Alphas/Headscratchers

• Why is Nina not in the compound? In her own words, the compound is for Alphas that misuse their powers. In her first scene she forces a policeman to eat a ticket (and the carbon copy), she lives rent free and "borrows" cars. And it isn't like she would keep it a secret. To repeat that: she mind controls people into giving her things worth hundreds of thousands of $ (rent in NY alone). And this despite the fact that she seems to try to atone for something she did in the past.
  • The compound is for Alphas that misuse their powers, making them a danger to themselves and/or those around them. Nina doesn't hurt anyone, not directly anyway, and she's under Rosen's protection. By the same logic, you could argue Gary is hurting people by using his powers to steal cable and internet service.
    • There is a difference. The stunt with the ticket was outright vicious. She could have just ordered him to forget the whole thing, ignore it or something. Maybe I am just annoyed that she uses mind control for personal gain since I don't care as long as she is using her abilities to help the team. And Gary is not on the same level as her.
    • Gary is nevertheless guilty of a slew of privacy violations, theft, and other somewhat petty electronic crimes. But he is not malicious. Nina making that cop eat the ticket was excessive, yes, but hardly vicious. Bit of a dick move, perhaps even a bit vindictive if she feels entitled, but harmless overall.
  • By that logic, Hicks should definitely be in the compound; he's the only member of the team so far who has actually killed someone, albeit while under mind control.
  • In the pilot there was definite talk of sending Hicks to the compound, but Rosen stood up for him, and there's also the fact he was completely brainwashed at the time and seems to be very socially responsible otherwise. Gary, likewise, might constantly commit multiple low-level privacy violations, but a) no one else really knows about it because it's all inside his head and b) he's not really inclined to do anything substantial with the data he has (sort of like how everyone's internet searches and web activity are very easily traced in real life, but few people really care because they don't know about it and no one ever uses it against them). Nina's behavior and her power in general would definitely the most troubling, especially from the perspective of a government handler. I figure the ticket incident and her actively using her power to get stuff without paying money for it are used to indicate the morally grey nature of Nina's character and the fact that she seems to have a pretty harsh anti-authoritarian streak. Or it could have just been a one-off joke.
    • Anyway, an in-story justification would probably be that her power is useful enough that the government is willing to tolerate a little larceny and other antics on her part as long as she doesn't do anything that would draw headlines or attention to her.
• Isn't "activating the fight or flight response" basically just a panic attack? Wouldn't Matthew's powers be more likely to result in a room full of cowering people thinking they're having heart attacks and trying to escape instead of an orgy of violence?
  • While the fear response is essentially a panic, it would most likely just put people on extreme edge, rather than the specific cognitive responses such as escape. I ignore the fight or flight handwave and just think of it as rage pheromones, or attack pheromones they paralleled from the beginning.
• Okay, so Matthew has the power to cause a Hate Plague with pheromones. Sure. However, Rachel can smell those pheromones in the air or on objects. How come they don't affect her every time she uses her power?
  • Her senses can pick up minute traces, but even super-sensitive smell is not enough for them to actually work any more effectively. You and I, for example, may not be able to smell the same, but the concentration of the particles we smell remains constant even if you can detect it better than I.
• Does Gary's ability come with an off switch? So far, every Alpha they've shown has been able to turn their powers on or off as they so desire, and I always thought Gary could do it too. But then Anna launched her information overload attack on him to knock him unconscious. It occurred to me when I saw that "Why didn't he just not tune in to what she was sending?" Is he not able to?
  • Well, the first answer that comes to mind is that Gary spends so much time "online" that he's forgotten where the mental off switch is.
  • Gary says himself that his power comes from an abnormally developed region of his brain. Depending on how this connects to his primary senses, he may not be able to shut it off, anymore than a normal human could stop seeing or hearing (you can plug your ears and close your eyes, but it only helps so much).
  • We've seen a few Gary scenes where he clearly turns on his powers. It also appears that he needs to be fairly close to an active device that's sending out a signal of some kind.
    • We've seen the graphic come up, but there's no indication he's just flipping a switch to turn them on.
  • Gary's ability is a sense, just like hearing or sight. Are you constantly bombarded by all the sounds around you, all the time, or do you tune them out unless you've got a reason to pay attention?
    • The thing people fail to realize is that Gary in fact DID have a reason to pay attention: he detected her doing something and wanted to know what it was. She then bombarded him. In fact it's more like smelling than seeing or hearing: once you smell something you can't get rid of it, and it can overpower you easily.
  • Didn't Gary say once that if he was 'online' for too long he'd get a headache? So that sort of indicates he can turn it on or off.
    • It's not given much explicit mention, but Gary is doing far more than sensing the electromagnetic spectrum. He's mentally translating the signals that he senses into comprehensible information, an immense feat for anything other than AM radio broadcasts, and especially huge for digital signals. Spending too much time concentrating on that would surely give him a headache, much like intense concentration for long duration would do for anyone. He can turn his ability off in the sense that he stops concentrating on making sense of the signals around him and just relaxes, but that doesn't protect him from being aware of them, such as the humming that he couldn't escape in the early episodes.
• Episode 5 will have Lindsay Wagner appearing as her character from Warehouse 13. Setting this in the same universe as W13 and Eureka really doesn't fit.
  • Why not? They all have specific, well designated areas with very little crossover, plus Warehouse 13 already has people with enhanced skills (Pete's premonitions and Jinx's ability to tell when someone is lying).
    • Additionally, in the episode Lindsay Wagner does hint that she has suspicions of an artifact in the cases. Plus, the circumstances would hint that she forced her involvement under these suspicions. She is the Warehouse doctor after all, and in her previous Warehouse episode does help find an artifact.
    • Stating a viewpoint without a developed argument is bad form. All three can easily be expanded to include each other.
  • To me, it's a question of tone. Alphas is a relatively dark and serious show. Warehouse 13 and Eureka are more humorous and light-hearted (though Warehouse 13 does have its darker moments, it's less serious than Alphas). To have them all take place in the same universe seems...off, somehow.
    • It is a classic technique of shared universes (like cape comics) to have the light and the dark in separate storylines. Full on crossovers can cause problems.
    • (Original troper who posted the headscratcher here) the tone or "feel" of the show not mixing with the other 2 is what made me say them all being the same verse doesn't "fit". After watching the episode it seemed her characters appearance was an after thought, she was only there for the purpose of establishing this show is connected to the others. The other thing is that it means there are all these "big bad" groups happening at the same time (Red Flag, whoever the mystery enemy are in W13 etc).
      • What's so unbelievable about multiple evil organizations running in parallel for different goals? These people aren't going to be working together, so it's hardly inconceivable that they could exist at the same time.
        • I didn't mean to impy it's unbelievable just something else them all sharing a verse means. It probably should mean at least one case where one bad group is aware of another (the way Eureka works with the Warehouse). i'm not particularly bugged by it at all.
          • The Sarah Jane Adventures, Doctor Who, and Torchwood all share a universe while having wildly different tones and battling various bad guys without crossing paths too much. (Even if you consider that The Doctor is busy flitting through time and space, every one of Sarah Jane's adventures should have at least pinged on Torchwood's radar.) I don't see why Eureka, Warehouse 13, and Alphas can't coexist similarly.
          • Perhaps more to the point How do you have opulence and poverty existing side by side in Real Life? We have democracies in one part of our meta story and autocracies in another. combine that w/good and bad days and our qorld looks very poorly written.
          • Eureka doesn't work with the Warehouse. Fargo thought it was a myth until Mrs. Fredrick approached him.
  • To me, the problem was in having Lindsay be the only Warehouse 13 character to appear. I missed part of the episode, was she the one who alerted Rosen's team? Shouldn't she have called in Pete & Myka and Jinx because of suspected Artifact activity?
    • She didn't alert them. They didn't even expect her to be there.
    • It's been established that Artie has a protocol for determining whether or not an Artifact is responsible for weirdness (maybe nobody smelled fudge). Most likely he simply realized that this particular weirdness was not his department.
• How did a super-advanced sense of hearing allow Kearns to turn into Banshee? Rhythmic breathing at resonant frequencies?
  • It didn't. His echolocation ability, however, did.
• My question is how do shared universes handle a Broken Masquerade from a single storyline?
  • I think they're only shared in the sense of "Hey, look, a crossover that will pull in viewers from that other popular show! Now let's never ever mention it again."
    • That's rather snide don't you think? It would help explain some things either universe. Possibly, it's too early to say.
    • Actually, I was trying to be funny about something that's rather cynical. Someone earlier mentioned the difference in tone, and I think they're exactly right: IMHO, the only reason they crossed Alphas and Warehouse 13 was because they had already crossed W13 and Eureka, and Sy Fy wanted a hat trick with their Monday night lineup. W13 and Eureka were Sy Fy productions from day one, and Alphas was not -- hence, the difference in tone and the shoehorned feel of the crossover (the other two had whole-episode C/Os, rather than a quick cameo). I'm a fan of all three shows, but Alphas is pretty much a separate canon. (Or look at it this way: Why isn't Eureka's FTL drive all over the papers on Warehouse 13? Because despite occasional convergence, the two shows are functionally independent of each other.)
    • tl;dr: The crossover was due to Executive Meddling and will not have an effect on either show.
  • I'm guessing that the characters in the other two shows already have more than their share of weirdness to deal with and are simply doing what they've always done while other people deal with problems that aren't strictly in their purview. Still, Alphas has only been around for one season, so perhaps they'll do more with crossovers later on one or more of the series.