Sami on Hunters 1.3 - In which we learn about Reagan

Hunters airs at 10pm on Syfy Monday nights!

I think it's still being damaged by being after the feels-stravaganza that is 12 Monkeys; it's very hard to jump right from whatever happened in the last few minutes of Monkeys into Hunters that is very much a slow-burn and much less...I don't want to say interesting, because it's very interesting, but it isn't as complex so far, and it doesn't hook me as strongly or as quickly. I continue to basically not care at all about whatever the case of the week is.

This week, it was blah blah blah terrorists funding themselves with drugs blah blah excuse to get into the jungle. There was a child soldier who could have been useful, that they shuffled off much the way they shuffled off Emme, who is also a teen girl who could be useful. There was a guy called Alejandro who was smart enough to figure out that they weren't looking for normal drug people, who then had to be killed because apparently murder is okay if you're in the ETU? Like, it's problematic whenever they try to talk about anything A-Plot on this show.

But there was also a huge focus on Reagan, and I liked that. She grew up thinking she was human until she almost killed someone as a child, then her dad showed her she's alien but apparently didn't tell her how to handle it--she wound up trying to cope by using all sorts of drugs and sex, but since she says in the non-flashbacks that alcohol doesn't work, I'm going to assume the drugs are minimal, too. She has to flee her house at sixteen with no understanding of what she is, and then gets "recruited" by the ETU in a way that sounds more like "do this or die in jail" and "we totally knew who you were all along and were looking for a chance to prey on your insecurities for our own ends". It didn't make me like him more, but did make me feel bad for her.

She's a total badass in modern times, and it's rough seeing her being such a mess in the past. I don't think bossman really cares that much about her, either, and that makes it worse.

Meanwhile, she and Flynn are on better terms. He's still trying to learn about her to understand his wife, who they're not chasing down today, and it feels like a set-up for a ship...which could be cool, if his wife wasn't his main driving point. Maybe after they find the wife and deal with her story in some way. Reagan and Flynn would be a lot less gross than her and McCarthy, who was blessedly absent this week. I think Flynn is basically a good guy, even if they seem to have forgotten that he has PTSD to deal with.

The Hunters had left the camp where they were brewing what looks like actual drugs and creepy alien-taken-from-humans drugs (that's the first the team has seen of that connection, I think), and killed most of the people that were just people, but there's still a monster in the woods. It's stalking them, and it's the reason they kill Alejandro--he freaks out when he figures out that monsters are real. 

But it also gives some of the very rare humor the show feels like it needs to allow--when the boss is all "abort" and Flynn fakes interference and goes "report? we'll finish the mission and then report!" and stops taking calls. I think he could be really fun, if they'd let him. And I think the show could really use the slight breaks from all the scowling and bickering and brooding. It would give the team members something in common, too, because they're not doing a very good job of team-building, and it's making them kind of the suckiest elite team ever.

I hope they start getting ahead of things soon, too, because they're always fumbling around in the dark and not getting much of anywhere. 

I missed Emme this week; she's still an underused resource. I missed the kitten*. I did not miss McCarthy being the grossest person ever, but I think he's probably behind the attack that drove Reagan out of her house at sixteen. It seemed like there's a division between the ones who want to blend in just to blend**, and those who want to blend in just to later come out and blow stuff up, and she grew up on the hiding side. Maybe McCarthy's weird interest in her is because she was pointedly hidden--she's biologically or culturally or historically important. That would be super cool, and it would be very important that she's  on the human side, if that's the case.

Hunters could be so cool. There's this whole pile of awesome, progressive ideas that I haven't seen on any other show. But they seem to be tangled up in a contest to be more gritty than they need to be, with a lot of shock-value choices that keep coming at me so that they aren't as shocking as they could be and ARE more annoying than they're intended to be. And in the meantime, their good ideas keep being underused.

On the other hand, this episode feels like things are coming together, a little, and that's a good sign. If they can get on the ball before the mid-point, they've got a chance! 

Here's what I'm seeing around all the messy gratuitousness:

• A kickass lady-lead who is alien but wants to be human: she's not happy with what she is and keeps trying to drown it, but that's where all her literal power is, and she's probably important to her own people in a way we don't know yet.***
• A male lead who is founded on manliness--he's an ex marine--but who is compromised by the trauma of that life so that he can't do it anymore, and then is thrust into a world where those skills are needed but he should have to find other ways to the same results.
• Music as a weapon.
• A girl who has perfect recall and doesn't have standard human reactions to things, who could really be an asset.
• A shifty boss who has a hardass boss of his own, neither of which seem to care all that much about the actual team they're running, and a crew of scientists who look to be poised to get stuck between team and leadership.
• Aliens who communicate with synaesthesia!
• A mole in the agency!

I don't care about the terrorism angle. But there's lots else to play with! Go play, Hunters!

 *They showed too much of the kitten in the first ep for it not to be convenient to the story later! Bring back the kitten!^
^Or have I been spoiled by 12 Monkeys, where Everything Matters, and I'm over-estimating this show?
**I feel like her parents should have raised her with some coping mechanisms--"you have sensory problems, things will seem too loud or too bright, here's how you deal with that". Save them the trouble of "oh no, my daughter almost killed a kid"...
***Is she the only female Hunter we know? Would we be able to tell if the others were male or female? Do they always pick the human gender that corresponds?

Hunters 1.2 - In which things get more interesting but not much clearer

Hunters airs at 10pm on Syfy Monday nights, right after 12 Monkeys!

I feel a little bad for Hunters, coming right after 12 Monkeys--as a lead-in, it's probably not a bad idea, since they'd likely have a similar audience, but Hunters is gloomier and much newer, and probably suffers from everyone still talking about what happened on 12 Monkeys and not paying attention. I know that's what I was doing, and it looked like a lot of people on Twitter were, too!

The plot was pretty straight-forwardly reactionary to last episode: Flynn is getting ticked that it's taking so long to find Abby, McCarthy is cleaning house by blowing up places that hold evidence, and he's taunting the ETU by calling them by names and threatening to blow more stuff up unless they give him the body they captured last episode. Flynn and Reagan talk to the dead guy's wife, who claims she didn't know he's an alien, and then proves that she actually did all along when she's the one that sets off the next bomb.

The fun stuff is between all these plot-boxes to check off.

Emme is not happy at school--they put gravy on everything and she hates gravy--but Flynn remembers that she has really good memory for details and goes to ask her about the people they're looking for. She's also got Aspergers, that makes her faceblind, so the pictures don't help, but Flynn lets her hear the message-song and it triggers a memory of going to a music shop with Abby. The song was playing loudly out of some guy's headphones, and the music shop in question is the one that got blown up already. That leads them to see that McCarthy has been passing secret messages through the shops and the Spotify channel used for his remixes. 

It's great that Emme is neurodiverse and that it's being presented as a plus, not a problem. Flynn doesn't know what to do with her and would obviously be a terrible single dad, but he knows when her strengths would be needed, and they're the key that unlocks what they need to track McCarthy down!

And the second thing that comes of that song being used in the investigation, is that Reagan realizes she has synaesthetic communication! The clicks and distortions embedded in the song form a picture in her mind and "the colors come from the shapes of the sounds"--and that's very exciting! As a synnie myself, it's super cool when someone comes up with a way to use it that makes it useful for the plot and interesting for the character.* It means the actual language of the Hunters is intrinsically and fundamentally different from human languages. It's built on conveying images though this crossed senses thing, and that's so cool.

Because of what she sees, they know which music shop is going to be hit next, and they get there and evacuate it before the crazy culty wife blows the place up. Reagan manages to save her and Flynn from the blast, but something about the whole day makes her go all animalistic and she tears the woman's throat out with her bare hands--and horrifies herself.

Through the whole episode, there's been beef between her and Flynn because he doesn't trust that she's different from the people they're hunting. She admits that she doesn't know what planet she's from or how she was born, but she is on their side--she's not the mole that the dead guy warned them was in the ETU. Oddly, it's the event with the bomb that makes Flynn warm up to her, maybe because she saved his life. He asks about her periodic skin condition and says that Abby never had something like that, but Reagan says that with enough lotion, it goes away and you'd never know. Flynn digs through Abby's stuff and finds about twenty bottles of lotion, and he's not happy about it. He's been denying that she's an alien and wouldn't have told him--and the culty wife makes that worse by saying so pointedly that her husband wanted her to know who and what he is. 

Meanwhile, McCarthy tortures a blonde girl and takes like a core sample out of her back, then injects it into himself like a drug, and it's GROSS. She's not Abby, but he lets Flynn think she is so that he can get the drop on him and finish him off, except that Reagan stops him. He almost kills her, and then seems to notice that something is different about her--and instead sort of hangs over her with her pinned to the ground in a weirdly about-to-make-out thing while he clicks at her and she seems frozen in place. What is he saying to her? She doesn't say, but she does say that it's harder for her to control herself when the skin condition flares up, and she's scared--she wants some treatment her boss has, but he wants her strong and fast and tells her, basically, to suck it up.

McCarthy also creepily does some other blonde girl in the shower after saying he'll have to "punish you again", and then, later, has a third girl in the car waiting while he meets with a deformed-looking guy in a cloak and feeds some skin he tore off Reagan's arm to a giant mouth in the man's chest. Such a weird and intriguing and gross note to leave it on!

He's creepy, guys. He's got this predatory thing down that makes sense for someone who is actually a vicious alien predator, but it seems to also bleed into being a sexual predator. It's icky as crap how he touches all the women he comes into contact with, like there's no difference between abuse and making out. Does he mesmerize the women? Is it a breeding imperative, or is he a monster in that, too? He's all big talk and violence, and he's incredibly off-putting, but he's also incredibly charismatic. I'm just worried I can't follow where they take him, if he goes too far into that woman-hating mess.

On the other hand, yay neurodiverse characters and helpful aliens and people with near-literal demons! I missed the kitten, and Flynn's PTSD, and there was no new message song, which is a shame because they could have a nice full 13-song soundtrack if they did a new one every week, but the characters are starting to work as a pretty effective team and Flynn is good at getting his butt beat without it stopping his mission. Reagan is so interesting, the alien trying to be human. I mean, she's vegetarian and watches Downton Abbey. I wonder if there's going to be a storyline about assimilation later, where she has to choose which world she'll belong to?

So far, the show is walking a pretty good line between government conspiracy, alien-body-horror gross-out, and scifi action, and it's given depth by the choices they're making with the characters and their roles. If they can keep the balance, and keep showing people's so-called "disorders" as secret strengths in a secret war, this could be an important show. It's already more interesting because of it!

What did you guys think? Comment below, or come talk to me on Twitter!

*And this way is more similar to how I experience it than the way they use it for Cassie in The Librarians, though I can't, as far as I know, communicate with it.

Hunters 1.1 - In which we meet a bunch of weird people and get no answers

Hunters airs at 10pm on Mondays (and will be paired with 12 Monkeys starting next week!)

The latest entry in Syfy's We Don't Suck Anymore initiative feels like it's going to continue the trend of actually being good! I feel like I shouldn't be surprised anymore--they've proved with several shows now that they're serious about it--but it still feels new. Maybe because all the shows still are new? And I am still surprised.

First off: the Hunters are the possibly-but-not-definitely-aliens who manage to live among humans as terrorists and, apparently, DJs, not the people who are out to stop them in another poorly-lit government office.* The humans are the Exo-Terrorism Unit, ETU, out to stop them from whatever totally unclear nefarious plots they have going on.

In this episode, we meet Flynn Caroll, an FBI agent who will be our in--he's got pretty bad PTSD but hasn't been benched for it, so I guess he works through it, and if we're lucky, it'll make him better able to handle something having to do with the Hunters. He's married to Abby, who has hearing aids that seem to actually do the opposite of usual ones; when she gets kidnapped, the baddie, McCarthy**, takes them out and hits her with a sonic barrage that makes her ears bleed (and happens to be built around remastered OMD songs from the 80s?). Flynn and Abby also have guardianship of a dead friend's daughter Emme who has a "spectrum disorder", so I guess she's Autistic in some form? She's not handling her dad being dead and Flynn being sort of unintentionally awful to her very well, and he puts her in a boarding school, but she's about the only one who speaks her mind directly and to the point on the show, so hopefully she'll be back. And rounding out the family is a kitten that wandered in and so far hasn't been named, but also gets a lot of screentime to not be important.

So Abby gets kidnapped and held in a tiny cage with constant music making her catatonic, and as Flynn goes looking for her, he meets the ETU who are hunting these terrorists. They've just lost someone from what looks like their only strike team, and Flynn gets into that spot because he's the main character. The team is weird, too. Reagan flirts by beating people up and no one seems to trust her, and she can sort of do what the Hunters do. The other guy is on loan from Australia and is not very nice to anyone. Their boss seems to be allergic to humor and throws a lot of words at Flynn without a chance to process any of them. The guy who seems to be spokesman for the scientists is nerdy and the most relatable of the team; he won me over when he was explaining OMD to everyone. 

And the aliens are creepy and gross! They wear human skins, but human ways of killing won't stop them and barely slow them down--they have to get hit with a sonic blast right in the head. They communicate with creepy clicking noises and McCarthy has been embedding them into his remixes as a way to communicate with his scattered operatives. This is the first time the ETU has caught one of these transmissions, and it's a manifesto with things like "love will swing the hammer" and "you will cry and you will die" and no real details about what they're actually going to do.

As a pilot, it sets up a lot, moves people into place pretty well, and then doesn't answer any of the questions it asks, but it's classed as a thriller, so I'm assuming the point of the show is to chase those questions till the end. It's intriguing, though. Reagan is snarky and closed off, and has all those quirks that make her a big interesting question mark. Flynn is in way over his head and knows it, but needs to find his wife--and hasn't yet found out that there's something going on with her. The baddies are bizarre and creepy and up to something we've barely discovered yet.

The show as a whole is dark and atmospheric, and scored with a great soundtrack and background music spooky enough that even the kitten scenes and the romantic ones are tense. You're always wondering what's going to happen next--when the next problem is gonna drop. 

The cast is nicely diverse--not just in race and gender, but also in neurodiversity; if they handle that stuff well, it might wind up being important for that alone, regardless of what happens in the rest of the season. 

So much is introduced and so little is answered that I could have used a 2 hour premier, but also it seems as if it's going to be an ongoing story rather than an episodic one, so if you're watching this baby, don't miss any!

I'm definitely coming back. Did you guys see it? What did you think? Let's talk in the comments, or come over and tweet at me on Twitter!

*Seriously, that's one of the trends in weird-TV right now--lighbulbs are so last decade or something.

**Julian McMahon who always makes me want to punch him within thirteen seconds of being on screen. I'm actually happy he's a baddie on this show, because it makes my gut reaction to him easier to handle--you're supposed to want to punch bad guys! I don't even know what it is; he's been around my shows for decades, and I just always want to punch him.