"You've stepped into the middle of a war between an ancient evil and a twisted secret society."
Agent Rachel Winter is a C-TAC agent investigating the strange discovery of teenager Kali Cunningham, and others, frozen in a strange genetics laboratory hidden below Battersea Power Station. Her investigations lead her to the mystery of the cloned Agent Bendix and ultimately to the Storyteller, the paranoid mentor figure Jude Redfield. Jude explains that The Institute, currently run by Severin, is in fact a secret society. Originally established to combat the city's deepest Evil - The Heart - it seems to have dangerously lost its way ...
Comment
Urban Gothic is unlike other genre shows in that the backstory is neither the entire modus operandi, as with The X Files, nor is it conprised of entirely stand-alone stories, like The Outer Limits or The Hunger. However, it's all very well having an ongoing mystery, clones, secret societies, hidden laboratories, unexplained characters and so on, but there also has to be a plot, and a resolution. Urban Gothic has succeeded with the former, but the latter still needs work.
Urban Gothic's plot is buried deep within a confusing structure of characters and events which relies to quite a large extent on viewers having seen, understood, and remembered previous episodes of the series. I'm all for building viewer loyalty, but there has to be something for casual viewers to latch onto as well, and for these 'arc' episodes, I suspect that casual viewers were left floundering. Making return appearances here are Rachel Winter (Sum of the Parts); Kali (Seratonin Wild), Severin (Seratonin Wild); Jude (Thirteen); plus references and flashbacks to Membrane. Despite a very brief but welcome summary sequence at the start, it is hard to know who (and in the case of Jude, what) the characters are, and what the situation they are in all means.
In some respects, it's easy to criticise. This two part story perhaps could (and should) have introduced the characters afresh, set up and re-explained the arc premise, and given first-time viewers a gripping and thought provoking adventure of good versus evil 2001-style. Unfortunately it doesn't and the result is a bit of a mess.
Aside from all this, there are scenes included which just don't make sense. In this episode, Cole appears to revive Kali by injecting her with something, and Kali later apparently uses the same needle to sedate the raving Bendix - it's not possible for the same drug to do both! Also it is established that if you try and kill a clone it doesn't work, and you need to kill the original to kill the clone ... an excellent idea but one which gets forgotten five minutes later as some mystery men start killing the clones in their underground storage bunker.
There are some really nice ideas here, but the script doesn't add clarity. Much of the explanation comes from Jude - nicely played by Tyber O'Neill, taking over from Sean Maguire from the first season - but there is too much spoken explanation, and not enough explanation by events and action.
The revelation that Severin is in charge of C-TAC, as well as The Institute, was a very nice twist, and Terrence Hardiman was simply superb as the evil brain behind it all. Cole, Winter and Kali run about a lot, and there's a neat radio controlled camera buggy. The Battersea Power Station location is used very well indeed and is quite impressive, as are the scenes in the clone bays - visually it's faultless.
The episode ends on a bit of a damp squib - it should have been a 'must watch next week' cliff hanger, but is a restatement of something said in the episode Seratonin Wild and repeated at the start of this episode: that Severin wants Kali to be the reincarnation of the Anti-Christ - a fact which seems to have little or no bearing on anything that has gone before ...
| Credits | |
| Written by | Tom deVille |
| Directed by | Chris Bould |
| Starring | Ania Sowinski (Kali Cunningham)
Adam Robertson (Thomas Cole) Kelle Spry (Rachel Winter) Terrence Hardiman (Severin) Tyber O'Neill (Jude Redfield) David Crow (Sean Bendix) |
Click here for full credit list | |
