Well, we’re now two episodes into the first series of the new Knight Rider, and so far I’ve been enjoying it a lot.

The second episode was probably the stronger of the two so far. The first serving more to setup the arc-plot regarding Mike’s past in black ops and, of course, explain his name change to Michael Knight. This allowed the second a bit more free reign as an adventure of the week type story to throw in some nice character moments (loved the scenes with Mike and KITT watching the western) with the first episode having set things up.

Both episodes have been high on the action quota, and the second especially harked back nicely to the feel of the original series, with Mike travelling to a remote town, getting involved in street races and, as I mentioned, some nice building in the friendship between Mike and KITT.

Its also interesting to note some of the changes Gary Scott Thompson’s brought in. The “KITT cave” makes a lot of sense for the scale of the operation (realistically one engineer maintaining KITT in the back of a truck isn’t likely) although the humour from the supporting techs is sometimes forced. The arc plot with Mike’s past is welcome, and much in the style of Doctor Who, seems to be something being drip-fed into episodes for the regular viewers, while the episodes themselves remain stand-alone, probably building up to some revelations in the finale.

The changes to KITT are a bit of a mixed bag. I definitely appreciate the reasons they changes KITT’s attack mode. In the pilot, it wasn’t instantly obvious which car you were looking at in a particular scene without checking closely (the spoiler usually being the quickest give-away), and there’s no doubt this is a more aggressive-looking attack mode. However I prefer the sportier lines of KITT in his regular mode, and the blue underlighting (forming the Knight Research logo) is really just a bit over-the-top. However the good news is that the attack mode is also being used quite sparingly so far, with the Shelby remaining the main “hero” car of the piece which I definitely like.

I do miss the iPhone-inspired screen from the pilot, but the new HUD works well. Although there have been a couple of times when Mike’s been driving and its clearly obscuring his view of the road. It perhaps needs to be more obvious that KITT’s driving while Mike’s using the screen (safety first ). KITT’s new vocaliser (for want of a better term) seems a little busy to me, but I do love how they’ve included the three bars from the original series in it.

How the series fairs in the modern age of networks being quick off the mark to cancel shows remains to be seen, but, while its still finding its feet, Knight Rider strikes me as filling a gap in the market with some good “switch your brain off and enjoy the ride” action.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 3rd, 2008 at 13:14 and is filed under Knight Rider, Television. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.