Grade: C
Continuing a downward spiral can be hard but
Alcatraz breaks that streak with
”Webb Porter” in one of the most tense episodes yet. In a story about a serial killing savant, Porter plays the violin to drown out the ringing in his ears. Oh, he also makes his bows, they are the wand type thing that makes the violin...violin, out of human hair. Specifically, female human hair & if they don’t hold up to the auditions in his mind, really either way in the end, he takes them to a bathtub & drowns them. Porter is probably one of the most deranged to come back with the audacities that he commits but that also makes this one of the most interesting episodes of
Alcatraz even if our main cast are still blank as slate.
As the hunt for Porter is on, & before the team even knows its Porter, Emerson is on edge to try & save Lucy & when he finds out that Porters blood, found at a crime scene, has the elusive silver & is the same blood type, Emerson is out to catch Porter, before he knows its Porter, alive. Yeah, that is a hefty sentence but this is a pretty hefty episode which doesn’t entirely bring some pathos to our main cast but brings a great sense of urgency & drama to the returned-inmate procedural. A lot of what makes
”Webb Porter” so good is Webb Porter himself. As we watch him during his original time on the rock we see that he has been secluded to one room to stop his screaming because he uses the humming from a fridge in the adjacent room to drown out his the ringing in his ears. Like most of the episodes of
Alcatraz it is the inmates journey which is the most poignant & even more so than earlier decent episodes, like the stories of Jack Sylvane & Ernest Cobb, we get an even richer amount of detail laid out to Webb’s backstory & evolution on the rock.
In what has become a ho-hum series
Alcatraz can still pull off some great episodes when the team behind it is forth-willing. Though the series main cast remains with very little relatable pathos there could still be hope in the final two upcoming episodes of season. This of course is all dependent on the hope that
Alcatraz is willing to give us a bit of reveal behind its secret & hopefully some better motivation for its characters.
