Being Human Revisited: Season 2
Aug. 14th, 2013 01:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakThe first time around, season 2, or to be more specific, the last third of it, almost drove me to quit the show. (And then I was glad I didn't because s3 was fabulous and dealt with my main complaint beautifully.) Rewatching, I went in knowing my previous main issue was not actually an issue. However, what about the other issues? Well, as it turned out, several of the other s2 downsides were still downsides for me, but I also discovered virtues I had forgotten, and some foreshadowing I had been previously unaware of.
First of all, no matter how often Toby Whitehouse claims not to have watched BTVS, bringing Ivan and Daiy for s2 after Herrick in s1 follows the "hedonistic modern vampire couple follows conventional vampire mastermind" pattern too closely for me to believe him. That being said, Ivan and Daisy don't resemble Spike and Dru at all, personality wise, and the show uses them in different ways from the way Buffy used Spike and Dru in its second season as well. But I defy you not to watch their introduction episode and think of it. Something that one notices only with all five seasons in mind, though, is this: s2 is unique in the way it presents vampires as a group. In all other seasons, Being Human brings on a distinct class code - vampires are mostly rich, affluent, parasitic and intensely snobbish, werewolves by contrast are mostly poor, working class or middle class at best, and tend to be among the exploited rather than among the exploites. Doesn't mean we don't get the occasional working class vampire in other seasons as well, but by and large, this is true, and of course is nowhere more focused on than in the vampires amusing themselves via putting werewolves in cage fights.
Not in s2. Daiy and Ivan in the first episode deliver a few "dog" taunts at George, but that's it. No cage fights, and a notable lack of vampires-taunt-and-bully-werewolves scenes throughout the season. Nor do the vampires plot the vampocalypse. Instead, Ivan aside, none of the vampires we see strike one as rich. Instead, vampires who get screentime other than Ivan and Daisy are the vampire who first jumps on board of Mitchell's Vampires Anonymous idea, presented as basically an honest working class bloke, and the pathetic Kara - and I do mean pathetic in the sense of having pathos - , the kindly hospital dinner lady transformed by Herrick into his devoted follower, dim, loyal and presented as dirty and homeless while her two victims are rich and affluent. When Mitchell punishes Kara for this - a power demonstration which gets the vampire community behind him - by breaking out her teeth and walling up her up underground - the narrative while having established a necessity for his actions still devotes a lot of time to her helpless cries and also directly parallels Mitchell with the witch hunters in the opening teaser of the same episode. (Which, given how this season ends, is important.) Wait, there is another rich vampire other than Ivan: Karl, a one episode character whom I had misremembered dying in his episode, a vampire who lived without blood for decades and once helped Mitchell get clean. Karl after decades of being on the wagon fell off it and killed his (male) lover, which is presented as tragic - for Karl, who immediately rues the deed. (The flashback of Mitchell getting clean aside, where he has just one line, we never "meet" the lover, other than as a corpse.) S2 is as sympathetic as Being Human ever gets to vampires as a group, not just to individuals, without, however, downplaying just how dangerous they are. (Again, see how it ends.) This is important, given that the season antagonists, both big and little, are human. (One key big difference to how s2 of BTVS used Spike and Dru.) As far as Little Bads are concerned, you have the police constable who had a deal with Herrick and tries to blackmail Mitchell into becoming his personal assassin, who is a corrupt and negative character (though not in a caricature way); whereas the Big Bads are Kemp, who with the exception of the Devil himself in s5 is just about the worst antagonist of the show, and Lucy, who has layers and is written more sympathetic than not but whose narrative has other problems. I'll get to that.
Seriously, though: Kemp is as bad as I remembered. He gets one measly flashback to explain why he is how he is (wife and child murdered by vampires), and otherwise not only walks around as the cliché of the evil fanatic priest personified, whose actions even by his own goals are blatantly illogical and just there so the plot can proceed (I'm thinking in particular of him killing Lucy in the season finale). Now it's not that you can't do a vampire and supernatural beings hunter whom revenge has driven into becoming evil himself, and still make that person three dimensional and layered; step forward, Daniel Holtz of Angel fame. But while my main objection to Kemp - I thought he was just there to make Mitchell's horrendous actions look better by comparison, which as s3 proved turned out not to be the case - is not there anymore, the fact remains he feels like a lazily written character, with no depth and dimension. A walking plot device, which most BH characters are not. The fact that we get Kemp in the same season in which vampires, plural, as opposed to just one or two of them, are presented at their most sympathetic feels like additional easy emotional manipulation.
On to the good stuff, though: because you can make a case, in retrospect, that the actual Big Bad of s2 isn't Kemp (or Lucy), but Mitchell, despite the fact that in the first half of the season he's also at his most sympathetic. As opposed to his panicked abandonment of Lauren (btw, loved the little detail that when Mitchell has his first flirtatious conversation with Lucy on a bench in the hospital park, this bench is revealed to have the plate "in loving memory of Lauren Drake") at the start of the saga, this time he makes a serious effort to deal with the fallout from Herrick's death from the get go. He does try to not only prevent the vampires going on to an anarchic free for all slaughtering (oh, the irony), but also to give them something to strive for. When Daisy points out that it's easy for Mitchell to talk about having managed to get on the wagon, because he always had help, he comes up with the Vampires Anonymous scheme, which seems to work (until a certain plot point). However, there are little signs that even in this Mitchell-really-tries phase point towards his fatal flaw. When Ivan, recruited by Mitchell to become a spokesperson so that other vampires will try to abstain, admits that he can't do it and instead suggests only pretending to be on the wagonn for the benefit of the other vampires while secretly continuing to feed, Mitchell's reaction is: "Do you have any idea of what you're asking of me?" Of him, mind. Not of, say, the people Ivan is going to feed on. No, the great sacrifice here is that of Mitchell's moral integrity. No wonder then, that when the next ugly compromise comes in the shape of the corrupt police captain, Mitchell grows more disenchanted of the whole project, though he still continues until the cop demands the assassination service from him, at which point Mitchell snaps and kills the cop. At which point he basically washes his hands of the vampire community project in favour of his personal redemption narrative, by asking his current love interest to become his new saviour. "I can do it", he tells her, "if only I had a reason", and that she must be this reason.
The woman in question is Lucy, who happens to work with Kemp on the supposed study and actual elimination of supernaturals. When Mitchell finds out that instead of becoming his next personal saviour, Lucy set him up to get exploded together with the rest of Bristol's vampires (minus Daisy and Kara, the other two survivors), his incredibly revealing reaction is: "For three years I've protected them, and this is how they repay me?"
Note: "they", i.e. humanity. Not Lucy the individual. (This is Mitchell's reaction to his neighbours suspecting him of pedophilia from s1 all over again.) Also the casting of himself as humanity's protector, a hero. Um. We've seen Mitchell protect the occasional individual, and also, see above, make a serious effort to prevent the aftermath of Herrick's death make the vampire population of Bristol run amok. But we've also heard him admit, just an episode earlier in the Josie flashbacks, that he has had a tremendously high amount of victims during the course of his long unlife. But most of all: it's all about him. At this point, he has no idea what motivated Lucy. And frankly, there are a lot of good reasons to blow up a bunch of lethal predators, each of whom qualifies as a serial killer, even if they haven't killed during the last few weeks. But the idea to see humans killing vampires as justified doesn't even enter his head. No, it's all a personal betrayal, of ungrateful humanity to their saviour. At which point it's Mitchell - not Daisy, who goes along with his idea, but doesn't suggest it, which will be important in the s3 opener where he immediately tries to blame her when adressed by one of his victims - who decides this calls for a massacre of random strangers in a box car. Mitchell's story as a whole works as a deconstruction of the romantic, redemption seeking vampire so well not because he's not presented as romantic but because he is. Only in a way that consciously shows the incredible egotism of the romantic temperament at every corner. When Mitchell tells Lucy, in the final episode and just a day after the massacre, that the difference between them is that she had a choice in her actions, the instant rewriting of history and self delusion is breathtaking. (As, again, the previous episode made very clear that it was Mitchell's and only Mitchell's idea and choice to committ the massacre.)
Something else I found fascinating in the light of his s3 responses to this is that s2 makes far more obvious than I remembered the extent of what George knows. When he and Annie find Mitchell post massacre in the house, Annie concludes from Mitchell's strange manner that he's drunk (of alcohol), but George, by contrast, immediately deduces something other than alcohol happend. In s1, when he realises that Mitchell killed and sired Lauren, George is horrified, disappointed and runs home to deck him, but he's not actually surprised, and he doesn't hand out ultimatums. Here, he is just as horrified, but he doesn't confront Mitchell anymore, his instinct is to get himself, Nina and Annie out of the house, and later to call Mitchell on the phone to say "you can't keep doing that, I can't keep dragging you back". Which is at a point where he can't know/guess more than "Mitchell must have killed again", not the extent of it. At the very end of the episode, however, when Mitchell listens to a radio report on the box car massacre, George switches it off, and a few lines later when Mitchell says George never asked him what happened before Mitchell showed up at the lab says "I can't be your confessor... I need you too much". All of which foreshadows their scenes in the s3 finale, when Mitchell is forced to see how much this silent acceptance has become enabling and has corrupted George.
George in general, though, I'm far less furious with than I was when s2 was originally broadcast. I mean, I still think he acts like a dick in the s2 opener (not solely, but especially towards Nina), but I can also see his pov somewhat (before realising he made Nina into a werewolf, he reads her behaviour as his worst nightmare come true, that she'd be disgusted by him and reject him once she knows the truth, and promptly tries to hurry the process), and the first episode aside, he's a really good friend to Annie throughout the season. (The George and Annie friendship is so easily comfortable with each other by now that when George near the end to the season says to Annie "I love you", the question of this being misunderstood by either Annie or the audience as having romantic undertones is not even raised.) Moreover, his rebound relationship with Sam may be self deluded but not deliberately trying to hurt anyone.
Annie, too, has a stronger season than I remembered. I mean, I still think the way the show first lets her manifest herself all the time and then pushes the reboot button on her powers again comes across as a blatantly Doylist "we need Annie to be invisible to non supernaturals again" instead of making character sense, but whatever, Annie in this season is a very active character rather than reacting to other people's actions. It's her idea to work in a pub at the start of the season (when she still can manifest), to learn from Sid how to close the "doors" through which ghosts go or can get dragged, to visit the psychic showman and make him interact with the ghosts again. Even to fix up the pub owner with his former girlfriend. (The episode where another ghost makes her babysit now doesn't look so random anymore, in view of what's to come in s4.) Her developing friendship with Nina at the beginning and near the end of the season is lovely to watch, too.
All of which makes it the more frustrating that her part in the last third of the finale falls into the black hole of Kemp being a badly written villain and the plot making more sense. After a season in which we saw Annie learn and then prove she can resist the "doors", the idea that Kemp, after killing his hapless psychic sidekick, can suddenly perform an exorcism well enough (after failing at that earlier) for Annie to get dragged through a door is ludicrous. And only sets up yet another scene that's even more "what the hell?" ludicrous, is Kemp, because that's what Mad Priests (tm) do, show up in the middle of the night to kill Lucy, which in turn allows Annie to get through the door enough to drag him through it, but for some reason not to stay herself. Which in turn sets up Mitchell deciding to go and rescue her, which needs to happen in order to the s3 plot to unfold, but good lord, couldn't it have been set up in more character sense making ways? The way it is, it's such an obvious "we don't want to leave either Lucy or Kemp as loose ends, or deal with them in the next season, so we'll just have Kemp kill Lucy and then Annie drags Kemp into hell, so Annie can do something badass in the finale" thing.
Lucy, now: the actress I had first seen as Cleopatra in Rome, and she gets to play a very different role here. I like and appreciate that she actually looks like a scientist in her thirties (could even be a young looking 40s), a woman who doesn't have the time to put on elaborate make up or fix her hair every day. I also like that if BH had to do a take in the "mad scientist" trope, as horror shows do sooner or later, it picked a female one rather than a male one. And the early conversations between her and Mitchell have enough wit and charm to make it believable both that he would be attracted, and that she would. Lastly, having her conflicted not just because Mitchell's that handsome but because the thought of the four werewolves who died in the course of her experiments haunt her is good.
However. Kemp is so obviously evil, fanatic and bad news that having a scientist, even one who believes in "intelligent design" and for this got ostracized, going along with him as an ally, more than that, making him into a superior she's listening to makes Lucy look naive and stupid at best, which presumably is not the intention. Also, while making her a believer gives her initial common ground with Kemp, it would have made more sense if the reason for her experiments had been scientific curiosity rather than faith - I mean, otherwise why bother to make her a scientist at all? And then there's her ending. As I said: lazy.
Minor things:
- This season has some great flashbacks, notably the ones with young Josie and with Herrick, drenched in yellow light, and intercut with Mitchell making Lucy into the next saviour figure in the present, and the black and white Ivan and human!Daisy flashback during WWII, showing how they met. (And that Daisy did make a choice, as opposed to many another vampire.) The only thing that struck me as anachronistic was Josie's joke about wanting to be married to David Bowie in 1969 (surely that's more a 1972/73 thing to want?), but I suppose she could have been a very early fan. Herrick's remark to Mitchell that "becoming a vampire doesn't change your nature, that's just what we tell newbies to get them through the first few kills; what it does is liberate your nature" is self-serving, but born out by the characterisation of the majority of vampires, if you define "liberate" as "pushing the id to the forefront".
- Daisy helping Kara to resurrect Herrick at the end, though, still makes as little sense as ever
- Mitchell tends to have only male friends (Karl, Ivan), whereas he makes the women he grows close to into romantic interests almost immediately (Josie, Lucy) or at least has sex with them (Daisy, for value of 'close' - shared interests after Ivan's death, is more like it). Which makes Annie an exception, I suppose, until s3.
- Nina's angry objection to the hospital being used to cover up for a vampire murder - which triggers her leaving George, though it's not the deeper cause - and rejecting the rationale that this is necessary in order for the vampires as well as the other supernaturals remain hidden in retrospect works as great foreshadowing to what she'll do when confronted with Mitchell's murders in s3.
First of all, no matter how often Toby Whitehouse claims not to have watched BTVS, bringing Ivan and Daiy for s2 after Herrick in s1 follows the "hedonistic modern vampire couple follows conventional vampire mastermind" pattern too closely for me to believe him. That being said, Ivan and Daisy don't resemble Spike and Dru at all, personality wise, and the show uses them in different ways from the way Buffy used Spike and Dru in its second season as well. But I defy you not to watch their introduction episode and think of it. Something that one notices only with all five seasons in mind, though, is this: s2 is unique in the way it presents vampires as a group. In all other seasons, Being Human brings on a distinct class code - vampires are mostly rich, affluent, parasitic and intensely snobbish, werewolves by contrast are mostly poor, working class or middle class at best, and tend to be among the exploited rather than among the exploites. Doesn't mean we don't get the occasional working class vampire in other seasons as well, but by and large, this is true, and of course is nowhere more focused on than in the vampires amusing themselves via putting werewolves in cage fights.
Not in s2. Daiy and Ivan in the first episode deliver a few "dog" taunts at George, but that's it. No cage fights, and a notable lack of vampires-taunt-and-bully-werewolves scenes throughout the season. Nor do the vampires plot the vampocalypse. Instead, Ivan aside, none of the vampires we see strike one as rich. Instead, vampires who get screentime other than Ivan and Daisy are the vampire who first jumps on board of Mitchell's Vampires Anonymous idea, presented as basically an honest working class bloke, and the pathetic Kara - and I do mean pathetic in the sense of having pathos - , the kindly hospital dinner lady transformed by Herrick into his devoted follower, dim, loyal and presented as dirty and homeless while her two victims are rich and affluent. When Mitchell punishes Kara for this - a power demonstration which gets the vampire community behind him - by breaking out her teeth and walling up her up underground - the narrative while having established a necessity for his actions still devotes a lot of time to her helpless cries and also directly parallels Mitchell with the witch hunters in the opening teaser of the same episode. (Which, given how this season ends, is important.) Wait, there is another rich vampire other than Ivan: Karl, a one episode character whom I had misremembered dying in his episode, a vampire who lived without blood for decades and once helped Mitchell get clean. Karl after decades of being on the wagon fell off it and killed his (male) lover, which is presented as tragic - for Karl, who immediately rues the deed. (The flashback of Mitchell getting clean aside, where he has just one line, we never "meet" the lover, other than as a corpse.) S2 is as sympathetic as Being Human ever gets to vampires as a group, not just to individuals, without, however, downplaying just how dangerous they are. (Again, see how it ends.) This is important, given that the season antagonists, both big and little, are human. (One key big difference to how s2 of BTVS used Spike and Dru.) As far as Little Bads are concerned, you have the police constable who had a deal with Herrick and tries to blackmail Mitchell into becoming his personal assassin, who is a corrupt and negative character (though not in a caricature way); whereas the Big Bads are Kemp, who with the exception of the Devil himself in s5 is just about the worst antagonist of the show, and Lucy, who has layers and is written more sympathetic than not but whose narrative has other problems. I'll get to that.
Seriously, though: Kemp is as bad as I remembered. He gets one measly flashback to explain why he is how he is (wife and child murdered by vampires), and otherwise not only walks around as the cliché of the evil fanatic priest personified, whose actions even by his own goals are blatantly illogical and just there so the plot can proceed (I'm thinking in particular of him killing Lucy in the season finale). Now it's not that you can't do a vampire and supernatural beings hunter whom revenge has driven into becoming evil himself, and still make that person three dimensional and layered; step forward, Daniel Holtz of Angel fame. But while my main objection to Kemp - I thought he was just there to make Mitchell's horrendous actions look better by comparison, which as s3 proved turned out not to be the case - is not there anymore, the fact remains he feels like a lazily written character, with no depth and dimension. A walking plot device, which most BH characters are not. The fact that we get Kemp in the same season in which vampires, plural, as opposed to just one or two of them, are presented at their most sympathetic feels like additional easy emotional manipulation.
On to the good stuff, though: because you can make a case, in retrospect, that the actual Big Bad of s2 isn't Kemp (or Lucy), but Mitchell, despite the fact that in the first half of the season he's also at his most sympathetic. As opposed to his panicked abandonment of Lauren (btw, loved the little detail that when Mitchell has his first flirtatious conversation with Lucy on a bench in the hospital park, this bench is revealed to have the plate "in loving memory of Lauren Drake") at the start of the saga, this time he makes a serious effort to deal with the fallout from Herrick's death from the get go. He does try to not only prevent the vampires going on to an anarchic free for all slaughtering (oh, the irony), but also to give them something to strive for. When Daisy points out that it's easy for Mitchell to talk about having managed to get on the wagon, because he always had help, he comes up with the Vampires Anonymous scheme, which seems to work (until a certain plot point). However, there are little signs that even in this Mitchell-really-tries phase point towards his fatal flaw. When Ivan, recruited by Mitchell to become a spokesperson so that other vampires will try to abstain, admits that he can't do it and instead suggests only pretending to be on the wagonn for the benefit of the other vampires while secretly continuing to feed, Mitchell's reaction is: "Do you have any idea of what you're asking of me?" Of him, mind. Not of, say, the people Ivan is going to feed on. No, the great sacrifice here is that of Mitchell's moral integrity. No wonder then, that when the next ugly compromise comes in the shape of the corrupt police captain, Mitchell grows more disenchanted of the whole project, though he still continues until the cop demands the assassination service from him, at which point Mitchell snaps and kills the cop. At which point he basically washes his hands of the vampire community project in favour of his personal redemption narrative, by asking his current love interest to become his new saviour. "I can do it", he tells her, "if only I had a reason", and that she must be this reason.
The woman in question is Lucy, who happens to work with Kemp on the supposed study and actual elimination of supernaturals. When Mitchell finds out that instead of becoming his next personal saviour, Lucy set him up to get exploded together with the rest of Bristol's vampires (minus Daisy and Kara, the other two survivors), his incredibly revealing reaction is: "For three years I've protected them, and this is how they repay me?"
Note: "they", i.e. humanity. Not Lucy the individual. (This is Mitchell's reaction to his neighbours suspecting him of pedophilia from s1 all over again.) Also the casting of himself as humanity's protector, a hero. Um. We've seen Mitchell protect the occasional individual, and also, see above, make a serious effort to prevent the aftermath of Herrick's death make the vampire population of Bristol run amok. But we've also heard him admit, just an episode earlier in the Josie flashbacks, that he has had a tremendously high amount of victims during the course of his long unlife. But most of all: it's all about him. At this point, he has no idea what motivated Lucy. And frankly, there are a lot of good reasons to blow up a bunch of lethal predators, each of whom qualifies as a serial killer, even if they haven't killed during the last few weeks. But the idea to see humans killing vampires as justified doesn't even enter his head. No, it's all a personal betrayal, of ungrateful humanity to their saviour. At which point it's Mitchell - not Daisy, who goes along with his idea, but doesn't suggest it, which will be important in the s3 opener where he immediately tries to blame her when adressed by one of his victims - who decides this calls for a massacre of random strangers in a box car. Mitchell's story as a whole works as a deconstruction of the romantic, redemption seeking vampire so well not because he's not presented as romantic but because he is. Only in a way that consciously shows the incredible egotism of the romantic temperament at every corner. When Mitchell tells Lucy, in the final episode and just a day after the massacre, that the difference between them is that she had a choice in her actions, the instant rewriting of history and self delusion is breathtaking. (As, again, the previous episode made very clear that it was Mitchell's and only Mitchell's idea and choice to committ the massacre.)
Something else I found fascinating in the light of his s3 responses to this is that s2 makes far more obvious than I remembered the extent of what George knows. When he and Annie find Mitchell post massacre in the house, Annie concludes from Mitchell's strange manner that he's drunk (of alcohol), but George, by contrast, immediately deduces something other than alcohol happend. In s1, when he realises that Mitchell killed and sired Lauren, George is horrified, disappointed and runs home to deck him, but he's not actually surprised, and he doesn't hand out ultimatums. Here, he is just as horrified, but he doesn't confront Mitchell anymore, his instinct is to get himself, Nina and Annie out of the house, and later to call Mitchell on the phone to say "you can't keep doing that, I can't keep dragging you back". Which is at a point where he can't know/guess more than "Mitchell must have killed again", not the extent of it. At the very end of the episode, however, when Mitchell listens to a radio report on the box car massacre, George switches it off, and a few lines later when Mitchell says George never asked him what happened before Mitchell showed up at the lab says "I can't be your confessor... I need you too much". All of which foreshadows their scenes in the s3 finale, when Mitchell is forced to see how much this silent acceptance has become enabling and has corrupted George.
George in general, though, I'm far less furious with than I was when s2 was originally broadcast. I mean, I still think he acts like a dick in the s2 opener (not solely, but especially towards Nina), but I can also see his pov somewhat (before realising he made Nina into a werewolf, he reads her behaviour as his worst nightmare come true, that she'd be disgusted by him and reject him once she knows the truth, and promptly tries to hurry the process), and the first episode aside, he's a really good friend to Annie throughout the season. (The George and Annie friendship is so easily comfortable with each other by now that when George near the end to the season says to Annie "I love you", the question of this being misunderstood by either Annie or the audience as having romantic undertones is not even raised.) Moreover, his rebound relationship with Sam may be self deluded but not deliberately trying to hurt anyone.
Annie, too, has a stronger season than I remembered. I mean, I still think the way the show first lets her manifest herself all the time and then pushes the reboot button on her powers again comes across as a blatantly Doylist "we need Annie to be invisible to non supernaturals again" instead of making character sense, but whatever, Annie in this season is a very active character rather than reacting to other people's actions. It's her idea to work in a pub at the start of the season (when she still can manifest), to learn from Sid how to close the "doors" through which ghosts go or can get dragged, to visit the psychic showman and make him interact with the ghosts again. Even to fix up the pub owner with his former girlfriend. (The episode where another ghost makes her babysit now doesn't look so random anymore, in view of what's to come in s4.) Her developing friendship with Nina at the beginning and near the end of the season is lovely to watch, too.
All of which makes it the more frustrating that her part in the last third of the finale falls into the black hole of Kemp being a badly written villain and the plot making more sense. After a season in which we saw Annie learn and then prove she can resist the "doors", the idea that Kemp, after killing his hapless psychic sidekick, can suddenly perform an exorcism well enough (after failing at that earlier) for Annie to get dragged through a door is ludicrous. And only sets up yet another scene that's even more "what the hell?" ludicrous, is Kemp, because that's what Mad Priests (tm) do, show up in the middle of the night to kill Lucy, which in turn allows Annie to get through the door enough to drag him through it, but for some reason not to stay herself. Which in turn sets up Mitchell deciding to go and rescue her, which needs to happen in order to the s3 plot to unfold, but good lord, couldn't it have been set up in more character sense making ways? The way it is, it's such an obvious "we don't want to leave either Lucy or Kemp as loose ends, or deal with them in the next season, so we'll just have Kemp kill Lucy and then Annie drags Kemp into hell, so Annie can do something badass in the finale" thing.
Lucy, now: the actress I had first seen as Cleopatra in Rome, and she gets to play a very different role here. I like and appreciate that she actually looks like a scientist in her thirties (could even be a young looking 40s), a woman who doesn't have the time to put on elaborate make up or fix her hair every day. I also like that if BH had to do a take in the "mad scientist" trope, as horror shows do sooner or later, it picked a female one rather than a male one. And the early conversations between her and Mitchell have enough wit and charm to make it believable both that he would be attracted, and that she would. Lastly, having her conflicted not just because Mitchell's that handsome but because the thought of the four werewolves who died in the course of her experiments haunt her is good.
However. Kemp is so obviously evil, fanatic and bad news that having a scientist, even one who believes in "intelligent design" and for this got ostracized, going along with him as an ally, more than that, making him into a superior she's listening to makes Lucy look naive and stupid at best, which presumably is not the intention. Also, while making her a believer gives her initial common ground with Kemp, it would have made more sense if the reason for her experiments had been scientific curiosity rather than faith - I mean, otherwise why bother to make her a scientist at all? And then there's her ending. As I said: lazy.
Minor things:
- This season has some great flashbacks, notably the ones with young Josie and with Herrick, drenched in yellow light, and intercut with Mitchell making Lucy into the next saviour figure in the present, and the black and white Ivan and human!Daisy flashback during WWII, showing how they met. (And that Daisy did make a choice, as opposed to many another vampire.) The only thing that struck me as anachronistic was Josie's joke about wanting to be married to David Bowie in 1969 (surely that's more a 1972/73 thing to want?), but I suppose she could have been a very early fan. Herrick's remark to Mitchell that "becoming a vampire doesn't change your nature, that's just what we tell newbies to get them through the first few kills; what it does is liberate your nature" is self-serving, but born out by the characterisation of the majority of vampires, if you define "liberate" as "pushing the id to the forefront".
- Daisy helping Kara to resurrect Herrick at the end, though, still makes as little sense as ever
- Mitchell tends to have only male friends (Karl, Ivan), whereas he makes the women he grows close to into romantic interests almost immediately (Josie, Lucy) or at least has sex with them (Daisy, for value of 'close' - shared interests after Ivan's death, is more like it). Which makes Annie an exception, I suppose, until s3.
- Nina's angry objection to the hospital being used to cover up for a vampire murder - which triggers her leaving George, though it's not the deeper cause - and rejecting the rationale that this is necessary in order for the vampires as well as the other supernaturals remain hidden in retrospect works as great foreshadowing to what she'll do when confronted with Mitchell's murders in s3.
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Date: 2013-08-15 12:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-08-16 06:46 am (UTC)