TDL’s Sports, Wrestling, & Otherwise

I didn’t catch this show for the first few episodes. I finally remembered to tape it last weekend and busted through two episodes in a row. To note: I have not read the novel so some plot-points may be missed on me.

The Good

• Most of the good stuff is the interaction between Crusoe and Friday, the magical black man. Since I missed the impetus of their relationship, I’ll presume that it explains why Crusoe managed to find one particular black man on a deserted island in the 1600s who happens to speak English.
• As a positive to missing the first few episodes, I missed the whole “set up the treehouse and learn to survive on the island” part and jumped right in to the “mutineers land on the island to offer Crusoe a way to get himself off the island” storyline. I prefer this as I don’t need to see the first few episodes of Lost - The Black Rock Years.

The Bad

• I’m not sure who decided we were long overdue to create another Gilligan’s Island, where someone is smart enough to make everything he needed with just what was available on the island… except a boat.
• Maybe it’s too much Prison Break, but I’ve grown tired of the “things go wrong to delay the story and create artificial drama” story device. Crusoe and Friday happen across the shell of a boat. Inside the boat is a working compass which they desperately need if they ever want to build a boat and sail away — so they leave it on a ledge over a fireplace where an inadvertent nudge knocks it in to fire, melts the needle, and ruins it. But, ho, the mutineers are on the island and they have a compass so the heroes have to try and steal theirs! If you want to run a “steal the bad guys’ compass” story, just do it. Don’t preface it with nonsense carelessness that would never happen when you happen to find the most valuable thing you could possibly find in a particular situation.
• The mutineers are kind of a silly plot device. In the 2nd of the 2 episodes I recorded, Crusoe and Friday find the destroyed hull of a boat. They take it back to the treehouse and there was a fix-it montage. Now, I admittedly don’t know the finer points of repairing a boat hull, but it seems like something that would take a long time. During the entire montage the mutineers were in suspended animation and never continued looking for the two guys randomly attacking their camp… which is nice because they were probably making plenty of noise cutting down trees and burning fires at the treehouse.

The Rest

I wouldn’t say I hate it, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say I like it. The joking and play between Crusoe and Friday are fun and Crusoe’s dancing around the whole “If I take you back to England with me, everyone will think you are my slave” is awkward. There is a bit too much of the aforementioned “if anything can go wrong, it will go wrong” plot-device for me. The scenes from next week also don’t leave me hopeful — as they will introduce another group of people who happen to be on the island (the savages) who happen to have Friday’s father held captive. For a deserted island it has more traffic than the Lost island.

I’ll give it another few weeks, but I smell “13-episode run”.