"Star-Crossed" Review

This is Steven Petrick posting.

I have been trying to watch "Star-Crossed." I intended to watch at least the first episode, as my general feeling was that the series was going to be "teen-angst with aliens" rather than anything else.

Well, it is "teen-angst with aliens" but something more as well.

Unfortunately, so far the something more is not well thought out.

While we are assured (so far) that all of the aliens arrived on one night on one (monster) ship that "crash landed," this simply cannot be the case.

Somehow some of the aliens escaped the crash and managed to disappear into society, eluding detection to get into some sensitive jobs.

Are you ready to believe that the aliens managed to become some of the people guarding the aliens? Can you really believe any federal uniformed service trusted with such a task is not going to be doing medical exams of the people it puts into service? The problem is the "alien" aspect where these men are going to be working. The risk of exposure to "exotic" alien diseases and general contact with aliens means you are going to be tracking the health of such men (and women) closely. How is one of the aliens going to survive such scrutiny? And this is inevitable.

And gets us into how did the aliens know "American," much less enough American Idiom/slang to pass as citizens? Or how did they know where to go to contact people to get false documents that would enable them to get into security work? This is not the same thing as an undocumented worker from elsewhere in the world entering the U.S. through the various systems that provide such assistance (including false social security cards).

All this happens in less than 10 years? The list of implausibilities needed for the just crashed aliens that slipped away from the wreck to infiltrate society in Modern American (as in "today") so that in 2024 they are able to have achieved some critical conditions is just one of the things that blows the "willing suspension of disbelief" circuits.

The show might have helped win me over if it had not immediately delved into the "the aliens are superior to humans" trope. (Alien blood combined with an Earth plant that they can modify is a cure for cancer, and the aliens know this but humans do not).

I am not sure how many more episodes of this I am going to watch. I have seen three, but literally have not found the motivation to watch the fourth and do not know if I will bother to record the fifth.

I will also comment that I normally am not much of a critic on actors as I normally do not feel I have the right or skill to do such, but some of the performance of the lead alien character has hit even me as "wooden."