“Touch" 8 tonight, Fox
What It’s About: There are 36 “righteous" people in the world, and little Jake Bohm (David Mazouz) is one of them. He can read the future (and much else) and has led his father, Martin (Kiefer Sutherland), to Los Angeles to locate another of the righteous, now missing. They meet up with her mother, Lucy (Maria Bello), who is also searching for her lost daughter. What does giant energy company Aster Corp. have to do with this, and why does it want to gather all the righteous ones? There’s your second season ...
My Say: We are all connected. Where you begin, I end (and vice versa). No matter how hard we try to control it, nothing is really what it appears to be. And finally, “Touch’s" Martin Bohm is a much cooler dude when he channels Jack Bauer, which he does on a few occasions Friday night.
Buy all this stuff, and you’ll buy the two-hour second-season launch of Fox’s smart but still-struggling-to-find-a-consistent-tone drama about a father with an autistic son who has a whole lot to say but refuses to say it. (Those first three statements? Jake’s grand philosophy, spoken in voice-over, though he’d probably prefer his dad to be the same old dull Martin from last season.)
“Touch’s" move this season to L.A. should also be a welcome venue change for viewers, if only for subliminal reasons — wasn’t that building in the second act the same one that blew up in the third season of “24"? In fact, this week’s two-part opener is much more action-adventure, much less back-story mythology, about numbers and Far Eastern philosophical diversions concerning red strings of fate, and how we’re all interconnected, etc.
Instead, you have plain old smash-mouth elemental TV story devices — good guys, bad guys, evil corporations, a family unit, and a headlong rush toward the Truth, whatever that may be. Plus this special bonus: Intimations of Jack Bauer. So far, it all makes the second season of “Touch" — what’s the word that was missing last year? — fun.
