What I’m Watching: Awake

Awake: Season 1, Episode 8 “Nightswimming” (B)

Here what we have is an episode that’s almost entirely devoid of any connections between Michael’s two universes, and perhaps more significantly, one in which neither of his shrinks appear. The one exception to the first rule was when Ayelet Zurer’s hysterical wife shouted at him that he couldn’t imagine what it feels like to leave everything behind, which was followed up immediately by Michael awakening in his other life to find Hannah packing up and throwing away most of his life in their garage. Michael’s relationship with his C.I. Jake was most telling in terms of what’s holding him back, the notion that he’s just so willing and ready to move on and leave his old life behind. To him, of course, it hasn’t been easy, and we’ll have to see what ends up happening in terms of his being tethered to his location due to his dual existence. Running around naked at the beginning of the episode proved merely to be the amusing epilogue to a rare bit of levity, in which Michael and Hannah went skinny-dipping in the pool, only to trip an alarm and get themselves discovered by the law. Neither case of the week was exceptionally strong, as the C.I.’s purposely bad information obviously went nowhere, and preparing for witness protection proved intense but ultimately anticlimactic since neither the husband nor the wife was terribly compelling as a character. Michael’s a good cop, but, to an extent, he’s only as good as the case he’s assigned in each of his universes.