Four Things and a Lizard

Sanctuary premier: Yawn. October 5, 2008

Unfortunately, I didn’t get into this at all. In fact, I had to struggle to stay awake.

Sci-Fi had been hyping it for a while, and even shuffled up their regular Friday night schedule to put the two-hour premier into a prime spot, but frankly, I didn’t think it was worth all that effort.

It’s a show about monsters. Yeah, monsters. Interesting, no?

Well, no, actually, it doesn’t turn out to be all that interesting.

It’s not that the “monsters are actually real!” idea is inherantly worthless, because it’s not (check out True Blood if you don’t believe me). The problem with Sanctuary is that all it seems to offer the viewer is a long sequence of “oohs” and “ahhs” over the monster effects. That’s not enough to base a show on. I mean, what are they going to do in subsequent episodes? Just hunt monsters and put them in their big, secret monster zoo? Is that all?

Actually, it’s clear that the main hook on the show is intended to be Dr. Magnus (played by the fabulous Amanda Tapping). Problem is, not only was a lot of the mystery about her given away in this first double episode, but she is only one character. The male lead, whose name I can’t even remember at the moment, is virtually devoid of interest, and the daughter is about the same. One semi-interesting character and two cardboard cutouts are not enough to base a good show on, especially when most of the mysteries for Dr. Magnus are already revealed. Where else can they go? There are questions left open relating to Dr. Magnus’s longevity, as well as the story of how she got to where she currently is. Will that be enough? For myself, I can already tell the answer is “no.” (There are some wildcards, namely some of the more sentient creatures inhabiting the sanctuary. Will they play a role? Take the mermaid, for instance. Will they do anything interesting with her, or is she just intended for decoration?)

As for the story itself, there were actually two of them sandwiched together. One involved a boy with a prehensile tentacle growing out of his rib cage. The tentacle featured a mouthlike thing on the end that looked a lot like the mouth of a larval Goa’uld, only with four jaws instead of three. As a fan of Stargate: SG-1 and Amanda Tapping’s role on that show, I thought this was amusingly ironic. (What’s sad was that this moment of irony turned out to be the most interesting thing about the show.)

The other story centers around a villian, who turns out to be someone that Dr. Magnus had an affair with over 100 years ago. The affair led to a pregnancy, and even though this was over 100 years ago, Dr. Magnus, being brilliant and cutting edge, managed to extract the embryo, freeze it for close to 100 years, and then implant it (in herself, presumably), resulting in her now having a fully grown daughter. The girl’s father is evil with a capital “E”, though, and has to be done away with. Oh, and he’s got super-speed. Whoopee.

I don’t know about you, but I just wasn’t all that taken in with either of these ideas, especially when Daddy Evil turned out to be Jack the Ripper, an idea which felt like a totally gratuitous throw-in. Jack the Ripper references tend to annoy me anyway, because everyone knows that the Jack the Ripper mystery was already solved on the original Star Trek series over 40 years ago, in the episode “Wolf in the Fold.” ;)

In any case, I’m not going to belabor this anymore. I almost fell asleep at least a couple of times while watching, which means the interest level really wasn’t there for me. Why spend any more time on it?

Unless I end up hearing some real raves about subsequent developments on this show, I’m done.