The Passage Review: You’ll love this sly take on the book…

Based on Justin Cronin’s best-selling novel, Fox’s new drama “The Passage” has the raw material of a potential hit: Richly detailed source material, an appealing star in Mark-Paul Gosselaar (Chris Pratt’s brother!), and a compelling hook.

The show gives us a world in which an attempt to cure diseases by harnessing a dark sort of power results in the rise of a vampiric race. It should work: leading to man’s own destruction is a theme both time-tested and, these days, particularly fresh.

And yet “The Passage,” in its first three episodes, is doomed by its unwillingness to commit to its own darkness of the same source material. Such as the first three episodes in which the vampires haunt the dreams and minds of their prey. (No one would expect Fox to broadcast sequences as violent as those on FX’s “The Strain” or “Van Helsing,” but those shows at their best exhibit a nightmarish tension that’s missing sadly here.)

And the show’s frame, as a story narrated by a child at the center of a nefarious government plot, deadens what could otherwise be a propulsive pace.

What The Passage doesn’t feature a lot of, at least at this early stage, is a definable sense of menace, or any real inkling of the (much, much) wider story that Cronin’s trilogy encompasses.

The vampires, as everyone is so hesitant to call them so far, aren’t entirely the point. As the human characters are the main point of the show and the developing relationships of past and present memories of these characters collide as the show unravels itself throughout the course of the season.

Those who have read the books know what’s coming; those who haven’t will just have to content themselves with the ominous voiceover supplied by the show’s breakout star, young Saniyya Sidney. Assured and charismatic, Sidney plays Amy, the girl who may or may not hold the key to humanity’s survival — which is why the show’s various factions spend these first few episodes fighting over her.

PLOT:

Basically: We have a secretly run government lab somewhere to the mysterious Project Noah in Colorado, where we have scientists wanting to inject Amy with their formula, which causes their best agent (Mark-Paul Gosselaar) to rebel against his orders and take her on the run, but is eventually caught and becomes her glorified mentor, bodyguard, babysitter all thrown under one job title.

That doesn’t last long, and Amy falls into the clutches of Project Noah, which presents yet another threat to the world. Its experimental cure obtained from the Bolivian Highlands has some major side effects that mimic vampirism, and its test subjects aren’t content to stay inside the facility. It’s just a matter of time before all is chaos, but just how much chaos remains to be seen.

The series devotes much of its running time (mainly in the first few episodes), to establish the bond between Amy and Gosselaar’s Agent Wolgast, which makes sense — any show with this many high-concept trappings needs a believable human relationship or two to provide emotional ballast.

So… it is the relationship between the two main human characters that carry the story and the weight of the dialogue. We have anger, the heartbreak, and the love he shows for Amy provoke a visceral reaction in the audience — you can’t help but empathize with him at every turn, even when he yells, smashes his phone, and throws it out the window. Because while that anger is difficult to watch, but it comes from a place of love for this little girl he’s decided he must protect at all costs.

THE PASSAGE:  Mark-Paul Gosselaar and Saniyya Sidney

Marshaling the shows hope and survival of a potential life-saving cure for the human race is Amy.

In Cronin’s novel, Amy is depicted as white, but she’s cast with a black actress and that’s no accident. The friendship and bond between Amy and Wolgast is natural, and in today’s political climate, it’s aspirational, especially when he reiterates that her life is important — and not just because of the pandemic.

Amy Bellafonte is important, period.

OTHER CAST:

“Lost” and “The 100” actor Henry Ian Cusick shows promise as the troubled Dr. Jonas Lear, who could prove to be a knowledgeable ally, as does Emanuelle Chriqui as Wolgast’s ex-wife Dr. Lila Kyle. They’re joined by Caroline Chikezie, Vincent Piazza, Brianne Howey, and McKinley Belcher III. The standouts, however, are Jamie McShane, who brings a gleeful menace as Patient Zero, aka the head vampire, and Kecia Lewis as a no-nonsense hermit with a religious and military past.

For horror fans, there are plenty of heartaches, blood, and scares. The creature makeup for the infected subjects is particularly eerie in how it depicts the infection’s vascular and biological effects. These are not sparkly, sexy vampires of the ‘Pattison reign.’ The violence, however, is sanitized compared to the body count in the later episodes.

NEGATIVE POINTS:

Oh boy, characters who say and do some very, very stupid things only because the plot demands them to. (The laws of idiotic cause and effect in The Passage‘s universe dictate: If there’s a cage with a monster inside it, some idiot will dutifully open said cage.)

FINAL THOUGHTS:

This Justin Cronin adaptation is easier to stomach than “The Walking Dead,” and introduces a name you’ll remember: Amy Bellafonte.

We have strong performances from leads Mark-Paul Gosselaar and Saniyya Sidney. Culturedemandsgeeks was sold on this new drama for the complexity of its characters, the suspense, and the psychological questions that are raised during the run. But a lack of horror entwined with how the show tackles the ‘supernatural’ elements felt too forced or too silly at times.

But with a neat ending, a huge jump in time, it’ll be interesting to see where the show, and how it will pick up from the last episode in the first season.

STARS: 3.5/5