Warning. This review contains several spoilers about the first season of the series “Touch”!

On May 31 the second season of the show “Touch” ended in the U.S.A. and in the following days it ended in a number of other countries where the show aired.

“Touch” is the story of ex journalist Martin Bohm and his son Jake. His wife was a victim of the attack to the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001 and Martin has struggled to raise Jake, who is autistic and has never spoken.

After Jake escaped several times from his school, social worker Clea Hopkins is charged with evaluating if Martin is capable as his father. To avoid losing Jake, Martin tries in all ways to communicate with his son and finds the help of Professor Arthur Teller, who has studied many cases of autism. Teller explains Martin that Jake communicates through numbers so to understand his son he must be able to understand what the numbers mean.

The episodes of “Touch” follows Martin’s attempts to understand how to communicate with Jake, who is connected to the collective consciousness and tries to help people all over the world. In the attempt to communicate with Jake, Martin performs various actions necessary to help the people connected to his son.

“Touch” first season cast consists of:

• Kiefer Sutherland (photo ©Paco Lalas) as Martin Bohm
• Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Clea Hopkins
• David Mazouz as Jacob “Jake” Bohm
• Danny Glover as Arthur Teller
• Roxana Brusso as Sheri Strapling
• Catherine Dent as Abigail Kelsey
• Bodhi Elfman as Avram

“Touch” is based on the concept that things that most people see as chaotic actually follow mathematical laws, therefore in reality nothing happens by chance and coincidences don’t exist. Jake Bohm is one of the few who can see those interconnections that make the universe a sort of big machine that works according to deterministic patterns.

The series starts with the episode “Pilot”, featuring Martin Bohm struggling to raise his autistic son Jake, who doesn’t say a word. The peculiarity is that Jake is the narrator who at the beginning and end of this and the following episodes provide some explanation to the audience about the interconnections existing among people.

The pilot episode, however, is made in order to have mostly an emotional impact on the audience. In fact, the stories not only of the protagonists but also of most of the characters affected by the mathematical interconnections seen by Jake are dramatic.

The happy ending, with a series of global images that bring together the various subplots, is built with the purpose of being touching at the cost of not being particularly consistent. For example, the Baghdad boy forced to become a suicide bomber manages to defuse the bomb that was tied to him but it’s unclear how he and his family were saved from the revenge of the terrorists who wanted to use him for an attack.

The later episodes seem to be more rational with an effort to give a more consistent closure to most of the various subplots while some others continue in following episodes extending the plots of the individual episodes.

Sometimes things didn’t go so well. For example, in the episode “Noosphere Rising”, Martin adds to the Amelia sequence written by Professor Teller the numbers “1188” but the numbers to be added were “6 1188”. It’s a huge mistake considering that the numbers are the basis of the series!

One of the positive elements of “Touch” is the fact that it’s not just formulaic. In each new episode Jake focuses his attention on some numbers and Martin tries to understand their meaning and ends up intervening in the lives of some people who need help. However, not all of these stories are completed in a single episode, on the contrary in some way the series expands into various subplots that intersect with each other in various ways.

Too many TV shows are based on episodes with independent stories which easily become repetitive. The producers hope to increase the audience with occasional watchers but end up weakening the core audience who will soon begin to get bored.

In “Touch” the stories soon went beyond this formulaic structure exploring for example the subplot concerning Professor Teller. Through the episodes, Martin discovers Teller’s research and also met Avram, who considers Jake as one of the 36 righteous people who justify the existence of humanity in God’s eyes.

Thus we can see that in “Touch” they try to bring together science and spirituality. It’s a minefield because of the risk of seeking to attract a certain type of audience ending up making another type unhappy.

Actually, in “Touch” there seems to be little real science: the concepts expressed in the series are essentially isolated mathematical elements put together mostly by using pseudo-scientific elements. Without straying into philosophy with discussions on free will, the deterministic patterns behind the series clash with the concepts of chaos now well studied by modern science.

“Touch” is a show that is based mostly on characters using some basic concepts only as an instrument to build the plots. The protagonists are well developed over the episodes, giving them depth. Again, not everything is perfect: for example, I wonder why Martin waited years to try to understand the meaning of the numbers written by Jake. The discovery of hidden reasons behind Abigail’s interest towards her nephew was obvious though it’s positive that her motives are kept ambiguous.

In the double episode “Gyre”, season one finale, AsterCorp, the company that wants to exploit the Jake’s skill, starts acting to get custody of the boy. Martin’s escape with his son intersects with the stories of characters who already appeared in previous episodes together with new ones culminating with a meeting with the Amelia’s mother.

The season ends with a sort of global song and that’s appropriate because music is composed by mathematical patterns. When Martin meets Amelia’s mother and understands why Jake brought him exactly in that place, his son touches him voluntarily for the first time in his life.

“Touch” was renewed for a second season despite a fall in its audience. I’m glad about it because despite some issues it’s overall a good show. I understand that not everybody are interested in following events interconnected by a series of mathematical patterns but if you have a certain type of mind surely there were times when those patterns fired your synapses like a Christmas tree!