When I was browsing through the list of series that I planned to watch, I noticed this one which had been there for quite some time. I was intrigued by it since it seemed like an interesting science fiction series. As it only has 10 episodes for the first season and it was already shown back in 2018, I thought this would be a good time to start watching it. And it took me around 3 days to finish it, which surprisingly took longer than I foresaw. Anyway, let us get on with the series now.
Brief Story Line
Henrietta "Henry" Coles (Maddie Hason - Twisted TV series etc) was a teenager who just moved to a small town with her single mother Cleo (Missi Pyle - A Haunted House 2, The Artist etc). They lived together with Cleo's boyfriend who also had a daughter similar to Henry's age named Jenna (Sarah Desjardins). Henry was feeling like an outcast in school, especially since she was a loner and was distant with Jenna who was a popular girl.
However things started to change significantly with Henry when she started to experience something with her body that made her mysteriously able to teleport herself to another place, but not before damaging things around her. To further complicate things, Henry was involved with a popular basketball star in school named Clay Boone (Tanner Stine) and his older brother Lucas (Craig Arnold). Henry's teenage problems also brought the attention from the local Deputy Sheriff Anna Hulce (Enuka Okuma - Rookie Blue TV series etc).
So what would happen to Henry? What was the reason for her ability to teleport? And would she be able to handle her new power, especially when there was some party who was interested in capturing those like her? Find them all in this quite interesting sci-fi teen drama series.
End of Brief Story Line
Well this was a bit different than I anticipated. When I first read the premise about a girl who can teleport, my thought was this seemed like a good sci-fi series, probably full of cool stuff. Especially when the first few minutes of the series showed something that looked a lot like scenes from the 2008 movie Jumper starring Hayden Christensen which I quite enjoyed despite critical and commercial failure (more on this later). But after 2 or 3 episodes later, I realized that this series was not entirely built on that part. It seemed to be focusing quite a lot on Henry's character development and another topic of sexual violence. Now I am not saying this out of insensitivity (I totally root for victims of such assault and the perpetrator should not be punished lightly), but personally I would have preferred it if that topic was told in a separate series rather than combining it into this sci-fi story as it made me feel like the series was not focused enough.
As I mentioned above about Jumper movie, it turned out that this series was indeed based on a novel of the same title written by Steven Gould, who happened to be the writer of Jumper novel series. Impulse was actually set in the "Jumper" universe which would explained the similarity to that movie. So we should not be surprised if there were possible references to that movie. I just hope they would be able to tie in smoothly.
For a first season which consisted 10 episodes with duration a bit longer than the normal series (mostly > 50 minutes) I thought this one did an adequate job of keeping things interesting. The first few episodes were balanced between Henry's finding her power (like in a superhero origin story) with the heavier topic of sexual assault. But in the latter episodes focus seemed to be more on that area which made the series felt more drama than sci-fi. This was a topic which probably the series producer/writers wanted to bring into the series to make it more serious (I read a bit about the novel itself which did not have this topic in it). However as we entered into the final 2 episodes, the series really picked up the pace and brought a quite amazing finale, especially episode 9 which I thought was the best. While the season finale having such an intriguing ending that truly excite me for the continuing seasons.
As a supposedly sci-fi series, there were brief special effects shown in here which were pretty decent. The scenery was mostly done in the small town during the winter with snow shown in the entire town, and at the same time made the whole series seemingly always having dark background. Some nice music were also playing throughout the season where people could be mistaken for thinking this was an MTV series. But no, this one was shown on Youtube Premium channel, being one of its few original produced series.
The names I mentioned in the brief story line above were the ones credited as the main cast. I actually was surprised that one name was not put there. He was Townes (Daniel Maslany) who was Henry's only friend in school and a very important character to my opinion. There was a surprise name of Keegan Michael Key (The Predator, Hotel Transylvania 3 etc) who was also credited in the pilot episode. Other recurring characters whom I thought were quite important was Clay and Lucas' father Bill Boone (David James Elliot - JAG TV series) and a mysterious guy played by Callum Keith Rennie (Jigsaw etc). Of the main cast, I thought Jenna's character was the most interesting one as well as Henry's mother Cleo whom I thought was a wonderful character convincingly played by Missi Pyle. While Maddie Hason was quite OK as the lead character.
Overall I thought that the first season was not bad. It was certainly interesting enough to warrant me to continue to second season, especially after those last 2 episodes. The story was quite intriguing, plus the sci-fi element of people who could teleport was very much the main attraction for me. A bit of drama and conflicts (which were pretty abundant in here) is fine with me, but I would have enjoyed this series better if it was focusing more on the sci-fi part. So if you are looking for a sci-fi series from the Jumper universe then this should be interesting enough for you, if you don't mind the heavy topic of sexual violence brought up in the first season. I believe this one is an upgrade to that sadly unsuccessful movie.
Mike's movie moments rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
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