Jan 28, 2014
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| Image Credit: IMDB |
I thought it was funny….
Back to your regularly scheduled lycanthropy!
Last week saw the “Mutt” attacking two more young women. The show continues to be a little ghoulish with the wolf killings. The problem is that the atmosphere of danger and mystery being built isn’t well defined enough to make the gruesome killings feel appropriate for this series. There’s still too much of a mishmash of seemingly unrelated plot lines, mostly the girlfriend of Logan and boyfriend of Elena. Speaking of Elena: the second episode saw our protagonist spar/flirt (Splirt? Flar?) with both Clay and Nick. Then Nick and Clay also have to spar while shirtless, for some reason. Let no one ever say this show doesn’t understand it’s audience. The rest of the episode sprinkled in bits of Clay’s past—turns out his now deceased father was also a Mutt hunter by profession, but got killed while on the hunt.
Last night’s episode was much more exciting on the whole. There was a night club wolf out, a tense showdown between Nick, Peter, Logan and a businessman Mutt named Karl Marsten who wants his own territory, and Clay killed a guy. Yeah. That escalated quickly.
I have to say, I didn’t think the series would manage to reach its full potential this early. The first episode was overwrought and reliant on clichés about balancing a dual life. But by this episode the show has neatly refocused on the hunt for the Mutt, and is much better for it. Elena Michaels isn’t the kind of character that is good at pretending to be who she’s not, and the show makes this clear up front by her inability to keep her story straight. So when she is given a task she actually knows how to do-- instead of forcing herself into a dress so she can make small talk with her boyfriend’s mother—she is immediately more interesting and likable. The tension between her and Clay is just icing on the cake.
The sequence to which “Trespass” attaches all its dramatic weight is undoubtedly the showdown between Elena and the Mutt at the bar. What I enjoyed so much about this was how neither Elena nor Clay were fully comfortable with letting one another take control; Elena is obviously less experienced hunting Mutts than Clay, but she’s anxious to finish things and fully aware of Clay’s disconnect with the “human world”. As badass as Clay is, he’s not exactly the kind of person who blends in. Not just because he’s built like a linebacker and has a weird obsession with going shirtless, but because he has no use for humans. So Elena’s refusal to infiltrate the club with him is a logical source of tension. But to Clay’s credit, he is fully capable of appearing human (he is, apparently, a college professor), he just doesn’t like to fake it as much as Elena seems to. Clay’s been hinting since the beginning that he doesn’t buy into Elena’s own fakery either, so I have to wonder if he wasn’t intentionally bowing to Elena’s argument in order to let her feel the rush of hunting the Mutt on her own. Of course, when Elena ends up making the Mutt wolf out, not realizing he’s too new to know how to control his transformation, and the club is soon being terrorized by a rabid werewolf.
I said in the initial review that the CGI for the wolves is a bit cheesy, but it works surprisingly well in the scenes from the night club. The wolf moves with a lightness that makes it obviously fake, but it borders on looking like a creature that is simply beyond the kind of animal you would see in the real world. If nothing else, the gore is excellently handled. One poor guy is having his guts eaten when Elena catches up to the wolf and scares it off, we see just enough of a hint of his lower intestine to get the point without actually wanting to puke.
The rest of the scene plays out as one would expect—Elena forces the wolf out into the parking lot, where the sheriff has arrived amidst the madness of clubgoers fleeing. Clay doesn’t get the chance to do much before the sheriff puts a couple of rounds from her sidearm into our Mutt. The Mutt then charges her, but is hit by a passing vehicle which I have to assume is being driven by a drunk driver since it didn’t even pretend to slow down. But the most pivotal scene of this sequence is still to come. Remember that random clubber who lost a piece of his intestine to the Mutt? Well since he was bitten, he’s starting to transform.
Clay and Elena rush in to figure out how to fix their little problem. Elena suggest putting him in something called “The Cage,” which will presumably allow him to transform without risking the lives of those around him. Clay doesn’t seem to agree after seeing the poor guy’s needles. He chokes the guy out as casually as a normal person would kill a cockroach.
There are two reasons this scene is so powerful. The first is obvious: the turmoil that Elena seems to feel over killing has already been underlined by a flashback in the previous episode. But seeing her conflict is more palpable here, because she’s probably very capable of stopping Clay. Or at least doing more than pleading with Clay not to kill the man. Her not throwing down and putting her own life on the line to make Clay see reason suggests she’s not so sure she’s not wrong. Part of her also likely wants to save the poor guy the presumably incredible pain of the initial transformation. But the other reason is more subtle, as most things seem to be with Clayton Danvers. The little we know of Clay suggests he’s the “good soldier” type, doing everything he’s commanded to do by Jeremy. The idea that he’s okay with murder, so long as Jeremy commands it, is pretty much par for the course. But taking the bitten guy’s life here is a move he makes without any instruction from Jeremy. Beyond that, he does it even though he’s well aware Elena would disapprove of it. Too often in supernatural thrillers there’s such a focus on the romance between certain characters that one or both characters absolutely refuse to take actions that make them less appealing to their love interest. The fact that Clay begrudgingly carries out what he sees as his duty and risks alienating Elena over it makes him feel more real as a character. I can’t understate how awesome it is that he’s not just pining over Elena (or vice versa).
With the hunt for the Mutt seemingly over, Elena decides to return home, and she intimates to Jeremy that her decision is due to how dark the environment is at Stonehaven. The rest of the episode appears to be bringing Elena back to the painful duality that made the pilot so dissatisfactory. There’s a dinner with Phillip, Logan and his girlfriend, and lots of quickly improvised lies about their “family.” And then, a sucker punch: Logan gets a call from Clay and reveals that Peter was gruesomely murdered not too far from Stonehaven. Elena naturally agrees to return, and now the entire group is presumably ready to avenge the death of their friend.
All of which leaves the series in an interesting position. I have no doubt that if the books are followed the series could become really amazing, but the fact that Logan has an inquisitive girlfriend and Phillip’s background has expanded make me feel like the humans are going to take on an unwelcome importance in the main plot. I suppose we’ll see how things develop.
Getting Ducks in a Row:
- I’m so glad the creepy/rapey Mutt is gone. He had a pretty awesome death scene, too.
- We should start a shirtless quota to keep track of how many times Clay removes his shirt, probably.
- I feel kind of bad; I had to go through all the imdb pages for actors in this series in order to find Peter’s name. Poor, forgettable Peter.
Grade: 8.5/10
