‘Opposite Worlds’ premiere review: Is this journey into time exciting, or just insane?

If there is a reason that we love “Big Brother” as a reality show, it is that by and large, the show combines great strategy with also a hefty dose of silly. Within the span of one episode, you have someone making a grade-A strategic move, and then at the same time having to dress as s giant tortilla chip rolling your body around in dip. We’re a sucker for the ridiculous.

Well, “Opposite Worlds” was a little bit differnet. There were some things about the season premiere on Syfy tonight that were pretty amazing. The house? Awesome, and the future half of it was all sorts of amazing. It was the sort of thing you would see on some sort of Robin Leach special. We were only missing the site of some little robot following around and cleaning people up. Also, the past world was pretty miserable, especially when it comes to having to watch these people make fire. Our favorite moment of the entire episode was the social dynamic of watching the future people so bored that they just stood around and watched the people in the past bond. These people could actually have an advantage later in the game, since they’ve had these active experiences together while the others are mere observers.

Now, we have to talk about that “worldly challenge” to discuss who ended up being in the past, and who ended up being in the future and who was relegated to the past. This was basically the sort of stun-gun joust that would have completely terrified us, and the moment we realized that we had to fall to our doom, we may have been out. There were two injuries that happened here almost right away, which leads us back to one fundamental thing with reality TV: As someone who broke their collarbone in a “Beauty and the Geek” football game, physical challenges are often bad news. People get way too into fighting for their reality TV lives that they morph into crazy people. We wouldn’t have gone that physical.

Team Chronos, otherwise known as the team who was in the future world the whole time, ended up actually winning the challenge, and keeping their status for at least the rest of the episode. Meanwhile, Charles and Lauren from Team Epoch (the past) were the two injured, with the latter returning not long after the challenged happened. The next twist is that the players voted on who could be safe from elimination from each team, with JR (Epoch) and Lisette (Chronos) being the picks. America will vote on one of them to be the Decider (who, despite what you may think, is not George W. Bush … cheers if you get that reference), and one of them will help to figure out who goes home.

All in all, this was a decent start to a series that has some things going for it. It’s visually arresting, the players have some cool stuff, and some of the twists for America are great. We just wish for now that there was a challenge that was less about chest-pounding, and some more strategy and conflict among some of the contestants. For now, it’s hard to know who is who. At least this premiere did enough for us already to not make it a thing of the past just yet. Grade: B.

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Photo: Syfy