The folks out at A&E sent over a copy of Criss Angel: Mindfreak season six, and you’re in for a real treat here, whether you’re already familiar with Criss Angel’s work or if you’re not. But there are plenty of problems here as well that probably couldn’t have been prevented.

Criss Angel: Mindfreak season six takes Criss Angel through a whole lot of bizarre and improbable stunts, including their lead-off stunt, the Grand Canyon Death Jump, and plenty of others besides. But you’ll also see the lead-up to these stunts (also, for some reason, called “demonstrations”), as well as plenty of other strange stuff.

It’s probably a bad idea, in retrospect, to start off a season with a “demonstration” called The Grand Canyon Death Jump, because it’s pretty much a foregone conclusion that it’s going to go off. Why? Because if it didn’t, there wouldn’t be a second episode, that’s for sure. They’ve really telegraphed the punch, and that makes the entire lead-up to the stunt pretty much just a tedious exercise in pointlessness. They keep telling us how dangerous this is, and how if anything’s wrong Angel won’t survive, and how incredibly well-timed this has to be, and all the while, you know full well it’s going to work. How do you build suspense around a foregone conclusion?

No, where you’re going to get the value here is around the strange bits and tricks that you won’t see coming, the little bits of “mindfreak”-ing that turn out so strange and so downright unexplainable that they’re plenty exciting to watch. Things passing through things, people passing through things, things showing up where they really shouldn’t be; it’s like watching the destruction of physics as we know them. This is what you should be here for–all the ridiculous buildup about horribly complex and horribly dangerous “demonstrations” that we all know is going to work is meaningless and tedious by comparison–but the surprises built in throughout do make up for this.

He’ll even teach you a couple tricks, which might be a violation of magician’s code, but is still plenty interesting in its own right; you too can try the trick with the soda can–I would have if I’d had a can handy–and impress your friends.

Criss Angel: Mindfreak season six is a strange beast; its big tricks all fall flat, but its little tricks are all wildly impressive. The combination is oddly unbalanced, but still reasonably entertaining. If you haven’t already seen Criss Angel: Mindfreak, you can start here without incident as it’s all episodic in nature (you’re not dependent on previous episodes for context), and you should be pretty happy with the results.

The Screenhead Ten Scale hands the strange mix of wonder and disappointment a six out of ten–it’s interesting enough to watch, make no mistake, but so much of it is just such a foregone conclusion that it pulls all the suspense out of the occasion.