‘PASSAGE’ FROM EVIL, TV,
‘The Passage’ can’t find its way
There’s a reason why AMC’s “The Walking Dead” opened in 2010 with Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) awakening from a coma and discovering the world was overrun with ravenous zombies. The creators of that show understood that it’s infinitely more interesting to start a story in the middle. Fox’s “The Passage,” the first new broadcast network drama of the new year, teases a disaster on an even grander scale yet backtracks several times over in its first three episodes and still manages to rush its most crucial relationship. In this adaptation of Justin Cronin’s book trilogy of the same name, Dr. Jonas Lear (Henry Ian Cusick, “Lost”) has the most noble of reasons for wanting to find a vaccine that will somehow prevent all diseases. (The “science” here starts at preposterous and zooms to TARDIS-level absurdities. Just go with it.) In 2015, in a remote part of Bolivia, a local leads Jonas and his best friend and colleague Dr. Tim Fanning (Jamie McShane, “Southland”) to a cave, allegedly the home of a 250-year-old man. What they find attacks Tim, going right for his throat. Hours later, Tim is fine. Better than fine. His body shows no sign of injury. And then his two upper canine teeth fall out. It’s almost like something pushed them out. Huh. Three years later, Project NOAH in Telluride, Colo., is drafting such select death row inmates as Anthony Carter (McKinley Belcher III, “Mercy Street”) for a hush-hush medical experiment, but, hey, as federal agent Brad Wolgast (MarkPaul Gosselaar, “NYPD Blue”) suggests, isn’t anything better than being executed? Carter should’ve taken the needle. Just sayin’. Deep within Project NOAH, a few other death row inmates, most notably killer Shauna Babcock (Brianne Howey, “The Exorcist”), are imprisoned. The search for the magical vaccine from the blood of Patient Zero — that would be Tim — has led to the creation of several more peosay ple with varying degrees of gray, mottled skin and a thirst for human blood. The brainiacs who run this tomb of the undead decide that for their next round of testing they should grab a child, preferably an orphan, one nobody would miss. That would be 10-yearold Amy Bellafonte (Saniyya Sidney, “American Horror Story”) in Memphis, after her mother dies from a drug overdose. Brad and a fellow agent snatch her, but Brad feels guilty. His own daughter died years earlier and his grief destroyed his marriage. Before you can instant family, he’s ready to be Amy’s bodyguard, daddy and allaround-savior, and he takes her on the run. The nitwits at NOAH — including Major Nichole Sykes (Caroline Chikezie, “The Shannara Chronicles”) and dark operative Clark Richards (Vincent Piazza, “Boardwalk Empire”) — launch countermeasures that lead to an expanding cross-country body count. They could just snatch another kid, but they need to attend to the coverup for the cover-up. There are dream sequences, fakeouts, flashbacks. Meanwhile, the dungeon lifers are antsy — and still thirsty. In “The Passage,” you’re waiting for the beasts to get loose. But “The Strain” seemingly exhausted the vampire apocalypse genre. “The Walking Dead” and its lesser sibling “Fear the Walking Dead” are on their fifth retreads of stories of humanity attempting to rebuild civilization. “The Passage” is a test of patience. It cries out for a nice, sharp stake.