Fox's 'Touch' revamps plotline, locale

BY RITA SHERROW World Television Writer
Thursday, February 07, 2013
2/07/13 at 7:06 AM

The world is about to change for the characters - and the viewers - in Fox's supernatural thriller series "Touch."

In the new season, launching Friday on Fox, there are new characters, a new setting and much more danger, according to creator/executive producer Tim Kring, who also created "Heroes."

"The dominant storyline will be finding Amelia, this mysterious other version of Jake who was introduced at the end of last season," said Kring in a teleconference Wednesday. "Also, a much more highly charged danger has infiltrated the show."

Last season viewers were introduced to Martin Bohm, a single father desperate to connect with a 10-year-old son who has never spoken a single word.

He's a widower whose wife died in the World Trade Centers on 9/11 when their baby was nine months old, a man whose life was reduced from being a successful newspaper reporter to handling baggage at an airport and whose beautiful son is seemingly unaware of almost anything around him except numbers and patterns. He and his father are on a silent journey to decipher the hidden patterns in the numbers that connect all life on the planet.

In the second season, which premieres with a two-hour episode at 7 p.m. Friday, everything is heightened, Kring said.

The opener starts off where last season ended - with Martin (Kiefer Sutherland, "24") on the run and coming to California in search of this mysterious girl named Amelia (Saxon Sharbino). A female version of Jake who possesses the same abilities as he does and whose abduction leads them to connect with the girl's mother, played by Maria Bello, who has joined the cast.

"If you were a loyal viewer of the show, you noticed the show started in a kind of stand-alone nature where every episode had beginning, a middle and an end," Kring said. "By the end of the season, we had introduced a more serialized version.

"And, in many ways, everything changes from the first season. Loyal viewers of last season will find the show seamless because there is a natural progression of this story."

"...In truth, there will be less of the idea of sort of people who connect up by the end of the episode because of the nature of the high stakes driving the main story... My feeling has always been that we can come back to that, I think, once the danger is lifted."

The show's setting also moves from New York City to Los Angeles and "all of characters from that world have been jettisoned and we are starting fresh," he said.

New characters, in addition to Bello as a mother on a mission to rescue her daughter, are Lukas Haas as a genius from the mysterious corporation who has been working on the same numbers and patterns as Jake but on an analog level and poses a threat to the boy, Said Taghmaoui as an extreme religious zealot determined to eliminate all who stand in the way of him attaining his vision, and young Amelia whose equation started the father-son quest.

In last season's finale, Jake, who has never communicated with his father, reached out and took Martin's hand. It was their first "touch."

"... The idea of touch becomes this very big move forward in their relationship," Kring said. "... The ways in which Jake communicates with his father, without speaking, increases this season."

Also, Amelia's mother, Lucy Robbins, who doesn't care about the numbers and just wants to find her daughter, and Martin, who is trying to uncover a global conspiracy while protecting his son, butt heads in their quest to find the girl. And along the way they become a family of sorts. She becomes a de facto mother to Jake, bonding with the child.

"We say they are sort of part of the smallest club in the world because they share these children that have the same abilities but both have their own method of finding Amelia," Kring said. "It's sort of a 'Sophie's Choice.' What do you do when your child's life is a stake? Which side do you choose?"

TOUCH

When: 7-9 p.m. Friday

Where: Fox, channel 23, cable 5
Original Print Headline: Fox's 'Touch' revamps plotline

Rita Sherrow 918-581-8360
rita.sherrow@tulsaworld.com

Associated Images:

Martin (Kiefer Sutherland) and Lucy (Maria Bello) search for Amelia in the "Event Horizon" episode of "Touch," the first part of the two-hour season premiere airing Friday, Feb. 8 on FOX. ISABELLA VOSMIKOVA/FOX

Jake (David Mazouz, pictured) has a lead for Martin and Lucy in the two-hour season premiere of "Touch," airing at 7 p.m. Friday on Fox, channel 23, cable 5. ISABELLA VOSMIKOVA/Fox