Summary: Nikita’s Xander Berkeley guest stars in a solid episode that continues to up the improvements and play with the changes the show made in the premiere .
If you have not seen this episode yet and don’t wish to be spoiled, don’t continue reading.
Recap
Sally says goodbye to the reanimated Stevie and Nick (who has reunited with Zoe.) She and Josh get a phonecall from Aidan, who’s managed to crawl away from the wreckage to reach a pay phone. The roommates reunite and reflect on how much things have changed, and Sally wants to go out with everyone to enjoy the newfound humanity. It’s the full moon, though, so Nora will have to be locked up, and Aidan has to attend to other business.
Aidan visits the blood hooker, who’s out of business because of the flu. She gives him information on where to maybe fine a new blood source, but instead he gets ambushed. However, Henry rescues him, and takes him back to his home. Henry is keeping a woman with him, posing her as his girlfriend, but in reality she’s a prisoner with clean blood. Aidan is reminded of his prison-esque experience in the coffin, so he frees her. He tries to get Henry to see his way, but Henry refuses and runs off.
Nora convinces Josh to go out and enjoy his life, because he doesn’t have to save anyone, including her. He does, and goes out with Sally, who runs into someone she once knew in her old life, Troy. He immediately recognizes her, and she makes up a story about faking her death. The two hit it off, but before they can have sex, he feels sick and leaves, promising to take her out the next day. Meanwhile, Josh spends the full moon walking around downtown, and decides he wants to propose to Nora.
The next morning, Troy is found dead outside of the house. Meanwhile, Brynn and Conner’s father arrives, having found out about Conner’s death, and tries to get information from Nora about Brynn’s disappearance. He locks himself in the storage locker with her, and when Josh arrives in the morning, both have ripped out and escaped.
Review
There’s a lot of really good pieces in this episode. It doesn’t all totally jibe thematically, at least not on the level the show worked to do in its early days, but not trying so hard to tie in its characters to some vague, pretentious monologue seems to be working to the show’s benefit. Also, Season 2’s biggest fault was its fragmentation of the main storylines, but this episode manages to keep the separation and connectivity relatively balanced. Sally even straight-up points out that Aidan has a knack for doing things on his own, and then getting screwed over because of it.
In this case, Aidan’s plot is still quite separated from the rest of the group, a problem which has persisted since the first season. It does, however, seem as though this time is being spent to tie up the loose ends from last year’s vampire mythology overload. Henry’s story kind of petered out by the end of season 2, and I wouldn’t have minded him simply dying offscreen because of how his character kind of failed. But it seems like he’ll be utilized better now, functioning as more of a direct foil to Aidan than the broad brother/enemy relationship that kind of fell flat before. With that, I’m willing to give his return a chance. However, while keeping his own personal blood source locked up was certainly creepy, considering the horrible things we’ve seen Aidan and the other vampires do (and concepts like blood hookers) it didn’t quite hit the mark of horror it should have. It was cleverly used to mirror Aidan’s experience, though, which seems like it’s going to be recurring for a while. His speech reflecting on his darker self last year was also fairly insightful, even if a little clunky.
Aidan’s reunion with his roommates—and the comical whirlwind of how much has changed just over the course of two episodes—was a fun, and he got some good scenes with all of them. What wasn’t expected was the tension between he and Sally, which I’m still not sure was organic or forced. It’s an oddity that such a romance between the leads on a show like hasn’t been teased yet, but circumstances had it set up as an impossibility for so long that it just…never seemed like an option. So it’s kind of clever to have such a thing sneak up. It’s a little random, but they’re also in similar-yet-opposite situations, with being the similarly contradictory living dead. But at the same time, like Aidan himself obliquely said, it’s really weird. We’ll have to see how or if this plays out.
Josh continues the upward slope his character has been on this season, with a much more optimistic and less obnoxious attitude. Nora’s attitude is much lighter too, and the idea that things are okay for once has kept up that much-needed lightness I talked about last week. There can still be conflict and dark times, but it’s not worth it if we can’t contrast it with scenes of Josh taking off his hood and happily deciding to marry his girlfriend. It’s wonderful growth for Josh’s character, and while I still think season 2 got too dark for its own good, the fact that the aftermath has led to optimism rather than more nonstop doom and gloom is a refreshing take.
And there’s certainly still some doom and gloom, what with Sally accidentally killing the hot guy she used to know. It’s kind of hard to sympathize with her plight, since you’d think all the characters would be genre savvy enough by this point to know that a witch saying something bad will happen means something bad will happen. Yeah, we got the “she’s so happy to be alive and wasn’t thinking!” excuse, but considering where all the blind indulging Sally did last year led her, you’d think she’d have learned. Though, it’s certainly not out of character for her; it’s more frustrating to see how much she hasn’t learned.
Xander Berkeley is engaging in pretty much any role he’s in, so getting him for what ought to be a pivotal role is nothing short of a coup. Bonus points here, too, considering the actors playing his children—while not the strongest actors—do bear some resemblance to Berkeley. Either way, Berkley made a great impression in what wasn’t a whole lot of screentime, convincingly pulling off the sympathetic/sinister dichotomy his children also portrayed last season. It’s nice that he wasn’t introduced as a villain so much as someone who’s honestly desperate, but can still provide ample conflict.
This season has done surprisingly well at carrying and expanding upon the open ends from season 2. While it doesn’t necessarily make up for how season 2 kind of dropped off at the end, the elements are being used fairly well thus far. We already have much more momentum and a wealth of material to play with only two episodes in, and while this particular episode might have been a little slow on the uptake, it’s continually engaging and clearly building momentum even now.
Odds & Ends
- I guess it would have been superfluous to show more gravedigging scenes, but it’s still weird how Nick and Stevie’s awakenings were skirted over. Wouldn’t have been gruesomely cool to see them freaking out as rotted corpses for a bit before they were dug up and reanimated?
- Speaking of which, Stevie’s farewell was very sweet and surprisingly honest.
- I quite like the running gag of Sally spending all of Josh’s money.
- Nora had a “slutty punk phase.”
- Despite having two human roommates now, Aidan still can’t drink drink from Josh or Sally because of the flu and living-deadness, respectively. I appreciate the attention to those potential plotholes, and that they were closed off without being too overexpository.
