Tiago is the Johnny Angel-from-Angel Heart character in the show. He was touched by an angel when he was a kid and is investigating a cultic sacrifice in his first assignment at the homicide squad. He’d be ripe for the allure of radio evangelism if not for his partner Lewis Michener (Nathan Lane), a veteran cop who hunts Nazis in his spare time. The Third Reich is just waiting for their boots to arrive in L.A. so they can stomp they’re way through on a new highway. Lane is a dramatic Lou Costello to Zovatto’s Bud Abbott. Vega has to play the straight man because he is the new kid on the block and still on the fence in the hood. While Lane, in a very underplayed performance, steals the entire series without missing his beat. The Jewish cop and the first Chicano detective in the LAPD ground the series in urban reality as the front line against the unreal.
Kerry Bishé plays Sister Molly, a popular and charismatic Christian evangelist who dreams of the normal life. Sister Molly is a stand-in for Aimee Semple McPherson and her Foursquare Church. McPherson was the first televangelist, except she broadcast her weekly sermons at the first megachurch the Angelus Temple over the radio. Raised on the tent revival circuit, she didn’t sing, but could speak in tongues. She turned the gospel of hellfire and damnation into one of love. According to Amy Peed McCullough’s book Her Preaching Body: Conversations about Identity, Agency, and Embodiment, McPherson tackled “explicit biblical passages” and “portrayed herself as the bride of Christ … Her critics labeled the preaching magnetism a hypnotic sexually charged allure.”Barbara Stanwyck starred as a character based on her in Frank Capra’s film The Miracle Woman (1931).
In a mid-season episode, Molly tells her mother not to worry when she decides to drive herself to an appointment. She assures her she is not going to get kidnapped. But in real life, Aimee did disappear, and no one knows whether she was kidnapped, ran away or faked the whole thing. Molly complains about the isolation which comes from adoration. “Someone so jaunty has no place in my house,” she tells Tiago after he wins her a Popeye toy at an amusement park shooting gallery booth.
Rory Kinnear, who played Dr. Frankenstein’s creation in the original series, plays a doctor here. He is also the happy face of the Third Reich on the West Coach. He parades in a Nazi uniform in the park, cajoling Americans to think of their country first, and the old world of Europe not at all. Who wants to fight? He’d rather watch his sons make sand parapets on the beach. The unhappiest face of the Third Reich is city councilman Charlton Townsend (Michael Gladis) who does pretty much what he’s told, wherever he happens to be kneeling. Once again, Natalie Dormer’s Magda has his ear as his seemingly mousy, bespectacled, personal assistant.
The special effects are adequately gruesome, but also quite realistic-looking. Tiago’s activist older brother Raul (Adam Rodriguez) gets injured and a sequence includes a blood-and-bone compacted eye. It is a minor effect, compared with some of the gorier scenes, but the details make you want to look away. Bruises, like the ones found on a battered wife, are treated with as much care as the otherworldly effects. This was also true of the original series.