THE WHISPERS never made much sense, and that went triple for tonight’s finale. On a macro level, it was probably unwise to end the season with a cliffhanger, since reports are that although the ratings were no worse than middling, ABC had let the cast options lapse when it postponed the show to summer, and it would be difficult if not impossible to bring the series back in its current form.
More substantively, the finale, which was written by showrunner Zack Estrin and Ubah Mohamed, and directed by Charles Beeson, abandoned many of the premises on which the entire series had been built. It turned out that the outer-space alien electrical presence “Drill” wasn’t limited to communication with children–it could still easily get into the heads of all the now-adults it had contacted on earlier visits decades ago, and therefore had an army of full-sized people, able to drive cars and do other adult things, who, one would assume, could far more easily accomplish some of its ends than a cadre made up of 7 year-olds. Also, all that painstaking trouble Drill went through to befriend the children, insinuating itself into their minds so that they thought they were playing a “game” or were doing something to help their parents? Apparently unnecessary, as Drill was more than capable of using brute force to take over the kids and simply have them do its will. And in the climax, it was revealed that Drill’s fellow aliens weren’t after Earth at all, just the kidnapping of a few thousand children, and while that’s certainly a nasty thing, one would have thought it could have been done far more straightforwardly than all the machinations Drill has been pulling over the last 13 weeks.
The Whispers has had plenty of other problems, from tinny writing to characters who barely existed outside of their roles in the plot. The idea of visualizing Drill as flickering lights and the like became dull and then campy. Fundamentally, the show never figured out its way around the central contradiction of wanting to exploit the trope of creepy, devilish children while also absolving them from all responsibility for their actions. The one exception was the pleasing ambiguity of last week’s episode, where one of the girls was assumed by everyone in authority to have been possessed by Drill, but just turned out to be a brat. That kind of concept, the disconnect between the perception of adults and children and the paranoia it could cause, was a fertile ground for a daring science-fiction thriller–but The Whispers wasn’t it. On top of all that, it certainly didn’t help that the final hour seemed to turn what had preceded it into a paper spaceship and throw it into the air.
Lily Rabe–whose character ended up abducted with the children–did her best to give a professional performance under the circumstances, even though she had little to play besides material concern and guilt over one of the most asexual extramarital affairs in TV history (it was never even clear just what her character did for the FBI), and here and there the series managed a disquieting moment. Mostly, though, The Whispers was wise to keep its voice down, because it had almost nothing provocative or even just plain scary to say.
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