James McTeigue directs the first half of the series as if he were working on another sci-fi project, this one more grounded than career landmark “V for Vendetta” but with the same desired scope in presenting a type of world-changing event. You only realize once he stops directing (by episode six, and then returns for nine and ten) that’s he been brought on to work with the truely interesting stuff—the magic tricks, be it the cultural feats that Al-Masih accomplishes, or his enigmatic presence. All the while, Al-Masih’s journey through America’s fixation on a Chosen One is spiked with real-life matters that make render the premise all the more immediate and exciting, like when the ACLU, Fox News, Buzzfeed, and America’s immigration policies all play their respective parts.
But "Messiah" plateaus by its sixth episode, all while it should be building. It’s in these passages that the initial appeal of subtext weakens to on-the-nose text, where the mass amount of side characters take away from the focus and make the first season’s ten-episode length seem like a curse. The show is flattened by melodramatic arcs about characters dealing with their personal woes, like a woman who desperately wants Al-Masih to cure her sick daughter, or someone who tries to tempt Al-Masih, only to be defeated by his stoicism. Only a few of these arcs have something to do with the people in Al-Masih’s orbit, and it creates an overall tedious pacing for a story that clearly has more impact when it has a smaller focus (the story could have made for a great two-hour movie). Even an arc that’s meant to prime season two, about a young Palestinian man named Jabril (Sayid El Alami), is so tepid and obvious that it just makes each episode feel even longer.
It’s not just Al-Masih who suffers from the story’s lack of focus: Michelle Monaghan plays an initially fascinating character, a dedicated CIA agent one who approaches Al-Masih with logical skepticism from the onset. But by this slump in the story she becomes more of a largely expositional piece, like when she flat out asks out loud, “what better agent of chaos than a messiah?” Other scenes largely involve her digging into the truth, and instead of making the story more interesting, it makes the script’s elusiveness with key details all the more tedious. Her own drama with her father (Philip Baker Hall) and the loss of her husband mostly fills up air-time, and feel detached from the issues at hand, as if these were all pieces to a rinky-dink “worlds colliding” ensemble piece like “Crash.”
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