Critic Reviews
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A crime drama doesn’t need soft edges if it has crisp plotting and interesting characters, but the first two stories on Past Life are startlingly generic, and Kate, in lieu of a personality, is given a dog and a wacky mother.
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The weakness of the plot might matter less if the regular characters had something special to offer, but Past Life's are standard-issue blanks.
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It's bad writing. It's lazy storytelling. It's ridiculous.
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Past Life is created by David Hudgins ("Friday Night Lights"), who certainly knows his way around a script, so it is literally shocking how bad the writing is, with Whately grinding out such illuminations as "You can't get DNA from a memory" or "It's like all your life you've been playing this game and then someone changes the rules" until you want to scream.
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Past Life begins with a fairly ridiculous premise, and the show's bland leads don't make it anymore watchable.
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As it is, Past Life is just a bad premise executed badly, and very unlikely to be given a second [life] season.
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Past Life is so glum, lugubrious and blandly cast I felt I had temporarily regressed into someone who in a past life hated television.
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Even as you’re hoping that she won’t have to conjure up variations on this explication theme every week, she does it a few more times in this episode alone.