We watched both hours of this creepy little show, and at the end of
those episodes, we still aren’t sure if we like it. It has a lot of
elements that we enjoy. We like the horror and supernatural elements, the
mystery, most of the cast, the Blair Witch Project-y filming, and the speed at
which answers are dispensed. The story was decent. We think the failure of the
characters to grab us in the first two hours is what made this show tedious to
watch at times. We just didn’t enjoy
watching it as much as we wanted to, even though we decided that it was objectively pretty good. We are
going to keep watching. It’s different than almost anything else on TV, and the
first season will only be seven episodes (eight if you count these as two, even
though they aired the same night), so we should probably give it the full season.
Maybe the characters will become people to us soon. We admire this show's weirdness.
Dr. Emmet Cole, a TV naturalist, disappeared in the Amazon
and was declared dead. His wife, Tess, gets a deal with the network to fund her
journey to find her husband, as long as they get to tape everything…and as long
as the Cole family’s only child, the grown Lincoln, goes with them. Lincoln is
estranged from his father (because all the long trips into the wild for TV took
the father away from his family) and would rather stay home and finish medical school, believing his father
to be dead. He can’t refuse his mother’s pleas and finds himself on a boat, on
a river, in the Amazon, looking for his father.
Our first complaint is that Lincoln could definitely be
hotter. The actor needs to eat some cheeseburgers. Our second complaint is that
Tess (generic widow name) is played by Leslie Hope, who annoyed us as Jack
Bauer’s wife in 24. She does a fair bit of screaming in The River and we don’t
appreciate it. She is also too thin to really be attractive, but at least she
has hair on this show.
Along for the ride is a produce, Clark, that Tess probably
boned and a camera crew. Clark is played by another 24 (and Lipstick Jungle!) alum, Paul Blackthorne,
who used to be decent looking, but age isn’t doing him any favors. At least he
still has his British accent. At the last minute, the gang is joined by Lincoln’s
childhood friend and daughter of the cameraman who went missing with Dr. Emmet
Cole. Her name is Lena, and she’s a pretty blonde. She does not annoy us, as
you might expect. Nope, all that is saved for screeching, manipulative,
cheating Tess.
There are two more players on this boat who need a
mention. There is the Captain, Emilio Valenzuela (pretty last name). He worked
with Dr. Cole in the past and has a psychic daughter named Jahel, who is also
beautiful. Jahel speaks no English. The network and Tess have hired a
professional bodyguard named Kurt Brynildson. He is very German, and yet his
accent doesn’t come across as gay, like most German accents. If we had to do
any guy on this boat, it might be him, quite frankly.
Lena helps them find Dr. Emmet Cole’s abandoned ship, the
Magus. Inside, they find a mysterious force that tears Lena’s leg. She needs
stitches. Through psychic Jahel and the examination of the evidence on the
boat, they decide that the force is the ghost of Emmet Cole’s last producer,
Cam Travers. The ghost destroys the group’s rafts and engines. Uh oh. Sh*t
just got real. Everyone panics, and it’s funny. They figure out that the reason
the ghost was encased in the Magus was because Dr. Emmett Cole trapped it in
the ship in the first place. That was their solution, so our crew decides that
they need to do a blood ritual and re-trap it.
During the ritual, Tess screams at the ghost, asking if
her husband is still alive. She gets a reply: Yep. Dr. Emmett Cole is alive.
Lincoln changes his tune of reluctance and is ready to plunge forward in the
search for is dad. Lena brought 104 archive tapes of the mission that brought
Dr. Emmett Cole to the Amazon anyway. He was looking for a) real magic and b) something
called The Source, and the journey involved shamanism and magic and other weirdness.
The German bodyguard has orders to take Dr. Emmett Cole out if the doctor has
found The Source. We don’t know who the orders are from.
In the second hour, one of Dr. Emmett Cole’s trained
dragonflies goes into Jahel’s mouth so that the doctor can use her as a
mouthpiece to talk to his wife. Dr. Emmet Cole tells Tess that she needs to
give up the search and go home. Something bad happened to him, but he wants his
wife out of it. One thing we do like about Tess is her determination to find
this guy. The gang goes into the jungle and finds a tree covered in dirty,
creepy dolls. Of course, they move a little. There’s also a really great shot
of a small monkey holding a doll face in front of its own. It turns around,
removes the doll face, and makes its monkey noises. That was kind of a scary
moment, even though it doesn’t sound scary. Dude, the dolls are creepy. We’re
telling you.
The group decides that this is the perfect place to set up camp. This tree has to do with a spirit and
the dolls are gifts to appease its anger or whatever. Lincoln sees his old
teddybear hanging from the tree and we get a flashback to Dr. Emmett Cole
giving his son a serious…and creepy…talk. The gist is 1) there’s a pendulum of
life and death, 2) someone might stop it from swinging, and 3) Lincoln might be
the child strong enough to do something. Then Dr. Emmett Cole gives Lincoln a
necklace, but we see later that Lena might be the person destined for this
vague, mysterious greatness.
Lincoln takes his teddybear back and this angers the
tree. The spirit tries to steal Lincoln’s mommy by pulling her into a muddy stream.
Lincoln and the others try to put the teddybear back, but it is rejected and
falls off the tree many times, even though they tie it on securely. Lincoln
hears the legend of the spirit of the tree and figures out what he has to do,
which is dig up a corpse and throw it in the river. Tess is pushed back from
underground, alive. This whole tree thing was pretty entertaining and just the
fun kind of scary that produces a few jumps and a few good laughs. It’s not
campy enough that you can’t take it seriously enough to watch, but you can tell
the show isn’t taking itself too seriously either. It's nice to see a horror show that doesn't just go right for shock and is building to something.
Episode grade (for both): B
No comments:
Post a Comment