Warning: Full spoilers for the episode follow...
"Dammit!" count: 4
"Tessellations" was a bit of a dud as far as Touch episodes go if you consider that the main strength of this series, and the tipping point regarding whether you're going to get a decent episode or not, resides in its ability to pull together those "global connectivity" stories in clever, unexpected ways. Unfortunately, the show misses way more than it hits in that department, and even when it does hit the chance is more than likely that you've had to endure some insufferable characters along the way.
The most interesting things that this episode had to offer involved the reveal that someone inside Aster Corp, where Jake's aunt works, is behind the sinister plot to keep Jake away from Martin, and test him with numbered blocks in order to bring out his special abilities. That, and Avram's (Bodhi Elfman) explanation of Teller's block test to Clea; the five platonic solids (each shape representing a classical element) and a dodecahedron to represent the universe.
Other than that though, "Tessellations" was filled with more dumb characters and a rather unbelievably dangerous situation for Martin. I know they did their best to explain , but it still seemed like a bit of a stretch, even for this show, to buy that Martin would risk dying and no longer being around for Jake. And what was the point of making Joey, the Mobius shipping employee who lost his job and had the wife with MS, get singled out as a hero on the news if that's not what got him his job back? Martin still had to go talk to Nelson (Stabone from Fast Times!) and threaten him in order to get him to rehire Joey.
Plus, there wasn't even a vast, intricate web connected people here. There were, really, only two stories; the shipping yard and Israeli Tomer with his Palestinian girlfriend. And that story played out in an even more cornball fashion than the heist scenario. Once again, we get a "dreamer." A guy in love who constantly aggravates the girl he loves. A girl who's cold and practical only up until the guy floors her with a grand romantic gesture. But never the first grand dramatic gesture, right? It's always the second one. Didn't we just go through this last week in "Music of the Spheres?" And so, because the girl always winds up sort of just "caving," it becomes hard to believe that the girl really loves the guy at all.
Also, we got another scene where Avram himself has a brief, somewhat inconsequential connection to the "B" story when Tomer called him to randomly ask him about numerology. And since the "B" story, like last week, also involved a man looking for a gift for his girl, Avram was strangely mixed in. The trouble here was that as soon as Avram told Tomer that his message regarding "9808 becoming 2545" meant that something good was going to come from something bad, we knew everything would turn out just fine. Not that we couldn't assume that anyway, with this being Touch and all, but the whole scene felt forced. And it made me roll my eyes at Tomer even more for calling Avram to ask him whether or not the message was a good one or not based on the numbers.
Source : http://www.ign.com/articles/2012/05/20/touch-tessellations-review-2
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