Perception TV show season 3 premiere: Eric McCormack as crazy as ever

By Mike Valdez | June 22, 2014

Perception, the TV show about an eccentric professor who’s brilliant enough to help the FBI solve murders and crazy enough to see at least one hallucination per episode, has returned for season three with the premise of the show shaken up rather severely at the start of the season premiere entitled Paris. As promised, Daniel Pierce (played by Eric McCormack) is living it up in Paris France with his former flame, after quitting his university job and heading abroad. Life goes on without him: Kate Moretti (Rachael Leigh Cook) is officially back with her ex husband. Dean Haley (LeVar Burton) and Max Lewicki are trying to plot how to get Daniel to come back to work. Suddenly, Daniel finds himself pulled into an international espionage case – or has he?

Those who have been watching Perception for all three seasons know enough by now not to take much of anything in the show at face value. At least a couple of scenes from each episode will be hallucinations, with neither Daniel nor the audience always sure which is which. In this instance there’s a Chinese scientist who wants to pass medical research secrets to Daniel right under the nose of his communist handlers – except once the exchange is made, suddenly no one has any record of the scientist or even the agent involved. This sends Daniel into a tailspin, unsure whether he’s imagining things again or whether he’s staring at the tip of a massive coverup. He finally brings Kate across the world to help him figure it all out.

Things only get worse. The scientist turns up dead, but he wasn’t a scientist, and now Daniel is suspected of his murder. The FBI agent who asked him to get involved in the first place isn’t even of the correct gender. And even Daniel’s allies aren’t sure which parts of his recollection are real. But at the last possible moment he finally figures out that his girlfriend’s ex has been orchestrating the entire thing in an attempt to paint him as crazy and get back with the girl. She realizes Daniel has been telling the truth, but they both realize that she won’t be able to handle his mental issues, and part ways. Through some shenanigans from Haley, suddenly Daniel has his lecturing job back, and by the end of the episode the structure of the show is more or less right back to what it had been late last season.

“Paris” is precisely the kind of neat and tidy package one might expect from a season premiere, putting most of the pieces back to where they had been before the previous season finale shuffled them around. By now Perception has made clear that for all its twists and turns and imaginary backtracking, its premise is largely going to remain the same as it was when the show debuted. The only fundamental change is the omnipresence of Scott Wolf, which gives Kate a personal life and saves the show from having to deal with the question of romance between Daniel and Kate. Aside from that, Perception is Perception.

Eric McCormack continues to be what make Perception work. His character is mentally ill and he knows it, and sometimes his hallucinations are played for schtick. But he brings enough gravitas to the role, and enough skepticism toward his own mental state, that even when he drops a line as absurd as “I’ve been hallucinating mimes” in the middle of a dramatic scene, it somehow works. As usual, by the end of each episode there are questions you’re left asking about what was or wasn’t real. Did Daniel’s girlfriend’s apartment really get trashed and then cleaned back up by the villain – including a shattered glass lamp somehow being put back together – or did Daniel hallucinate that part? And should the viewer have been paying closer attention as that answer was revealed, or was it merely a plot hole?

But then that’s part of the fun: when no scene in the show can be counted on as being real, it means the audience members are left interpreting each episode with their own, well, perception.

Posted in Entertainment, News and tagged , , , , , , ,