I can’t believe this show made it onto the air. I mean, by the time I got around to watching it on Hulu, it had already been canceled, but, really, it’s amazing this even made it to pilot. The premise is blatantly absurd (team of past life investigators and their PI help people experiencing past life regressions and help them solve their own murders?), but even stranger is that everyone seems willing to go along with it. I mean, the first episode ends with a SWAT team breaking down somebody’s door on the word of a teenage boy who claims to be the reincarnation of a murder victim. How did they get a search warrant based on that? Unless the second episode consists of nothing but the agent who approved that raid getting chewed out by the DA who has to prosecute this case, I’m going to have a very hard time accepting this series at all.
Now, what would be really interesting is if they acknowledged that past life regressions, while vivid, aren’t especially accurate. I really liked that BBC special I watched about the young boy with clear, distinct memories of the island he claimed he was from and his previous mother, but who freaked out a bit when they actually took him to the island and found it wasn’t quite as he remembered it. To me, that speaks more to cross-parallel world contamination instead of reincarnation (or some sort of time loop theory in which things aren’t exactly the same each time around), which would make for a much more interesting show. Though, I guess that’s pretty much where Fringe seems to be heading, isn’t it?