Paradox Lost no comments

(Couple of spoilers included, but you've got a back button.)

So here I sit, waiting for the second episode of Paradox, the BBC's new sci-fi/police drama.

Last week's opener was a pleasant surprise: a policewoman DI Flint, played by Tamzin Outhwaite, was inveigled into looking at images which had been received from a satellite which were apparently sent twenty hours in the future.

Initially skeptical (you wouldn't be?), she keeps an eye on the proceedings as elements of the image come together at the right time and place, until she comes to believe that an explosion will occur as predicted.

The game seemingly afoot, she then fails to prevent it by sitting and watching it happen. Seems a bit daft: all she had to do was block access to a bridge for ten minutes and either be a heroine . . . or preside over a damp squib.

This slight faux pas was, of course, a plot device. The starting red herring of is-this-a-terrorist-trying-to-taunt-us? had already petered out. There were too many unconnected elements for it to have been planned by the pet mad scientist Dr Christian King (played by Emun Elliott).

So we're left to conclude that the images were from the future, somehow linked to solar flare activity, whilst leaving open the question: could she have stopped it if she'd tried a wee bit harder, or is the future fixed and only observable?

Tonight she gets a second crack at that one as a colleague appears in another set of images - must be in the middle of a sunspot cycle - prompting further involvement.

The hook provided from the pilot worked for me. It's nice to see a program where the good guys fail to save the day once in a while, instead of the formulaic last-second rescue. But do they have the courage for an X-Files style killing-the-cast moment?

I don't see why not. It's only the second episode so no-one (except Flint & King) is too well established to be expendable. But excepting a clever did-we-help-or-did-we-misinterpret ending they'll have to keep the balance by being able to alter the outcome or, like the viewers, they'll be limited to being spectators.