Sanctuary, Season 2
Oct. 4th, 2011 06:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakAs promised, and as is the case with many a show, the second season improved on the first - one can tell the writers are now sure who the characters are - and was a very enjoyable, and occasionally angsty experience.
First of all: considering that in their responses to my s1 review, most people mentioned someone named Kate who hadn't appeared in s1 at all, I guessed Clara wasn't going to last long on the show. Evidently during the hiatus the writers had gone back to the drawing board for their new younger female character, and it's easy to see why; as I said in the s1 review, I didn't find the Invisible Girl very convincing. Though I can't see why they had to kill her off in order to remove her from the show, other than to give Will some more angst, which given this happened in the big angstorama around Ashley was hardly necessary.
Anyway. Kate as a streetwise fast talking freelancer was a more interesting addition from the get go, with more interesting dynamics between her and everyone; that she and Helen started off antagonistically prevented she came across simply as an Ashley replacement, there was no instant!attraction between her and Will which meant she could be her own character instead of the love interest, and she and Henry as well as she and the Big Guy bicker enjoyably. It's interesting that several episodes establish her mother is still alive (I wonder whether we'll meet her in s3?), and that the finale addresses her Indian-American status outright. (The Kate and Rafi scenes were among my favourite elements of the season finale.) Maybe Kate gave up her mercanary ways a bit too quickly in favour of becoming a full fledged team member, but that's about the only criticism I can think of.
Considering the suspicious lack of Ashley on the s2 dvd cover, I guessed she would not be rescued from the dark side. I'm still in two minds about the entire storyline. As a genre fan, I am of course familiar with the whole "a much beloved regular turns enemy either due to outside forces or for internal reasons, and the other regulars have to fight him/her, causing angst and tragedy galore" trope. Two of the emotionally most affecting examples where the turn to the dark side had not been due to the regular's own decisions were Picard being turned into Locutus by the Borg in TNG and the entire Angelus season 2 plot line in BTVS. These two also offer the two possible outcomes - Picard gets rescued from Locutus-ness from his crew while Angel is dispatched to hell by Buffy. Yet a third variation of this would be the neural clone plot line in Farscape's second season, where John Crichton, also not due to his own will but because of a) his arch nemesis who is after information he has, and b)The Prophets The Vorlons The Ancients who dumped valuable information into his brain to begin with, slowly loses his grip on sanity and gets taken over by his his enemy's neural clone until he kills his beloved in the season finale before his sanity can be restored. (Wel, as much as Crichton ever becomes sane... :) So yes, when done well, it's a terribly effective storyline, and my first impulse, to declare that I prefer it when walks to the dark side are a character's own decision, is evidently not born out by my experience because all three of these examples definitely worked for me upon first watching.
However. Those were the 90s. And considering Ashley was Helen's daughter, I can't help but wonder about a plot line where she's actually convinced her mother is wrong and joins the Cabale for ideological reasons, playing out over an entire season, would have been as good or better. But then of course the Cabale would have had to be presented less fiendishly than they were. And I will admit that the modification of Ashley into a super abnormal while wiping out her orignal personality was really gruesome to watch and worked as a nightmare mirror of how her parents changed themselves intomutants abnormals to begin with; it's the experiment of the Five carried to its ultimate conclusion, stripped of all ethical pretensions and put to modern corporate use. And I did terribly grieve for Helen when Ashley at the last moment had a moment of original personality returning, enough to save her mother before she died.
I'm glad Helen got an entire episode devoted to the immediate after effect this has on her. It - and a later episode, three guesses which one - also reminded me of something that is still true in s2 as it was in s1: that the Helen and Will relationship is one of my favourite things about this show. It's sadly still so rare that we get a female boss/male employe team without any UST but much affection and loyalty without said loyalty being blind. Will is supportive, but also aware that the likelihood this is just Helen working through her mourning process is as high, if not higher, than her having a genuine hunch.
As promised, John Druitt as a character came across more clearly and with more personality in s2. I'm still not that keen on the stolen TOS plot that is his backstory (i.e. the electrical energy made him do it), but I'm glad the show adressed point blank via Helen that his Jack the Ripper track record can't all have come from outside. And presented logical consequences to him killing off Cabale members (if you let a reformed serial killer kill your enemies, you should know ahead of time and without any energy creatures bouncing about this would result in a relapse, Helen!). I did feel sorry for him in his big s2 episode. Though he still is my least favourite of the Five (that we've "met" on screen).
Like many another genre show, Sanctuary does the tv science thing, i.e. if you're a genius scientist, you're a genius at everything. So just like Fred the physicist is qualified to conduct autopsies on Angel the Series, Walter on Fringe is equally good at constructing universe-crossing gates as he is at biogenetics, and Nikola Tesla, also a physicist, can whip up genetic miracle cures and/or dna changing droughts. Well, okay, one can declare Tesla had ample time to branch out into other fields since the 19th century as well as a vested interest, what with the becoming a vampire, but just once I want to see a genius scientist declare, look, this is not my field. All this being said, I enjoyed Nikola's rare appearances on the show immensely. The episode with the bored rich kids becoming vamps decades ahead of schedule (which was hysterical) made me realise he's basically Delgado!Master (not the later versions with their progressive insanity, but Delgado!Master had this pattern of behaviour where his scheme du jour landed him in as much trouble as it did the world and before the story was over he and the Doctor had to team up to deal with it, plus he was the most suave and charming of Masters) and Helen is the Doctor. This explains everything. Clearly, Will is her Companion while the Big Guy is the Brig.
Will must by now dread any request of Helen's to travel with her, between the first air crash, the submarine and now the second crash on a lone old drilling station. Again, loved that the episode wasn't coy but let him bring this up to Helen. It was interesting to compare this latest two people character play with the earlier versions, because now they're much more familiar with each other, he's less in awe of her, and not above needling her, while she actually opens up to him to a greater degree. Well, if they're stuck on a lone platform in the ocean with a giant scorpion and octopus, that is. They have progressed to teasing each other, as opposed to this being a privilege of Helen's contemporaries.
The darker version of their dynamic comes when Sanctuary does the obligatory dystopia episode. Making Helen into Oedipus, discovering the plague was actually her fault because of her Ashley-caused death wish was a good twist, though given all the similarities to I Am Legend/The Omega Man I half expected her to end up temporarily dying while her blood flows into a big fountain.
S2 offerend more about the global Sanctuary network and we got to repeatedly meet Declan as the head of the English Sanctuary. I appreciated that in the finale two parter, we saw many more heads and that they were not all white men but representative of the various nations and of different genders; also, I'm not sure whether I missed something but is Terrence the only (visibly) Abnormal head of a Sanctuary? If so, there should be more, to head off the whiff of paternalism and white (wo)man's burden with the whole organization, not that it doesn't make sense to have started that way given the Five were all products of the Victorian age, no matter how progressive individuals they were. Anyway, I'm also glad that Terrence isn't the moustache twirling type and that his arguments against Helen's unilateral decisions re: Big Bertha are at least debatable; that Helen isn't presented as the automatically ruling and always right leader, and that there are checks and balances in place.
However, the whole Will-and-Kali thing is... how shall I put this... while the thing I like about it is that Will is actually bonded to a big spider, no matter how attractive a woman she can appear in a vision, the whole chosen prophet thing is really too much, and Robin Dunne's acting when in a trance doesn't help. The big Bollywood dance number made me smile, though, and as mentioned before I liked all of Kate's scenes with Rafi.
In conclusion: bring on season 3!
First of all: considering that in their responses to my s1 review, most people mentioned someone named Kate who hadn't appeared in s1 at all, I guessed Clara wasn't going to last long on the show. Evidently during the hiatus the writers had gone back to the drawing board for their new younger female character, and it's easy to see why; as I said in the s1 review, I didn't find the Invisible Girl very convincing. Though I can't see why they had to kill her off in order to remove her from the show, other than to give Will some more angst, which given this happened in the big angstorama around Ashley was hardly necessary.
Anyway. Kate as a streetwise fast talking freelancer was a more interesting addition from the get go, with more interesting dynamics between her and everyone; that she and Helen started off antagonistically prevented she came across simply as an Ashley replacement, there was no instant!attraction between her and Will which meant she could be her own character instead of the love interest, and she and Henry as well as she and the Big Guy bicker enjoyably. It's interesting that several episodes establish her mother is still alive (I wonder whether we'll meet her in s3?), and that the finale addresses her Indian-American status outright. (The Kate and Rafi scenes were among my favourite elements of the season finale.) Maybe Kate gave up her mercanary ways a bit too quickly in favour of becoming a full fledged team member, but that's about the only criticism I can think of.
Considering the suspicious lack of Ashley on the s2 dvd cover, I guessed she would not be rescued from the dark side. I'm still in two minds about the entire storyline. As a genre fan, I am of course familiar with the whole "a much beloved regular turns enemy either due to outside forces or for internal reasons, and the other regulars have to fight him/her, causing angst and tragedy galore" trope. Two of the emotionally most affecting examples where the turn to the dark side had not been due to the regular's own decisions were Picard being turned into Locutus by the Borg in TNG and the entire Angelus season 2 plot line in BTVS. These two also offer the two possible outcomes - Picard gets rescued from Locutus-ness from his crew while Angel is dispatched to hell by Buffy. Yet a third variation of this would be the neural clone plot line in Farscape's second season, where John Crichton, also not due to his own will but because of a) his arch nemesis who is after information he has, and b)
However. Those were the 90s. And considering Ashley was Helen's daughter, I can't help but wonder about a plot line where she's actually convinced her mother is wrong and joins the Cabale for ideological reasons, playing out over an entire season, would have been as good or better. But then of course the Cabale would have had to be presented less fiendishly than they were. And I will admit that the modification of Ashley into a super abnormal while wiping out her orignal personality was really gruesome to watch and worked as a nightmare mirror of how her parents changed themselves into
I'm glad Helen got an entire episode devoted to the immediate after effect this has on her. It - and a later episode, three guesses which one - also reminded me of something that is still true in s2 as it was in s1: that the Helen and Will relationship is one of my favourite things about this show. It's sadly still so rare that we get a female boss/male employe team without any UST but much affection and loyalty without said loyalty being blind. Will is supportive, but also aware that the likelihood this is just Helen working through her mourning process is as high, if not higher, than her having a genuine hunch.
As promised, John Druitt as a character came across more clearly and with more personality in s2. I'm still not that keen on the stolen TOS plot that is his backstory (i.e. the electrical energy made him do it), but I'm glad the show adressed point blank via Helen that his Jack the Ripper track record can't all have come from outside. And presented logical consequences to him killing off Cabale members (if you let a reformed serial killer kill your enemies, you should know ahead of time and without any energy creatures bouncing about this would result in a relapse, Helen!). I did feel sorry for him in his big s2 episode. Though he still is my least favourite of the Five (that we've "met" on screen).
Like many another genre show, Sanctuary does the tv science thing, i.e. if you're a genius scientist, you're a genius at everything. So just like Fred the physicist is qualified to conduct autopsies on Angel the Series, Walter on Fringe is equally good at constructing universe-crossing gates as he is at biogenetics, and Nikola Tesla, also a physicist, can whip up genetic miracle cures and/or dna changing droughts. Well, okay, one can declare Tesla had ample time to branch out into other fields since the 19th century as well as a vested interest, what with the becoming a vampire, but just once I want to see a genius scientist declare, look, this is not my field. All this being said, I enjoyed Nikola's rare appearances on the show immensely. The episode with the bored rich kids becoming vamps decades ahead of schedule (which was hysterical) made me realise he's basically Delgado!Master (not the later versions with their progressive insanity, but Delgado!Master had this pattern of behaviour where his scheme du jour landed him in as much trouble as it did the world and before the story was over he and the Doctor had to team up to deal with it, plus he was the most suave and charming of Masters) and Helen is the Doctor. This explains everything. Clearly, Will is her Companion while the Big Guy is the Brig.
Will must by now dread any request of Helen's to travel with her, between the first air crash, the submarine and now the second crash on a lone old drilling station. Again, loved that the episode wasn't coy but let him bring this up to Helen. It was interesting to compare this latest two people character play with the earlier versions, because now they're much more familiar with each other, he's less in awe of her, and not above needling her, while she actually opens up to him to a greater degree. Well, if they're stuck on a lone platform in the ocean with a giant scorpion and octopus, that is. They have progressed to teasing each other, as opposed to this being a privilege of Helen's contemporaries.
The darker version of their dynamic comes when Sanctuary does the obligatory dystopia episode. Making Helen into Oedipus, discovering the plague was actually her fault because of her Ashley-caused death wish was a good twist, though given all the similarities to I Am Legend/The Omega Man I half expected her to end up temporarily dying while her blood flows into a big fountain.
S2 offerend more about the global Sanctuary network and we got to repeatedly meet Declan as the head of the English Sanctuary. I appreciated that in the finale two parter, we saw many more heads and that they were not all white men but representative of the various nations and of different genders; also, I'm not sure whether I missed something but is Terrence the only (visibly) Abnormal head of a Sanctuary? If so, there should be more, to head off the whiff of paternalism and white (wo)man's burden with the whole organization, not that it doesn't make sense to have started that way given the Five were all products of the Victorian age, no matter how progressive individuals they were. Anyway, I'm also glad that Terrence isn't the moustache twirling type and that his arguments against Helen's unilateral decisions re: Big Bertha are at least debatable; that Helen isn't presented as the automatically ruling and always right leader, and that there are checks and balances in place.
However, the whole Will-and-Kali thing is... how shall I put this... while the thing I like about it is that Will is actually bonded to a big spider, no matter how attractive a woman she can appear in a vision, the whole chosen prophet thing is really too much, and Robin Dunne's acting when in a trance doesn't help. The big Bollywood dance number made me smile, though, and as mentioned before I liked all of Kate's scenes with Rafi.
In conclusion: bring on season 3!
no subject
Date: 2011-10-05 06:09 am (UTC)Kate and Ravi were great together - I really liked the vibe between them, I really liked the contrast between daughter of immigrants and home-grown son. (I might over-identify a bit there, because a lot of the ribbing and teasing felt very similar to me and my Italian family.)
Tesla so is Delgado!Master! I can never unsee that now! His plans are always ultimate plans.
The head of the Tokyo Sanctuary was an Abnormal - he passed, but he had to wear dark glasses. And later, when Tokyo had been attacked, Helen spoke with a woman with snake hair who seemed to have replaced him.
Declan rocks! Not an Abnormal, though. Still, I love him very much.
no subject
Date: 2011-10-05 06:32 am (UTC)Exactly. There were any number of ways to explain why Clara would not want to stick around the Sanctuary after the end of s1 without killing her. Bah.
Tesla so is Delgado!Master! I can never unsee that now! His plans are always ultimate plans.
:) I'm glad someone of the Whovian persuasion agrees with me on this!
Declan is a good character, and excellent point about the head of the Tokyo Sanctuary and his successor.