If You Love 'Stranger Things,' You Need to Watch 'Emergence'
ABC's new series Emergence debuted.
The show is similar in many ways to Stranger Things.
If you can't wait for Stranger Things 4, this could be your tide-me-over.
For the last decade, the major TV networks have been consistent in one thing: looking for the next LOST (EW put together a great blast-from-the-past list of shows that have made the attempt). ABC's latest mystery box drama, Emergence, just debuted, and while it certainly pays tribute to the frenetic mystery that LOST helped to make the TV standard, another uber-popular show feels much more channeled: Stranger Things.
It's not necessarily a bad thing; there can be more than one good show about similar subject matter. Just think for a moment about how many Detective shows there are, how many doctor shows, lawyer shows, so on and so forth. Just because something shares a similar plot with something else doesn't mean it should be written off right away. But that's the space that Emergence certainly lives in, as it takes beats right from the success of Netflix's big sci-fi hit. The major difference, here, is that Emergence is set in the present, while Stranger Things of course gets much of it's value from it's '80s setting and Stephen King vibes. Emergence, on the other hand, exists here.
Now that you've seen Emergence, though, at least from the pilot, we got a lot of Stranger Things memories. Emergence's story isn't reinventing the wheel, but it's certainly interesting and well-acted enough to keep watching.
Here's what Emergence did that really made us think about our friends back in Hawkins, Indiana:
There's some weird stuff happening.
Just like Stranger Things kicks off with Will Byers' disappearance into the night's sky, Emergence opens up with an unnamed child (eventually called Piper) appearing after a flashing of unknown lights and what appears to be a plane crash.
It centers on a cop.
Here's a big one. Where Stranger Things centers primarily on Hawkins' David Harbour's Chief Jim Hopper, Emergence focuses on Allison Tolman's Jo Evans, a Long Island police chief investigating the unusual occurrences. Where Hopper starts his series off as lazy and not invested, though, Tolman seems motivated from the first beat; she's protective of "Piper" right off the bat, and is even able to suss out a fishy occurrences—when Piper's "parents" show up to the police station, trying to take her home—to protect Piper.
Tolman is easily the best part of Emergence. While it's not her first time playing a small town law enforcement officer—Fargo hive!—it's a warm role that she plays with depth that isn't usually found on network dramas.
There's a little girl with secret powers/abilities.
There's also this. In the first episode alone, Piper is seen making rain bend as it flow's down Jo's windshield, and completely flipping a car that she's being kidnapped in. These powers—though neither we the viewer, nor anyone in the show have any idea what they are—are very similar to the telekinetic powers that Eleven puts on display throughout Stranger Things. No bloody noses in Emergence, though. Not yet, at least.
The whole thing is a conspiracy/mystery.
After only an episode of Emergence, it's clear that we're only scratching the surface of the story set to unfold. Could there be ancient beings and forces at play, like in LOST? Could there be aliens, like in The X-Files? Could it be monsters and science gone wrong, like in Stranger Things itself? We'll just have to wait and see.
But with the first episode, it's clear that there's a conspiracy afoot—superpowers, impersonations, and crazy lights in the sky will certainly prove that.
A bathroom mirror scene reveals a secret.
As anyone who's seen Stranger Things won't forget, the first season concluded with the Byers family enjoying a nice dinner. It seemed like everything was OK and they were out of the woods from the events that had just occurred—until Will, who had escaped from the Upside Down, went to the bathroom. While there, he coughed a slug-like creature into the sink, and blinked his eyes as the room around him transformed to the upside down.
Emergence doesn't wait until its season finale to do this—at the end of the first episode, Piper looks at herself in the bathroom mirror, and just as Will sees the upside down flash around him, she sees super bright light flash around her. Just as Will coughs up a slug into the drain, Piper takes a box cutter—that she had stolen earlier in the episode—and cuts an unidentified little chip or bug out from behind her ear, and tosses it into the sink.
These sequences are remarkably similar. But still, nonetheless, we're left wondering what could possibly happen next.
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