In all our years doing this work, we have never come across an international show that is only available in dubbed English and not its native language. But, thanks to Hulu, there’s a first time for everything. A new sci-fi show from Spain is only available in English, but the show’s problems go beyond a clumsy dubbing job.
FOR TOMORROW: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Initial shot: “Bizkaia, 1955.” At night, a boy walks through a rocky area with his dog. He and the dog see the impact of a meteorite. He sees something behind a door that is strange.
The essence: “Bizkaia, 2024.” Gaby (Marta Hazas) and her husband David (Jaime Zatarain) move to a new house with her daughter Emma (Denisse Peña) and her son Teo (Amets Otxoa). David is upset because he left a tile in the kitchen pantry, revealing a mysterious rock underneath. After he leaves on a business trip, she sees the rock and almost touches it, but is called away.
That night, after making sure her children are okay, Gaby goes to the pantry and looks for something that was stored. She accidentally touches the rock with her foot and is transported to some point in the near future. As an ER doctor, she sees herself in her medical uniform on a call, and she sees Emma unconscious and possibly seriously injured on the floor. She then has a vision of her mother before returning to the present.
Gaby is so shocked by this vision that, when she arrives at the hospital for work the next day, she requests an emergency CT scan of her brain. Her friend Aranxta (Nuria Herrero) gets the head of neurology, Esther (Valeria Alonso), to read the scan – the two are dating – and everything becomes clear. Gaby is about to explain her vision when she is called for an emergency.
The call takes her to the campus of Geocorp, the corporation started by her father Aurelio (Ramón Barea). Two teenagers were apparently trying to climb an electric fence into a restricted area and one of them burned his hands. Gaby is not very happy when the teenager with burned hands is Mikel (Gabriel Guevara), who is dating Emma. He and the other teen were there during the school day to try to investigate or disrupt something Geocorp is doing that is harming the environment.
At the scene, Gaby sees Andrés (Álex González), a police detective she knows. Gaby apparently treated his late wife three years earlier, just before she died, and has never forgotten Gaby’s compassion. When he hears Ger tell Aranxta about her vision, he piques her interest, to the point of disabling her car to take her to her new house.
As Gaby grapples with the vision, she’s more concerned with the fact that Emma was the other teenager with Mikel when they tried to scale the fence at Geocorp, whose CEO is Gaby’s brother Nacho (Pablo Derqui). As the family gathers to celebrate Aurelio’s birthday, we discover that Aurelio was the boy who saw the meteorite fall in 1955 and founded Geocorp to study the “unique mineral” found underground in the region.
Gaby ends up having another vision, this time showing men in protective suits leading her away from Emma. Later that night, she sees Andrés lurking outside her house and demands to know why he is there. That’s when she reveals that her late wife had the same visions as her. But what she doesn’t tell him is that that same night she saw some suspicious things happening at a Geocorp.
What shows will it remind you of? For tomorrow (original title: From tomorrow) has a bit of Sliders-esque feeling. It’s a science fiction mystery like, say, Outer rangebut much lighter in tone.
Our opinion: We’re really not so sure what kind of program For tomorrow I want to be. Sometimes it’s dark and sinister, sometimes it has scenes that could fit into a medical show like Grey’s Anatomy. There are funny lines of strange tones and a soundtrack that at times goes from dramatic and spooky tones to something out of the ordinary. virgin river. All of this is delivered through a really clunky English dub, which is the only way viewers can watch the show, because Hulu doesn’t offer the show in its native Spanish.
The story is packed with coincidences and events in the first episode, which is no way to set up a story. Gaby is called to her family’s corporate campus and meets the husband of a woman she treated three years ago. And by the way, the boy she treats in that scene is her daughter’s mysterious boyfriend. Either they live in a small town or it’s too many coincidences to believe.
It’s not difficult to understand where the story is going: Gaby and Andrés team up to discover what is happening with these visions, what the rocks under the house are made of, and what they can do to save Emma from fate. Gaby saw. In the process, Gaby’s father and brother will be implicated in whatever mysterious event is happening at Geocorp.
We don’t normally insist on language in a program, but for a long time we thought that For tomorrow It wasn’t necessarily a family show, but at least one that’s family friendly. Then, in the second half of the episode, f-bombs start dropping, among other dirty lines out of left field, and we wonder why they were necessary. Do you want the show to look more realistic? Once again, it speaks to its confused tone and indecision about what kind of show it wants to be.
To be honest, the English dub is a lot dumber than the English subtitles, which to us speaks to how much the English dub completely took us out of the show’s story.
Sex and skin: None in the first episode.
Parting Shot: Aurelio, dressed in a protective suit, opens a locked door in a restricted area.
Sleeping star: We’ll give it to the subtitle translators, who seemed to use a lot more restraint than the translators who wrote the script for the actors dubbing the show into English.
Most pilot line: When Emma asks her mother if Mikel is okay, Gaby says, “Well, he won’t be able to masturbate for a while,” to which Emma replies, “Don’t worry about it. “I’ll do it for him.” That was both in the dubbing and the subtitles. Yeah.
Our call: SKIP IT. Even if we looked For tomorrow in its native Spanish, we’d still be rolling our eyes at the plot contrivances and tone shifts. But the horrible English dub makes things even harder to watch.
Joel Keller@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and technology, but make no mistake: he’s a couch potato. His writings have appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.comFast Company and other places.
