Review: Alpha Betas “This is Alpha Team”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Unbeknownst to the public, the American power grid has been powered by the constant gaming of its citizens, but is constantly in jeopardy due to any given glitch that may make people too frustrated to play. To circumvent this, the CIA put together a team of 20-something gamers, Eddie, Tommy, Buck, and Mason, who enter games to undo the damage and keep people playing. However, Chris Parnell has arrived to shut them down if they can’t solve the current problem: Red Dead Redemption is glitching out for some reason, causing people to quit the game, and that game powers the sector that keeps Area 51 online (including keeping some aliens prisoner). The cause seems to be one of the AIs going rogue and capture all of the NPCs, making the game unplayable, meaning Alpha Team will have to go in and take the leader out.

After working through countless goons and two of their own getting booted from the game, the team manage to defeat the leader and get Area 51 powered again. However, Chris Parnell still plans to send a report to get the team shut down, only for Paget Brewster, who runs to the team, to bring him to meet Bravo Team…who then kill him. It seems that the “rogue AI” was actually Bravo Team in an attempt to sabotage Alpha so that they would fail and be fired, which is Paget’s plan all along. But then they would have been fired anyway if they had let Chris send his report, so…I’m not sure what the point of this is.

OUR TAKE

Back in the early 2010’s, when the Internet as we know it today was still forming, I was very much into finding original animated pilots and seeing what projects being made outside of the usual channels looked like. They’d often be a lot less polished, but there would be a lot of passion behind them, often making me sad that they wouldn’t get a chance to explore their ideas. Alpha Betas reminds me a lot of those sorts of pilots, though also a bit like the shows that would come out of Comedy Central or G4 back in the mid-2000’s. There’s a lot of focus on making the 20-something gamer lifestyle look both necessary and awesome, almost as a biting back at those who aren’t noticing that gaming as a subculture has been growing in the mainstream for awhile now, on top of the inherit human nature of wanting to seek entertainment. Though I could be pulling that idea out of my ass for all I know, as this first episode has me questioning a lot of things and not in a good way. And it doesn’t help that the name is based on references to debunked research on wolves in captivity.

The premise, for whatever it might be trying to do, is terribly convoluted and falls apart at the smallest bit of thought. If the American power grid is powered by gaming, how is it so constantly in danger of going down when gaming has only become more prevalent over time? Why is one game providing power to each sector? Is it all gaming that acts as a power source or just online play? How is that power generated and why does it need video games specifically? Has this program existed since the 70’s when this system was put in place? And to get more specific with the plot of the pilot, why were these specific people chosen as the ones to go into this system? Why did defeating the leader of the rogue AIs instantly bring the power grid back on when the problem was keeping people interested in playing the game? Did the people who left the game initially get a notification saying it was working again? Why did Paget Brewster (yeah I know they have actual names but c’mon) set Bravo Team up to make Alpha Team fail when she could just fire them all at any time and use Bravo Team, who look like they’re a lot more put together as a team?

And those are just a few of the things that shoot major holes in the story that you don’t want to have in a pilot. This series seems to be a collaboration with a few popular Gaming Youtubers and Starburn Industries, known for creating Rick and Morty. Apparently not a lot of the writing prowess from that show carried over into this. Even with the voice acting star power they brought in like the aforementioned Parnell and Brewster, the main cast, played by gaming Youtubers (who all do a pretty decent job at voice acting) all end up blending together or seeming like caricatures instead of actual characters. The trailers indicate that there will be further episodes coming, though we don’t seem to know how many, so the series could turn things around as it goes along, but on its own, this is not the start that would really entice me to keep watching, so unless you’re already a fan of those involved, I would give this a pass.