Brainiac crime fighters on television

Imagine how cool it would be to "see" the entire electromagnetic spectrum, to intercept a cell phone signal and silence that cretin jabbering away behind you in the cinema. Or to tap into super-adrenalin and toss aside that Lexus that's boxed you into a parking spot. Or to sway the seductive powers to make anyone do anything.A mind is a terrible thing to waste, posits the new science fiction series Alphas, especially when five extraordinary minds can be brought together to form one extraordinary team of "Alphas", people who can stretch the capabilities of the human brain into superhuman physical and mental abilities. If more ordinary minds think this all sounds like an X-Men or Heroes rip-off, the executive producers of the Syfy network series, Zak Penn and Ira Behr, beg to differ. "We absolutely set out to create something that was unique from the ground up," says Penn, a veteran of X-Men and The Avengers. "There's no question that there are other properties existing in the world that have similarities with this. We actually wrote the pilot of Alphas at the same time Heroes was being written. Unless I was psychic, I wouldn't have been able to create it avoiding Heroes. But definitely I drive Ira crazy every day saying 'We can't do that' because it's been on X-Men, and 'We did it on X-Men' and 'That's too close to X-Men'. And then he does that back to me." Operating within the Defense Criminal Investigation Service of the US Department of Defense, these brainiacs are led by the preeminent neurologist and psychiatrist Dr Lee Rosen (the Emmy Award winner and Academy Award nominee David Strathairn), an expert in Alpha phenomena. The team tackles cases that point to others with Alpha abilities. As they race the clock to solve this newfangled crime wave, they must also keep a lid on personality clashes that could compromise their mission to catch the enemy. In the series premiere, Alphas take the case when a witness is inexplicably murdered in a locked room at a federal courthouse. Other cast members include: Warren Christie as Cameron Hicks, with the power of hyperkinesis; Ryan Cartwright as Gary Bell, who has autism and can "read" wireless transmissions; Malik Yoba as Bill Harken, super-strong, fast and immune to pain; Laura Mennell as the seductive Nina Theroux, who can influence anybody into doing anything; and Azita Ghanizada as Rachel Pirzad, who can hyper-intensify her senses. Keeping it "rooted in realism" is the burly Yoba's thespian goal: "So that it's not, you know, like I'm all of a sudden going to pick up a car and fly away. One of the other things is that our powers come at a cost. We don't just activate them and everything's hunky-dory." The real firecracker on the series may well turn out to be Ghanizada, whose character, Rachel, must evolve beyond her strict, traditional family background. To hear her rave on about her new gig makes one wonder if she has a marketing gene buried in her DNA: "Why is Alphas awesome? We've got beautiful girls. We've got some man-candy. We've got ghosts. We've got murder. We've got David Strathairn being a classy, sexy doctor. I don't know what sci-fi fan isn't going to want to watch our show." Of her own character, she adds: "Rachel has the ability to hyper-intensify all of her senses. She can, like, telescopic-see, hear, taste, touch, smell. I don't know how great the smelling thing is going to be, but I take it all. It comes in a package."from the national.