'Past Life,' whodunit
with bad karma
And the writing and acting aren't so good either
By Tom Conroy
Feb 9, 2010
One of the twists that made “The X Files” entertaining was that the creators reversed the usual sexual stereotyping and made the female lead a cynic and the male lead a true believer. In the long list of subsequent paranormal series that have tried to imitate “The X-Files,” however, the two leads — who are always attractive and always somewhat attracted to each other — tend to follow the usual gender pattern.
That’s the case with “Past Life,” a new Fox drama that is getting a sneak preview tonight at 9 p.m. and then starts in its regular time period on Thursday at 9. Dr. Kate McGinn (Kelli Giddish) is a true-believing Ph.D. who works at the fuzzily conceived Talmadge Center for Behavioral Health, where she has hired Price Whatley (Nicholas Bishop), a skeptical former New York police detective, to help her investigate the past-life traumas that may be causing her patients’ current-life pain.
In the first two episodes, the patients’ painful visions turn out to be glimpses of felonies that happened during their souls’ previous incarnations, and the show turns out to be an odd mixture of New Age-style mysticism and crime procedural. The listless result is unlikely to please devotees of either “The Ghost Whisperer” or “Cold Case.”
Moreover, the main characters’ presumed chemistry fails to catalyze. We probably won’t be seeing lots of web sites devoted to McGinn-Whatley fan fiction.
The two partners’ attraction is complicated: Price still feels guilty about his wife’s accidental death; Kate has vague commitment issues that may or may not be explained in a future episode.
Bishop’s performance at least hints at Price’s tormented side, but Giddish plays Kate as a generic pretty, smart girl. Surely someone who not only can’t form a serious relationship but also believes in reincarnation would be a little quirkier.
To give Giddish the benefit of the doubt, the show treats the paranormal as quite normal. Kate is immediately convinced that tonight’s patient is having past-life regressions and speaks scornfully of conventional psychotherapy and pharmaceutical treatments.
It might have been more interesting if the show had been written so that there were possible natural explanations for the phenomena. As is, even Price is converted to Kate’s belief system by the end of the first episode, throwing their mismatched-partners dynamic out of whack.
But a larger problem is that having characters with supernatural visions takes the usual fun out of a procedural. Rather than marveling at the investigators’ ingenuity in solving the case, viewers marvel at how conveniently the subjects have a new flashback whenever the investigation is stalled.
When Price and Kate do rely on normal investigative techniques, the internal logic of the show sometimes skips a gear, as when Price theorizes that one crime must have occurred in Washington, D.C., because there are fewer sites there that match the client’s flashbacks.
The writing is generally half-baked. Though the solving of a high-profile missing-child case through the use of a reincarnated witness would likely be big news — seeing that it throws into question centuries of Western science, philosophy and religion — there are no large societal repercussions. (In most paranormal TV shows, the news would have been hushed up by the government at the behest of evil corporations, but “Past Lives” has no overarching conspiracy theory.)
The dialogue is generally flat or slightly off. In particular, a scene in which Kate spends the evening with her mother (Judith Ivey) feels as if it were cut and pasted in from a different show.
The minor characters are sketchy at best. The two other employees of the Talmadge Center, Dr. Malachi Talmadge (Richard Schiff of “The West Wing”) and Dr. Rishi Karna (Ravi Patel), merely serve as subplot filler or as sounding boards for the two stars’ expository dialogue. Schiff underplays so ferociously that it seems he’s hoping no one will notice he’s on the show.
Or maybe he’s wondering whether he wound up on this show because he accumulated bad karma in a previous role.
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