist.” Apparently like the scientists from ’50s sci-fi movies, he doesn’t have a specialty, he’s just a “Scientist.” Following that line of thinking, he basically and conveniently has a working knowledge of all disciplines.
The characters are right out of the Lame TV Handbook, too. Hood is a brilliant scientist, but absent-minded and bad with simple, real life things. He sometimes gets into trouble because he’s only concerned with The Truth, and not the rules, blah blah blah. Rachel is his not brilliant but gruff and stalwart and street smart government bodyguard, always annoyed at how Hood will put himself in danger because he’s so blindly focused. You know, on The Truth.
What a yin/yang couple they are! He’s old, she’s young, he’s a man, she’s a woman. He only cares about Big Issues (and The Truth), she occasionally just wants to get laid. He understands quantum physics and chaos theory, but she has to help him do a web search on his laptop computer. He talks like Patrick Stewart, she has a thick working class accent. They’re the (not so) original odd couple! On the other hand, they are so alike! They both are very good at their jobs, and in the end, and Rachel is as passionate as he is about searching out The Truth.
The show has the occasional short sex scene or hard profanity, apparently just because they can. The writers also attempt to show the human cost of these situations, focusing on some Approved Little Person, but it’s generally just a bit too trite.
The politics are also predictably leftish, but too timid to get worked up about. Patrick will occasionally be given a little speech (he worries about illegal cloning lest it be used as a weapon, by the Usual Know-Nothing Zealots, against vital stem cell research) or some crack about how America is keeping the world from confronting Global Warming. These issues, needless to say, are somewhat more nuanced than presented. Still, the program brays just enough to establish its trendy credentials before moving on to the next rote scene.
Apparently I wasn’t the only one unimpressed. The show hasn’t been renewed, apparently due to poor ratings. In the end, I’d give the show maybe a six or *very* mild seven out of ten, but with two of those points awarded solely due to Patrick’s presence. Ten years ago this might have seemed more impressive. In a time when TV is better than ever, however, the writing and often irritating direction here just don’t make the cut. Patrick is predictably very good, and might well for many make watching the show worthwhile just on his own. However, his age is apparent. I was actually depressed by the fact that he isn’t being given better work to do with the limited amount of time he has left.
