Megan standing in front of one of the Alcatraz cells
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When we were moving our daughter to Orlando, we stopped briefly for a car shuffle. Rob ended up in a car with the two dogs and most of Megan’s stuff, and I ended up driving Megan’s car while she went through a movie magazine, reading excerpts about the new TV shows this season. The two she mentioned that hit my buttons were Touch, which we wrote about, and Alcatraz. We saw the first two episodes of Alcatraz tonight.
I’ m a sucker for these kinds of shows. Give me a riddle, an essential mystery and sympathetic characters and the promise of illumination at the end, and I’ll follow you anywhere. J.J. Abrams, who brought us Lost and Alcatraz, is my pied piper.
Lost affected me the same way that X-Files did. The terrific stories aside, I felt that I was being prepared for a collective experience, for something big. That’s how I felt when we watched these episodes of Alcatraz.
We visited the rock some years ago, walked through those old cell blocks, strolled past the barracks where employees and their families were housed. Children were raised on this rock. Books have been written about these kids, their families, the guards, the inmates, the warden. There’s a collective consciousness in this place that you can feel. It seeps into you when you walk around, move through those cell blocks, and try to imagine the lives of the men who lived there.
The place closed in 1963 – the last of the inmates supposedly transferred to other prisons. But were they transferred anywhere? Here are the episodes so far, available on hulu.com
Even thought it’s never mentioned during the first two episodes, this series is about time travel – specifically where nearly 300 inmates and employees went when the place closed in 1963. And, even more to the point, why are these disappeared returning now? Why have none of them aged? Where have they been all this time?
Echoes of these questions could be seen in the TV show, 4400.
But the bottom line in all these shows is that although speculation is rampant, the bottom line is that we just don’t know. We don’t yet know the extent to which time travel is possible; we don’t yet know for sure who or what is visiting our universe, meddling in human affairs. Even though we hear the voice of synchronicity, we really don’t yet know what role it actually plays in our lives.On one level we know we are interconnected, that the degrees that separate one human from another are probably fewer than the six percent. We have theories hopes, our personal certainties and worldviews about how stuff works. But like the characters on Alcatraz, we’re groping in the dark, digging into the mystery.
PS. Now we’ve seen a couple of more episodes. This series may get old quickly. Each episode is about one of these criminals returning. You sense the larger picture, but no one really talks about time travel or how it might be possible. No one talks about who or what may be behind this. It feeds like a gimmick, not an intricate part of the plot.





















