I’m going to be upfront right from the start by stating the season finale was a decent way to end the season, but it wasn’t the big bang I was expecting. The story generally wasn’t something I felt was finale-quality.

Rufus Sewell as Dr. Jacob Hood

The story, by the way, was about a young woman who claimed her boss had stolen her baby, was keeping it from her, and is having her treated like a mental patient. Of course she was telling the truth. I had no doubt about it. Dr. Hood seemed to agree but had to walk a fine line as to what he said and to whom since her boss was a big-shot in the FBI.

Rachel being shot by the crossbow was an interesting touch. Still, it would make it very difficult to get her around, even into the truck to get her to the hotel room in the first place. The crossbow bolt (arrow) was fairly long and would make it difficult to get into a truck.

There are really only two things about “Medea” that I would say made this “finale-worthy” and those are Hood was on his own and the FBI director backed Hood when it looked like he may not have been on the same side as the FBI.

I haven’t paid much attention to the buzz about this show, as it pertains to whether or not it will be renewed for a second season. I would like to see it renewed for the simple reason that this show is different in one very key aspect: the writers actually make the victims-of-the-week interesting. So many shows do a poor job of character development that it’s hard to care for them one way or another. Eleventh Hour generally does a terrific job in that area.

Rating: 7.5

The opening scene with the red carpet, the camera, the fighting, etc all felt like I was watching another crappy episode intro of CSI: New York and not Eleventh Hour. It felt completely unlike this show for whatever reason.

Omar Benson Miller as Agent Felix Lee

I don’t feel as though this episode needs a whole lot of elaboration because it was unbelievably silly and, well, I knew what was going to happen well in advance.

The reasons for why the engineer did what he did to the perfume was lame. This is one of the very few episodes of Eleventh Hour that honestly left me with a feeling of disappointment, like The Simpsons used to do on a weekly basis.

Rating: 4.5

In “Subway”, Dr. Hood (Rufus Sewell) and Special Agent Young (Marley Shelton ) investigate a toxin cluster when it is reported in the Philadelphia area. I’ve mentioned it before, but I think it’s worth repeating: the recent addition of Agent Felix Lee (Omar Benson Miller) was very smart. He’s a colorful character, adding a little humor to the show at times.

Mariel Hemingway, Rufus Sewell

Anyway, this cluster that was reported shows several people who were affected by something out of the ordinary, including an elderly woman who turned into a fireball while making food for pets. That was one of the least expected things I’ve seen in a while… all of a sudden, whooosh!

The investigation felt thorough and typical. Wasting no time, the trio determined that the only thing the victims had in common was a location where they all came into contact with one another. And as the episode title may suggest, it was in the subway system.

I was searching and searching for a reason why the guilty parties did what they did, but it just seemed a little hard to buy. Perhaps it’s because there haven’t been many white-looking terrorists on television, but even Jacob Hood had a little difficulty going along with the idea that these guys are holy fighters.

This, combined with the fact that the show did a poor job of including Mariel Hemingway’s character, made for a mediocre episode of Eleventh Hour. It felt like new people were put in charge of making sure the “victim of the week” was made an integral part of the show.

Rating: 6.2

Naturally, there was an explanation and it was all about nanotechnology. A company trying to further battery technology to bring about better automobiles was responsible for the mess. Well, technically, it was one individual who was sabotaging another scientist’s work who managed to unleash this little virus which was quite unusual.

Rufus Sewell as Dr. Jacob Hood

Instead of the typical cold virus, this virus was metal and pulled everything metallic from the body to further replicate itself, creating a mesh all over the body.

This was another episode with a villain I could have done without. There wasn’t a whole lot of character development there. I wish the villains were as interesting as the victims on Eleventh Hour. They’re disproportionally developed.

That being said, I didn’t find myself quite as attached to the victims in this episode. It may be because the husband was interested in another woman, but then again, I didn’t feel much for the wife either even though she was going through a lot. Neither character was handled particularly well.

Hood and Young weren’t alone this week. Agent Lee (Omar Benson Miller) was back this week. I’m really liking Lee. He’s not always around Hood and Young. When I try to compare him to anyone else on TV, I have to say he’s like the CSI character Captain Jim Brass, who’s always doing a lot of leg work and isn’t always seen with the main stars of the show. I don’t know if Felix Lee will become a regular, but I hope so.

Rating: 7.6

Thankfully, Dr. Hood and Rachel Young are on the case and they have backup in the form of Agent Felix Lee. Lee is played by the quite large Omar Benson Miller, who towers over both Marley Shelton and Rufus Sewell with his 6′6″ frame.

Marley Shelton as Rachel Young, Rufus Sewell as Jacob Hood, Omar Benson Miller as Felix Lee

The characters, true to almost all other episodes of Eleventh Hour, were terrific. The widow, in particular, was wonderful. She had a very difficult decision to make. She and her developing fetus were both being poisoned by a very high amount mercury and it isn’t entirely clear where it was coming from.

My initial thoughts were with the water supply, but I wasn’t completely out of my mind when it was the food supply that was affected thanks to an idiotic fish and game employee who decided to poison Lake Michigan with mercury to bring attention to the fact that we’re all killing our planet and ourselves.

I really liked the Felix Lee character. Omar Benson Miller was energetic for a man of his size and brought some excitement when he tackled the fish and game employee when he decided to run. Even if I didn’t particularly care for the villain in this episode, I found the rest of the episode to be very entertaining.

Rating: 8.2

A point of the show that I like is the victims featured each week. I’ve credited the Eleventh Hour writers for doing a terrific job in creating real people that you can care about. And while it’s hard to get too worked up over a pair of illegal immigrants, I still liked them since they were really just trying to care for the fourth cloned child that they had taken off with.

Marley Shelton as Rachel Young

Agent Rachel Young didn’t have too much trouble talking about her passing certain tests to get into the FBI, but I’d like to see her pass a shooting test. One of the things that always frustrates me with TV shows and movies is the horrendous shooting. The bad guys almost always get away untouched and Young couldn’t hit the guy with two clips.

One of the things that I liked about the Gepetto character was that she seemed like someone we’d get to see a few times this season, in a cat and mouse game with Dr. Hood. However, this was Gepetto’s second episode of the season and she was already caught. I found this to be a punch to the gut. There was an opportunity to create a character who could be quite interesting to watch. Instead, the writers blew it and already called it a wraps on this.

Rating: 7.4

I don’t pay any attention whatsoever to ratings, but there’s a certain quality to this show that I’m sure resonates with others. This isn’t just your ordinary procedural with boring people being affected by someone/something. I find the characters to be exceptionally well done compared to most other shows. I find myself caring for them which isn’t typically the case for most one-hour dramas.

Rufus Sewell as Jacob Hood

This week, Hood and Young went after the fountain of youth when it seemed to kill a man in a highly unusual way. The man was using stem cells to prolong his health and enhance his appearance. In the process, the stem cells grew a second heart, over-oxygenating his body, killing him. That was one hell of a tease. Two hearts?! You’ve got me hooked.

The “heart” for this episode came from a brother and sister who were about sixteen years old, give or take a year. The brother had cancer, but used his stem cells to get rid of it. And now his sister has the cancer, but when the doctors went to look for her stem cells, they were gone. They were stolen.

I can’t say that I was particularly surprised by which person was responsible, but that’s to be expected sometimes. I loved the MacGyver mention, by the way. Mac was in a similar situation, locked in a freezer. My biggest fault with that set is that it didn’t look cold enough to be taken seriously.

Still, the “heart” of this show is what I’m most attracted to. I enjoyed the characters this week. It’s hard not to root for the brother and sister and there was even a family reunion that was touching. This is one of the few new procedurals I enjoy and I know I’m not alone.

Rating: 8.3

When a child seems to have been cured of his kidney cancer, Hood knows something is going on and it isn’t a miracle. There’s no such thing as a miracle in his eyes given the fact that his wife asked for a miracle and never got one before she died of cancer.

The boy in question seems to have been cured after drinking water from a local spring which came up during a huge flood. This spring has in turn brought about a flood of people to try the water. It’s a circus-like atmosphere which reminded me of the miracle water episode on USA Network’s Monk not so long ago.

Marley Shelton as Rachel Young

Although I don’t know a whole lot about water contaminants, I knew it was going to be something unusual — it just had to be something out of the ordinary, but I never would have guessed heavy water would be the issue. That ice cube test was very cool, although I wish I had a freezer which could make ice cubes in five minutes like the one on the show.

The writers are doing a better job of making the victims sympathetic. The last two episodes, in particular, have had very good, very believable characters and I feel like the show does well when good characters are introduced.

I’d like to see more of Rachel and her new boyfriend or whatever he is to her. It’s nice to know that she has some life outside of working with Hood.

Rating: 8.3

An outbreak of bizarre behavior in a small Texas community had Rachel Young and Jacob Hood investigating everything from the local water supply to a bug repellent. Initially the bug repellent was thought to be the problem, but that didn’t quite pan out. It took a fairly long time for Hood to figure out the cause, not before he felt the affects of the poisoned water in fact.

Rufus Sewell as Jacob Hood and Marley Shelton as Rachel Young

When I see people point out the fact that bottled water is mostly a scam, I often wonder how many people actually see this and stop buying it. Bottled water has it’s place, but it’s not to be consumed by everyone when perfectly clean water is available in your kitchen.

The cause proved to be a small shipment of water pipes which were made to contain large amounts of PCP. This supply of pipes got mixed in with other shipments and the chlorine in the water ate away at the PCP-laced pipes, making some of the residents hallucinate and some even lost their temper.

One of the reasons I liked “H2O” is because of the characters. I really liked the father, mother, and son we were introduced to. This felt like an actual family and not something thrown together for an episode of TV. It felt familiar and very real.

My biggest complaint was with the prop department. I forget the exact scene (time stamp-wise), but there was a scene which showed a piece of pipe that was being cut. It didn’t look like a real piece of water pipe at all. It was far too flexible to be placed in the ground and be considered a water pipe. It was laughable… and sad, really.

Rating: 8.2

The opening of this week’s episode of Eleventh Hour had me intrigued right from the start. It isn’t every day that you see someone come back from the dead like that. I recall an episode of CSI which had a similar occurrence, but there are scientific differences for the reasoning behind that.

Rufus Sewell as Dr. Jacob Hood

Dr. Hood’s explanations of the DNA sequencing and his theories regarding what was at work was very good. He does a very good job of explaining what is going on to Rachel Young and in turn, the viewing audience.

I have to admit that those guys got what they had coming. I didn’t feel sorry for them once it was revealed what they were guilty of and got away with. As I’ve aged, I’ve grown more disgusted with the way some people manage to get away with their behavior. So I honestly don’t have too big of a problem with the father of the daughter seeking revenge. Yes, he should have done it in another manner, putting fewer people in harm, but without that, this episode’s tone would have more resembled Law & Order than anything else and that isn’t what is needed.

It wasn’t until the end that I felt any sadness. The emotions I felt through much of this episode weren’t too strong. It wasn’t until that girl woke up that I felt much in the way of emotion aside from the annoyance I felt regarding those little college kids.

With so much science involved, Eleventh Hour doesn’t do enough to involve one’s emotions. If they manage to do that, the show will be a little better, but the show’s damn good the way it is right now.

The episode ended in a similar manner to how it began, with a conversation between Hood and the woman he’s trying to ask out. Although the conversation was brief, it seemed to be a success. Even Rachel congratulated him on it which was nice of her.

Rating: 8.5