Hemlock Grove
Netflix: 2013
Young Adult
I love a good werewolf story. Despite the gore factor, I feel comfortable reviewing Netflix’ new made for streaming series for Awake at Midnight because the 13 episodes are written at the Young Adult level and both protagonists are high school kids. This unapologetic treatment of teen culture –weed-smoking, bullying, and all– is believable. It feels a lot like Supernatural, (They even drive around in a bitchin’ vintage car,) and the graphic adult content, though intense, isn’t gratuitous. The story plays out more like a single movie rather than a soap opera, but it does do enough repetition of themes that if you wait a month before watching the next episode, you can pick up the story line again easily.
Lynda and Peter Rumancek , A mother and son, unabashed Gypsy thieves, arrive in Hemlock Grove looking to continue Uncle Vince’s business… in the supply line. He sold a drug that allows vampires to go without killing for their sustenance, (a la Morbius, the Living Vampire). With typical luck, on their first night, Brooke Bluebell is savagely killed.
Peter (and the wolf?) and local rich kid Roman Godfrey meet at the crime scene at night by accident, both fueled by curiosity. Peter instantly recognizes that Roman is an Upir, but strangely that he doesn’t know it.
Christina Wendell is a novelist, as she likes to introduce herself, who for some strange reason is best friends with two ‘Barbies,’ the daughters of the local Sheriff. Christina is introduced in a confrontation with Peter where she calls him out as a werewolf because his middle and index finger are the same size (at least we know he’s not a psychopath, that’s the index and ring fingers,) to which he responds with an apt Twilight joke about a three-way with a vampire.
Olivia Godfrey, “the most beautiful and despised woman in Hemlock Grove,” (who works in her greenhouse just like our beloved Morticia Addams,) is overly controlling and manipulative. She is widow to J.R. Godfrey and mother to Roman and Shelley. There are some overt Oedipal insinuations with her coddling of Roman, but it becomes clear just how obsessed with ensuring that he will thrive she is. Olivia’s love interest now lays with Norman, her late husband’s brother. Will she destroy him the way she destroyed J.R.?
It is interesting to watch the game play out between Olivia and Lynda. Olivia gets truly angry that her son is inviting that Gypsy filth into her home, but Lynda is just waiting it out knowing that the aristocrat will soon be out of her magical eye-drop medicine.
Shelley Godfrey (as in Mary W. Shelley?) is a deformed teenage girl who is teased mercilessly by townsfolk and schoolmates, but is protected by her brother, Roman, and befriended by Peter.
Peter believes the murderer to be a Vargulf, a werewolf that’s gone insane; “it doesn’t eat what it kills.”
Enter the werewolf hunter Clementine Chasseur who works for a religious organization called The Order of The Dragon (a la Being Human,) who is a lesbian (a refreshing inclusion, yet we are supposed to be –shocked- at this, though I’m not really sure why,) To pretty much sum up her character profile: Troubled Tough-Chick Seeking Redemption. She’s not a likeable character, but she is certainly fascinating in a car-crash sort of way. I want to call her a bad-guy, but in this show, again refreshingly, there are no clear-cut good guys or villains, just the beautiful people.
Artificial organs, genetic study, lifesaving cellular therapies… The Godfrey Institute leads the world in developing these groundbreaking techniques.
Roman may be the sole heir to the Godfrey fortune, (Shelley is apparently left out, and we do see the late J.R.’s horrified attitude towards her in later flashback sequences,) but Norman Osborn (wait—that was Spider-Man… Norman Godfrey, I mean,) is the true spoiled rich brat of the series, since Roman actually displays a streak of heroic strength. Norman has set himself up as the conscience of The Godfrey Institute, a contrast to the “large phallic tower.” And in so doing, he has invited Lod, LLC to offer to buy out his interest in the company. Wait till you find out who they are.
Letha Godffrey, Norman’s beautiful, normal, human daughter… has been impregnated by an angel, or so she says. She is Roman’s companion, and so of course, soon falls hard for Peter.
I know how birds can fly, fishes swim, and animals run. The runner may be snared, the swimmer hooked, and the flyer shot by the arrow. But there is the dragon — I cannot tell how he mounts on the wind through the clouds, and rises to heaven. Today I have seen the Dragon.
~ Confucius.
We discover that Project Oroboros, under the guidance of one Dr. Johann Pryce, (a man with extraordinary physical strength,) has the ability to resurrect the dead, if the body is young enough. That is the explanation for Shelley’s disfigured appearance: she died as an infant. Not technically, like her heart stopped for 60 seconds, either. They had placed her in the coffin already. Her father, J. R., was consumed with grief and called on Dr. Pryce late one rainy night. (Queue the lightning: “It’s alive! It’s alive!”) It is interesting at this point to note that Pryce’s first published paper is best known as Better Reincarnation through Chemistry. It provides a clue as to why it is that Shelley glows when touched:
Pryce: It’s all very theoretical… If one took an existing but inanimate carbon-based structure…
Chausseur: A corpse.
Pryce: that was still in a relatively labile situation…
Chausseur: A baby’s corpse.
Pryce: One might weave into the existing structure the element of phosphorus, forming chain molecules that could support life.
In the episode In Bad Taste, we see a checkup conducted by Pryce during which he shows Shelley his latest work, a flower that is somehow artificially living, yet not alive. Shelley’s reaction is to call for “A hand!” to which the Doctor responds, “Soon.” (reminds me of Dr. Who and the Brain of Morbius…) Since Shelley’s hands are wrapped in bandages and she speaks with a voice box, we can assume that she is still a work in progress.
A lunatic escapes the local asylum… or was that Godfrey Tower? Frances Pullman, who’s right eye is deformed, and who has visions. He is taken to the resident shrink, Norman Godfrey at Hemlock Acres, where Norman has a full-time practice when he is not litigating against the Institute or banging Olivia. (That’s where the YA part comes in. There are raw adult sexual situations accompanied by shots of Peter’s naked butt as well as some pretty bloody scenes, but nothing worse than what you’d see on The Walking Dead.
The show has oddly recurring themes both of angels, (sometimes seen in blood angels on the ceiling,) and the right eye, where Olivia places her medicine. (Shelley’s eye is enlarged and Pullman’s is disfigured, but he can still see into the supernatural world. “We didn’t ask to see these things!” he explains.) We also learn that the photo-receptors of Pit Vipers are studied in the secret labs of Godfrey Tower… to aid the blind, of course. Pullman sees many of the same images that Peter, Roman, and Shelley all share in visions.
The baby in the blood pouch, the river glowing red, a dog hatching out of a big, black egg, a demon with a crown of light, a needle the size of a sword…
(…and whatever that thing in the Tleilaxu cloning tank was.) Pullman also makes mention of another patient at Oroboros who Norman discovers died some time ago.
Pullman: That’s why they killed us—it’s all part of their plan.
A second savage murder occurs, which is discovered by our author Christina in one of the series’ most wonderfully memorable scenes. Though the murderer, clearly not human, leaves no tracks, Chausseur opines that it is an apex predator leaving trophies behind like a cat’s gifts of dead mice; Price calls the newspapers’ “demon dog” a “pathological sexual predator.”
Peter decides it may be time to leave before he takes the blame for the murder. Too late. He’s under suspicion. If he leaves now, the newspapers will convict him. Luckily, his pal Roman wants to find the Vargulf so he can be a hero like in the crusades, like The Order of the Dragon.
So Peter goes to see his cousin, Destiny Rumancek, a fortune teller and sex therapist who looks great in shorts. But first she needs some stuff. From the grave of the dead girl. Her channeling of Lisa Willoughby, the second victim, leads the boys to her house looking for “an invitation.”
Did we mention that Roman has Upir mind control? It comes in handy for finding clues. They discover the invitation calling Lisa to the Godfrey Steel Mill. (That’s how they made their fortune before founding the Godfrey Institute. It was here that they “made pig iron into money.”) In the center of “Castle Godfrey” lay a huge, dark, womb, the Bessemer Converter, cursed when it fell and crushed a worker.
Roman, in a vision, explains to Peter that the local river oddly flows North, confusing birds on their migration routes. “What do you think brought us here?” he asks. “Dumb-ass birds!”
The one thing I have real trouble with here is Roman’s evil side. He is supposed to be a sympathetic character, but then he date-rapes a school friend (it’s OK, he’s really a good guy. She invited him in, didn’t she? And she was hitting on him at the Homecoming Dance, so it’s not like she didn’t want it, right? I mean, he made her forget all about it, so it’s like it never really happened. Right?) Our attention is drawn to the fact that upirs can influence people’s minds to get what they want sexually. This marks the beginning of Roman’s fall from heroic grace. He’s always been violently sexual, cutting himself during sex, going down on menstrual women, but this is his first true act of evil. Unfortunately, I had to pretend this didn’t happen in order to keep liking him.
Pullman: “It was you!” [Points to Roman]
The boys work together to protect Letha from the Vargulf, who now has the ability to shift on the wrong moon, at will (in addition to writing really cool rave-invitations). It all builds to an incredible climax.
But I have to admit at this point, that I simply do NOT find the form of regular wolves at all scary. Maybe big, black oily-furred ones with angry faces a little, but these are not the werewolves that you see in The Howling. Wolves are just too beautiful and graceful, and cute and sweet and fluffy and I just want to hug them… (anyone see the screen version of Blood and Chocolate? Speaking of fluffy and cute:
Casper, Peter’s beloved cat is sacrificed, (Just so you’re prepared.) |
Meanwhile, Peter gets blamed for the murders by the townsfolk, who trash his trailer and beat him up.
“People see someone like Peter like a blank sheet of paper they can just put everything they’re afraid of on.”
We have to wait until the very last episode to learn Olivia’s origin story, but it’s worth the wait. Somehow she kills herself by cutting off her tail. Sorry if that’s a spoiler, but it was just too bizarre and incongruous to pretend that it really happened in the story.
(There were some other failed attempts to be all occult and symbolic, too. Destiny calls Roman a Elektrik People plays on in the dark room while you try to wrap your mind around what just happened, and your heart is beating, and all you can think of is those geese nose-diving into the bay.