Review of The After

The After (2014 TV Movie)
8/10
With good all round performances, and a suggestion that the show is headed in some dark and interesting directions will keep me watching for now.
21 February 2014
For months "X-Files" fans have been talking up a storm on the internet about Chris Carter's return to television with a new show called: "The After". Unfortunately he choose to align the TV series with Amazon, who are famous for bad pilot episodes anyone else remember the Zombie Land pilot episode? *Cringes* For those of you who do not know Chris Carter, he was the golden boy of 90′s television after creating The X Files franchise which instantly became a cult classic. He never really delivered another show to equal that of the X Files, he came pretty close with crime drama Millennium. But even that only truly became popular after the series was finished.

"The After" begins right at the very moment the apocalypse hits earth. By apparent manipulated circumstance, a group of eight strangers with the exact same birth dates are thrown together when the power goes out in their building. The group consists of a gay clown, a tough Latina policewoman, a French bombshell, a drunk Irishman, and a rich old white lady. Which really does sound like the start of a very bad joke And being ignorant human beings they are they think that they are the only ones affected by this "power outage" They then try to break out of an underground parkade, only to discover that there is far more wrong with the world than just a simple power outage..

The pilot episode of "The After" is exactly what you would expect from any apocalypse themed drama. Mass chaos everywhere, the police have lost control of the situation obviously. There are people everywhere trying to get out of the city and no one really knows what's going on, including us the viewers which I really loved as they only really revealed some of the key plot elements during the last few minutes of the show. The first episode of the show plays its cards closely too its chest which caused me to scream out in frustration multiple times because I wanted to know what type of apocalypse has befallen our characters and fictional world.

During the course of the episode Chris Carter throws in the suggestion that the supernatural is at play and though some of it feels a bit rushed in the plot episode, the closing scene feels like something strait out of an X Files episode, it's reminiscent of a really great opening for an "X-Files" episode. I really want this show to succeed. Chris Carter has provided some solid entertainment in the past, and X Files had a few really iconic/classic standalone episodes. With good all round performances, and a suggestion that the show is headed in some dark and interesting directions will keep me watching for now. So let's see were this show goes hopefully not the same direction as the Zombie Land pilot.
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