After the trudging pace of the premiere, thankfully it’s not just Madison’s arc that beefs up. With rigid introductions out of the way all of the characters are allowed to delve into juicier material. Ex-cop Jack Whelan takes the investigation into his wife’s disappearance up a notch. Heading to Seattle – where she’s supposedly at a work conference – he becomes mired in the city’s sinister greyscape. The Pacific Northwest is typically a televisual mecca of the zany and bizarre (Twin Peaks) and dark and moody (The Killing.) Intruders meshes the two atmospheres together, albeit with Vancouver standing in for the rainy metropolis yet again.
Whelan’s first port of call places him at the company of Todd, an old friend. Scheduled to meet his missing wife, Todd is the shiftiest character thus far. Only because his responses and body language are over-the-top weird. Which matches his workplace to a tee. Dark shadowy figures linger behind frosted glass. Music cues build to crescendoes without action. The mood weighs thick to make sure you know: this show is bizarre. It’s a touch heavy handed, but then again, it works. What should be a straightforward office environment transforms into something utterly sinister.
Following that dead end, Jack tracks down the cabbie who found his wife’s phone. The two band together as Jack romps across the city. In an attempt to find a building captured in a snapshot on his wife’s cell phone, the two end up in a fist fight. And there’s some running. Eh. By far the best moment in this storyline is a confession by the cabbie. After Jack badgers him into remembering anything at all his wife might have said, he ‘fesses up. During Amy’s backseat blatherings, she mentioned she from the 1800s and once murdered a union leader. Yep. The first connect to Madison/Marcus and Shepherd. Amy is the victim of an intruder. The plot thickeneth. Agent Shepherd, the mystery hitman, slips in between the two stories gunning down everyone who crosses his path.
There’s of course a bunch of silly niggles that crop up. Such as, why doesn’t Jack just call the cops about his wife? Isn’t Shepherd bothered that a trail of corpses might attract unwanted attention? Can’t Madison/Marcus just steal a car? That being said, there’s artistic license that you can only hope will serve to further ignite the mystery. The second episode is a vast improvement on the first, as it sinks its teeth deeper into what’s a very riveting premise. The majority of which is finally made clear at the episode’s close – with the last shot of Madison reading the instruction manual for the reincarnated (like Beetlejuice’s handbook for the recently deceased.) Her voiceover, reading from the book, offers some answers regarding the nature of the intruders. It’s not the full story, but just enough to get you to tune in next week.
