Rumble is the newest episode of the Tomorrow People and it represents a return of some of the worst elements of the show.

We follow three story lines in this episode. We have the return of a person from Cara’s past. He is a nihilist that sees humans as nothing but bumps in the road of his own ascension. On the Ultra front, we are introduced to a few trainees and get to see what happens if you are a Tomorrow Person and don’t make the cut. Jedekiah makes the solemn pronouncement that they are all still being judged. Finally, we have the predicament of Charlotte. She was rescued from the Citadel and is having horrible dreams that hurt everyone around her.

On to the Review!

The Good:

The Charlotte story line is by far the best thing about this episode. She was rescued from a lab where she was kept prisoner and experimented on. This has caused great trauma that is being expressed through her powers. The rest of the group is ostracizing her for the pain that she is inadvertently causing them. It provides a good set up for the making it easier to connect with these characters.

John steps up and takes her under his wing and uses his past treatment by Ultra as a point of connection with Charlotte. He shows her how to take the pain and anguish and turn it around and make it something useful. I know that this is a trite convention but I really liked seeing it here. It made me like john more and this is something he could definitely use.

The expected finesse added to this story is still nice. The main villain of the piece has gathered a gang of thugs about him that are capable of fighting until the point of almost killing. The Tomorrow People confront his gang, hence the episode title Rumble, and the tide starts to turn against them. A few of the group gather around Tara while the rest teleport away. They then teleport away revealing Charlotte who then incapacitates most everyone present with her newly mastered ability. A nice cap to good story.

The Bad:

The whole trainee thing just didn’t work for me. I think we are supposed to think that Stephen is really at risk of being de-powered if he fails but it never really fits. This same point is used for a driver of one of the other trainees as well. She confronts him with the fact that he isn’t really at risk in this trial but then proceeds to find ways to get one over on him. This makes even less sense to me. There are multiple occasions where Stephen confronts both his Uncle and the Founder with almost no repercussions. If you are playing crafty to find an edge on Stephen, this would be a major red flag. When she sees him teleporting away with Astrid, I don’t feel any tension. I just feel bad that she is being written so poorly.

The Ugly:

This episode mark the return of one of the ugliest things about this series, the flashback opening. Flashbacks aren’t bad in and of themselves. They are just bad in how they are used in this show. We are always taken back to be shown something horrible. Each time this happens we are shown something horrible about one of the main characters that makes me like them a little less.

This time we are shown Cara falling in with the villain of the piece and his girlfriend. Yes, we get to see the bad guy being a bad guy but we get that throughout the episode. What we learn here is that most of how Cara and the Tomorrow People live is from how the bad guy lived. On top of this, we get to see Cara get someone killed for no good reason.

The trio has broken into a rich persons house and are robbing him. the resident stumbles upon them and they tie him up. They leave him with Cara as the continue to fleece the place of valuables. The bound man convinces a telepath that he has a heart condition and that they are going to kill him. She lets him go and then he kills the villain’s girlfriend.

It just makes no sense. Cara knows she none of them can actually kill him and can read his mind to know that he is lying. The whole premise of the show is based on something that makes no sense whatsoever. It gives me a headache just thinking about it.

I have high hopes for the next episode that we will see more fall into the good category and nothing in the Ugly category. The show had been doing so much better that I hope this is just an anomaly.